IMPACT IN SOUTH AFRICAN THEOLOGY
The term black power is usually associated with Stokely Carmichael, a Trinidadian, who was driven to live with his mother in Bronx, New York. His most famous speech was delivered in 1966 to a group of middle-class white students at the University of California at Berkeley. In his article, Churcher argues that Carmichael’s speech was an attempt to articulate black power as a psychological struggle for liberation (Kalen Churcher, 2009). Until 1966 Carmichael was a supporter of MLK’s ethic of non-violence.
However, two events in 1965 and 1966, namely, the assassination of MXS and the shooting of protest leader, James Meredith, forced him to reconsider his
support of MLK’s doctrine of non-violence. These events led Carmichael’s thinking to the notion of African-Nationalism, alluded to earlier by leaders such as MXS and Marcus Garvey. While working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) he came into contact with the Black Panther Party. The Black Panthers preached a doctrine of self-defence and revolutionary nationalism. Kalen Churcher (2009) argues that the Berkley speech served more than any other to articulate what Carmichael understood to be Black Power. Carmichael’s goal was never assimilation into white society but rather liberation. In this respect, the struggle of black people in the USA resonated with similar themes in the African struggle for liberation. This was also the distinct difference between Malcolm X Shabazz and Martin Luther King’s notions of liberation. The former had initially called for a black approach to the eradication of racism while the latter had called for integration and, perhaps, assimilation into white society.
Some would argue that Carmichael’s articulation appeared to change in definition from time to time. Nevertheless, at the core of its delivery at all the time; was the notion that the struggle of black people in America was a psychological struggle. Black people had to start doing things for themselves. However, the problem was that, every time they tried, white people were there to show them how. It was this incapacitating presence of white people in the subconscious mind of black people that made it crucial for lines to be drawn between liberal white people and a Black Nationalist movement. Thus, black power represented a psychological recognition that black people wanted to lead the fight for their rights themselves as opposed to following white civil rights organisers. “It boils down to the fact that black people organise black people more effectively” (Kalen Churcher 2009:140).
oppressed would ensure that it would never succeed. By 1968 Carmichael had become convinced that, when white America killed Dr King, “you killed non- violence” (Kalen Churcher 2009:145). Stokely Carmichael (now Kwame Toure) died in 1998. At some point in his life he was married to Miriam Makeba, the South African born singer, who had galvanised opposition to apartheid through her music worldwide while in exile.
According to Cone (1993:11), it was black power that “shook black clergy out of their theological complacency”. Black clergy in the USA began to reassess the relation between their faith, as black people, and white religion. Their dilemma revolved around how they could reconcile the doctrines of MXS and MLK. It was clear, however, that a radical theology of liberation informed by black culture and experience had become urgent and that it had to be a project unpacked by black people. Christian symbols, such as the Exodus narrative, the message of the prophets at various times and the story of Christ, all took on new meanings and were interpreted in relation to the black struggle for liberation and justice.
According to Cone (1984:5):
The idea of Black Theology emerged when a small group of radical clergy began to reinterpret the meaning of the Christian faith from the standpoint of the black struggle for liberation in the United States during the second half of the 1960s. To theology from within the black experience rather than be confined to duplicating the theology of Europe or white North America was the main objective of the new black theology. It represented the theological reflections of a radical black clergy seeking to interpret the meaning of God’s liberating presence in a society where blacks were economically exploited and politically marginalised because of their skin color.
Black theology is, therefore, God in black terms. Just as white theologians had interpreted God in the context of their own culture and experience, black theology
made a reciprocal gesture to encourage black people to take God seriously while striping the whole notion of God of its western garb.
Cone defends the notion of Black Power and refuses to see it as an anti-thesis of the teaching of Christ. Even more, he robustly links Christ with the lynching tree, which white racists used to murder black people in the American South (Cone 2011). Thus, black theology may thus, be seen as a theological corollary of black power. Cone regarded black people who called for a soft approach to or tolerance of the oppressive structures of society as completely misguided black brothers. According to Cone the agenda of black power in relation to the black church still needed to be exhausted (Cone 1999:3). It is the frightening items on this agenda that introduced his magnum opus, Black Theology and Black Power, in 1969.
For Cone (Cone 1999:5), black power was a call for action:
Black Power … is by nature irrational, that is, not denying the role of reflection, but insisting that human existence cannot be mechanised or put into neat boxes according to reason. Human reason, though valuable, is not absolute, because moral decisions – those decisions that deal with human dignity – cannot be made by using abstract methods of science. Human emotions must be reckoned with. Consequently, black people must say no to all do-gooders who say “We need more time”.
Cone argued that black power should not be reserved for the comfort of human reason and that, at some point, it calls for radical action in the heat of the injustice aimed at undoing the evils of white supremacy. It is this assertion that was frightening for the many disciples of tolerance – frightening because buried deep in it is the call to overthrow injustice and oppression by whatever means necessary.
In Cone’s view, Christ was crucified precisely because he was a revolutionary. His fiercest confrontations were not with the poor and downtrodden of society but with the elite teachers of the Law who sought to protect the status quo. This is the precise juncture at which black theology emerged from the framework of black power. Thus, black theology may be seen as black power in revolutionary prayer.
Thirty years after the publication of Black Theology and Black Power Cone is still relentless in advocating a theology of liberation for the poor. He despises those clergy who deliberately walk away from what he regards as the heart of the gospel of Christ. Cone (1999:12) states:
We must say that, when a minister blesses by silence the conditions that produce riots and condemns the rioters, he gives up his credentials as a Christian minister and becomes inhuman. He is an animal, just like those who, backed by an ideology of racism, order the structure of this society based on white supremacy. We need men who refuse to be animals and are resolved to pay the price so that all men can be something more than animals.
2.5 SUMMARY
This chapter attempted to draw and develop a global picture of liberation theology from the time of the slave religion in the USA to black theology in the tradition of James Cone. It also highlighted Latin American liberation theology in the context of the more global phenomenon of oppression that was not exclusive to the Black context alone. It is possible to safely conclude that the black clergy in the USA, for example, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and others, laid the foundations for black theology.
Maimela (1983:34) is of the opinion that white American theology has not been involved in the struggle for black liberation and that, essentially, it has been a
theology of the white oppressor, giving religious sanction to the racial extermination of Indians and the enslavement of black masses. From the very beginning to the present day, white American theological thought has been patriotic, either by defining the theological task independently of black suffering (liberal northern approach) or by defining Christianity as compatible with white racism (conservative southern approach). In both cases, theology became a servant of the state, thus involving the death of many black people. It is little wonder that an increasing number of black religionists were finding it difficult to be black and to be identified with traditional theological thought forms.
The appearance of black theology in the American context was due exclusively to the failure of white religionists to relate the gospel of Jesus to the pain of being black in a white racist society. Black theology arose from the need of black people to liberate themselves from their white oppressors. Thus, black theology is a theology of liberation because it is a theology which arose from an identification with the oppressed blacks of America, seeking to interpret the gospel of Christ in the light of the black situation (Maimela 1983:34).
In South Africa black theology was born in the wider context of the emergence of the black consciousness movement. The next chapter traces the evolution of black theology in the 1970s in South Africa and how it created an environment which gave rise to the political empowerment and involvement in activism of Drs Allan Boesak and Frank Chikane.
CHAPTER 3
THE INFLUENCE OF BLACK THEOLOGY ON ACTIVE
PARTICIPATION IN THE UNITED DEMOCRATIC FRONT
3.1 INTRODUCTION
Chapter 3 discusses the way in which black consciousness and black theology influenced Boesak and Chikane to become proponents of the United Democratic Front. This influence stemmed from the black power and black theology of the United States of America and the liberation theology of Latin America.
Firstly, the chapter researcher provides a brief history of black theology as it was articulated by the University Christian Movement (UCM) and its influence on both Boesak and Chikane. The advocacy of black theology has played a major role to develop Steve Biko’s sense making known as black consciousness (BC). Secondly, the chapter illustrates the way black theology and black consciousness became natural supporters in the attempt to deconstruct the psychological and religious constructions of both apartheid and the missionaries in both church and society in South Africa. Maurice Ngakane, Frank Chikane and Cyril Ramaphosa emerged in this time as a rare breed of Pentecostals who opposed a tradition that had resulted in a religious vacuum of political inactivity.