Black power, white press; literacy, newspapers, and the transformation of township political culture

Abstract

Black political mobilization in South Africa has largely been explained by factors which are either structural or external to the communities involved: falling wages and employment, the contradictions of school and township administration, and anticolonial wars on the country's borders. Social and political movements, leaders, and processes within black communities have received short shrift. The political consciousness of different sections of black society has frequently been neglected or read off from class positions. The institutions, organizations, and discourses which shape them have been ignored or treated as tools of the status quo. In particular, the movement which did the most to initiate the black political renaissance, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), has been written off as a "group of petit bourgeois intellectuals" without links to the masses. Yet the resulting accounts have failed to adequately explain the forms and gaps of the re-emergence of mass resistance over the past two decades or to predict or periodize the development of national political life