Arming Black Consciousness: The Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition and South Africa's Armed Struggle

Description

Since 1994, as the ruling party in South Africa, the ANC have become synonymous with and indivisible from the fight against apartheid rule. This has left little space for competing accounts, visions, and political projects to find their appropriate place in the historical narrative. In this innovative book, Toivo Asheeke moves beyond these well-trodden histories, to tell the previously neglected story of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), a militant revolutionary nationalist wing of the anti-colonial struggle. Using archival sources from four countries and interviews with former veterans of the movement, Asheeke explores the BCM's engagement with guerrilla warfare, community feminism and Black Internationalism. Uncovering the personal and political histories of those who have previously received scant scholarly attention, Asheeke both illuminates the history of Africa's decolonization struggle and that of the wider Cold War.

Toivo Tukongeni Paul Wilson Asheeke is Assistant Professor at Georgia State University. He is a scholar-activist whose research interests intersect the disciplines of Historical-Sociology, History and Africana Studies. He comes from a Black Internationalist background with parents who have fought for the freedom of peoples of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a committed grassroots activist and as a scholar-activist, has published widely on Black Consciousness and Black Power in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Southern African Studies and the Journal of African American History. His dissertation won the Dissertation of the Year Award 2019 at Binghamton University.