Morgan, M., & Baert, P. (2018). Acting Out Ideas: Performative
Citizenship in the Black Consciousness Movement.
American Journal
of Cultural Sociology
,
6
(3), 455–498. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-
017-0030-1
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Page 1 of 53
Acting Out Ideas:
Performative Citizenship in the Black Consciousness Movement
Marcus Morgan
1
University of Cambridge, UK.
Patrick Baert
University of Cambridge, UK.
ABSTRACT: This paper introduces the concept of ‘performative citizenship’ to account for the
manner in which the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), and in particular its charismatic
leader Steve Biko, transformed a collection of relatively abstract philosophical ideas into concrete
political practice. We outline how the BCM challenged the psychological internalisation of white
supremacy and asserted citizenship claims through a variety of performative techniques, many of
which explicitly and implicitly reiterated earlier rights-based claims both in South Africa and
abroad. We show how this took place within a remarkably restrictive context, which on the one
hand constrained performances, but on the other augmented their dramatic efficacy. The paper
makes an argument about the performance of counter-power, showing how whilst the apartheid
complex retained its command over economic, military, and political power, it struggled to control
the social drama that was unfolding on the cultural plane, therefore losing its grip on one key
element of ideological power. Finally, the paper also makes a methodological contribution to
reception studies by showing how researching the reception of ideas exclusively through the
spoken or written word neglects other modes through which ideas might find expression,
especially in contexts of pervasive censorship and political repression.
Keywords: citizenship; social movements; apartheid; performativity; South Africa; Steve
Biko
[for publication in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology]
1
Marcus Morgan, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB23RQ,
UK, mm2014@cam.ac.uk.
Page 2 of 53
people more frequently act their way into a new way of thinking than think their way into a
new way of acting
- SASO Leadership Training Programme, 1972.
Much has been written about citizenship in apartheid South Africa, and for good reason, since
the topic offers an unsettling case study in the annexing of citizenship rights for the exclusive enjoyment
of a privileged and racially-determined minority. Fanon had spoken of the Arab in colonial Algeria as
‘an alien in his own country’ (1969: 53), and his phrase aptly describes the predicament of the Black
population under apartheid. Although racialised laws preceded apartheid proper, after 1948 when
apartheid became official policy with the coming to power of the National Party, and up until the early
1980s, a whole raft of segregationist and discriminatory legislation was introduced, the majority of
which was only gradually repealed during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
2
A great deal of what had
previously been de facto became de jure during this period, and additional laws restricting the rights of
the non-White population even further were also brought into effect. The quantity of discriminatory
legislation introduced was staggeringly large and differentially regulated almost all aspects of South
African life, from one’s ability to vote and buy property, to one’s freedom to move throughout the
country unabated, or have sexual relationships with whom one desired. This mass of legislation may at
first glance appear to demonstrate the totality of the power structure of the apartheid state, yet it might
also be read as a successive set of legal defences aimed at protecting the notion of ‘separate
development’ from the multitude of everyday challenges that South Africans brought against it.
3
In this
sense, the abundance of repressive legislation might be taken as an indicator not of the monolithic
nature of state power in South Africa during this period, but in fact of the ongoing resistance to such
2
The ANC’s 1943 proposed Bill of Rights demonstrates how citizenship demands had become the key focus of
resistance even before apartheid became official policy.
3
This is not to suggest that the state was unwilling to continually introduce new legislation as and when repression
demanded it. Indeed, as the so-called ‘Sobukwe Clause’ (a clause in the General Law Amendment Act no. 37 of
1963) makes clear, the government were prepared to change legislation simply to suppress a lone individual
identified as posing a threat. This specific clause was contrived with the sole purpose of extending the Pan
Africanist Congress leader Robert Sobukwe’s prison sentence indefinitely, whilst the broader detention law of
which it was a part was introduced in order to, in the infamous words of B J Vorster—then Minister of Justice, later
Prime Minister—keep dissidents locked up until ‘this side of eternity’.
Page 3 of 53
authority, and the state’s struggle to quiet it. One key area in which this struggle was occurring during
the late 1960s and 1970s was within the arena of ideological power, in which conflicts over the the
symbolic meanings of South African racial politics were being fought.
Weber’s political sociology is the most obvious source for arguments over the manner in which
different forms of power and authority have evolved alongside the development of social complexity
and differentiation (Weber, 1946: 77-128; [1922] 1978: 215-216), and in a strongly Weberian manner,
Michael Mann has more recently provided a global history of power on the basis of a fourfold ideal-
typical schema of ideological, economic, military, and political power (2012: 1-33). Although the forms
of struggle outlined in this essay were concerned ultimately with winning political recognition, the
battles themselves were in fact fought within the realm of ideology, expressing themselves through an
assortment of performative means. Various theorists have focussed upon the way in which power is
performed, and perhaps most prominent among them has been Clifford Geertz. Geertz offered thick
cross-cultural descriptions of power as a performed spectacle, in which authority is maintained through
its being routinely dramatised to those over whom it is exerted (e.g. 1980; 1983: 121-146). Paying
attention to these dramatised aspects of power is clearly important since it demystifies a central
mechanism through which power—such as the ‘charismatic authority’ that Weber had earlier
described—operates and is sustained. It also draws our attention to the common manner in which power
is wielded in practices as diverse as religious ritual, royal pomp, and staged political spectacle,
revealing how the ‘gravity of high politics and the solemnity of high worship spring from liker impulses
than might first appear’ (Geertz, 1983: 124). A growing literature in recent cultural sociology has also
been interested in the performance of power, offering even more autonomy for the cultural element
than Geertz himself allowed, and often using this perspective to better explain the fortunes of
enormously powerful and iconic political leaders (e.g. Mast, 2012; Alexander & Jaworski, 2014).
Much of this concern with the performance of power has, however, so far been directed towards
dominant power, with less acknowledgement of the fact that that there is ‘no power without potential
refusal or revolt’ (Foucault, 1979: 253). Whilst theorists of the performance of power often
acknowledge the performative significance of resistance in passing (e.g. Geertz, 1983: 122-3), with
certain notable exceptions (e.g. Alexander, 2006; 2011), less attention has been paid to how this
Page 4 of 53
dynamic of counter-power is performed,
4
and especially when this performance takes the specific shape
of citizenship claims. This paper contributes towards correcting this oversight, through an analysis of
the performative counter-power harnessed by the Black Consciousness Movement in 1970s South
Africa. Before we begin our analysis however, we will first elaborate a little more clearly what we
mean by ‘performative citizenship’.
The concept of citizenship is often claimed to have emerged some time during the sixth century
BC under the reforms of the Athenian statesman Salon, and it seems important to note that from its
inception, and in fact throughout its subsequent developed, the idea has carried with it—one might even
argue, relied upon—the concomitant idea of exclusion. This exclusion has not only been about the
barbarians outside the city walls or across the river, mountain, or sea but has also been directed towards
internal residents; as is often noted, in ancient Athenian democracy, the citizens ruled not only over
themselves, but also over women, children, slaves, and metics.
In T. H. Marshall’s classic lecture on the emergence of ‘social citizenship’ he stated that ‘I
shall be running true to type as a sociologist if I begin by saying that I propose to divide citizenship
into three parts’, which he then proceeded to label ‘civil’, ‘political’, and ‘social’. In the case of
apartheid, all three of these notions of citizenship—even the ‘civil citizenship’ that Marshall claimed
emerged earliest, and which he identified as ‘the rights necessary for individual freedom—liberty of
the person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid
contracts, and the right to justice’ (1950: 10)—were to a greater or lesser extent, and via more or less
formal means, denied to the racially-circumscribed majority of the population. As a state, apartheid
South Africa can therefore be accurately described as embodying ‘white supremacy’ understood as the
‘systematic and self-conscious efforts to make race and colour a qualification for membership of the
civil community’ (Fredrickson, 1981: xi).
In this paper we focus on a mode of citizenship that lies outside of Marshall’s purview, and
which was actively laid claim to by black anti-apartheid activists, rather than officially granted to them
by the state. Working with a definition of citizenship as meaning a status of specific rights and duties
4
This is partly a consequence of the fact that the dominant Anglophone approach to the kinds of insurgent social
movements that might embody counter-power was originally formed in a relatively structuralist mould (Goodwin &
Jasper, 1999), even if some of its most celebrated proponents did eventually turn to the centrality of performance
(e.g. Tilly, 2008).