Somewhere the spear of Black Consciousness has fallen, writes SIPHO MALEFANE. The baton has been dropped yet the race is far from won. We need a new cadre to redefine Black Consciousness as a theory of praxis.

September 12, 2018 marks 41 years since Steve Biko died at the hands of apartheid forces. He would have turned 72 on 18 December.

South Africa needs a new consciousness to take us from the doldrums of moral emptiness and a soulless struggle.

Marx wrote in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

I guess Marx meant that humans derive consciousness out of the context of their prevailing material conditions.

Depending where they find themselves in the prevailing power relations, they are thrown into dialectical tensions between those who dominate the power relations and whose interests vest in maintaining the status quo and those that are the subject of power and whose lot depends on the overthrow of the status quo.

These dialectical contradictions and resultant tensions exist "independent of their will" and independent of their consciousness...