Toivo Asheeke’s Arming Black Consciousness: The Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition and South Africa’s Armed Struggle adds to an already impressive list of monographs enhancing our understanding of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). Most previous accounts focus on early phases of the BCM, its formation as a distinct presence in the South African political landscape, its community programs, publications, and the torture, imprisonment, and murder of key figures. Previous studies have also given due consideration to the gender question. Asheeke’s work picks up some of these themes to read the BCM differently, eschewing attention to religious influences and nonviolence to center the “history of BCM’s unrelenting engagement with armed struggle as a form of resistance to white settler colonialism” (4).

Over six body chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, the author chronologically traces differences within the BCM on strategies against apartheid. He convincingly demonstrates through new interviews, readings of previously available interviews, and close readings of primary sources that BC leaders (including Biko) were aware of the turn towards violence. The introduction, “Black Consciousness, Echoes of Haiti’s Revolution and the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition,” looks towards histories of the Haitian revolution to argue for BC as part of the Azanian Black Nationalist tradition as a “comparable revolutionary tendency” (16). The author’s attempt to connect the two in the interests of transnational, transhistorical accounts of Black resistance is somewhat less convincing than other more detailed global connections established in the book.

Black internationalism as a key idea, first introduced through references to the Haitian revolution, is also the theoretical anchor of the book. The broad trajectory of the study is: the influence of Julius Nyerere, Amilcar Cabral, and Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael’s ideas on his visit to East Africa in 1967 (Chapter One); BCM beginnings, consolidation, and “Stage Two” members who believed in armed struggle (Chapter Two); Bokwe Mafuna, Nosipho Matshoba, Tebogo Mafole, and Ranwedzi Nengwekhulu training and some of them launching armed resistance from Botswana (Chapter Three); international training received by BC activists (Chapter Four); influence of BC on the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) (Chapter Five); and absorption and indoctrination of BC figures outside the country in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in training camps in Angola (Chapter Six). These chapters weave a fascinating account of differences in methods of direct action in the BCM, focusing on key working-class figures—Mafuna, Thandika Zondo, “Skaap” Motsau, Welile Nhlapo, and Nosipho Matshoba—involved in resistance from outside the country.

Methodologically, the early chapters include fifteen new interviews with former members of the BCM who either formed their own armed wings (even as they received international training in Libya, Palestine, and Iraq with Pan African Congress (PAC)) or eventually joined MK in the 1970s and 1980s. Some were members of the “Bokwe group,” named for Bokwe Mafuna who led them for a while. They were ironically also labeled the Small Broederbond, uncannily echoing the Afrikaaner Broederbond. Ideological differences in the various strands of the movement are deftly unraveled in the book. The work of BCM offshoots such as the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO) formed after the BCM was banned in 1977, and South African Youth Revolutionary Council (SAYRCO), the Isandlwana Revolutionary Effort of Azania (IRE) and the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania (BCMA), is examined through primary documents including articles, news reports, and interviews in various collections in South Africa and Botswana and some CIA documents.

One specific line of enquiry is women’s role in the movement. Prominent among these was Nikiwe Deborah Matshoba who joined SASO in 1972 and worked on literacy projects. Her younger sister, Nosipho, followed a different trajectory in exile. Nosipho’s experience with BC gender ideologies included Tiro’s refusal to take someone as young as her into exile and later, when she accompanied the others, being perceived as accompanying a boyfriend rather than an activist in her own right. Others such as Thenjiwe Mtintso who joined the ANC from BCM sometime in 1979/1980 had a different experience. Originally at Fort Hare, she joined SASO in the early 1970s during the time of the Tiro rebellion, connected with the BCM later in the decade, and was a journalist on the Daily Despatch. She was arrested and tortured in prison in 1977, worked with Chris Hani in Lesotho, and was outspoken about gender concerns during her training in the camps.

Covering BC in exile in later chapters, Asheeke’s claim “in the years after the Soweto Uprising, it was this new generation of MK recruits, coming from Black Consciousness organizationally, who remade, reshaped and revitalised Umkhonto We Sizwe” (206), is well supported. Despite attempts at ideological retraining, BC men and women who joined ANC held on to their core beliefs of black self and societal affirmation in a fast-changing South Africa. The last body chapter describes how while some BC activists of the Soweto generation who joined the MK rose to high ranks within the organization, others were suspected of disloyalty and subject to imprisonment and violence during the MK mutinies in the early 1980s.

In sum, this is a comprehensive account of later stages of the BCM when armed resistance was embraced by members in exile. It adds to the already rich corpus of BC histories.