Black Consciousness advocates and fight for the right of Black people to exist in the world as a complete, and free human beings, and for the world in which racialised identities are not the measure of people’s humanity

The starting point of the analysis is that the architects, agents and beneficiaries of racial-capitalism have so much to gain from the maintenance of the apartheid economy and apartheid geography and so much to lose from the dismantling of racial-capitalism and the rolling back of the legacies and continuities of colonialism that they cannot risk even the slightest possibility of a revolutionary turn to the left in South Africa – whether initiated by the ruling African comprador bourgeoise or imposed on them by pressure from below.

It speaks to the importance of securing and protecting the frontline. It speaks to the importance of defending what you have or what you have gained. It speaks to the significance of a vanguard. A fortress that has warring sentinels is as good as a fort without a vanguard.

Jazz and Black Consciousness both emerged out of efforts of Black people to find their own voice in an anti-Black world that denies Black people a sense of being and belonging that is at variance with the stereotypical portrayal of Black people as subhuman and inferior beings who are incapable of making and developing any refined and distinguished philosophy, science, art and culture outside the proprieties, protocols, conventions, canons, and orthodoxies of Eurocentrism and outside the regimes and regiments of White Supremacism.