Half a century separates African American Methodist minister James Cone's influential works Black Theology & Black Power (1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (1970) from South African anti-apartheid activist and minister Allan Aubrey Boesak's Selfless Revolutionaries: Biko, Black Consciousness, Black Theology, and a Global Ethic of Solidarity (2021). In this book, completed during the pandemic, Boesak offers a serious revaluation of Cone's and other black revolutionary theological ideas by relating these to Black Consciousness (BC) student leader Steve Biko's philosophy. An influential theologian with a substantial body of writing since the 1970s, Boesak was elected president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1982, a position he held until 1991. A public figure who seeks connections between radical ideas emerging from different parts of the world, including South Africa and the United States, he is also well placed to suggest measures for radically reshaping South African and global society. He has consistently expressed these ideas from his early publication Farewell to Innocence: A Socio-Ethical Study on Black Theology and Black Power (1976) to the most recent work.
The story of the transnational circulation of black revolutionary theology is well known through excellent historical work by George Frederickson, Ian Macqueen, Daniel Magaziner and Anne Heffernan which discusses connections between BC and the University Christian Movement (UCM). In 1969, American Methodist minister and theologian James Cone published his landmark work, Black Theology & Black Power, based on ideas from Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's manifesto, Black Power (1966).
Talking about institutional racism, Hamilton and Carmichael came up with a vocabulary for analysing the racial climate in America after over a decade of civil rights efforts. Theirs is a reflection on the exhaustion and anger at the persistence of oppressive structures student activists had struggled against for over a decade. Cone refers to this manifesto when he offers a "constructive" definition of Black Power. Here Cone is responding to criticisms of the philosophy as reverse racism and an expression of black hatred against white folk, critiques also levelled against BC activists in South Africa. As an affirmation of black existence, Black Power and BC lend themselves to a critique of both white liberalism and non-violent resistance. And for Cone these translate into the essential task of theology, "to show what the changeless gospel means in each new situation." Consequently, black theology is a "theology whose sole purpose is to apply the freeing power of the gospel to black people under white oppression." Even as he refers to its central tenets, Boesak reiterates that black liberation theology is African in its orientation and that it is constantly evolving in relation to the circumstances and location where it is expressed. In these ways it offers a way for South Africans, African Americans, and other black populations to recognize their own positionality amid the processes of globalization.
The apartheid regime was at its most vicious in the 1960s and 1970s. Prominent leaders and organizations were banned and political activists in exile were murdered. Families of resistance leaders were often interrogated, imprisoned, and tortured. Additionally, there was media censorship and extensive surveillance of those suspected of political activities. These turbulent times, including the 1976 Soweto uprising, political assassinations of leaders such as Abraham Tiro, Biko and others, and violent intra-party conflict, led to a philosophical position on violence, and concomitantly, non-violence. This philosophy is premised on four central concerns: morality, inevitability, positivity, and responsibility. Selfless Revolutionaries is a response to these concerns, with an emphasis on morality and responsibility as keywords for South African regeneration in the post-apartheid era.
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Key ideas governing this analysis are autobiographical experiences of an activist pastor; BC ideas and their relation to black theology; feminist revaluations of BC and black theology; and the continued relevance of BC to contemporary South Africa. The author's life is inextricably connected to South African and global politics and nationalism. He draws on his own apartheid experiences in and around the pivotal year 1968 - one of radical thought and action around the world - in a key essay, "The Inescapable Network of Mutuality." His family was forcibly removed from their dwellings in Cape Town's Somerset West, when it was declared a predominantly white area under the Group Areas Act. Boesak connects this period to experiences of selective discrimination later in life. These include preaching in Paarl (another area which was declared white) as a young pastor when people were facing similar threats of eviction and removal. In his most personal moments, the author recalls listening to, reading, and being influenced by the philosophy of non-violence embodied by icons of African American and South African activism, Dr Martin Luther King and Chief Luthuli. Echoing the mutual transnational reverberations of civil rights and anti-apartheid resistance, the voices of the "prophetic church" in the United States and South Africa appear to call and respond to each other across the Atlantic in Boesak's essays.
Broad aims of global solidarity and national regeneration emerge via BC and Biko's ideas on black cultural pride and community consciousness. They are presented as relevant today as they were in the 1960s and 1970s. Tenets of other key figures in Black Freedom Movements, including Rev. King, Rev. Beyers Naude (a white Dutch reformed pastor who joined the black struggle because he refused to live with oppressive white Christian nationalism), the venerated ANC leader Chief Albert Luthuli, and finally Nelson Mandela are equally important to these aims. Because these leaders were proponents of non-violence for most (though not all) of their careers, Boesak's work is also an occasion for musing on the question of "provoked" violence between 1976 and 1990, crucial years of South African anti-apartheid resistance. Recent historical scholarship by Toivo Tukongeni Paul Wilson Asheeke has demonstrated that this was also the period when some BC activists shifted their position to embrace violent resistance against the apartheid regime.
A thread running through this analysis is a candid acknowledgment of the oversights of BC ideology and masculinist theology. Among excellent critiques of gender blindness in BC ideology are those by Mamphela Ramphele and Pumla Gqola, which prefigure Boesak's account. These blind spots have been previously acknowledged in black theology. Cone famously accepted the gender bias in his original conception of black theology in the United States, as did Basil Moore when expressing its central tenets emerging from the UCM in South Africa. Boesak continues this tradition of self-critique by indicating BC masculinism in "In Search of Our Human Race" and "Who will Rescue me from this Body of Death."
In keeping with this tradition, an awareness of inclusivity characterizes these essays as the author works hard to address gender biases. He invokes women theologians, including Kelly Brown Douglas, who spoke of the murdered Trayvon Martin as "Jesus on a Florida sidewalk." Further, extending the reach of Dr King's historic Poor People's March, Boesak mentions how its call for "radical justice would have had to include women and LGBTQI+ persons." Whether or not this was the case - Dr King's famous phrase "I have a dream" was in fact first used by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Prathia Hall - he did not sufficiently acknowledge SNCC founder Ella Baker's years of organizing in the deep South. For many years he distanced himself from organizer, one-time friend and gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin.
The inclusiveness of which Boesak speaks should be central tenet of any social justice movement. As he says: "A liberating consciousness today should be in the forefront of the struggle against patriarchalism, religious exclusivity, and heteronormative bigotry as these manifest themselves in South African and African societies as well as our global community." The specific contours of this broad gender inclusivity and parity are evident in the call for inclusion of women as equal partners in the struggle for liberation, and further, acceptance of their leadership in these struggles.
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Calling for Black Jesus as a "fighting god," the author has in mind struggles against corrupt leadership, gender-based violence, class inequality, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism that he believes will remake South Africa in the twenty-first century. As the ideas offered by BC thinkers and Black theologians have not been adopted either within South Africa or globally in other nations with large black populations, this, in his view, is an "incomplete revolution." Engaging with these ideas is crucial during a time of global conflict, targeting of racialized populations who bear the brunt of police brutality, mass incarceration, unemployment, and increasingly detention and deportations of migrants and refugees.
There are no guarantees that the central tenets of radical black theology can be translated into effective actions for a just and humane society. However, despite the unfinished and incomplete nature of revolutionary politics, black theology's key tenets of individual and social morality and responsibility offer a faint glimmer of light. These glimmers are more important now than before given a blinding resurgence of warfare, renewed violence against black, women, children, and queer folk, amid recent and ongoing national crises within South Africa and the United States.
Kanika Batra is Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in Women's Studies at Texas Tech University. She researches and teaches transnational feminist and queer studies, globalization, urbanization, postcolonial and comparative literature. She has been a Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies in South Africa and is the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Society and Culture, University of Alberta in 2025.
