Freedom from Black Governmentality under Privatized Apartheid

Abstract Many anticipated that the formal demise of public apartheid would free black citizens of South Africa from systematic racial oppression; but apartheid was privatized and carries on, with the aid of ‘Black governmentality’. The brutality of the apartheid regime gave rise to a common misunderstanding of White settler coloniality as a public, sovereign, and repressive mode of power imposed on and against Black subjects and African culture. But power is not just repressive. It is complex and productive. Public apartheid was formally signed off, but its features are reproduced by citizens in private lives, often without our knowing it. Our account of Black governmentality explains such self-defeating subjective agency in the post-apartheid context with reference to Biko’s writing on Black shame, wherein Black South African subjects are secondary agents of apartheid. We demonstrate how and why apartheid is perpetuated in private by Black governmentality, as cultivated in subject-formation, drawing on Biko’s insights into the structure of this relationship. In so doing we correct a misunderstanding of freedom from apartheid, common in scholarly receptions of Biko’s writing, as a negation of the White face of public representation. With reference to Foucault’s theory of power, we offer an alternative account of Biko’s insights into subjective and national liberation, to explain how he sees colonial power as a facticity-inducing force for Black subjectivity. Where these misreadings miss this critical point of traction, our productive reading of the power of Black governmentality and freedom in Black consciousness better informs effective public resistance against private modes of apartheid.