Abstract
This chapter situates the Soweto Uprising of 1976 alongside the more contemporary ‘fallist’ campaigns of 2015–2016 to understand how the unrealised potential of past struggle shapes popular politics in the present and prefigures future mobilisation. Using Santos’ framing of the sociology of ‘absences and emergences’, we suggest that the quest of the Soweto Uprising remains a work-in-progress whose unanswered questions about ideology, identity and intersectional struggle re-emerged in the fallist campaigns of 2015–2016. We distinguish between the original variant of Black Consciousness, which was dominant during the Soweto Uprising of 1976 and introduced the notion of ‘political blackness’ as a vehicle for building solidarity across difference, and a newer more inclusive variant (what we have called Black Consciousness 2.0) that began to emerge with the insertion of class into debate and action from the mid-1970s. The chapter argues that the incorporation of decolonial thinking into fallism alongside the recognition of the centrality of trans and women’s voices has led to a further modification of Black Consciousness. The latest iteration—Black Consciousness 3.0—includes gender as an analytical category, and mobilises people around the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability. As such, Black Consciousness 3.0 harbours the potential to effect structural change in post-apartheid South Africa.