LIBERATON AND DEVELOPMENT, Black Consciousness community programs in South Africa

255pp., illus., maps, paperback, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 2016

ISBN: 9781611861921

Explores Black Consciousness community development in the 1970s primarily through the history of the Black Community Programme organisation and its three major projects: the annual publication "Black Review", and the Zanempilo Community Health Centre in Zinyoka village and the Njwaxa Leather Home Industry factory.

"Liberation and Development is a major accomplishment. Hadfield's study shows what Black Consciousness meant in the lives of the usually overlooked community development workers who knew it not as an abstract political philosophy but as the lived experience of social and personal development under apartheid. Hadfield's study is a vital intervention in the history of the struggle against apartheid, the social history of the 1970s, and the African origins of community development. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding what Black Consciousness leaders like Steve Biko actually did during their all-too short lives as activists. Based on comprehensive work with oral and written resources and rendered in sparking prose, Liberation and Development announces exciting new directions in the historiography of twentieth-century South Africa." Daniel Magaziner, author of The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977

"The Black Community Programmes of forty years ago may now be largely forgotten, but important lessons can be learned from them for development today. Hadfield's pioneering exploration of their successes and failures is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of what Black Consciousness achieved." Chris Saunders, Emeritus Professor in Historical Studies, University of Cape Town

Leslie Anne Hadfield is Associate Professor of African History at Brigham Young University. She is the author of A Bold Profession: African nurses in rural apartheid South Africa.