Barney Pityana: outspoken champion for human rights

Abstract

Barney Nyameko Pityana was one of the founding members of the South African Students' Organisation (Saso), an important figure in the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) with Steve Biko in the late-1960s, and an exponent of black (liberation) theology. He describes Black Consciousness as follows: Intellectual life was therefore about the search for the truth and a challenge to some of the putative truth-claims that were restricting of freedom... This is sometimes referred to as the principle of the identity of opposites, of knowing and being, a synthesis of opposites. But there was more to it. It was that the oppressed people must give themselves the freedom to rebel against oppression and to so free themselves and their thinking that they would dare to imagine an Other possibility. His more recent work in defending human rights and opposing corruption has also been widely recognised.