Itumeleng Mosala takes issue with last week’s article by Dr Mamphela Ramphele
DR MAMPHELA Ramphele (Mail & Guardian September 8 to 14) makes several serious claims that need challenging.
I am a member of the Azanian People’s Organisation; in fact, an immediate ex- president, but, contrary to the opportunistic claims of Ramphele, I was not only a close associate of Steve Biko, I was one of many trusted comrades of his who remain members of Azapo.
It is time, albeit after eighteen years of typical African courtesy, that the truth be told about Ramphele — about her relationship with the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), with Biko, with the black community as a whole and with the black and African intellectual community. There is a limit to how courteous we can remain; there is a limit to how tolerant we can be to a systematic and constant rubbishing of the black community as a way of climbing up the ladder of white privilege. There is even a limit to rationalising about black liberals in terms of the extent to which the pathology of apartheid has distorted their self-image.
Some of us who know Ramphele and remember her from the early years of the BCM, frankly recall only two outstanding things about her: the courage and bravery with which she smoked her cigarettes, in the context of a cultural conservatism that permeated even a movement as radical as the BCM. We admired her for daring to go against the stream of cultural behaviour, mainly because we were inculcating precisely that political trait among our people at a time when a major repressive machinery was grinding them.
Except for one more thing, there is nothing else some of us remember her for. The one more thing is this: she also had the distinction of having had the most well- known affair with Steve Biko. For these two things and for nothing else do some of us remember her.
Ramphele inveighs against the Azanian Students’ Movement (Azasm) and Azapo for supposedly wanting “the dead (to) rule from the grave, nor should their rest be continually interrupted to settle intellectual disputes”. I beg your pardon, Dr Ramphele. We know what you want and mean by these words. You want to monopolise Biko. Your statements about your relationship with Biko here and internationally betray your real prejudice. You are unable to invoke anything from your own life and history to back the claims of your worth. Instead, you are continually introduced as a stalwart of the BCM and you yourself constantly and subtly attempt to let “the dead … rule from the grave”, and “continually interrupt their rest” as in your recent television appearance.
Many people overseas refer to you as the widow or common law wife of Biko. It is hard to believe that they have invented this themselves. Why don’t you correct them? Why don’t you tell them that Biko was married? His wife’s name is Ntsiki Biko. She is the widow, not you.
Ramphele’s relationship with the black community is a curious one. Many black people, especially among professional colleagues, are baffled by her continual anti- black rhetoric, indeed diatribe. Black people have taken enough cultural, political, intellectual and physical battering from white people for many years.
We do not expect more of the same thing from a black person who claims an important “connection” with one of the great heroes of our struggle. I am tired of letting courtesy hold me back. Frankly, for me, you come across like a more indigenous version of comrade Eugene Nyati: that is, you are always right and everybody else is always wrong and deserves to be lambasted. You could pay Steve Biko a better tribute than that.
As to the issue of black consciousness itself and Biko, here are my thoughts: no person has a monopoly of knowledge and power over the forces and waves of history. This includes Ramphele and Biko. Frankly, I do not care whether Biko would have belonged to Azapo or not. But, knowing Steve, he would have concurred with Muntu Ka Myeza, when he said, about the likes of Ramphele: “Renegades are not the best judges of the cause they have deserted.”
Ramphele is an intellectual, but a strange one who cannot penetrate the depths of the campaign that Azasm is waging. Her comments on it remain on the surface almost as if she is one of the news reporters. This is a sad commentary on African intellectualism if the likes of Ramphele are to be allowed to continue to claim to be a part of it. The contradictions of it are, for me, like those of a piece in an introduction to Edward W Said’s book The Pen and the Sword, where a powerful statement is contradictorily analogised with South Africa:
“Said was invited to the White House, did not go and watched the ‘tawdry’ affair on TV: Clinton like a Roman emperor bringing two vassal kings to his imperial court and making them shake hands in front of him. Then there was the fashion show parade of star personalities … and, most distressing of all, were the speeches in which the Israeli Prime Minister Rabin gave the Palestinian speech, full of anguish, Hamlet’s anxiety and uncertainty, the loss, the sacrifice and so on … Arafat’s speech was in fact written by businessmen and was a businessman’s speech, with all the flair of a rental agreement.” The writer then goes on to say: “It appeared obscene that just when South Africa was breaking free, there was all this hoopla over creating a Bantustan in Palestine; but Said’s pain was obviously different and deeper” (1994:12f).
As an African intellectual and black leader, my pain is also deeper, both because of Ramphele and because, contrary to the above quoted writer, South Africa has not yet broken free and Azasm’s campaign points to that. Good people in all political organisations, especially black ones, may disagree with the tactics of Azasm, but they know that this is the truth. It’s not yet Uhuru. There is a problem to be solved and it is a strange intellectual who denies this.