Mamphela Ramphele tells how Steve Biko’s death in detention coincided with a threat to her unborn baby, in the third extract from her autobiography
IT is difficult to explain the series of coincidences which began to happen after my return to Lenyenye (a small Northern Transvaal village to which Ramphele had been banished), other than in terms of what I believe must be telepathy. I started experiencing discomfort around my lower abdomen towards the end of August. I went to see a Swiss missionary doctor who was the superintendent of Shiluvane Hospital, a local hospital nearby. He reassured me about my pregnancy, and advised bed-rest.
My attempts to contact Steve Biko over the next week or so drew a blank. I became concerned when he did not return my calls. (I had by then installed a telephone in my house.) A few days later I learned that he had been detained en route to King William’s Town from Cape Town. I was not overly concerned. He had, after all, survived many brushes with the security police and could take care of himself. It would just be a matter of time before they charged or released him.
My admission to Shiluvane Hospital with a threatened abortion coincided with the beginning of Steve’s brutal interrogation, which was to lead to his death on 12 September 1977. I was then 16 weeks pregnant. His death coincided with the intensification of the threat to the life of my expected baby.
With much reluctance, and after threats from me, the security police agreed to my transfer on the same fateful day to Pietersburg Hospital, a relatively better-equipped institution with specialist services. I remember weeping on the way to the hospital in the ambulance, which left Shiluvane at 4am on 12 September 1977. I ascribed my weepiness to anxiety about the safety of my pregnancy.
Dr Van den Ende, the obstetrician, was the doctor assigned to look after me. He was a well-built, kindly man who had soft eyes and spoke with a strong Afrikaans accent. He explained to me after a thorough history and examination that I had an irritable uterus which was reacting to both the growing baby and the multiple fibroids (benign tumours) in its wall. He cautioned me about the chances of success in maintaining the pregnancy to term, but promised to do his best. I was put on treatment to suppress the contractions, and confined to bed. The nurses were wonderful. I relaxed towards the end of the day, permitting myself to regard this as time to be nurtured.
The following morning I was taken aback when the nursing sister in charge of my care insisted that I breach the order of strict bed-rest and go and speak to my sister on the phone. She had a major family problem to share with me. I told the nurse that that was precisely the reason why I should not go to the phone: my family had to learn to solve their problems without me. I had enough of my own, I said. But she persisted.
Eventually I was wheeled to the phone. It was Thenjiwe (Mthintso, a friend pretending to be a sister because Ramphele’s banning order prevented contact with anyone except her immediate family) on the line. I thought that she had succeeded again in fooling “the system” and settled down for an update on the state of affairs. After impatient niceties, she asked me if I was sitting down, and then she said the impossible: “Steve is dead.” It was as if someone had put a high voltage current through me. A searing fire burned inside me. “No, it can’t be true” was all I remember saying.
I went into a state of profound emotional shock. “It can’t be true,” was my refrain. and Dr Van den Ende had to sedate me. I fell in and out of a state of nightmarish sleep and wished that I could die. But death does not come to those who need it most. There was no escape from the reality of loss.
I owe the survival of my son to many people, above all to the undying loyalty and love of Thenjiwe. She had correctly anticipated that I might learn about Biko’s death when I opened the newspapers on the morning of the 13th. The paper, with bold headlines, was indeed lying on my bed when I returned from the fateful phone call. Thenjiwe followed up her call with a visit a day or so later, to share the grief with me.
I also owe a debt to the skill and patience of Dr Van den Ende. He constantly reminded me over the next few days to pray to God for “Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change those I can, and wisdom to know the difference”. This prayer remains my constant companion. I owe much as well to the support and good care of the nurses at the hospital, who went beyond the call of duty, and to Father Duane, who came to sit at my bedside day in and day out for two weeks after this tragedy. He just sat there, ready for a smile or tears on my part. I felt utterly lost. My world had collapsed around me. Gone were the anchor in my life and the security I had become so accustomed to.
The seismic event which shattered me on that fateful morning had many after-shocks. It was not just the end of the vibrant life of a gifted person with a sense of destiny, but it was the death of a dream. The dream which was killed had both personal and national dimensions.
But it was the personal anguish which preoccupied me in my lonely hospital bed. I had none of the traditional support which one gets from family and friends. My sister’s visit, though brief, helped. But the worst aspect of the loss was not being able to bury Biko. I remember being even more distraught the day after his funeral on seeing newspaper reports and photographs of the ceremony. There was a finality about the pictures of the proceedings. But my exclusion from the rituals made acceptance of this finality difficult. I kept hoping for a miracle to restore him to life.
There were other aspects to the exclusion. Not only was I banned and thus unable to travel to King Williams Town, but I would have been too ill to travel. I had to refrain from burying him in order to protect the life of his unborn son. What is more, I was not his widow. How would I have fitted into the rituals, given this fact? It was a bewildering time for me.
The Biko family were also bewildered not only by his death but by the fact that he and his wife had already separated as part of the divorce proceedings which Steve had instituted a few months earlier. In fact they reversed his own decision to end his marriage, by fetching his wife to come and take part in the mourning ritual as his widow.
This reversal of Steve’s own wishes has run like a thread through the continuing confusion about his life. His widow was put in the uncomfortable position of mourning as a wife someone who had taken steps to end the marriage in real life. It is not surprising that tensions often surface within the Biko family around the ambiguous position they made her occupy.
The film Cry Freedom was in one respect an inaccurate portrayal of Biko’s political life, which Donald Woods had not understood in the short time in which he had come to know Biko. It also misrepresented his personal relationships. The peripheral role in which I was cast belied the centrality of my relationship, both personal and political, with Biko.
What the film did was to perpetuate the lie of Biko as a Gandhi-type person respectably married to a dedicated wife who shared his life and his political commitment. When I tried to stop the filming of this movie in Zimbabwe, my attempts were sabotaged by the eagerness of a number of people in the liberation movement, including senior African National Congress leaders, who were only concerned about the anti-apartheid statement it was making. It all added to the pain of loss by inventing memories which were not in concert with the reality of his life.
Next week: Changing the University of Cape Town
A Life by Mamphela Ramphele is published by David Phillip (R54,95)