Steve Biko was just about to turn 23 when he articulated the aims and objectives of the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso) at its first meeting, held at the “black section” of the University of Natal at Wentworth in Durban in December 1969. He already seemed to be aware that he was under pressure from the racist establishment, wilfully articulated by a largely racist white media,
to prove that he, as well as the organisation over which he presided, was not racist.
Saso needed to “boost … the morale of the non-white students [sic] to heighten their own confidence in themselves and to contribute largely to the direction of thought taken by the various institutions on social, political and other current topics”, he said in his presidential address.
He also said that Saso aimed “to heighten the degree of contact not only amongst the non-white students but also amongst these and the rest of the South African student population, to make the non-white students accepted on their own terms as an integral part of the South African student community”.
One would have thought that he was bending over backwards to make his non-racial message clear. But still, to the end of his short days, and on into the future, Biko was to be labelled as a “black racist”.
One cannot, unfortunately, use the analogy of “the pot calling the kettle black” — not just because of the irritating intervention of racial terminology into a literal interpretation of this phrase, but also because the implications are much worse than that.
The racist establishment (and we should not forget that a steadily increasing majority of the white electorate supported it until the bitter end) had put in place a whole panoply of laws that specifically excluded black people from every possible area of the mainstream of life — including the basic right to education. Biko’s statement not only reflected this insulting and debilitating reality, but went so far as to offer an olive branch — “it’s not too late to bring us on board and head into an exciting world of new possibilities together”, he was saying.
In this case, the kettle was not even remotely as black as the pot. But Biko’s words were to prove to be of very little avail.
Some months later, in July 1970, it was evident that Biko found it necessary to ratchet up the pressure a few spokes in one of the earliest of a series of columns under the generic title I Write What I Like, in the Saso newsletter that had begun to appear at around that time. In a piece he called “Black Souls in White Skins?” he laid into white liberals and white leftists alike for wanting to continually be in the forefront of political debate — “the whites doing all the talking and the blacks [doing all] the listening” was how he described it.
“They want to shy away from all forms of ‘extremisms’,” he wrote, “condemning ‘white supremacy’ as being just as bad as ‘Black Power!'” “Black power”, of course, being about black empowerment in a disempowering environment, rather than about black domination. But once again this careful articulation of the black consciousness position produced outrage rather than understanding in all-too significant sections of the white community.
In this essay, he went on to explore how black South Africans had incipiently come to accept not only a physically, but, crucially, a psychologically inferior position in South African society, and why they should reinvent their thinking to overcome this. This was what black consciousness was all about.
In that series of columns he went on to explore themes like the “Fragmentation of the Black Resistance”, “Bantustans”, and “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity” — all of which, while constantly referring back to the theme of a necessary black liberation, also left open the door to a plural society in South Africa — what today we call “reconciliation”. Liberation, he was saying, was a state of mind, and a state of being, that was necessary for all of us, black and white, whoever we were.
In his short years of life, Biko dedicated himself to returning constantly to the same theme. For his pains, he was denigrated by both the righteous left and the conservative right — and most of those who inhabited the cautious spectra in between.
Already, in his early twenties, he had placed himself out on a dangerous limb between the devil of apartheid and the deep blue sea of the banned Charterist movement, including the banned, jailed and exiled leadership of the African National Congress. This is where he was placed in his own precarious times.
But is that what he was really about? More importantly, is this really the way we should lay to rest the highly complex, conflictual spirit of those crucial years of struggle between the late 1960s and the late 1980s, which finally saw the early dawn of a triumph, of sorts, of the struggle that we all stood for?
Is Biko a footnote or a hero? We all know that he is a martyr, because of the extraordinary way in which he was put to death for his beliefs.
But how are we going to remember him, now that we are able to step back from history and assess what it is that he, and we, really did? What, indeed, did he do, in those few years when he, and his ideas, had such a huge impact on so many people — and yet had so little impact on so many others?
What is the legacy of Bantu Stephen Biko? It will still take a long time for us to work that out in detail. But part of it, at least, lies in his sheer physical and intellectual courage in reminding us to stand up for ourselves. And the fact that he had to say the same things over and over again, in what was effectively a silenced society, is testimony to his sheer endurance in the face of what seemed an impossible task — to move the brutally obstinate rock of apartheid.
But we should also ask ourselves how the legacy of Steve Biko is represented in a transformed South Africa. Do we really remember what he stood for, and are we still prepared to pay the price of the freedoms he articulated?
In an e-mail message on the subject of how we commemorate Biko’s death, a friend of mine wrote: “Biko was brutally beaten until he was brain damaged, driven a thousand kilometres in the back of a Land Rover to his death. Now our consciousness is brutally assaulted with material acquistion and put us in the driving seat of Land Rover Freelander. And we traverse the terrain of our mutilated conscience to … where?”
One might well wonder what Biko would have made of the New South Africa if he had been privileged to survive. But perhaps his legacy, if we care to reflect on it from time to time, is to make us constantly question the choices we make in defining our identity.
Viva, Steve!
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