We Write What We Like (Wits University Press), a collection of essays on Steve Biko edited by Chris van Wyk, has just been published. The edited extract below is from Jonathan Jansen’s essay King James, Princess Alice, and the Ironed hair: A tribute to Stephen Bantu Biko.
Biko’s assertion of blackness not only as an oppressed identity but also as an assertive one explained the mushrooming of afros among my black friends and the instant attacks on any unsuspecting township dweller who dared to refer to him or herself as ‘coloured” or ‘Indian” or ‘Xhosa”. In one move, black identity became not only a means of organising oppressed groups on the basis of a common experience but a way of chipping away at the certainties that apartheid assigned to ethnic labels.
It is Biko’s call for assertiveness of the black condition that made such a major difference to the lives of many South Africans. It forced another look at the fragility of whiteness, its false power, its presentation of itself as a single model of goodness. To be black, now, was to say so; it was to wear black and speak back; it was to elevate black culture, traditions and practices from their denigration (note the exchange with Judge Boshoff on the meaning of witchcraft in Biko’s trial) as something beautiful, intriguing and blessed.
But it was in writing back that Biko had his greatest influence on the lives of many, including me; turning the tables on the relationship between knowledge and authority so that we ceased to be consumers of official history written by white authorities of all ideological leanings.
I understood this to mean, in my own work, that black people should step away from their awe of white writings and lead scholarly writing about things they knew well but never dared to commit to paper because of a sheer lack of confidence. The importance of this shift within black academic and scholarly work from knowledge consumer to knowledge maker cannot be overstated. It is a psychological, emotional and political shift that is as liberating to black scholars as it is intimidating to many white scholars.
This was the kind of political attitude that led to the production of my first book, Knowledge and Power in South Africa, published in 1991 by Skotaville Press. It was only in part an attempt to show how the social and natural science disciplines were implicated in the apartheid project; the disciplines were not merely conveyors of apartheid ideology, they created and sustained the myths of white supremacy and black subordination. It was, however, also an attempt to demonstrate what happens when black academics take the lead in writing about subjects that few besides Archie Mafeje, Es’kia Mphahlele and Chabani Manganyi had redefined intellectually. What was crucial about the assembly of authors in Knowledge and Power was that while black editors and authors led the writing in major disciplines they did so with the participation of progressive white scholars in a secondary but collaborative role. In tone and substance, therefore, the book owes its emergence to the powerful role of Steve Biko in my life as a graduate student and a new scholar.
There is trouble ahead, though, for all major signposts point to a coming crisis in black research leadership and productivity. The familiar narrative of ageing white males still dominating the research corpus with no clear signs of their replacement is not an exaggeration. Despite millions of rands being invested every year in capacity-building initiatives there is little to show in terms of a visible new generation of black academics and researchers. The implications are profound, for it means the replacement generation, especially in competitive disciplines like genetics and mathematics, is likely (again) to consist of young white scholars trained in the best laboratories in the country.
The problem here is only partly one of access and opportunity. It is still largely a problem of personal confidence, of intellectual assertion, and of occupying the ample space provided in this open society. I have trained and graduated enough doctoral students in the past 15 years to recognise the enduring problem of black reticence and withdrawal in the face of academic power. It expresses itself in writing in the third person, in concealing personal voice, in dismissing the authority of experience and in hiding behind the power of external authority (the famous professor) in an almost permanent state that I call the black apologetic condition.
The challenge here is not to regress into some obscure nativism or race essentialism, as the morally obtuse project of the Native Club tried so clumsily to enforce. Black people now have political power and, by the day, more and more economic power as well. It is how that power is wielded, how the space is occupied, that will determine how fast the imbalances of social and intellectual power can be redressed in our open society.
And so, the question will be posed now and into the future: is Biko relevant to a post-1994 South Africa? The response I hear often, an appealing one, is that black consciousness is relevant as long as white consciousness exists. I understand this reflexive response, as someone recently put it: ‘Black man, you are still on your own.”
There are two problems with this formulation. First, it suggests that Biko was fixed to a concept of blackness devoid of social context and history. His vision, best expressed in the extraordinary exchange with Judge Boshoff during his trial, was one of ‘a very open society” and of black collective action as a platform for being able to speak for oneself, without fear, in the long struggle for such community. In another interview, published in his collected writings, he gave substance to this open society; a country in which ‘there shall be no minority, there shall be no majority, just the people. And those people will have the same status before the law and they will have the same political rights before the law.” He would argue, in other words, that we have formally attained this status even as the struggle for an equal society continues.
Second, it suggests that race consciousness can end voluntarily, without social intervention. Of course this is unlikely to happen as the deep roots of colonialism and apartheid continue to influence ways of thinking and acting. Another kind of consciousness is required, one based on Biko’s vision of an open, egalitarian society.
Power has changed hands since this brilliant 30-year-old was killed by the apartheid state. Yet to this day I am deeply grateful to Steve Biko and his movement for the confidence and self-respect that black consciousness engendered in me, and from which basis I felt much more prepared to push back against white racism. Biko remains relevant today to the extent that he inspired a generation of black intellectuals to come into their own and today they occupy positions of considerable influence in this fragile but nevertheless open society.
But I now find myself more attracted towards imagining a world without race, a broader cosmopolitanism, as the sociologist Paul Gilroy calls it, in which one identifies with people on the basis of common citizenship of a troubled world. Yet I do so from the platform of confidence that black consciousness bequeathed to me.