”Steve died and I was in detention; because I was in solitary confinement I had no way of knowing. And the only way was after a day or so, I picked up a newspaper and I saw there was a statement by [Jimmy] Kruger, the [then] minister of justice: ‘His death leaves me cold.’
”And I remember the utter shock, the numbing pain I felt as a result of this; it was just shocking,†Professor Barney Pityana says, describing his memories of the murder of his friend, Stephen Bantu Biko, by police in September 1977, 30 years ago.
Together they led the student Black Consciousness movement, the South African Students’ Organisation, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Meeting him on a cold and wet summer’s day in Dublin, Pityana recalled how the murder of Biko took the country to the precipice of revolution. It was more than the loss of a voice. ‘South Africa lost a then very young intellectual giant. Somebody who had just amazing compassion for people, who would have made an enormous contribution, positive contribution, and we lost that.
‘But the good thing is that what they did not realise. They might have thought that by killing Steve, they killed everything he stood for. What they might not have realised is, because he was able to lead the Black Consciousness movement for 10 years, he was able to make something that can never be destroyed. So, in an amazing way, in some sense it was futile to kill Steve and think you are killing an idea, because an idea you can’t confine to a person.â€
This year the Steve Biko Foundation organised a series of cultural events under the banner of ‘Biko 30:30â€. These events have been held throughout the country to mark the 30th anniversary of the death of Biko, who was 30 years old when he died.
In Johannesburg there was a series of films, screened at Museum Africa in Newtown. The audience was a mixture of school pupils and young men, all of whom had come to learn more about their idol.
‘He is one of my heroes,†said Thato Loeto, who had travelled hundreds of kilometres from North West especially to attend the event. ‘Most of our parents underestimated themselves; he [Biko] taught African people never to underestimate yourself.â€
One of the many school learners, 15-year-old Mashepo Mazibuko, said her mother had taught her about Biko. She said he was ‘one of the people who took part in the struggle for freedom. Most people lack that self-confidence of ‘I am what I am —’ You have to take pride in yourself to be who you want to be and that pride will help you to be where you see yourself in the future.â€
Driving through the country from Durban, where Biko was a medical student, the landscape changes from the balmy tropical climes of KwaZulu-Natal. The neatly manicured white farms and sugar cane plantations give way to the barren hillsides of what was the former Xhosa homeland of Transkei. This has the effect of magnifying the sense of abject poverty. It is one of the poorest regions of Southern Africa — and it is clear the land issue Biko grappled with remains unresolved.
The Great Kei River bridge marks the other edge of the Xhosa frontier, where the British invaders were pushed back. It is only a short distance from there to the small Eastern Cape settlement of King William’s Town.
This was where Biko was confined under a banning order during the last years of his life. It was here that he established a health clinic, with Mamphela Ramphele and others, which still provides for the community today.
‘It was really a mini-hospital,†Nkosinathi Biko says when I meet him in Port Elizabeth. ‘But around it there were other community-based projects, such as leather works, brick-making and agricultural activities.†The eldest son of Biko, Nkosinathi has the air of a successful businessman and is in town in his capacity as director of the Biko Foundation.
After the meeting, Nkosinathi directs me to the nearby police station in Walmer, a middle-class Port Elizabeth suburb where, in cell 619, Biko was subjected to the savage beatings that led to his death from a brain haemorrhage.
A few days earlier they had been busy knocking down the prison cells where Biko spent his final days. That was until Nkosinathi and the Biko Foundation stepped in. Nkosinathi indicated that he could mobilise certain powers when necessary. The police, for their part, claimed merely to have been refurbishing the cells.
Most of the security policemen who were involved in the torture and murder of Biko have died, although at least one of them, JJ Beneke, remains free, even though no amnesty was granted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in relation to the Biko case.
The TRC found in 1999 that the police ‘had not testified truthfully†and that their version of events in the Biko murder was ‘so improbable and contradictory that it had to be rejected as falseâ€.
Despite this, Pityana has a positive spin and thinks most of today’s black leaders of South African business, politics and cultural life developed from the Black Consciousness philosophy they promoted.
‘It was very important to assert the fact of being black. Most people’s starting point was blackness, because that was their experience. But I think that many people, having asserted with confidence the idea of being black and understood the experiential nature of being black, become more than just their experience and ideas, to become in fact a vision for the country that they lived in and what kind of society they want, which Steve expresses very well,†he says.
Nkosinathi questions the creation of the ‘rainbow nation†by the media and believes that it is important to challenge how we see ourselves as a nation. Quoting his father, he says: ‘We have set out on a quest for true humanity and somewhere in the distance we can see the glittering prize; let us march forth with courage and determination, drawing strength from our common plight and our brotherhood. In time we shall be able to bestow on South Africa the greatest gift possible, a more humane face.â€
In an old piece of footage, shown on TV to promote Biko 30:30, he himself says: ‘There shall be no minority, there shall be no majority, there shall just be people.†However, that point does not appear to have been reached yet.