Steve Bantu Biko.
Thank you to Andile Mngxitama for “A dream not deferred, but defiled” (September 14). Over and above the pain it causes us to remember (and our remembering is not an “empty ritual” but a deeply felt loss and bewilderment that a man such as Steve Biko should have met the death he did), we have to move on.
What I would like all young South Africans to realise is that consciousness has no colour. No matter how much pain we have borne because of the colour of our skins, we all have to get to that place where we can see clearly that colour is a misnomer. The site of struggle in our period has to be in the mind.
The mind is originally pure and without colour; it is only our thoughts that we colour, by proxy, with the colour of our skins. I don’t know what the solutions are to our economic troubles, but I do know that unless we come to consciousness in a colour-blind way we will be sunk in a never-ending morass of enmity and hatred: a future too ghastly to contemplate. – Irma Liberty, Cape Town
What a shame that Biko has to be honoured by the Democratic Alliance’s renaming of one of the apartheid-era streets in Gugulethu. But I must say it was a smart move by Helen Zille and Patricia de Lille. The ANC should not be surprised that it is losing support in the black areas of Cape Town. Poor people have nothing to show for liberation except watching the party destroying itself through infighting.
I hope this is a good lesson for the ANC: the party has failed to recognise the contributions to the liberation struggle by people other than its members. The ANC was in government in Cape Town and the Western Cape for some time, but failed to change even the most offensive apartheid names. Cape Town still has names such as Verwoerd Street in the suburbs; google Welgelegen and you will see how many streets are named after Afrikaner generals.
I appeal to the ANC government: remove the statue of Louis Botha in front of Parliament and replace it with one of Biko or Robert Sobukwe. – Bonga Mthembu, Cape Town