Those who claim to be so disgusted with how the people are living include the same ones that have been stealing from the people.
This week marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Black Consciousness leader Bantu Stephen Biko by the unjust apartheid system whose project was to bedevil race relations, and to subject blacks to oppression and subjugation.
The evil system, which evolved from colonial attitudes, laws and prejudice, was devised by the leaders of the National Party, a bunch of men supposedly learned in theology, philosophy, sociology, law and other professions. For some strange and illogical conclusion, these men of the Nationalist Party came to believe that blacks were not entitled to the same education that they received and that by God’s design, blacks were predestined for a low life of poverty and suffering.
Three months short of his 31st birthday to be marked on December 18, Biko’s life was cut short by the foot soldiers of the apartheid system known as the Special Branch – a special unit of the South African Police (SAP) dedicated to harshly suppressing black political activism perceived to undermine the apartheid system. And so on this day – September 12, 1977 – Biko lost his life at the hands of heartless men, joining a long list of other blacks, including Ahmed Timol, Abram Onkgopotse Tiro, Mapetla Mohapi, Mthuli ka Shezi, perceived by the regime as “terrorists†bent on destroying “onse vaderland.”
Biko was caught up in the apartheid police dragnet in August 1977. For 25 days he was: held in detention, cruelly interrogated, manacled, badly beaten and tortured. He suffered extensive brain damage before succumbing to his extensive wounds; dying a death that the prominent international jurist Sydney Kentridge described as a “miserable and lonely death†in a prison cell in Pretoria on September 12.
Biko would become the 44th person to die in apartheid police custody. He was stripped naked by his torturers, and not even allowed the dignity to wear a pair of underpants in case, according to the inquest testimony, he might be tempted to use the scanty piece of garment to commit suicide. The warped concocted imagination of the cruel policemen of the time would be laughable if it wasn’t tragic, that a man in a coma could commit suicide by strangulation. As if this were not enough, he was driven, in that comatose state, in the back of truck for more than a 1 000km from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria.
Reflecting on the life of Biko in the Martyr of Hope: A Personal Memoir contained in the slain Black Consciousness leader’s book, I Write What I like, an English monk of the Community of Resurrection, Father Aelred Stubbs, writes: “Steve died to give an unbreakable substance to the hope he had already implanted in our breasts, the hope of freedom in South Africa. That is what he lived for; in fact one can truly say that is what he lived. He was himself a living embodiment of the hope he proclaimed by word and deed.â€
Now what is the purpose of making these reflections in the context of 40 years after Biko’s death?
South Africans continue to march in places of darkness, in political spaces not materially different from the places of oppression that the country experienced during the apartheid oppressive years.
Biko urged in his writings that South Africans must engage in projects of “freeing†one another from oppression and bad governance and causing “happiness of Africaâ€, so that all may look forward with confidence to the future, rather than be burdened by negative thoughts of uncertainty because of bad governance.
If he were alive, Biko would have turned 71 on December 18, having been born in 1946. The president of this country, Jacob Zuma, is 75. So in a sense, he is Biko’s contemporary, but it does not seem that he has taken to heart Biko’s teachings. Zuma’s tenure as the president of the country has been marked by regression and bad governance and purging of good men and women in his own party and the government, a view shared by many within the ANC.
Is there an inclination to govern the country beyond the grave, that, almost overtly, all efforts seem to be expended to ensuring that even in his years of retirement, his footprint, or spectre, continues to loom larger in the political space? There is a lot at stake for the president to be concerned about, including the reinstated criminal charges by the Gauteng North High Court. Zuma is at the mercy of the Supreme Court of Appeal which is shortly due to hear his appeal in an endeavour to overturn the decision handed down by the court of first instance a year ago.
Also, what are South Africans to read from the decision to have presidential hopeful Dr Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma sworn in as a Member of Parliament?
Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa makes reference to a claim that “dirty tricks†may be used to undermine his campaign.
Recently a Sunday newspaper in a news report claimed that Ramaphosa’s private life was marred by sex scandals. Could there be echoes of “dirty tricks†in this, even as we accept that it was clumsy of Ramaphosa to try to stop the publication of the story in a country that prides itself of a free press? This is assuming the article was truthful and accurate and fair, and not motivated by the desire to slander, and that the old principle of audi alteram partem applied.
Some critics, understandably, believe that the author of the report could be a “Zuma manâ€. In one of the now scrapped The New Age Breakfast briefings, sponsored by the SABC with the cooperation of its then chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng, the author, Steven Motale, openly apologised to Zuma for the negative articles he had written about him.
But could this “revelation†about Ramaphosa be part of the “dirty tricksâ€? We might never fully know. But as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Biko’s death, let the country not subvert what his project for the future was all about, which was, in the words of Father Aelred Stubbs, the “purification” of a country “reborn out of the destruction of this racist society- a society truly liberated and averse to “dirty tricks”.
