Thandiswa references Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, who was murdered by apartheid police in 1977, on her latest album.
Forty-seven years after his death, Stephen Bantu Biko’s ideas continue to influence the minds of black politicians, scholars and artists.
The contemporary jazz band iPhupho L’ka Biko named themselves after Moses Molelekwa’s song Biko’s Dream and, with their music, aim to “conscientise and spiritually awaken abahlali (residents) globally”.
Pretoria rapper Blaklez calls himself “Steve Biko on the mic” and has made numerous references to Biko in his music.
Simphiwe Dana’s 2006 album One Love Movement on Bantu Biko Street is a celebration of blackness and imagined a black Utopia, even if it was just one street.
Nasty C, in his 2020 song where he raps about “spelling love with AMG”, having “a separate account for my shoes and weed” and “all designer sneakers on my doormat”, called himself the “new Steve Biko” because he’s so “pro-black card”.
Reason rapped in the song Zim Dollar Zeros II: “I’m on my Steven Biko while I’m stacking my Zim dollar zeros/ Just so I can write what I like for the people.”
The list of songs that make reference to Steve Biko is long and dates back to the Seventies.
Biko wrote in the compilation I Write What I Like: “The Black Consciousness approach would be irrelevant in a colourless and non-exploitative egalitarian society.”
That society is sadly not South Africa today. It’s hardly any part of the world.
In 2024, as South Africa’s democracy turns 30, the same age Biko was when he was murdered by the apartheid police, two artists — Thandiswa and Stogie T — envision possible futures through the lens of Biko’s ideologies in songs from their latest bodies of work, Sankofa and Shallow, respectively.
New York hip-hop legend Nas rapped in 2008: “No revolutionary gets old or so I’m told/ you’re left full of bullet holes when you tell the people, ‘go free’.”
It explains why the lives of Biko, Mapetla Mohapi, and countless other Black Consciousness figures, were cut short. Biko was only 30 when he was murdered. Mohapi was just 29.
In the song Biko’s Ghost from Shallow, Stogie T raps that Biko “had a dream” so “they put him to sleep”.
Stogie T also references Steve Biko in his latest album.
But, as Biko famously said, “It’s better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die.”
Black Consciousness is a perennial idea that has fuelled different eras of protest and resistance.
Having started out in political activism as a student in the Sixties and Seventies, the South African Students’ Organisation founder’s politics formed the framework of the nationwide student protests of the mid-2010s, Rhodes/Fees Must Fall.
“Biko’s influence is not only evident in the ideologies of ‘fallist’ movements, it has also become embedded in the physical spaces that universities occupy,” wrote Nombuso Mathibela and Simamkele Dlakavu in City Press in 2016 as students raged in protest against residual colonial practices in South Africa’s institutions of higher learning.
Colonial statues fell and buildings were renamed after black anti-apartheid struggle figures.
On Biko’s Ghost, Stogie T speaks of a South Africa which is run by politicians who have abandoned Biko and “did us in and got us out duty-free/ Got us on a losing streak”.
He says if their “haphazard obsession on flash, cash and trendy hoes” ever leads to a revolution, it’s on “Biko’s ghost”:
“If it so happen that black anger ever rose/ to where they pack ratchets and aim at whatever glows,/ Don’t go making up excuses like you wasn’t told/ Call it by its name: ‘Biko’s Ghost’.”
In the song, the rapper alludes to a loose parallel between Biko and Erik Killmonger, the super-villain from Marvel’s Black Panther franchise. One of the 2018 movie’s most memorable moments is when Killmonger (played by Michael B Jordan) says: “Bury me in the ocean, with my ancestors that jumped from the ships because they knew death was better than bondage.”
And as Stogie T raps on Biko’s Ghost: “My little daughter said Killmonger/ Had real honour/ Did the witchdoctor/ How the king killed the kid’s father/ Holy shit, wowza!/ She can see martyrs/ Hidden in the marvels/ I wonder how it feel for her/ To see what they inflict on us/ They have the watches, we get the time/ They got the taxes hid in Dubai/ and the Bahamas.”
Biko Speaks, from Thandiswa’s Sankofa, is a call to action for South Africans to remember the future envisioned by the Black Consciousness leader before his life was cut short — the knowledge of black people owning their country as a birthright.
This in the context of a black government that has failed the black majority in so many spheres, especially when it comes to land redistribution.
“Land appropriation without compensation” never became anything more than a slogan for politicians, while the white minority continues to own the majority of privately owned land in South Africa.
In the aptly titled kunzima: dark side of the rainbow from Sankofa, Thandiswa reproaches our leaders for their incompetence.
“Fools for leaders, kunzima/ Their minds left destitute by greed/ No souls to speak of/ They cannot be redeemed,” she sings.
“Fiends for war/ There’s total destruction/ And they’re drunk on the Moët and Gucci/ Things that can wet the coochi/ Of those who plan to scale the patriarchy.”
Such messages, pieced together with an optimistic outlook on blackness and an anthropological exploration of African musical lineage, form a sonic love letter not just to South Africa but the content as a whole.
Sankofa is a mosaic of samples, a variance of West African instruments and a collection of speech extracts and parliamentary recordings.
Biko Speaks concludes with words from one of his most famous speeches: “And it is only when black people are so dedicated and so united in their cause that we can effect the greatest results.”
At its core, Sankofa is “just a celebration of us”, Thandiswa told Ice Kream Mag. “Even though it’s not fast-paced music — it is pensive and meditative.”
Speaking on Biko’s place in history during an interview with New York radio jock Ebro Darden for his Apple Music show, she said Biko “comes in at this time when we need a new leader that will reinvigorate how people see themselves and he comes with this idea of black consciousness; being conscious of what this blackness is, what it means to be oppressed and what it means to be free, what can we visualise when we think of this freedom”.
In I Write What I Like, Biko defined Black Consciousness as “the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression — the blackness of their skin — and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude”.
Today, 30 years into democracy, South Africa is still grappling with the meaning of freedom.
Across the African continent, citizens are rising up against former liberation movements and their leaders for their failure to govern with the people’s interests at heart.
“The power of what’s happening now,” Thandiswa told Darden, “is that we are all black people speaking at the same time, and so, we can learn from each other in real time.
“I can see what’s happening in America, I can see what’s happening in Kenya. These are these little inspirations that remind us that we can still spark this fire.”
Black Consciousness is still consulted in post-apartheid South Africa, in the examination of present events ranging from the Miss South Africa pageant to the government of national unity.
Biko stood for non-collaboration and spoke and wrote scathingly about the bantustan leaders who he said were “subconsciously aiding and abetting in the total subjugation” of black people.
Would Biko and his adherents have remained firm in the non-
collaboration stance today?
Perhaps the sequel to I Write What I Like would have been focused on corrupt black governments. What would he be putting on the pages?
Thandiswa and Stogie T are looking back at the words and ideas of a man who has been gone for close to 50 years.
They do so not as an exercise in cheap nostalgia but because it seems the present is where struggle heroes and previously promising leaders, who survived the carnage of apartheid, go to become “pseudo-socialists who wear Louis Vuitton bags, proven thieves and right-wing populists”, Thandiswa said in an interview with the Mail & Guardian.
In his monumental Sway in the Morning Freestyle in 2018, Stogie T rapped that “former heroes give birth to spoiled rotten kids”.
Shallow, he says, embodies the Afro-pessimism that runs through the political psyche of modern-day Africa where the current crop of leaders is veering off with the baton handed to them.
The question remains — what would Biko have done?