Steve Biko’s political thought was rooted in the climate of racism, and at the height of brutal subjugation.
The tendency to limit Steve Biko’s black consciousness to race overlooks its significance to empower and liberate us through all forms of constraints to human growth and development.
Biko’s political thought was rooted in the climate of racism, and at the height of brutal subjugation. His political philosophy reflected this fact, as well as his dedication to combat oppression at the psychological level.
He was not the first one to be aware of the psychological dimension of racism. In 1937, Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey declared: “We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.” An exhortation that inspired the Redemption Song by Bob Marley, and further resonated in Biko’s own postulation that, “black man you are on your own”.
What distinguished Biko was his industriousness in singling out and combating psychological subjugation. His development of a philosophical framework for black consciousness testified to his belief in the strategic importance of psychological liberation.
Although he was first and foremost an undisputable activist in his own right, his offensive against psychological subjugation was, for him, not ancillary to the broader struggle for liberation. It was complementary.
So, the polemic about Biko’s legacy will be more monumental to the man if we extend his psychoanalysis to contemporary forms of oppression in general. That task involves an analysis of black consciousness that does not confine itself to colour. And I am aware that at first glance this may seem counterintuitive, or even sacrilegious to those whose political careers depend on perpetuating black victimhood.
Yet, from the development of our self-concept, the perception of our capabilities up to the horizons of our dreams, feedback from our surroundings contribute to our worldview even today. It is well established sociologically that the environment plays a significant role in limiting or expanding our aspirations. That’s what must have bothered Biko in a situation where it was an institutionalised policy to make one race inferior to another.
If black consciousness developed as an antidote to the dehumanising effects of oppression and subjugation, it is not yet time to eliminate oppression and subjugation from our lexicon. Many of our present problems qualify as oppressive by nature and the human agency perpetuating them.
For instance, Biko would have agreed with Carl Jung that the antecedents for self-actualisation include access to basic needs like water, sanitation, food security and primary health care. It is, therefore, logical to infer that denying the people access to these basic needs is oppressive. And the purveyors of this kind of oppression are those who deprive the people access to these basic services, through corruption or maladministration. And that is no longer about race and racism.
The mission to change the lives of the suffering requires material interventions. But Biko taught us that the most urgent agenda is psychological emancipation when the circumstances tend to diminish our humanity.
To liberate the mind is to also restore its natural capacity to perceive and reason about its world as it is. People may not know how exactly white monopoly capital caused their suffering, especially when their political leaders acquire and flagrantly display opulence. And for a while, their epistemic limitations may open the doors to the salesman of fabricated ontology, offered in the form of elegant public relations strategy.
But fabricated political ontology is still a fantasy, and cannot withstand the phenomenology of free minds, when they point to the empirical causes of their suffering.
This cognitive capacity among the downtrodden may confound the privileged urban chauvinists. The post-liberation clichés who impose their ideas about realities they do not live. And in so doing, dare to shut down the voices of people who live through the suffering. It could never have been Biko’s ideal that one class may undermine the intellect of another.
Affirming black people through colour identity was indispensable to Steve Biko’s black consciousness. But we do not need to redact the text of his political philosophy, because its spirit allows us to question if race is still germane to the application of his thought to self-actualisation in post-liberation South Africa.
The answer still lies in Biko’s words: “While it may be relevant now to talk about black in relation to white, we must not make this our preoccupation, for it can be a negative exercise. As we proceed more towards the achievement of our goals, let us talk more about ourselves and our struggle and less about whites.”
There was no beauty in colonialism and apartheid, even though Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille once said there was. Both displayed a primordial animal instinct to advance the white man’s life by turning other races into prey. That remains the historical essence of these oppressive systems, regardless of the value of artefacts the former victims inherited by accident.
So, I am perfectly aware why colour still lingers as an instrument to reverse the effects of colonial and apartheid atrocities. But I fear that leveraging colour as a means of progress can have a paradoxical effect of self-incarceration. We subconsciously make black existence contingent on white existence.
Our self-worth, self-pride and self-determination must still inspire self-confidence in our capabilities among all nations of the world. The grandchildren of Biko do not need to be affirmed with vestigial colour identities.
Of course, calling yourself black does not make you look or feel inferior. After all, Nelson Mandela’s visit to his former prison cell on Robben Island did not make him a prisoner again. But the danger is that racism or fascism can emerge from what could have been innocent racial affirmations of former victims.
That’s how citizens in Nazi Germany surreptitiously became accomplices to what turned out to be a criminal self-appointment as the Aryan race. The humiliation of defeat in World War I and the punitive Treaty of Versailles created perfect conditions for breeding perfect victims who would become the world’s worst criminals and accomplices.
During a visit to a genocide memorial in Kigali, I learned that one of the priorities of the Rwandan government after the ethnic genocide was to “de-ethnicise” citizenship. Academic, author and political commentator Mahmood Mamdani provides excellent insights about the hazards of identity politics, especially when identity had been the epicentre of racial or ethnic conflict. His book title, When Victims Become Killers, hints at something ominous about identity politics.
We still revere the heroism of our anti-apartheid political activists. But we must honour them (the living and the departed) by asserting our freedom of thought and self-actualisation. It is this agency, underpinned by free intellects, that Biko fiercely fought to preserve.
And when our politicians invoke this seemingly abstract notion of “our people”, they would do well to remember that Biko’s ideal of “our people” was about thinking beings, capable of giving dialectical feedback to their politicians.
Mzwandile Manto is the secretary general of the Mgwali Development Forum.