Remembering Steve Biko, Thirty Six Years After His Murder: Vikrant Dadawala

Steve Biko

Image: In his coffin

I think the central theme about black society is that it has got elements of a defeated society, people often look like they have given up the struggle. Like the man who was telling me that he now lives to work, he has given himself to the idea. Now this sense of defeat is basically what we are fighting against; people must not give in to the hardship of life, people must develop a hope, people must develop form of security to be together to look at their problems, and people must in this way build up their humanity. This is the point about conscientisation and Black Conciousness.

-from Steve Biko’s defence testimony to an apartheid court, published in I Write What I Like

Steve Biko was a anti-apartheid activist and student leader who was murdered while in the custody of the South African police on 12th September 1977. Biko was from a generation of South Africans inspired by the Black Power movement in the United States. The generation of the Soweto uprisings, a generation that grew up and came to political maturity at a time when all the erstwhile leaders of the South African freedom struggle were in jail in Robben Island or in exile.

Biko - “No 46”- was the 46th anti-apartheid activist to die in police custody. In February 1999, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission refused amnesty to the police officials involved in Biko’s murder. This was a somewhat unusual move on the Commission’s part which had made clear its preference for amnesty as a precondition for reconciliation. For the “reconciled” South Africa then, his killing has come to be seen as more than a political murder - an act of cruelty in excess of politics.

Image: It Left Him Cold - The Death of Steve Biko (1990) by Sam Nhlengetha

Sam Nhlengetha uses actual photographs of Biko’s corpse to recreate the abjection and the losses of the apartheid era to disquieting effect. The name of his artwork refers to the the then South African Minister of Police’s remarks on Biko’s death: “I am not glad and I am not sorry about Mr. Biko. It leaves me cold (Afrikaans: Dit laat my koud). I can say nothing to you… Any person who dies… I shall also be sorry if I die.” (Why does this remind me of puppies and motorcars?)

Biko remains a resonant figure in South Afircan popular culture - in tshirts, music, graffiti - perhaps even more so today than ever before. Outside of South Africa, his influence is more fragmented. A few statements/quotable quotes by Biko have come to metonymically stand in for the entire Black Consciousness movement.  Such as this one: 

At the heart of this kind of thinking is the realization by blacks that most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor in the mind of the oppressed.

Today, it requires conscious effort on our parts to see Steve Biko as a specifically third world figure. Biko and his comrades saw their struggle as part of a long war with the so-called first and second worlds. The figures who influenced Biko’s movement (all of them male) were a mix of third world leaders and American activists - Kenneth Kuanda, Sekou Toure, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Stokey Carmichel, James Cone etc.

Biko and his comrades were also highly affected by Paulo Friere’s work on education, and this made them make heavy emotional investments in ideas of “listening to the people”, even though as community organizers, they may have tended to slip up on this count as they grew more confident of their popularity. They saw alienation and self hatred in black society to be the result of living conditions, insecurity of life and livelihood, an education that crippled selfhood, poverty, and above all, the cultural domination of white values. Cockyness and “manliness” were to be their main weapons in a society where they were living as “perpetual under-16s”. They saw the police as "the vanguard of white society", and they were desperate to themselves be the vanguard of black society.

Those opposed to South Africa’s current economic policies are fond of quoting from Biko in order to argue that what South Africa has today is a “false” integration:

                       

 ...And this is one country where it would be possible to create a capitalist black society. If whites were intelligent. If the Nationalists were intelligent. And that capitalist black society, black middle-class, would be very effective at an important stage. Primarily because a hell of a lot of blacks here have got a bit of education—I’m talking comparatively speaking—to the so-called rest of Africa, and a hell of a lot them could compete favorably with whites in the fields of industry, commerce, and professions. And South Africa could succeed to put across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being underdogs.

-Steve Biko, in an interview with a foreign journalist

But Biko’s political or economic thoughts were largely derivative and not very original. His heroism,such as it was, is tied up with his times and with his life.  Nowhere can we see this better than in the records of his trial by a South African court (prior to his murder). The judge crudely attempts to establish the “whiteness” of democracy (remember this is 1970). The court blanks out testimonies in “bantu languages”. Against these dehumanising systems, Biko is an inspiring, defiant figure: “Not only have they kicked the black but they have also told him how to react to the kick”.

The anniversary of his murder is a good day to remeber all those who have refused to react to kicks the way they were supposed to!

Image: The famous photograph of Hector Pieterson's body being carried by his sister and friend after the brutal police repression of the Soweto protestors

Edit: On reading again, this is much more of an endorsement of vanguardist politics than I meant it to be. Such is life. Jai Hind...

Vikrant is a second year student of the MA in Development Studies programme at TISS, Mumbai.