topics: |  south-africa | essays | postcolonial

This volume is a collection of articles, lectures, trial testimoniesand
letters by Steve Biko, one of the most influential among early
critics of apartheid. 

Now it would have been bloody useful evidence for them to assault me.

Biko formed the Sougth African Student's Organization (SASO) while studying medicine at the University of Natal - the main university was whites-only; he was at the non-European branch.

Though repeatedly arrested, Biko was never convicted of any violent act. 

On 18 August 1977, he was arrested for the last time under the
Terrorism Act. He was transferred to Port Elizabeth, where he died in
detention on 12 September. 

There was intense media pressure, including international coverage which
led to a fair inquest - one of the first for a detention death in the
apartheid era.  It turned out that he was kept naked and manacled to a grill
all day, and slept on the urine soaked blankets at night.  He was killed
after being battered on the head.
	
Biko's funeral saw bus-loads of mourners coming to Biko's burial town (King
William’s Town).  The streets were lined with solemn Black youth standing
with their clenched fists raised. Prominent white liberals like Helen Suzman
and the black American diplomat, Donald McHenry attended.  There were about
20,000 people who marched and sang freedom songs. For five hours, speakers
eulogised Biko. The Reverend Xundu, the Transkei Anglican priest, who
presided over the funeral, appealed to God to take sides with the oppressed
to overthrow the system.

Excerpts

the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

The call for Black Consciousness is the most positive call to come from any group in the black world for a long time. It is more than just a reactionary rejection of whites by blacks. The quintessence of it is the realisation by the blacks that, in order to feature well in this game of power politics, they have to use the concept of group power and to build a strong foundation for this. Being an historically, politically, socially and economically disinherited and dispossessed group, they have the strongest foundation from which to operate. The philosophy of Black Consciousness, therefore, expresses group pride and the determination by the blacks to rise and attain the envisaged self.

At the heart of this kind of thinking is the realisation by the blacks that
the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the
oppressed. Once the latter has been so effectively manipulated and controlled
by the oppressor as to make the oppressed believe that he is a liability to
the white man, then there will be nothing the oppressed can do that will
really scare the powerful masters.

Through the work of missionaries and the style of education adopted, the
blacks were made to feel that the white man was some kind of god whose word
could not be doubted. As Fanon puts it: 

	Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip
	and emptying the Native's brain of all form and content; by a kind of
	perveted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people and
	distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.


The attitude of some rural African folk who are against education is often
misunderstood, not least by the African intellectual. Yet the reasons put
forward by these people carry with them the realisation of their inherent
dignity and worth. They see education as the quickest way of destroying the
substance of the African culture. They complain bitterly of the disruption in
the life pattern, nonobservation of customs, and constant derision from the
nonconformists whenever any of them go through school. Lack of respect for
the elders is, in the African tradition, an unforgivable and cardinal
sin. Yet how can one prevent the loss of respect of child for father when the
child is actively taught by his know-all white tutors to disregard his
family's teachings? How can an African avoid losing respect for his tradition
when in school his whole cultural background is summed up in one word:
barbarism? 70

On Death

					[based on a 1977 interview]
You are either alive and proud or you are dead.  p.152

I was talking to this policeman, and I told him, "If you want us to make any
progress, the best thing is for us to talk. Don't try any form of rough
stuff, because it just won't work." 

And this is absolutely true also. For I
just couldn't see what they could do to me which would make me all of a
sudden soften to them. If they talk to me, well I'm bound to be affected by
them as human beings. But the moment they adopt rough stuff, they are
imprinting in my mind that they are police. 

And I only understand one form of dealing with police, and that's to be as
unhelpful as possible. So I button up. 

And I told them this: "It's up to you." We had a boxing match the first day I
was arrested. Some guy tried to clout me with a club. I went into him like a
bull. I think he was under instructions to take it so far and no further, and
using open hands so that he doesn't leave any marks on the face. 

And of course he said exactly what you were saying just now: "I will kill
you." He meant to intimidate. And my answer was: "How long is it going to
take you?"

Now it would have been bloody useful evidence for them to assault me. 

[Indeed, his death generate powerful "evidence" for the sins of apartheid.] 

Lewis Gordon : Introduction

Steve Bantu Biko was a courageous man. This is not to say that he was
callously neglectful of the value of life, including his own, but rather he
was a man for whom life was so valuable that the fear of death could be
transcended. The consequence was that he found a way for word and deed to
meet and thus to achieve the urgently political and the genuinely
liberating. Brutalized to death in the flesh, he left his words to unfold
through three decades in a continued challenge to every human being to carry
on the fight for our humanity. Dust though his body has become, his ideas
live on.

You hold in your hand, dear reader, a classic work in black political
thought and the liberation struggle for all humankind. I mention both to
emphasize the paradox offered by blackness as the limit — as the periphery or
the margin -in the modern, racist world where whites are treated as the
carriers of universal humanity, although the world of color often admits the
genuinely universal and often hidden aspects of the modern world: its dirty
laundry or, in the formulation of the Latin American philosopher Enrique
Dussel, its "underside."

The Theodicy of a white God

An imbalance of power and perspective is the consequence of white
privilege, and it has led to what I call a theodicy of the West. Theodicy is
the effort to account for the compatibility of evil or injustice with the
existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and good God. If God is all-powerful,
all-knowing, and all-good, why doesn't God do something about injustice in
the world?  

White supremacists rationalize modern racism as a consequence of
God's favor of white people. Biko challenges such views of God in "Black
Souls in White Skins?" in which he writes that the revolt of black youth is
the most reasonable response: 

	The anachronism of a well-meaning God who allows people lo suffer
	continually under an obviously immoral system is not lost to young
	blacks who continue to drop out of Church by the hundreds.  |The
	Bible] must rather preach that it is a sin to allow oneself to be
	oppressed.

God has been replaced in the modern world by an order or system that is
to be maintained at all cost. In theological language, such rationalization
of modern racism is a form of idolatry because it treats the system as God,
although Biko does not put it this way. Racism can be described as a form of
idolatry in that it holds one class of people above others as intrinsically
superior. 

This means that it creates a double standard for human membership. On the
one hand, if those who are "below" consider themselves human, then those
who are "above" are suprahuman or demigods. And if those who are "above"
consider themselves human, then those who are "below" are subhuman and
closer to animals. 

	[Reading these ideas in the 21st century one cannot but be struck by
	the notion that many human groups - Palestinians, Santhals,
	shack-blacks - are perceived as "sub-human" while the demigods rule
	from the Madison Avenue.   In the _Bonfire of the Vanities, these
	"Masters of the Universe" adopt this view towards these lesser
	humans:  

    		"If you want to live in New York, you've got to insulate,
		insulate, insulate," [against the misery of the blacks]

	One work that addreses the anger this generates - Islam is only the
	largest group facing it - is the powerful Pakistani writer  Mohsin
	Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008) in which the 
	Pakistani-born McKinsey consultant eventually chucks up his job to
	become - or at least show sympathy for - the terrorists, a story
	that closely follows Mohsin's own career. ]

Theories of racism

This is the relational theory of racism. It enables us to see the problem
of normativity that emerges in what Frantz Fanon and subsequently David
Theo Goldberg call "racist culture." Those who place all others beneath
themselves create a situation in which the assertion of their humanity and
their superiority becomes superfluous. They literally are the standpoint of
nil reality. This means, then, that racism is fundamentally asymmetrical,
and it is this pervasive asymmetry that marks many of the contradictions in
efforts from within the racist system to liberate blacks. Biko's trenchant
criticisms of unequal power relations bring this argument to the fore.

Much of Biko's energy is devoted to criticizing the liberal in both the
condescending white and the idiotic black forms. The black liberal is
idiotic because black people lack power in a white-controlled system. The
white liberal, on the other hand, operates from the vantage point of having
something — perhaps a great deal — to lose in the event of progressive
social change. The white liberal's offer to help has an air of
condescension because it masks a profound existential investment in the
continuation of the racist system. Thus, the white liberal always insists
on offering the theoretical or interpretive strategies against antiblack
racism, but such strategies often act to preserve the need for white
liberals as the most cherished members and overseers of values in their
society. In Biko's words: 

	I am against the superior-inferior white-black stratification that
	makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil
	(and a pour one at that).

du Bois and "Double Consciousnes"

Biko refuses to be told what to think and what to write. "I write what I
like," he declares under the clever pseudonym Frank Talk. The clarity of
Frank Talk is a demand for truth. He reveals here the unique, doubled
relationship blacks have with European civilizations: blacks face a world of
lies in which they are forced to pretend as true that which is false and
pretend as false that which is true. This is the insight behind what is
perhaps the most powerful trope of black theoretical reflection, introduced
by W. E. B. Du Bois more than a century ago — double consciousness.