Biko: A Life

I had several reasons for wanting to read about the South African anti-apartheid martyr, Steve Biko (1946-1977). First of all, I knew little about him and the reasons for his murder by the South African security forces. Secondly, he was born and lived in the township called Ginsberg, which is part of town of King Williams Town in the Eastern Cape, where many of my mother’s family lived. One member of her family, her grandfather, was the late Senator Franz Ginsberg (1862-1936), in whose honour Biko’s township was named when it was founded in the early part of the 20th century. Thirdly, Biko was a friend of my cousin Geoff Budlender, who, as a student-leader in Cape Town became an important white anti-apartheid activist. Finally, this particular biography was written by Xolela Mangcu who arranged for me to visit Ginsberg Township in 2003, where I had the honour of meeting Biko’s elder brother Khaya briefly after having visited the house where Steve lived whilst under a banning order.At an early stage in his book, Mangcu quotes Christopher Hitchens’ view of writing a biography in which he points out that a good biography should leave the reader wishing that he or she had been able to meet the individual being described. Mangcu managed to achieve this in his book. From what he wrote about Biko, it would seem that he got on with most people, and that along with his brilliant mind accounted for some of his success as a politician who appealed to the ‘masses’. Indeed, although very busy with matters of national importance, Biko found time to do things, such as founding a crèche and a clinic, to ease the lot of his neighbours who lived under difficult material conditions in Ginsberg.Mangcu’s biography traces the development of Biko’s intellectual ideas back to the years when Europeans first began landing in what is now South Africa and started harassing its indigenous inhabitants. Mangcu then describes the influence of religious establishments and Biko’s acquaintances in Ginsberg, a ‘hotbed’ of anti-apartheid thinkers and activists, on Steve’s gradual politicisation. One of these activists was his elder brother Khaya. He also describes in great detail the importance of student groups in South Africa in the development of movements to counter apartheid. Biko, who was not entirely comfortable with the main white-dominated student union, NUSAS, developed a ‘black’ students’ union SASO.Steve Biko developed the Black Consciousness Movement (‘BCM’). In brief, as I understand it, he wanted ‘Black’ people (and in Biko’s mind this included not only Black Africans but also Indians and also ‘coloured’ people) to shed their feelings of inferiority to the white people, and to recognise that they were equal, but maybe different in outlook and aspirations, to the white people who had been suppressing them for several centuries in South Africa and elsewhere. During Steve’s lifetime, the non-white - and especially the black - man was considered by most white people in South Africa as being inferior to the white man. I find it hard to understand the kind of arrogance that led white people in South Africa (and also in other colonial societies such as British India) to believe in such nonsense, but they did. Another factor encouraging belief in superiority was the white man’s fear of the black man’s potential for competition and opposition. It is possible that the feeling that the ‘man of colour’ was inferior to the white man engendered, at the best, the (paternalistic) feeling that it was the duty of the white man to help the coloured man to strive for the benefits of the white man’s civilisation, or, more likely, at the worst, to suppress him so that he remained a source of cheap and easily dominated labour. Whatever the reason, Steve Biko felt that the black people of South Africa could not expect to liberate themselves from domination by their white neighbours until, to quote him “…whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior.”Steve Biko’s ideas and influence were not only taken seriously by the ‘black people’ in South Africa, but also by the ruling ‘white’ regime. The latter considered him such a serious threat to the status quo of apartheid, that they arrested and killed him without trial, and in the knowledge that they would not be held account for their brutal treatment of him. The details of Steve’s tragic demise, so far as they are known, are described in Mangcu’s fascinating biography.My cousin Geoff Budlender expressed Biko’s political desire to change ‘his’ peoples’ attitudes well in an interview that he gave after the end of apartheid, and long after Biko’s murder: “…I came from this white liberal background where the premise was that if only black people were like us everything would be fine. Steve Biko showed that black people didn’t want to be like us, they wanted to be like them. They wanted a liberation of a kind which was much more fundamental than simply becoming integrated into white society.” Would they have achieved this if Steve Biko had lived long enough to experience post-apartheid South Africa? Mangcu feels that they would have had a better chance of doing so had Biko not been killed. In the final pages of his interesting and thought-provoking book, he laments the current South African leadership’s betrayal of the hopes and dreams that the black people harboured when Nelson Mandela shook hands with De Klerk at the end of apartheid.

I found this one of the most convincing explanations of Black Consciousness in South Africa. The author traces Biko's thinking back to the two main responses to original white intrusion -- one a rejection of modernity, the other an embrace, but with an element of self loathing. Biko overcomes this dichotomy by accepting and welcoming modernity yet rejecting the side effect of inferiority and hatred of the own. Fascinating stuff.

"Biko" is a nicely written and heartfelt book, but strangely incomplete. It meanders all over the landscape, mixing biography (Biko's), autobiography (the author's), Xhosa history, and the story of now-obscure chapters of the anti-apartheid struggle (such as the split of SASO from NUSAS, and rivalry between the ANC and Black Consciousness groups). Unfortunately, the book never brings Steve Biko's thought into focus. Incredibly, it hardly even summarizes -- let alone analyzes -- the writings collected in Biko's epochal "I Write What I Like." I enjoyed "Biko" but I couldn't recommend it as an introduction to the life and thought of Steve Biko. Too bad. We should read him.

The writer has brought some insight into the understanding of Biko and Black Consciousness usedhis up to date information about the man.