Biko: A Biography. Xolela Mangcu

      To the memory

      of

      Mrs Alice Nokuzola Biko – MamCethe

      for giving up her beloved son so we could be free

      A Tribute to Stephen Bantu Biko

BY NELSON MANDELA[1]

      On 12 September 25 years ago, the 31-year-old Steve Biko’s life came to an end. His life was extinguished with more callousness and casualness than a person snuffing out a candle flame between calloused thumb and forefinger.

      Living, he was the spark that lit a veld fire across South Africa. His message to the youth and students was simple and clear: Black is Beautiful! Be proud of your Blackness! And with that he inspired our youth to shed themselves of the sense of inferiority they were born into as a result of more than three centuries of white rule.

      Assert yourselves and be self-reliant! With that he ignited a passion in the youth and they walked tall.

      I never had the opportunity to meet him. From prison we followed his exploits and closely followed the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement.

      Well before they murdered him in detention, I realised that his stride was leaving indelible footprints in the struggles of our people against apartheid rule. In his short life he achieved what many would need a lifetime to accomplish.

      We know today that when, in the life of a nation, the time comes for an idea, nothing – not even murder – can kill the idea.

      All the information we collected about Steve pointed in one direction: he was an engaging young man who thought deeply and acted with conviction. He lived for freedom and was infused with a zest for life.

      He understood that an enslaved people through their actions make freedom. He was focused on how to get our people into action, on how we could achieve freedom.

      He forged a space in the midst of repression and saw the inexorable logic that the forces he was helping mobilise had to become part of the liberation forces.

      He was arrested while he was busy going around the country consulting with a broad spectrum of people, gathered in different pockets of resistance. He was quietly preparing for a clandestine meeting he was due to hold with Oliver Tambo, the President of the ANC.

      It now appears certain that the apartheid regime got wind of this. Whether his death came from an accidental blow or not, they had to kill him to prolong the life of apartheid. The very thought of a link-up between the ANC and the Black Consciousness Movement was unthinkable to the apartheid government.

      As he grappled with the question of how to achieve freedom, he showed one of his strongest qualities – an ability to confront reality, to grow and develop ideas and continually broaden his outlook.

      Today there are those who claim validity for their ideas by claiming a lineage to Steve Biko. To live with Steve’s ideas they need to live out this singular ability of Steve, to adapt and grow and display the courage that belongs to leadership.

      Steve lives on in the galaxy of brave and courageous leaders who helped shape democratic South Africa. May we never cease celebrating his life!

      NELSON MANDELA

[1]Reprinted with permission from the Nelson Mandela Foundation. An edited version was published in 2002 as part of a Steve Biko supplement that Xolela Mangcu edited for the Steve Biko Foundation.

      Preface

      As I write this book there is a raging debate between two leading South African political commentators, Moeletsi Mbeki and Zubeida Jaffer. Mbeki stirred the hornet’s nest when, at the 2012 Franschhoek Literary Festival, he described Steve Biko as a Xhosa prophet. Jaffer found this characterisation of Biko objectionable, given the Black Consciousness Movement’s (BCM’s) non-ethnic politics. The approach taken in this book is that this is an unhelpful dualism. Steve Biko was as much a product of South Africa’s multi-ethnic political heritage as he was a child of the Xhosa people of the Eastern Cape. Chapter 2 locates Steve within a long trajectory that goes back to the wars of resistance by the Khoi-Khoi and San people in the Northern Cape frontier in the 17th and 18th centuries, right up to the anti-colonial resistance of the Xhosa people on the Eastern Cape frontier throughout the 19th century.

      I have provided an approximate periodisation of frontiers – if only to demonstrate the length of time it took to resist colonial rule, which is almost 150 years in each case. The third period, which is taken up in later chapters, would be that of the almost 100 years of nationalist struggle since the formation of the African National Congress (ANC), and later the Pan Africanist Congress, the Unity Movement, and the Black Consciousness Movement. This adds up to almost 400 years of political action and intellectual thought. Years are not a substitute for intensity of struggle, and there are great degrees of overlap, which is exactly the point of this chapter – the intercultural solidarities that were forged by different groups over time, culminating in Black Consciousness in the 1970s.

I use the term “frontier” for ease of reference to the literature. Roger Levine argues that “to describe the Eastern Cape in the early to mid-nineteenth century as a frontier is to underplay the long-term presence of Africans in the region”. Levine uses the term “border region”[1] to signal the degree of intercultural contact among the Xhosa, the Khoi, the San and the European colonists and missionaries. This idea of intercultural contact is central to Steve Biko’s attempt to reframe European modernity into a progressive African modernity through the philosophy of Black Consciousness, resulting in what he called a “joint culture”.

There is indeed more than a superficial relationship between the Khoi and the San on the one hand and the Xhosa on the other. The clicks in isiXhosa come from the languages of the Khoi and San people. Roger Levine observes that “the Xhosa have incorporated three click consonants from the Khoisan into their language – the explosive plop produced by the tongue rocketing from the top of the mouth [q], the gentle tut from the front of the mouth [c] and the cluck from the side [x]”.[2] Jeff Peires similarly notes that one sixth of all Xhosa words have clicks in them, attributing this to “the influence of the Khoi and San languages on Xhosa”.[3] The BCM’s definition of Blackness to include Coloureds and Indians is a supreme example of the centuries-old construction of hybrid identities. Aelred Stubbs describes Steve’s unique contribution to the solidarity that developed among Coloureds, Indians and Africans as follows:

. . . it was a special strength of the Black Consciousness Movement that from the beginning in the 1960s SASO [South African Students Organisation] had been open to Coloureds and Indians. I am not sure that the importance of this achievement, in the given social structures of South Africa, has been emphasised . . . but the way in which SASO managed to overcome traditional barriers between Africans and Coloureds . . . was not only indicative of a new mood in the Coloured community, but a significant achievement of non-ethnic solidarity.[4]

Recognition of this hybrid heritage does not mean we cannot trace specific political themes of Black Consciousness to 19th-century Xhosa chiefs and intellectuals, who took up the resistance after the Khoi and the San were defeated and almost decimated at the end of the 18th century. By this time the Khoi and the San had been reduced to “a servant class on European farms and with European livestock ranchers under a quasi-legal situation that amounts to forced labour at worst and indentured servitude at best”.[5] In this chapter