By Clare Byrne, DPA
Johannesburg : “The world will not forget the Steve Biko affair,” angry parliamentarian Helen Suzman warned South Africa’s apartheid government following the death of the influential Black Consciousness leader in police custody on Sep 12, 1977.
Wednesday marks the 30th anniversary of Biko’s passing at the age of 30 after suffering brain damage caused by a police beating. To this day his death is mourned as having robbed South Africa of one of its great leaders, whose radical ideas on race and African identity are still seen as very germane.
Steve Biko was born in Tylden in the Eastern Cape in 1946. While studying medicine at the University of Natal in Durban he founded the South African Students’ Organization to represent non-white students in 1968.
SASO developed a huge following among youth at universities and townships, re-energising the anti-apartheid movement after the outlawing of the African National Congress (ANC) and imprisonment of its leaders in the 1960s.
Biko’s ideas radicalised black youth. “Black man, you are on your own,” he said, urging black South Africans to break off ties with white liberals to achieve what he called “psychological liberation.”
“True and meaningful integration” between blacks and whites would only be possible when black people had asserted themselves to the point where they had to be shown respect, he argued.
Although Biko stressed he saw Black Consciousness as a first step towards non-racialism, and not an end state in itself, many people accused him of racism.
Donald Woods, the white editor of the Daily Dispatch newspaper, whose friendship with Biko is portrayed in the 1987 film “Cry Freedom”, admitted he was critical at first, believing Black Consciousness to be racism in reverse.
Woods, whose book the movie was based on, changed his point of view after witnessing through Biko the effects of the government imposed restrictions under the apartheid system.
Biko had a very non-racial vision of blacks, according to Adam Habib, deputy vice-chair of research at the University of Johannesburg.
“Black for Biko was a political condition. Whites couldn’t be black but Indians and Coloureds (who were also victims of apartheid) could be black,” Habib added, noting that the ANC still referred to members of all three racial groups as black in legislation.
Biko’s activities also played a key part in the 1976 Soweto uprising, when thousands of schoolchildren took to the streets of the township to protest the use of Afrikaans language in black schools.
After police crushed the uprising, shooting 700 school children, Biko was under intense scrutiny by the authorities, leading to his arrest at a roadblock under Terrorism Act No 83 a year later.
The uprising marked a turning point in the black-led resistance that culminated with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the end of apartheid. Biko was arrested in September 1977 and died six days later.
Then justice minister Jimmy Kruger’s declaration that Biko’s death “leaves me cold” came to symbolise the callousness of the apartheid regime, resulting in global protests and an UN arms embargo.
Progressive Federal Party legislator Suzman’s prediction about the resonance of the “Biko affair” proved correct.
Today, several political parties claim elements of Biko’s legacy, including the ANC, whose members once used to do battle with Biko supporters in townships in the 1980s and early 1990s.
President Thabo Mbeki has been an “enthusiastic proponent” of Black Consciousness and pan-Africanism, the Mail & Guardian newspaper noted in a recent editorial.
“So much so that organized political formations of these two ideologies have withered and died on the political vine,” the paper said referring to the Black Consciousness party the Azanian People’s Liberation Organization and Robert Sobukwe’s Pan-Africanist Congress. The two have fewer than five seats in parliament between them.
While Mbeki’s emphasis on a more equal relationship between Africa and the West recalls Biko’s “psychological liberation” the ANC has yet to deliver the type of freedom Biko yearned for.
Thirteen years after democracy, nearly half of South Africans live on less than 3,000 rand ($410) a year and inequality is growing.
Political freedom that does not touch on the proper distribution of wealth will be meaningless, Biko wrote. “If we have a mere change of fact of those in governing positions what is likely to happen is that black people will continue to be poor.”