BANTU STEVEN BIKO: FIGHTING AGAINST APARTHEID

Steve Biko

The Grandma has said godbye to her flu and today, she has decided to go to the library to read about Steve Biko, one of the greatest activists of the last century who was brutally killed in 1977 and who was born on a day like today in 1946.

The Grandma admires Steven Biko a lot and wants to talk about him, his struggle and the history of South Africa and the Apartheid during the last century.

Before going to the library, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 46).

More information: Much, Many

Bantu Stephen Biko (18 December 1946-12 September 1977) was a South African anti-apartheid activist. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he was at the forefront of a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign known as the Black Consciousness Movement during the late 1960s and 1970s. His ideas were articulated in a series of articles published under the pseudonym Frank Talk.

Raised in a poor Xhosa family, Biko grew up in Ginsberg township in the Eastern Cape. In 1966, he began studying medicine at the University of Natal, where he joined the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). Strongly opposed to the apartheid system of racial segregation and white-minority rule in South Africa, Biko was frustrated that NUSAS and other anti-apartheid groups were dominated by white liberals, rather than by the blacks who were most affected by apartheid.

He believed that even when well-intentioned, white liberals failed to comprehend the black experience and often acted in a paternalistic manner. He developed the view that to avoid white domination, black people had to organise independently, and to this end he became a leading figure in the creation of the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) in 1968.

Steve Biko

Membership was open only to blacks, a term that Biko used in reference not just to Bantu-speaking Africans but also to Coloureds and Indians.

He was careful to keep his movement independent of white liberals, but opposed anti-white racism and had various white friends and lovers. The white-minority National Party government were initially supportive, seeing SASO's creation as a victory for apartheid's ethos of racial separatism.

Influenced by Frantz Fanon and the African-American Black Power movement, Biko and his compatriots developed Black Consciousness as SASO's official ideology. The movement campaigned for an end to apartheid and the transition of South Africa toward universal suffrage and a socialist economy. It organised Black Community Programmes (BCPs) and focused on the psychological empowerment of black people.

Biko believed that black people needed to rid themselves of any sense of racial inferiority, an idea he expressed by popularizing the slogan black is beautiful. In 1972, he was involved in founding the Black People's Convention (BPC) to promote Black Consciousness ideas among the wider population.

More information: South African History

The government came to see Biko as a subversive threat and placed him under a banning order in 1973, severely restricting his activities. He remained politically active, helping organise BCPs such as a healthcare centre and a crèche in the Ginsberg area. During his ban he received repeated anonymous threats, and was detained by state security services on several occasions. Following his arrest in August 1977, Biko was severely beaten by state security officers, resulting in his death. Over 20,000 people attended his funeral.

Biko's fame spread posthumously. He became the subject of numerous songs and works of art, while a 1978 biography by his friend Donald Woods formed the basis for the 1987 film Cry Freedom.

During Biko's life, the government alleged that he hated whites, various anti-apartheid activists accused him of sexism, and African racial nationalists criticised his united front with Coloureds and Indians. Nonetheless, Biko became one of the earliest icons of the movement against apartheid, and is regarded as a political martyr and the Father of Black Consciousness. His political legacy remains a matter of contention.

Steve Biko with his son Nkosinath

Bantu Stephen Biko was born on 18 December 1946, at his grandmother's house in Tarkastad, Eastern Cape. This was a settlement of around 800 families, with every four families sharing a water supply and toilet. Both Bantu African and Coloured people lived in the township, where Xhosa, Afrikaans, and English were all spoken.

Biko's given name Bantu means people; Biko interpreted this in terms of the saying Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person by means of other people. As a child he was nicknamed Goofy and Xwaku-Xwaku, the latter a reference to his unkempt appearance. He was raised in his family's Anglican Christian faith. In 1950, when Biko was four, his father fell ill, was hospitalised in St. Matthew's Hospital, Keiskammahoek, and died, making the family dependent on his mother's income.

Biko was initially interested in studying law at university, but many of those around him discouraged this, believing that law was too closely intertwined with political activism. Instead they convinced him to choose medicine, a subject thought to have better career prospects. He secured a scholarship, and in 1966 entered the non-European section of the University of Natal Medical School in Wentworth, a township of Durban. 

More information: Times Live

The South African Students' Organisation (SASO) was officially launched at a July 1969 conference at the University of the North; there, the group's constitution and basic policy platform were adopted. The group's focus was on the need for contact between centres of black student activity, including through sport, cultural activities, and debating competitions.

The early focus of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was on criticising anti-racist white liberals and liberalism itself, accusing it of paternalism and being a negative influence on black Africans.

In one of his first published articles, Biko stated that although he was not sneering at the [white] liberals and their involvement in the anti-apartheid movement, one has to come to the painful conclusion that the [white] liberal is in fact appeasing his own conscience, or at best is eager to demonstrate his identification with the black people only insofar as it does not sever all ties with his relatives on his side of the colour line. 

Steve Biko

By 1973, the government regarded Black Consciousness as a threat. It sought to disrupt Biko's activities, and in March 1973 placed a banning order on him. This prevented him from leaving the King William's Town magisterial district, prohibited him from speaking either in public or to more than one person at a time, barred his membership of political organisations, and forbade the media from quoting him. As a result, he returned to Ginsberg, living initially in his mother's house and later in his own residence.

In 1977, Biko broke his banning order by travelling to Cape Town, hoping to meet Unity Movement leader Neville Alexander and deal with growing dissent in the Western Cape branch of the BCM, which was dominated by Marxists like Johnny Issel. Biko drove to the city with his friend Peter Jones on 17 August, but Alexander refused to meet with Biko, fearing that he was being monitored by the police.

Biko and Jones drove back toward King William's Town, but on 18 August they were stopped at a police roadblock near Grahamstown. Biko was arrested for having violated the order restricting him to King William's Town. Unsubstantiated claims have been made that the security services were aware of Biko's trip to Cape Town and that the road block had been erected to catch him. Jones was also arrested at the roadblock; he was subsequently held without trial for 533 days, during which he was interrogated on numerous occasions. 

More information: Huffington Post

The security services took Biko to the Walmer police station in Port Elizabeth, where he was held naked in a cell with his legs in shackles. On 6 September, he was transferred from Walmer to room 619 of the security police headquarters in the Sanlam Building in central Port Elizabeth, where he was interrogated for 22 hours, handcuffed and in shackles, and chained to a grille. Exactly what happened has never been ascertained, but during the interrogation he was severely beaten by at least one of the ten security police officers. He suffered three brain lesions that resulted in a massive brain haemorrhage on 6 September.

Following this incident, Biko's captors forced him to remain standing and shackled to the wall. The police later said that Biko had attacked one of them with a chair, forcing them to subdue him and place him in handcuffs and leg irons.

Biko was examined by a doctor, Ivor Lang, who stated that there was no evidence of injury on Biko. Later scholarship has suggested Biko's injuries must have been obvious. He was then examined by two other doctors who, after a test showed blood cells to have entered Biko's spinal fluid, agreed that he should be transported to a prison hospital in Pretoria.

Protests in solidarity with Steve Biko

On 11 September, police loaded him into the back of a Land Rover, naked and manacled, and drove him 740 miles (1,190 km) to the hospital. There, Biko died alone in a cell on 12 September 1977. 

According to an autopsy, an extensive brain injury had caused centralisation of the blood circulation to such an extent that there had been intravasal blood coagulation, acute kidney failure, and uremia. He was the twenty-first person to die in a South African prison in twelve months, and the forty-sixth political detainee to die during interrogation since the government introduced laws permitting imprisonment without trial in 1963.

News of Biko's death spread quickly across the world, and became symbolic of the abuses of the apartheid system. His death attracted more global attention than he had ever attained during his lifetime. Protest meetings were held in several cities; many were shocked that the security authorities would kill such a prominent dissident leader.

More information: Overcoming Apartheid

Biko's Anglican funeral service, held on 25 September 1977 at King William's Town's Victoria Stadium, took five hours and was attended by around 20,000 people. The vast majority were black, but a few hundred whites also attended, including Biko's friends, such as Russell and Woods, and prominent progressive figures like Helen Suzman, Alex Boraine, and Zach de Beer.

Foreign diplomats from thirteen nations were present, as was an Anglican delegation headed by Bishop Desmond Tutu. The event was later described as the first mass political funeral in the country. Biko's coffin had been decorated with the motifs of a clenched black fist, the African continent, and the statement One Azania, One Nation; Azania was the name that many activists wanted South Africa to adopt post-apartheid. Biko was buried in the cemetery at Ginsberg.

Biko is viewed as the father"of the Black Consciousness Movement and the anti-apartheid movement's first icon. Nelson Mandela called him the spark that lit a veld fire across South Africa, adding that the Nationalist government had to kill him to prolong the life of apartheid.

More information: Times Live

Apartheid -both petty and grand- is obviously evil. 
Nothing can justify the arrogant assumption that a clique 
of foreigners has the right to decide on the lives of a majority.

Steven Biko