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Chapter 2

Becoming Steve Biko

This chapter examines Biko’s early childhood up through his young adult years to examine influences that helped shape his Christian experience. This examination will allow an opportunity to analyze the significance of what he understood the Christian message to be, how he incorporated it into the Black Consciousness Movement’s message, and how he embodied it as a leader.

Stephen “Bantu” Biko was “born on December 18, 1946, at his grandmother’s home in Tarkastad,” located in the Eastern Cape (Hill 2015, p. xxi). Biko was affectionately given the nickname Bantu to describe his personality and attributes as a child, especially his wittiness and charm. Bantu was “a name meaning ‘people’ that Biko translated to ‘son of man’ when he felt mischievous” (Hill 2015, p. xxi). It literally meant “son of the people.” Unbeknown to them, it was a foretelling of who he would become. Contrarily, Bantu was also used as a pejorative by the government to relate to black South Africans.

Biko’s parents settled in the Ginsberg Township in King William’s Town when Biko was about two years old. Both were devout Christians in the Anglican Church. His mother, Mamcethe (Alice) Biko, was a woman of strong faith. Prior to his death, his father, Mzingaye Biko, served faithfully as the church pianist. Mzingaye died in 1950 from a gastrointestinal disease when Biko was just four years old (Mangcu 2012, p. 89). Up to the time of his death, his father was a career police officer. Mamcethe was left to raise Biko and his siblings, Bukelwa, Khaya, and Nobondile. Biko’s spiritual adviser, Aelred Stubbs, noted that Mamcethe’s “strong Christian faith” helped her raise the kids on her own and support her son in his activism up to his death (Mangcu 2012, p. 88).

It was his older brother (by two years), Khaya, who was very influential in Biko’s life and interest in black empowerment and anti-apartheid advocacy. Khaya was heavily involved in the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). He never really showed interest in politics growing up until he attended Lovedale College, at which point Khaya says, “This is when the giant was awakened” (Mangcu 2012, p. 78). Prior to then, Biko was a bright student with a lot of promise, strong leadership skills, and a gregarious sense of humor. However, he had all the makings of a charismatic leader.

Growing up during the apartheid era, Biko witnessed separate development, like most South African youths at the time. Magaziner (2010) described this period as Biko’s memories of “forced removals, Bantu education, job reservation,” and protests (p. 29). Subsequently, according to Magaziner, this period led to a post-Sharpeville existence of silence. During this time, the black masses distrusted the police because they witnessed killings, banning, and imprisonment by the Security Police. The silence within the black community was deafening because many of the leaders of the ANC and PAC were in prison and/or banned, operating underground and in the shadows of society, avoiding the Security Police and informers. The lull created a need for a public voice aboveground to advocate on behalf of blacks, which eventually was fulfilled in the person of Biko. The ensuing life events awakened Biko and began to shape and prepare him for his journey ahead in advocating on behalf of blacks, educating the liberal white man, and fighting against apartheid.

In 1963, the first of these significant events would take place. Biko was admitted to Lovedale College but would soon find himself expelled, along with his brother Khaya and his friend Larry Bekwa. Lovedale was fertile ground for the newly politicized youth. Khaya’s involvement with the Pan Africanist Congress and POQO, which was PAC’s armed wing, would eventually land him in jail. There was a boycott of classes where Khaya was identified as a ringleader; the police swooped in, arresting him at Lovedale due to his POQO membership and Pan-Africanist stance. Since Biko was with his brother, the police also picked him up to retrieve his and his brother’s things from the dorm. Because of association, Biko was not arrested but expelled from Lovedale along with his brother. For a year, Biko lived with his friend Larry Bekwa, hiding from the police, where they “would sleep in the trees and among the corn fields behind (his) father’s house,” according to his friend Larry (Mangcu 2012, p. 107).

These events were pivotal in Biko’s life because they would be the catalyst for his political involvement from that time forward. Khaya says of this moment:

Steve was expelled for absolutely no reason at all. But in retrospect, I welcome the South African government’s gesture of exposing a really good politician. I had unsuccessfully tried to get Steve interested in politics. The police were able to do in one day what had eluded me for years. This time the great giant was awakened. (As cited in Mangcu 2012, pp. 108–109)

While working at an attorney’s office, Khaya was determined to get his brother admitted into another school after being expelled from Lovedale. Khaya’s diligence paid off, and Biko was admitted to St. Francis College at Marianhill, which was a premier and competitive college in South Africa. St. Francis College was established by Abbot Francis Pfanner to educate and “produce Christian leaders of the African race” (Mangcu 2012, p. 109). It is here that Biko would become involved in the Literary and Debating Society, continue to rise as a stellar scholar by being among the top five in his class, and excel above all his peers in English and history. St. Francis’s liberal political culture “provided Steve with space for serious political reflection” (Mangcu 2012, p. 110). In 1965, he graduated from St. Francis and, by 1966, was admitted to Durban Medical School at the University of Natal Non-European (UNNE).

Throughout Biko’s time at UNNE, he became more politicized and conscientized by serving on the Student Representative Council (SRC) under the umbrella of the multiracial student organization, National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). The early 1960s had proven to be a time when “Black students discovered that this liberal formation afforded one of the few remaining legal avenues for national dialogue among blacks” (Hopkins 1989, p. 21). This situation rapidly changed as Biko began to hone in on the color issue within NUSAS. He saw blacks being treated differently by their white counterparts, especially at the Rhodes University in Grahamstown NUSAS Conference in 1967. It was here that Biko would be painfully reminded of the two separate worlds divided by race that existed when the black African students had to stay at a church off campus and white students could attend the conference and receive meals on campus.

Gail Gerhart, a political science professor and author at Witswatersrand University, known for her rare interviews with Biko and Robert Sobukwe, records Biko stating his perception of white liberal students in NUSAS:

They had this problem…of superiority, and they tended to take us for granted, and they wanted us to accept things that were second class. They could not see why we could not consider staying in that church, and I began to feel therefore that our understanding of our own situation in this country was not quite coincidental with that of the whites. (Gerhart and Karis 2013, p. 96)

She further states:

Biko was convinced that black students needed their own organization in which they could speak for themselves instead of relying on liberal whites to articulate their goals and prescribe their modus operandi. (Gerhart and Karis 2013, p. 97)

This led to the formation of the South African Students’ Organization (SASO), an all-black student organization, in 1969, of which he was the founding president. This was another pivotal moment in Biko’s Christian thought development. It was in presenting the manifesto of SASO and the concept of black consciousness that there appears an ideological paradigm shift from a Westernized missionary or European hermeneutic of Christianity to a black South African concept of black theology simultaneously born during the Black Power Movement in the United States. Biko and other members of SASO gleaned from James Cone, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, and other US political activists a new perspective on how to encounter and understand God through black lens. For him, these lens portrayed a different hermeneutical base from which a message and image of Jesus could emerge in a radical new way that grappled with black experience in South Africa.

Biko (1978) states:

We must agree also that tacitly or overtly, deliberately or unawares, white Christians within the churches are preventing the church from assuming its natural character in the South African context, and therefore preventing it from being relevant to the black man’s situation. (pp. 58–59)

This new message helped erode the fear blacks had of white supremacy in the form of apartheid and a white God that punished them for being black Africans. What Biko and his medical school colleagues who were part of SASO created was a collective idea that spoke to the black religious, political, and socioeconomic conditions prevalent among blacks in South Africa under apartheid. He had become a staunch activist against the system of apartheid and for black liberation. He had an uncanny ability to take everyone’s ideas and articulate them into one cohesive thought to present them in written or verbal form.

Mangcu (2012) states:

It is within this context of a search for a practical religion that Steve and his colleagues began to search for a theological framework that spoke to the practical needs of black people…Or, as Magaziner puts it “South Africans gave Black Theology an African twist… Black Theology offered South Africans the possibility of restoring [a radical] Christ to African Theology”—so that the latter could speak to a broader black political constituency that included Coloreds and Indians. Thus Biko and his colleagues reframed both European and African Christianity into something more inclusive and relevant to the struggle… Through this reframing of Christianity, Steve and his colleagues had put Christianity at the forefront of the struggle, and in the process gave the movement an entry point into the heartbeat of the community. (pp. 173–175)

The University Christian Movement (UCM) was very influential in introducing James Cone’s concept of black theology to university students. Black theology was really important to Biko as he shared that his own Anglican Church structure was foreign to him and without substance but that he found the other to be relatable and this was why black theology “seem to be so attractive” to him (Biko 1978, p. 212). This concept caught fire and helped expose many black students to an existential Christianity that related to their current situation in an oppressed South Africa. Even though this was another multiracial organization, the leaders were not afraid to address and protest injustices against black South Africans as was the case with NUSAS.

Basil Moore, one of the founding Methodist clergy of the University Christian Movement (UCM), helped uplift the truth and power behind black theology. Moore believed this theological viewpoint was relevant to the racial dynamics between black and whites in an apartheid South Africa. Additionally, Magaziner (2010) stated, “Moore set the context for black theology’s emergence in South Africa” (p. 99). However, the government became aware of the radical movement of UCM and began to harass NUSAS too, introducing a law that prohibited blacks and whites from gathering more than seventy-two hours at a time. Moore believed that Christ had a more powerful message that had been overlooked by conservative orthodox Christians and, like Cone, believed that Christ’s message was political and instrumental in helping the oppressed to see themselves as human beings who were free.

Magaziner states:

Rather, Christ was appealing to believers to look inside themselves, to affirm themselves in recognition that every person “has value simply by being loved by God.” Although such therapeutic language might appear benign, Moore argued that it was politically potent, for with it, Christ had lit “the dangerous fire of [the people’s] sense of dignity and worth as human beings.” Such an awakening made oppression intolerable. Moore’s Christ thus spoke in language similar to that of Black Consciousness… Moore made the allusion explicit: “Jesus fits the situation of South African blacks…[and] the Roman rulers fit the situation of South African whites.” (p. 99)

Biko’s rearing, institutionalized education, organizational involvement, engagement with his scholarly colleagues, and reading of the literary works of theologians on distant shores helped shape his Christian mind-set. He delved deeply into what he thought it meant to be a Christian, which was not to focus on individualized petty sins. Rather, Biko believed that Christians have a greater responsibility and should focus on sins that harmed the greater good of humanity; it was not possible to operate in ubuntu principles founded in community, love, and respect for others with a Europeanized Christian paradigm that focused on the self.

Black consciousness was about uplifting, embracing, and unifying the black community, and when it came to adhering and walking in what had become “the gospel of black consciousness,” Woods stated that Biko better exemplified this message than any one of their contemporaries.

Biko, for this reason, criticized the missionary hermeneutics and ethical application of Christianity that he believed was whitewashed and used as a tool to subjugate blacks and strip them of their culture and traditions during colonization and apartheid. Even though he believed that European-taught Christianity was skewed, he did not abandon Christianity and its tenets but applied it to his new sociopolitical and utilitarian hermeneutical expression. In so doing, Biko appeared to be truthful to his calling as a revolutionary destined to fulfill both the call of his God and of his people. Like Jesus, he became an enemy of the state for speaking truth to power in the form of a liberating message as he paved and illuminated the way to a true humanity.

Indeed, Biko embodied the message of black consciousness and sought to create, like Jesus, “disciples” among the “conscientized” youth on college and, later, high school campuses across the South African landscape. There is no doubt that black consciousness influenced the thinking of youth during the Soweto uprising in 1976, according to Tinyiko Maluleke, which came a few weeks after Biko’s trial in Pretoria (du Toit and Maluleke 2008, p. 58). In sharing the message of his belief from a black South African Christian perspective, he expressed what he understood as sin and obedience to God and his revolutionary calling as follows:

Black theology, therefore is a situational interpretation of Christianity. It seeks to relate the present-day black man to God within the given context of the black man’s suffering and his attempts to get out of it. It shifts the emphasis of man’s moral obligations from avoiding wronging false authorities by not losing his Reference Book, not stealing food when hungry and not cheating police when he is caught, to being committed to eradicating all cause for suffering as represented in the death of children from starvation, outbreaks of epidemics in poor areas, or the existence of thuggery and vandalism in townships. In other words it shifts the emphasis from petty sins to major sins in a society, thereby ceasing to teach the people to “suffer peacefully.” (Biko 1978, p. 59)