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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 I pay particular attention to the crucial role played by two Xhosa chiefs, Ndlambe and Ngqika, and their respective allies as prophet-intellectuals, Nxele and Ntsikana. Through their contrasting responses, these chiefs and their prophets laid the contours for the conduct and discourse of anti-colonial resistance, while grappling with the question of how to deal with the “onrush of [European] modernity”.[6] To understand Steve Biko’s response to that same modernity, one has to grapple with the political and intellectual history of the Eastern Cape – and the terms this history made available for him to engage with that modernity more than a century later. It is not enough to reduce Biko’s thinking, as many scholars have done, to the influence of Frantz Fanon.

Chapter 3 continues in this historical vein by locating Steve in the radical political culture of Ginsberg Location[7] in the 1960s, under the shadow of his older brother Khaya Biko. In the early 1960s Ginsberg was a stronghold of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and Khaya was the organisation’s leading member in the township. Formed in 1959 and banned in 1960, the PAC’s influence lasted much longer than its existence as a political organisation. Thus, Khaya was expelled from Lovedale College and subsequently jailed for PAC activities as late as 1963. It is important, however, not to stretch the relationship between the PAC and the BCM too far. The BCM consisted of people from both the ANC and the PAC. Barney Pityana has always belonged to the ANC: “I personally never felt outside of the ANC that I had been part of since I was 15 or so at school.”[8] Unlike the PAC – and particularly the more jingoistic elements who regarded even Coloureds as alien – the BCM built a strong black solidarity among Africans, Indians and Coloureds. The BCM also had more of a Third World than an Africanist outlook, incorporating in its ideology both the influences of African leaders such as Julius Nyerere but also Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire and the black nationalist movement in the United States. The fact that Ginsberg was itself a mixed community throughout Steve’s young life also played a role in his perception of Coloureds as part of the oppressed – their lived experience was there for all to see in Ginsberg.

Chapter 4 deals with Steve’s institutional encounter with racism when he was expelled from Lovedale College because of his brother’s political activism. He also objected to the authoritarianism he found at St Francis College at Mariannhill in KwaZulu-Natal. It is through these institutions of education and religion – what Ntongela Masilela calls the “political and cultural facilitators of entrance into European modernity”[9] – that many leaders come into their own. They were spurred into action by their experience of what the sociologist Emile Durkheim called “anomie”. In colonial and apartheid South Africa this would be the mismatch between the promise of educational attainment and religious conversion on the one hand, and the reality of racial exclusion and discrimination on the other. Steve tasted the injustice of apartheid when he was expelled from Lovedale College because of his brother Khaya’s political activities. But Khaya was not too displeased that his brother was drawn into politics. As he put it: “Then the giant was awakened.”

Steve began to assume a more conscious and assertive political role at St Francis College. That is when he started asking critical questions about the relevance of Christianity – the lynchpin of European modernity in Africa – to the lives of oppressed people. The questions were in the form of letters and conversations with his mother, a devout Christian, and discussions with a young radical cleric in our township, David Russell. It was Steve’s mother, Alice (whom I shall refer to as MamCethe, the clan name by which she was fondly called in the township), who protected Russell against a congregation that did not want him on account of his race. I still have vivid memories of Russell preaching in fluent Xhosa in our church. As a young boy I could not, for the life of me, understand how this Xhosa-speaking white man found himself in our midst.

Stubbs remembers an interview with Steve’s mother in the Daily Dispatch about her son’s growing political activism. Concerned and fearing for his life she sent him a Bible in the hope that he would find answers in it: at home during the vacation she tackled him about her concern, but he replied, “What did Jesus come into the world to do?” He told her if Jesus had come to liberate mankind, he too had a duty to seek liberation for his people.[10]

Steve continued to experience the contradictions between the liberal promise of equality and the actual reality of racial discrimination when he arrived at Rhodes University as a delegate at a congress of the multi-racial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) in 1967. At that congress black students were required to sleep apart from the rest in the township, and Steve enjoined his white colleagues to join them in the township or to cancel the congress. When the congress voted his motion down, Steve led the historic walk-out of black students that ultimately led to the first meeting to formulate the idea of a blacks-only student organisation. Chapter 5 is a discussion of not only the contradictory political relationship but also explores the nature of his relationship with his white friends, which caused tensions within the movement. Also, Steve was quite non-racial when it came to his relationships with white women, including an open relationship with a fellow student at the University of Natal, Paula Ensor.[11]

Chapter 6 is about the formation and the ideological evolution of the South African Students Organisation (SASO). Initially, SASO adopted nothing more than what Barney Pityana describes as a “pragmatic” black consciousness, which was no more than a gathering space for black students around the country on a social basis. I describe Steve’s leadership of the movement at this stage as cautious and tactical. The elements of a fully-fledged philosophy began to emerge around 1970 after he had served his term as president of SASO, and had taken up the editorship of the SASO newsletter. Of critical importance here is the key role played by the University Christian Movement (UCM) as a midwife of the new movement. Even though some members of BCM were against any collaboration with UCM, Steve maintained a strategic – some might say parasitic – relationship with UCM. However, given their radical political culture, UCM leaders such as Colin Collins and Basil Moore were quite aware of the historic role they were playing in their support for SASO. In any event, Steve and Colin Collins were constantly exchanging letters about how UCM could best support SASO.

I also explore the debates and divisions around the formation of the Black People’s Convention (BPC) (Chapter 7). Steve was firmly opposed to the formation of the BPC as a political organisation. The driving force behind the new organisation became Harry Nengwekhulu and other SASO leaders who, in 1971, were able to persuade a sceptical community meeting in Orlando, Soweto, to support the formation of a political structure. After the first generation of the movement’s leadership was banned in March 1973 – and that included Steve being banished to Ginsberg – a second generation of leaders emerged with an even more militant outlook under the leadership of Saths Cooper (who was also banned) and Muntu Myeza. Against Steve’s advice, this group organised the Viva Frelimo rallies in September 1974. They were ultimately arrested and Steve testified as the defence witness in the long-running SASO/BPC Trial. The trial was to be the first public political trial since the Rivonia Trial in 1964, and gave Steve a national platform to articulate to the world the philosophy of Black Consciousness.

Chapter 8 is a discussion of Steve’s work in Ginsberg through the Black Community Programmes, and its evaluation through the eyes of some of the community members who worked with him. The chapter also includes a discussion of some of his personal difficulties stemming from his messy love life. While married to Ntsiki Biko (née Mashalaba) he was also having an open relationship with Mamphela Ramphele, whom he had met at the University of Natal and who would later come down to King William’s Town to run Zanempilo Health Clinic. Some senior leaders of the political movement, including Robert Sobukwe, expressed their unhappiness about his multiple relationships and the impact these could have on the movement. On this one aspect of his life Steve found himself defensive and faltering. And as Christopher Hitchens writes in a critical essay on Mark Twain’s biography, it is important in biography that “the private person be allowed to appear in all his idiosyncrasy”.[12] This is indeed an ever-present danger for a biographer like me, who is a self-admitted admirer and follower of his subject. But for Steve to be human he must be presented to the reader warts and all – the women, the drinking, the bad temper, the stubbornness and the arrogance at times. As he put it in a letter to his friend Aelred Stubbs: “a lot of friends of mine believe I am arrogant and they are partly right.”[13] To paraphrase his friend Bokwe Mafuna, Steve was a prophet, not a saint.

Chapter 9 is a discussion of Steve’s elusive quest for unity among the liberation movements – a quest that takes him on his abortive and fateful trip to Cape Town. From the moment Steve was banished to King William’s Town, he lost control of the movement he had started, and oftentimes expressed his sense of guilt that many of the people he had brought into the movement had been arrested or killed. At one point he admitted to Stubbs that even though he regarded himself as “reasonably strong”, the going was quite tough because of the restriction orders placed on him. The chapter takes us through his trip to Cape Town and back, his arrest at a roadblock and his brutal murder at the age of 31 by the South African police.

I once had a conversation about Steve with the founding father of African literature, Chinua Achebe. He said Biko reminded him of the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo. Both men, Achebe observed, seem to have been “possessed” in their rush to achieve their respective missions – as if they knew they would have an early death. Steve prophetically described the impact his death might have, were it to come: “You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care anyway. And your method of death can itself be a politicising thing.”[14]

Yet another element of a good biography, Hitchens writes, is that it must leave you wishing you had known the individual. As recounted in Chapter 1, I still have vivid memories of Steve Biko in “my mind’s eye”, but I also wish I was old enough to have been able to converse with him. Each time I read his writings it feels like the first time. The last two chapters of this book (Chapter 10 and the Epilogue) are my own subjective reflections on a man that Nigel Gibson has described as “South Africa’s greatest liberation theorist”.[15] Newspaper editor Donald Woods called him “the greatest man I ever had the privilege to know”.[16] In those chapters I reflect on what we lost with Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement, and what we might do to regain some of that movement’s finest qualities and make them part of our usable past. Steve Biko’s greatest historical achievement remains that of restoring the humanity of a defeated and despised people so that they might resume what Nelson Mandela has called “the long walk to freedom”.

As I wrote this book over the years, I kept kicking myself for not spending more time with Steve’s mother. There was a time when both of our families moved from the “Brownlee” section of Ginsberg to the “Leightonville” section that was reserved for Coloureds, until they were moved under the Group Areas Act to the neighbouring areas of Breidbach and Schornville in the 1970s. This opened space for African families to move up, so to speak, in the hierarchy of accommodation from three-roomed houses to five-roomed houses. The Biko home is still in the street behind ours. As a teenager, I would pass Mrs Biko sitting on the verandah of her new home almost every day. Sometimes she would call me over to ask how I was doing, but in all honesty, I always felt she was holding me up from some more exciting youthful engagement – such as hanging out with girls in a local shebeen. And so, in repentance, I dedicate this book to the memory of Alice “MamCethe” Biko.

[1] Roger Levine (2011). A Living Man from Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press), 4.

[2]Levine, A Living Man from Africa, 13. Indeed, my name has at least two of those clicks: the x in my first name and the c in my last name, but when pronounced with a g it assumes a heavier sound.

[3] Jeff Peires (2003). The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their Independence (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball), 28.

[4] Aelred Stubbs, “Martyr of Hope: A Personal Memoir,” in Steve Biko (2004). I Write What I Like (Johannesburg: Picador Africa), 220. Stubbs had come to South Africa as a representative of the Community of the Resurrection first at St Peter’s College in Rosettenville, and later at the Federal Seminary of Theology in Alice, where he first made contact with the Biko family and later with Steve, Barney Pityana and other SASO activists.

[5] Levine, A Living Man from Africa, 12.

[6] Eric Hobsbawm (1990). Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 109.

[7] When I was growing up the township was simply known as a location, and it was only later that the word was replaced by township. For the remainder of the book I will be using the term “township”.

[8]Pityana interview with Rupert Taylor and Nhlanhla Ndebele, 8 February 2000, Parktown, Johannesburg.

[9] Ntongela Masilela, interview with Sandile Ngidi, unpublished manuscript, 2000, 63.

[10] Aelred Stubbs. “The story of Nyameko Barney Pityana” in South African Outlook, vol. 110, no. 1300, October 1979.

[11] Paula Ensor is now Dean of Humanities at the University of Cape Town.

[12] Christopher Hitchens (2011). Arguably (London: Atlantic Books), 40-41.

[13] Stubbs, “Martyr of Hope: A Personal Memoir”, 199.

[14] Steve Biko (2004). I Write What I Like (Johannesburg: Picador Africa), 173.

[15] Nigel Gibson (2011). Fanonian Practices in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press), 70.

[16] Donald Woods (1978). Biko (New York: Penguin Books), 85.