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In My Mind’s Eye

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of

memory against forgetting.”

MILAN KUNDERA

I was only eleven at the time. And yet, as best as I can remember, I had already grown beyond my years. Of course I ought to be careful when reconstructing what I experienced at such an early age. Memory can play tricks on the mind. But, somehow, many of those who were around in the 1970s remember where they were when news broke of Steve Biko’s death.

It was 12 September 1977. I remember my mother remarking on the oddity of the rain in the midst of the sunshine. AmaXhosa call that type of rain ilinci, and it is a bad omen. I also remember that it was a weekday because my mother – who was also my primary school teacher – and I had just returned from school. She had been preparing something for me to eat before I returned for after-school classes when someone knocked at the door. As she so often did, my mother asked me to answer the door. I called out: “Forbes Nyathi is here to see you,” and returned to the serious business of my lunch. Forbes is Steve’s first cousin, as his mother Eugenia was Steve’s father Mzingaye’s younger sister. I took a second glance at Forbes, normally a cheerful fellow, and noticed the sombre look on his face. They both disappeared into my mother’s room, and all I could make out were whispers. When my mother came out of the room, she looked distressed. Something terrible had happened, she said: “uBantu uswelekile” – “Bantu is no longer with us.” Everyone in our community called Steve by his first name – Bantu, a name which signifies being at one with the people.

Before I could ask more, she rushed me back to school.

Back at our school, chaos reigned. Steve’s niece Nompumezo was crying inconsolably in our Standard Five (Grade 7) classroom. The older boys summoned us out of class and instructed us to go back to the township. We would not be returning to school for weeks on end. This was of great concern because that meant there was a chance I would miss the exams for the last year of primary school. I had already expressed my desire to go to one of the more prestigious boarding schools for junior high school the following year. Given what was going on around me, this seemed like a self-indulgent thought. Community members streamed from all corners of the township to gather in the public square in front of our house. The question – and there seemed to be no satisfactory answer – was what had happened to Bantu?

The minister of justice, Jimmy Kruger, had issued a statement that Steve Biko had died from a hunger strike:

He was arrested in connection with activities related to the riots in Port Elizabeth, and inter alia for drafting and distributing pamphlets, which incited arson and violence . . . Mr Biko refused his meals and threatened a hunger strike. But he was regularly supplied with meals and water which he refused to partake of.[1]

The community was outraged. This explanation for deaths in detention had been offered too many times for anyone to take it seriously. I remember the anger of the crowd – especially the youngsters. I particularly remember the agitation of the twin brothers with biblical names, Joseph and Daniel, who lived at the back of our house. The youths were urging the assembled group to take revenge on the whites in town. Cooler heads prevailed and that line of action was abandoned. The anger turned inward. The discussion suddenly turned into speculation about who might have been the police informer. The next thing, a large group of youths went on a rampage. I ran home.

For the next few days a dark cloud of smoke hung over our township – literally and figuratively – as government installations and homes of suspected police informers went up in flames.

The youth targeted teachers because they were seen as part of the system of Bantu Education. My brother, who was a school principal at the nearby township of Zwelitsha, had his house destroyed by a mob of students and he moved into our home in Ginsberg. I was afraid for our home as well but nothing happened to us. My mother sent me to the shops to check out a group of youngsters who had threatened my brother about coming to find him at our house. The boys saw through my mission and warned me not to tell on them.

In the ensuing mayhem over the next few days I found myself literally staring at a policeman with a rifle. He was in camouflage behind a shrub. I turned and ran back as fast as I could. That kind of near encounter with death never left my memory. Under apartheid too many people were killed by being shot in the back, fleeing from the police – from Sharpeville to June 1976. I was lucky to come out of that experience alive, to somehow tell the story not only of Steve’s death but also of his life.

Over the next two weeks our little township became the focus of the world. Hundreds of people from all over the country and from all over the globe descended on Ginsberg to hold a vigil at the Biko home in Leightonville. Every night I escaped my mother’s watchful eye to listen to the fiery speeches and the freedom songs. By this time I knew the songs by heart, for I had grown beyond my years. My brother, who was a friend of Steve’s, would later tell me that Steve would compose some of these songs by simply taking popular Bible hymns and replacing them with revolutionary lyrics. For example, the popular struggle song Amabhulu azizinja[2] – “Whites are dogs” – is derived from a famous Presbyterian hymn written by the great 19th-century priest and intellectual Reverend Tiyo Soga on his return from study in Scotland in 1857. Upon arrival at the Port of Algoa Bay (Port Elizabeth) aboard the ship Lady of the Lake, Soga knelt down, kissed African soil and sang this hymn in prayer. Legend also has it that he was inspired to compose the song on his first view of Table Mountain as the ship came around the Cape. Barney Pityana has described the emotional and historical significance of Lizalis’ idinga lakho for black people as follows:

It is a hymn that has taken on the authority of a national anthem. It is sung in churches throughout the length and breadth of this land; it can be heard in political rallies; in times of sadness and in times of joy, Lizalis’ idinga lakho is evocative of our deepest feelings, expresses our prayers in words too beautiful to fathom. It is a plaintive song of remembrance, of pain, of defiance and of dedication. [3]

Whether Steve adapted Lizalis’ idinga lakho into Amabhulu azizinja is not clear. For example, others argue that the song was composed or adapted by Vuyisile Mini – one of the first people to be hanged for ANC underground activities in Port Elizabeth. It is also believed that ANC leader Govan Mbeki co-authored some of these songs. Barney Pityana recalls:

I remember so well growing up in New Brighton with the ANC having something called umjikelezo singing these songs rather like religious revival meetings. The songs grew out of that.

We will probably never know for sure. History, as they say, does not proceed in a straight line. The historian Jeff Peires explains the quest for certitude as springing more from “the understandable wish to bring order into history than it does from history itself”.[4] As Immanuel Kant put it: “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.”[5]

Whatever their authorship, these revolutionary songs became our heritage. The people at Steve’s home sang them as if they were singing from the same hymnal sheet, with a fervour similar to that described by Pityana.

The youth from Johannesburg’s Soweto township seemed particularly fearless as they did their famous call-and-response throughout the period of the vigil. Someone would shout at the police: Niyabesaba na? –“Are you scared of them?” – and the crowd would respond: Hayi, asibesabi, siyabafuna – “No, bring ’em on”. From a distance I had been fascinated by the militancy of the Soweto youth since the outbreak of the 1976 student uprisings the year before. I followed the news about Soweto student leader Tsietsi Mashinini whose famed disguises and escapes from the police were the stuff of legend throughout the country. Now Soweto had come to Ginsberg.

Steve Biko’s funeral was set for 25 September 1977 at the Victoria Stadium in King William’s Town – many of the most visible symbols of this most colonial of towns are named after 19th-century British monarchs or governors. The whole region is peppered with colonial names, many dating back to the arrival of German settlers in 1857 – East London, Berlin, Hanover, Hamburg, Frankfort, etc. Giving the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture in Cape Town in 2003, the famed African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o spoke about the inappropriateness of these names in an African country. It was as if African memory was made over and dressed in the garb of European terminology. Of course, the towns had their original names too, such as Qonce or Bhisho for King William’s Town. My granduncle, Benjamin kaTyamzashe (popularly known as B ka-T), composed a song for the town titled Bhisho ikhaya lam – Bhisho is my home. This name was later usurped by the homeland leader Lennox Sebe to build a boondoggle of a capital for the Ciskei Bantustan. Ultimately, the colonial names became the official ones.

And so there I was – an eleven-year-old, joining the throngs of adults on their way to Victoria Stadium. There are many things about that day that I don’t remember. One thing that has stayed with me is that I was wearing a shirt that Bandile, my cousin from Cape Town had given to me, and that I did not have any shoes on. Saying I was without shoes is not yet another example of the narrative of ascent – the rags-to-riches posture that is the favourite posture of many successful black professionals, so as to make their rise more heroic. In the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., successful blacks are “wedded to narratives of ascent . . . and we have made the compounded preposition ‘up from’ our own – up from slavery, up from Piedmont, up from the Bronx, always up”.[6] I did not put on any shoes because I liked walking barefoot.

It was unusual for the funeral of a black person, let alone a revolutionary leader, to be held in town. But there was no venue big enough in our township. The community had sent a delegation, led by my granduncle B ka-T Tyamzashe, to negotiate with the municipality for the use of the Victoria Stadium. When the municipality gave the go-ahead, the white people in the neighbourhood packed their stuff and left town for the weekend.

According to newspaper reports there were more than 20 000 people in the stadium that day. The numbers would have been bigger if thousands had not been turned back at various police roadblocks throughout the country. I would later learn that this was the first mass political funeral in the country – to be followed in the 1980s by such big political funerals as those of Griffiths and Victoria Mxenge in the nearby village of Rhayi, and that of the Cradock Four – Matthew Goniwe, Fort Calata, Sparrow Mkhonto and Sicelo Mhlawuli – in 1985. While the latter funerals were multi-racial events, there were only a handful of white faces at Steve’s funeral. Angry militants sneered and jeered at the whites, hoping the crowd would join in their attacks. The crowd did not take the bait. These people included some of Steve’s best friends, like the Reverend David Russell and Daily Dispatch editor Donald Woods. Throughout my childhood these people came to our township to visit the Biko family, and as children we were fascinated by the idea of whites coming to the township. This was particularly so with the Woods family, whose little children played ball with us while their parents sat in the house with the adults.

The Right Reverend Desmond Tutu delivered the sermon and former Robben Islander Fikile Bam, later judge president of the Land Claims Court, made a not-so-veiled threat that “we are not helpless”. Other speakers on the dais included representatives of the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), the South West Africa National Union (SWANU) and foreign diplomats. The prominent medical doctor and community activist Nthato Motlana also gave a rousing speech.

Steve’s coffin was taken to the cemetery – which has since been renamed the Steve Biko Garden of Remembrance – on an ox-drawn cart. This was a deliberate break with the tradition of fancy limousines. The coffin had a fist in the form of a black power salute on it, and was engraved with the words One Azania, One Nation. Everyone walked to the graveyard, led by dashiki-wearing (a dashiki is a bright, loose, coloured shirt) militants such as the president of the Black People’s Convention, Hlaku Rachidi.

I had always suspected that Steve Biko was an important figure in the world. I kept a secret makeshift album made up mostly of pictures from newspaper cuttings, many of which featured his numerous courthouse appearances. I went along with him to some of the community projects he was running, including the famous Zanempilo Health Clinic he ran with Mamphela Ramphele. Black doctors were rare in those days, and black female doctors even rarer. As children we were not allowed into the clinic but we peeped through keyholes and windows nonetheless. Sometimes we would go down to the township entrance to wait for Steve to drive back from his offices which, to our puzzlement, were also in town. The Black Community Programmes, for which he was working, was renting backroom offices at the Anglican Church on Leopoldt Street in the “white” town. At other times we would spend the afternoon sitting in front of the church on Leopoldt Street watching the comings and goings of the men and women in black and gold dashikis. Among them were Peter Jones, Malusi Mpumlwana, Thoko Mpumlwana (nee Mbanjwa), Mzwandile Mbilini, Mamphela Ramphele, Thenjiwe Mthintso, Kenny Rachidi, Mapetla Mohapi, Nohle Mohapi, Thami Zani, Mxolisi Mvovo and his wife Nobandile (Steve’s younger sister). There was a sense of fearlessness and urgency among them, and they had a deep connection with the community. Steve, in particular, was always surrounded by a group of Ginsberg youngsters who called themselves the Cubans and who in turn called him Castro. This was in apparent reference to both his political and physical stature. He was a big man in all senses of the word.

No one seemed more fearless to me than Mzwandile Mbilini, who lived in the shebeen directly opposite my home. The shebeen was run by his cousin, Skhweyi Mbilini, who was a childhood friend of Steve’s. There was drama whenever the security police came to arrest Mzwandile. He was always dressed in military fatigues and would defiantly raise his clenched fist in the air before they drove him away. Zolani Mtshotshisa, who was a youth activist in the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in the 1970s before crossing over to the ANC – as many BCM youth would later do after going into exile in 1976 – quotes how Mzwandile would describe those heady days in our township: “I had Jones on my left and Biko on my right, and we had the country on our shoulders.”

The last time I remember seeing Steve was from the vantage point of my home’s verandah. As usual, he was going to meet up with his friends at the Mbilini shebeen opposite our home, dressed in his brown suede jacket. Maybe he had other jackets but that is the only one he ever seemed to wear. He was not a man known for his sartorial elegance, quite the opposite. In fact, among the many nicknames he picked up as a child, two stand out – Goofy and Xwaku-Xwaku – the latter a reference to his unkempt manner.

I do not recall ever seeing Stephen Bantu Biko again, hence this search.

[1] Jimmy Kruger’s statement in Millard Arnold (ed.) (1979). The Testimony of Steve Biko (London: Maurice Temple Smith Publishers), 283.

[2] This, of course, was a metaphorical reference to the way white people were colluding with apartheid.

[3] Barney Pityana, Tiyo Soga Memorial Lecture, University of Fort Hare, East London Campus, 7 December 2010.

[4]Peires, The House of Phalo, 18.

[5]Immanuel Kant (1784). Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1910, vol. 8), 23.

[6] Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1996). “Parable of the Talents” in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West (eds), The Future of the Race (New York: Vintage Books), 3.