Biko: A Biography. Xolela Mangcu
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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”.