Biko: A Biography. Xolela Mangcu
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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.
1
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