Biko: A Biography. Xolela Mangcu
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tendency to reduce black consciousness to the events of the 1960s. I endeavour to place Steve Biko in a longer time span of black political and cultural thought in South Africa, in the aftermath of the late 18th-century African encounter with European modernity. This modernity in South Africa “was constituted through violence: colonial conquest, dispossession, slavery, forced labour, the restriction of citizenship to whites, and the application of violent bureaucratic routines to the marshalling, distribution and domination of the black population.”[2] It was also imported through mission schools and churches. I argue that one has to delve into the traditions of African thought in the Eastern Cape and in his own community in Ginsberg township to understand why figures such as Frantz Fanon would make sense to Steve at a later stage of his life. In short, he did not come to politics as a blank slate, and neither did he slavishly follow a particular political text. Noel Mostert has this to say about Steve’s historical antecedents:
Biko, himself missionary educated, represented the last African generation to be the beneficiaries of that tradition. He personified through his lack of anti-white sentiment, his gentleness and articulate rationality, so many of the characteristic attributes of the missionary-educated African elite which had assumed African leadership after the last of the frontier wars exactly a century before; yet he embodied as well a rupture with that tradition.[3]
Daniel Magaziner makes a similar observation that the Black Consciousness student leaders were “descendants of previous generations of African thinkers whose ideas figure prominently in works that examine the history of African theatre and poetry, journalism and academia”.[4] Cornel West captured the same theme:
Quality leadership is neither the product of one great individual nor the result of odd historical accidents. Rather it comes from deeply bred traditions and communities that shape and mould talented and gifted persons.[5]
In this chapter I trace the traditions of African thought that preceded Steve back to the differences between two great Xhosa chiefs, Ngqika and Ndlambe, and their respective prophet-intellectuals, Ntsikana and Nxele, in the 19th century. I argue that Steve Biko’s philosophical outlook should be located in this broader intellectual history. Instead of a rupture with traditions set by earlier African leaders, I speak of continuities and discontinuities, not only within African leadership traditions but also in the encounter with European modernity as well as the shifting alliances with the Khoi and the San people. Africans were never entirely free from other cultures, nor even from the ones against which they fought. Frantz Fanon captures the inextricably intertwined identities of the coloniser and the colonised in The Wretched of the Earth. First he points to the existential confusion wrought by colonialism on the educated elite:
Yes the first duty of the native poet is to see clearly the people he has chosen as the subject of his work of art. He cannot go forward resolutely unless he first realises the extent of his estrangement from them. We have taken everything from the other side; and the other side gives us nothing unless by a thousand detours we swing finally round in their direction, unless by ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks they manage to draw us toward them, to seduce us and to imprison us. Taking means in nearly every case being taken: thus it is not enough to try to free oneself by repeating proclamations and denials. [own emphasis]
And the educated elite cannot resist the seduction by simply returning to a romantic and pure past in the name of the people:
It is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called into question. Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is there that our souls are crystallised and that our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light.[6]
In characteristically dramatic language, the writer Lewis Nkosi describes black nationalist movements as “bastard children of Western modernity”.[7] Nkosi argues that in their efforts to liberate themselves from the “civilised decorum” of Western culture, black writers “were obliged to make use of the weapons which that culture had itself furnished” – mostly education and religion.
Bheki Peterson notes that the educated elite often joined protest and rebellious movements because of their own frustration with the contradictions between the promises of European modernity and their exclusion from the fruits of that very same modernity. Their participation in struggle was an attempt to show up and correct this contradiction. The more conservative among these educated elites relied on moral persuasion to get the European colonisers to extend political rights to Africans. Here is the legendary African intellectual DDT Jabavu on the prospects for change through moral persuasion – and see the importance he attaches to the two central features of European modernity – education and religion:
It is our belief that with the spread of better understanding in Church and college circles the future of South Africa is one we can contemplate with a fair degree of optimism in the hope that Christian influences will dispel illusions, transcend the mistaken political expedients of pseudo-segregationists and usher in a South Africa of racial peace and goodwill.[8]
Peterson further notes that even the more progressive elite such as John Dube and Pixley kaSeme tended to be accommodating and deferential towards colonial authorities. And yet, “it was precisely in occupying the intermediary ground, a diffuse, marginal space, that the kholwa were compelled to forge profoundly new forms of African identity in response to modernity”.[9] This is not to say that the hybridisation of modernity – and the making of new African identities – was a uniquely elite affair. Far from it. As David Attwell notes, “modernity is experienced ‘objectively’ as much by the migrant labourer as by the writer-artist . . . in oral popular genres and in the African independent churches, for example. It is true, nevertheless, that elites are, indeed, deeply involved in such work of interpretation and re-inscription.”[10] While the elites may lead this process, this is not a one-way street. One of Fanon’s major contributions was a recognition of the tensions that would emerge between the African elite and the working people at the moment of freedom as they each sought to define their identities and find their place in the post-colonial world. This is “the struggle over post-coloniality” that we see in South Africa today as the wealthy elite lead lives that are at a far remove from the masses of people – politically, economically and culturally.
The fact that the elite historically came from European institutions – educational and religious – explains why the leaders of the various liberation movements were all educated in the mission schools: Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe at Healdtown, Chris Hani and Steve Biko at Lovedale. Ian Macqueen observes that “as men schooled in the liberal crucible of Lovedale and, for Pityana, at Fort Hare College, they [BC leaders]were well-placed to judge the gulf between liberal ideals and actions”,[11] just like their 19th and early 20th century predecessors. And it is no surprise that the BC movement was born within the bosom of European modernity – the white universities in South Africa.
I argue that Steve Biko did more than any other political leader to form a political movement whose primary aim and achievement was to challenge the intellectual foundations of European modernity while engaging with that modernity itself through the weapons it had itself furnished. Attwell argues that the Black Consciousness Movement fashioned a response to European modernity that would be on the terms of black people themselves, by drawing