AN exceptionally brutal regime attempted to snuff out the light of an exceptional black man.
Over a period of nearly one month following his arrest at a police roadblock on August 18, 1977, Biko was repeatedly beaten and tortured at both the interrogation rooms of the security police in Port Elizabeth and the Walmer Police Station.
Biko had been determined to resist. But the five white policemen led by Daniel Siebert, had prevailed over their lone black captive.
They punched Biko, beat him with a hosepipe and ran him into a wall until he collapsed with a severe head injury.
Unconscious they chained him upright to a security grill, as if crucified, and left him for death. But it did not come.
Later they took him down and left him naked and unconscious on the floor. They would only call for a doctor more than 24 hours later.
Even then there was to be no hospital for Biko. He was to be driven naked and manacled in the back of a police Land Rover to Pretoria, a distance of 1100 kilometres.
He died shortly after arrival at the Pretoria prison on September 12.
Speaking at a National Party conference following the news of Biko's death the minister of police, Jimmy Kruger’s infamous response was: “It leaves me cold”.
The cause of Biko’s death was to be hidden and yet proved to be so important.
The official cover up line was a “hunger strike” and an inquest would find no one responsible except the dead man himself.
But, the damage was done, Biko is dead!
His murder would fuel further outcry against the apartheid government and more importantly, serve as a means to galvanise black South Africans to continue along Biko’s trajectory of resistance.
From his death we can read the state of black life under apartheid.
It was a precarious and perilous thing, a life constantly lived on the edge of death. Death, in large numbers, through generous measures of violence and violent crimes, became an encounter which formed a part of day to day life.
In Biko’s case, the violence and death in custody was predictable but what is perhaps a fundamental aspect to this story is the unveiling of the dehumanising technologies of apartheid to usurp black lives of the very capacity to inquire into the death of a black person. Such an inquiry required being able to anticipate one’s death or the very awareness of what it means to be human.
It was fairly routine to hear your loved one had “slipped on a bar of soap” or died “during a hunger strike”.
But once this had happened with Biko, it turned into international news and was cause for protest.
This is what makes Biko’s death and the controversy that resulted so significant.
It was a controversy around something that until then had become a norm for black folk.
I have no doubt Biko understood his death would mean something. He took many of the risks he did knowing his imprisonment or death would mean something but that he would die fighting.
This was not because he was a better black than any other under apartheid, but because he had spent much of his life making significant that which had thus far been immaterial. His Black Consciousness (BC) was fundamentally about making significant the very issue of black as human, read “black humanity”.
While we have a long and colourful history of resistance, the emergence of Black Consciousness in South Africa constituted much more than simply protest or activism but distinctly charted and challenged a more fundamentally epistemological terrain.
The apartheid regime did not anticipate the rise of new centres of opposition – from churches, neighbourhood centres, townships and school classrooms.
They were not afraid of the school teachers, children and artists as critics of white racism or as agents who would affirm the integrity of black identity.
Black Consciousness however, gave life to dynamic cultural and political movement by the mid-1970s.
At its peak, Black Consciousness was a powerful force on South African university campuses from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, beginning with the founding of the South African Students' Organisation (Saso) in 1968.
Biko developed Black Consciousness as a philosophy to address the struggle of the oppressed black majority. Through it he persuaded black people that their true humanity could be regained in waging a struggle against the white superstructure.
He called for the renewing of the minds of black people and a moving away from the dominant values and practices of white society.
As the father of Black Consciousness, Biko was indebted to Franz Fanon’s conception of colonial racial complexes resulting among blacks in an inferiority complex and among whites in a superiority complex.
He advocated that the only point at which black people could come to realise their political agency was when they stopped believing they were only passive objects in an inevitable system. They needed to begin to understand how they had been structured by slavery and colonialism in the service of white domination and anti-black racism.
What emerged strategically from this conception of black consciousness was the resolve to move away from the direction of, and dependency on, white allies in the determination of black peoples’ politics and struggles.
About white liberals/allies, Biko was unequivocal in denouncing their tendency to “call a few ‘intelligent and articulate’ blacks to ‘come around for tea at home’”. .
His view was that South Africa needed a complete overhaul of the political, economic and social structures of the day.
His antipathetic vision of white direction then was not only about the political involvement of white people but also about their intellectual contribution to what ideologies, strategies and objectives black people should pursue.
Thirty-nine years later, it turns out that Biko’s Black Consciousness is still pertinent and relevant.
Student movements such as #RhodesMustFall, #BlackLivesMatter #FeesMustFall, and even #StopRacismAtPretoriaGirlsHighSchool probe into the very question of the integrity of black identity and dignity. And they question the foregone ideals of integration into white society under white values.
The very political strategies of BC movements such as Saso have set the tone for how we can imagine the project of decolonising education.
For decolonisation to have any meaning we must first decolonise knowledge.
The base from which we must think is one that challenges the singular understanding of modernity with its category of Man/Human that excludes, as its natural order, black people from the zone of humanity, history and civilisation and roots them in culture and geography instead.
In fact, it is precisely this premise that systematically subjugates black people in order to reproduce lives which are fit only to die.
These teachings of Biko, Winnie Kgware, Onkgopotse Tiro and the likes continue to set a challenge for young black thinkers in a persistently anti-black world .
Biko, through Black Consciousness, gave us an intellectual activism that just will not let sleeping dogs lie, one so sophisticated and yet so poignant that it captured the hearts and minds of schoolchildren in Soweto, university students and communities across the nation. Today it does the same all the way from Pretoria to Cape Town to Ferguson, US, and Oxford UK.
Post our imagined liberation in 1994, the fundamental questions of our coeval humanity raised by Biko and his Black Consciousness continue to edge on a 21st century conception of black freedom.
In 2016 Biko still informs our generational mission, to give to the world “a more human face”, with the prelude being “whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior.”
In that cold cell Biko is dead, but in the hearts and minds of this generation, Biko lives!
Athinangamso Esther Nkopo was raised in King William’s Town. She has an Honours in international relations from Wits, and an MSc in politics from Oxford where she is currently working towards her Phd
Biko still lives in hearts, minds of this generation
Over a period of nearly one month following his arrest at a police roadblock on August 18, 1977, Biko was repeatedly beaten and tortured at both the interrogation rooms of the security police in Port Elizabeth and the Walmer Police Station.
Biko had been determined to resist. But the five white policemen led by Daniel Siebert, had prevailed over their lone black captive.
They punched Biko, beat him with a hosepipe and ran him into a wall until he collapsed with a severe head injury.
Unconscious they chained him upright to a security grill, as if crucified, and left him for death. But it did not come.
Later they took him down and left him naked and unconscious on the floor. They would only call for a doctor more than 24 hours later.
Even then there was to be no hospital for Biko. He was to be driven naked and manacled in the back of a police Land Rover to Pretoria, a distance of 1100 kilometres.
He died shortly after arrival at the Pretoria prison on September 12.
Speaking at a National Party conference following the news of Biko's death the minister of police, Jimmy Kruger’s infamous response was: “It leaves me cold”.
The cause of Biko’s death was to be hidden and yet proved to be so important.
The official cover up line was a “hunger strike” and an inquest would find no one responsible except the dead man himself.
But, the damage was done, Biko is dead!
His murder would fuel further outcry against the apartheid government and more importantly, serve as a means to galvanise black South Africans to continue along Biko’s trajectory of resistance.
From his death we can read the state of black life under apartheid.
It was a precarious and perilous thing, a life constantly lived on the edge of death. Death, in large numbers, through generous measures of violence and violent crimes, became an encounter which formed a part of day to day life.
In Biko’s case, the violence and death in custody was predictable but what is perhaps a fundamental aspect to this story is the unveiling of the dehumanising technologies of apartheid to usurp black lives of the very capacity to inquire into the death of a black person. Such an inquiry required being able to anticipate one’s death or the very awareness of what it means to be human.
It was fairly routine to hear your loved one had “slipped on a bar of soap” or died “during a hunger strike”.
But once this had happened with Biko, it turned into international news and was cause for protest.
This is what makes Biko’s death and the controversy that resulted so significant.
It was a controversy around something that until then had become a norm for black folk.
I have no doubt Biko understood his death would mean something. He took many of the risks he did knowing his imprisonment or death would mean something but that he would die fighting.
This was not because he was a better black than any other under apartheid, but because he had spent much of his life making significant that which had thus far been immaterial. His Black Consciousness (BC) was fundamentally about making significant the very issue of black as human, read “black humanity”.
While we have a long and colourful history of resistance, the emergence of Black Consciousness in South Africa constituted much more than simply protest or activism but distinctly charted and challenged a more fundamentally epistemological terrain.
The apartheid regime did not anticipate the rise of new centres of opposition – from churches, neighbourhood centres, townships and school classrooms.
They were not afraid of the school teachers, children and artists as critics of white racism or as agents who would affirm the integrity of black identity.
Black Consciousness however, gave life to dynamic cultural and political movement by the mid-1970s.
At its peak, Black Consciousness was a powerful force on South African university campuses from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, beginning with the founding of the South African Students' Organisation (Saso) in 1968.
Biko developed Black Consciousness as a philosophy to address the struggle of the oppressed black majority. Through it he persuaded black people that their true humanity could be regained in waging a struggle against the white superstructure.
He called for the renewing of the minds of black people and a moving away from the dominant values and practices of white society.
As the father of Black Consciousness, Biko was indebted to Franz Fanon’s conception of colonial racial complexes resulting among blacks in an inferiority complex and among whites in a superiority complex.
He advocated that the only point at which black people could come to realise their political agency was when they stopped believing they were only passive objects in an inevitable system. They needed to begin to understand how they had been structured by slavery and colonialism in the service of white domination and anti-black racism.
What emerged strategically from this conception of black consciousness was the resolve to move away from the direction of, and dependency on, white allies in the determination of black peoples’ politics and struggles.
About white liberals/allies, Biko was unequivocal in denouncing their tendency to “call a few ‘intelligent and articulate’ blacks to ‘come around for tea at home’”. .
His view was that South Africa needed a complete overhaul of the political, economic and social structures of the day.
His antipathetic vision of white direction then was not only about the political involvement of white people but also about their intellectual contribution to what ideologies, strategies and objectives black people should pursue.
Thirty-nine years later, it turns out that Biko’s Black Consciousness is still pertinent and relevant.
Student movements such as #RhodesMustFall, #BlackLivesMatter #FeesMustFall, and even #StopRacismAtPretoriaGirlsHighSchool probe into the very question of the integrity of black identity and dignity. And they question the foregone ideals of integration into white society under white values.
The very political strategies of BC movements such as Saso have set the tone for how we can imagine the project of decolonising education.
For decolonisation to have any meaning we must first decolonise knowledge.
The base from which we must think is one that challenges the singular understanding of modernity with its category of Man/Human that excludes, as its natural order, black people from the zone of humanity, history and civilisation and roots them in culture and geography instead.
In fact, it is precisely this premise that systematically subjugates black people in order to reproduce lives which are fit only to die.
These teachings of Biko, Winnie Kgware, Onkgopotse Tiro and the likes continue to set a challenge for young black thinkers in a persistently anti-black world .
Biko, through Black Consciousness, gave us an intellectual activism that just will not let sleeping dogs lie, one so sophisticated and yet so poignant that it captured the hearts and minds of schoolchildren in Soweto, university students and communities across the nation. Today it does the same all the way from Pretoria to Cape Town to Ferguson, US, and Oxford UK.
Post our imagined liberation in 1994, the fundamental questions of our coeval humanity raised by Biko and his Black Consciousness continue to edge on a 21st century conception of black freedom.
In 2016 Biko still informs our generational mission, to give to the world “a more human face”, with the prelude being “whites must be made to realise that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realise that they are also human, not inferior.”
In that cold cell Biko is dead, but in the hearts and minds of this generation, Biko lives!
Athinangamso Esther Nkopo was raised in King William’s Town. She has an Honours in international relations from Wits, and an MSc in politics from Oxford where she is currently working towards her Phd
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