Liberation means reading and writing what we like

September 12 marks one of the darkest days in South Africa’s history – tomorrow it will be 38 years since Bantu Stephen Biko died at the hands of apartheid police.

Biko, a founder of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), was one of the greatest proponents of collective action by black people to overcome racial, economic and social oppression. He – like many in South Africa, the continent and the diaspora – died for this ideal: liberation.

Biko was by no means the first person to fight for the emancipation of black people, yet he is an integral part of the African intellectual and activist tradition that includes leaders such as Marcus Garvey of Jamaica, Anna Julia Haywood-Cooper of the United States, Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal, and among others in South Africa, Charlotte Maxeke.

Biko’s death, which occurred only a year after the 1976 student uprisings in Soweto, thrust the brutality of the apartheid regime into the global spotlight. As he prophetically wrote, “your method of death can itself be a politicising thing”.

Despite his death at the age of 30, Biko’s teachings continue to resonate through the decades, perpetuated by his seminal work, I Write What I Like.

Banned in 1973, Biko was unable to publish under his own name and so he began writing under the pseudonym FrankTalk – sometimes in this very paper.

Many of these articles, alongside speeches and conference papers, form part of I Write What I Like. In it, Biko sounds a clarion call for blacks to liberate their minds from the psychological shackles of oppression, and he challenges the inferiority complex many blacks have developed.

Similarly, he challenges the white community to engage not from a position of superiority, but joint humanity.

Black Consciousness, a philosophy whose evolution can be traced in Biko’s work, is undoubtedly a homegrown ideology, though it finds resonance with international liberation movements.

Among those whose thinking influenced Biko are freedom fighters such as Frantz Fanon of Martinique and Algeria, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia.

Despite the work of these leaders being banned at the time, Biko and his colleagues were voracious readers who managed to acquire a wide variety of material.

Auspiciously, this week as we prepare to commemorate Biko’s death, the international community also marks World Literacy Day (September 8), and South Africa celebrates National Book Week, with the Eastern Cape celebrations taking place at the Steve Biko Centre in Ginsberg, King William’s Town.

As we interrogate the contemporary meaning of Biko’s legacy, it is natural to revisit his writings and those of other thought leaders who form part of the African activist and intellectual tradition.

It is an opportune time to ask how well versed we are in the writings that helped to win political freedom – and, more than that, how accessible are the written ideas of Biko and other thought leaders to young people today?

Considering the statistics that only 14% of South Africans are active readers and only 5% read to their children, it is imperative to assess if we have the requisite levels of literacy to ensure that Biko’s ideas are transmitted to another generation.

While I’m a staunch proponent of using other means beyond books – such as films and new media technology – to teach young people, many seminal works by African thought leaders were first created in written form, so if we are to have a true understanding of the ideologies of our founding mothers and fathers, we must be able to engage their original works.

Further, as demonstrated by Biko and his colleagues, through reading and writing we can confront dominant paradigms on our own terms and shape the future in ways we see fit. As Biko so aptly stated, “the greatest tool in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed”.

Do our youth have sufficient tools to free their minds? While the role of government in promoting literacy is undeniably critical, it’s equally important – in the spirit of self-reliance that Biko advocated – that communities and individual families create a culture of reading in informal settings as well. Statistics show that, overall, children who read regularly:

lHave better academic achievement;

lAcquire language skills more easily;

lReadily acclimatise to new situations through strategies learned while reading;

lHave enhanced concentration skills; and

lSeem more able of grasping complex topics.

Clearly, there are structural issues that curtail access to books, such as their high cost, the dearth of libraries in many communities, and often a scarcity of material.

Through religious, civic and social organisations, young people can regularly engage with the written word, sharing books and attending storytelling sessions such as those at the Steve Biko Centre.

With that said, we should not believe that literacy is the panacea for all that ails us – simply achieving a level of reading proficiency is insufficient for liberation.

It is imperative that we also ensure that young people can critically engage with and analyse the material they encounter.

Biko, in his chapter on white racism and black consciousness, observes: “To add to the white-oriented education received, the whole history of black people is presented as a long lamentation of repeated defeats. Strangely enough, everybody has to accept that the history of South Africa starts in 1652.”

In the same chapter he asserts: “We have to rewrite our history and describe in it the heroes who formed the core of resistance to the white invaders. More has to be revealed and stress has to be laid on the successful nation-building attempts by people like Shaka, Moshoeshoe and Hintsa.”

So as we commemorate Biko, and celebrate National Book Week, let us each do what we can to advance a culture of reading, and, in the spirit of Biko, ensure that the next generation can both read and write what they like.

Obenewa Amponsah is the CEO of the Steve Biko Foundation