Steve Biko: 30 years on

[NameOfBeast]

Steve Biko died on 12 September 1977. He died at the hands of the South African Police. There have been a number of events over the past week to commemorate his death, thirty years on. Here are links to a few of them:

Bright Life And Challenging Death of a Conscious Man:
http://allafrica.com/stories/200709120469.html

Xolela Mangcu has two pieces:
http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=2975927
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A563290

Thabo Mbeki's Lecture (as a pdf):
http://www.businessday.co.za/downloads/Steve_Biko_Lecture_2007_Mbeki.pdf

The Steve Biko Foundation:
http://www.sbf.org.za/biko3030/

Helen Zille on her role in exposing Steve Biko's murder:
http://www.thestar.co.za/?fSectionId=&fArticleId=vn20070909111739807C780534

M&G, ANC grapples with Biko legacy:
http://mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__national/&articleid=319116

Tiyani Lybon Mabasa:
http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=562134

 

[Debbie]

And thanks to Helen Zille for exposing the truth about Biko's brutal murder by the apartheid govt.

Ironic that she's been arrested 30 years on for continuing her activities as usual.

 

[marine1]

These guy died for nothing. The ANC has destroyed their legacy by destroying this place. I am sure he is turning in his grave. What a shame.

 

[kilo39]

Another turgid memory (long buried in the banks of time: WHY are we living in the past?)

Have we all, the former oppressor and former oppressed national groups, broken down the walls of what WEB du Bois described as a “prison-house”, which was constructed to represent and give permanence to the seemingly incontrovertible truth that those who are white had a manifest destiny to govern and civilise those who are black, and those who are black should, in their own interest, accept the white people as their benevolent and caring guardians, however cruel, insulting and inhumane their conduct!
In his work, “The coloniser’s model of the world”, the historian, J.M Blaut, says: “This belief is the notion that European civilisation – the West – has had some unique historical advantage, some special quality of race or culture or environment or mind or spirit, which gives this human community a permanent superiority over all other communities, at all times in history and down to the present…Therefore, the world has a permanent geographical centre and a permanent periphery; an Inside and an Outside. Inside leads, Outside lags. Inside innovates, Outside imitates”.
Reflecting on this racist and hegemonic Eurocentrism in his 2001 paper, “The Metamorphosis of Colonialism”, immanent in the commercial process of globalisation, Jeremy Seabrook writes:
“Alien values are implanted into the lives of the people… alien, not merely in the sense of foreign or exotic, but alien to humanity…At first it was partly resisted, but with time, it became more and more acceptable, until it has now become a major determinant on the lives of the young, displacing all earlier forms of acculturation, other ways of answering need, other ways of being in the world. This process of forgetting, beyond recall, but perhaps not quiet beyond reclamation, is a form of colonialism far more effective than that which held so much of the world in thrall in an earlier empire,”

Caught between the pincers of a mind-set that educated us to imagine and internalise the notion of an Inside that leads, and an Outside that lags, an Inside that innovates, and an Outside that imitates, and objective social reality that dictates that we should forget our identity and historical and human value systems, beyond recall, we must ask ourselves the challenging question – have we liberated ourselves from what Steve Biko identified as the “imprisoning (and demeaning) notions which are the legacy of the control of (our) attitude by whites”!

Gad. Sickening and depressing.

*Snore*

YES now can we please all move on 30 years later. It is up to us individually. Always has been. The sooner Mbeki and the rest realise this perhaps we can get on with >service delivery, urbanization, cheap broadband, etc, instead of constantly preaching the revolutionary song.

Mbeki should take his head out of his book and look at the world around him. What would he see?

And thanks to Helen Zille for exposing the truth about Biko's brutal murder by the apartheid govt.

Ironic that she's been arrested 30 years on for continuing her activities as usual.

Ag nonsense. The story was flighted by Donald Woods(?) at that time.

Thabo Mbeki's Lecture (as a pdf):
http://www.businessday.co.za/downloads/Steve_Biko_Lecture_2007_Mbeki.pdf

 

[dlk001]

Here are links to a few of them:

Nice work, thanks.

 

[NameOfBeast]

Gad. Sickening and depressing.
*Snore*

kilo39: I sympathise. I hesitated in including Mbeki's tribute as a link precisely because:
(a) Thabo Mbeki cannot write for toffee --- I have seldom read prose as turgid as his outside of (poor) dissertations;
(b) he has no right to appropriate any part of Steve Biko's legacy --- there is a considerable amount of bad blood between the ANC and the BC movement, a fact that you can gauge from Mangcu's slightly bitter articles.

YES now can we please all move on 30 years later. It is up to us individually. Always has been. The sooner Mbeki and the rest realise this perhaps we can get on with >service delivery, urbanization, cheap broadband, etc, instead of constantly preaching the revolutionary song.

I could not agree with you more. Though this thread is really intended as a tribute to Steve Biko who was murdered and deserves to be remembered, in part because we should understand that South Africa once had a political leader who, comparatively speaking, puts almost every living South African politician to shame.

Ag nonsense. The story was flighted by Donald Woods(?) at that time.

A common misconception --- while Woods, as the editor of the Daily Dispatch, and as Biko's friend, certainly had a role in the affair --- it was Zille (as a reporter for the Rand Daily Mail) who did most of the actual investigative reporting that blew the lid off of Steve Biko's murder at the hands of the security police.

Zille wrote a fairly nice piece on her role in all of this:
http://www.thestar.co.za/?fSectionId=&fArticleId=vn20070909111739807C780534

 

[chiskop]

kilo, have to say I agree with you about Donald Woods. Hadn't realised before a few weeks ago that Zille had anything to do with Biko, though I was familiar with her history as a journalist.

 

[kilo39]

Thank you for the correction NameOfBeast (and apologies to Debbie)

My editor, Allister Sparks, vowed to get to the truth. He sent me to Port Elizabeth, where Biko had been detained, to track down and interview the doctors who had treated him.
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We had to publish "a correction". This "guilty" verdict, I understood, was the minimum Kruger required as an alternative to banning us outright. I will never forget that phrase, "tendentious reporting".
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I was still young and idealistic enough to become tearful at such injustice.
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In mid-November 1977, he assigned me to cover the inquest held at the Old Synagogue in Pretoria. My instruction was to report proceedings verbatim, and I took down every word in shorthand. Because of the enormous workload of transcribing the verbatim record and pulling out a daily front-page lead, I was aided by court reporters Carol Steyn and Melanie Yap.
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Over the 15-day inquest, we listened to a parade of people who had contact with Biko during his dying five days - from the time of the alleged "scuffle" on September 7 to his death on September 12. They included Captain Piet Goosen and Major Harold Snyman of the security police and doctors involved in treating him. We heard their account and their suspicion that Biko's coma was a "sham".
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We all knew better, even Prins. The murder of Biko marked the start of the darkest decade in the history of apartheid.
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It is not my place to seek to be an interpreter of Biko's vision and world-view. There are many who argue Black Consciousness is a necessary step on the road to non-racialism. That may be so, and I have no doubt that is how Biko himself understood it.
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The great risk of defining identity exclusively in racial terms is that race classification and racial preferment become entrenched, to advance vested interests. An even greater risk is that they become a smokescreen for promoting the agenda of a small elite and pretend this is in the interests of the masses.
Steve Biko's legacy lives on - Zille
9 September 2007

Perhaps my real point was 'the story was known at the time,' ie, goes to denial: "we didn't know what was going on."

Also towards present attitudes to the media, ie, media is 'sensationalist and propaganda.' Whereas it is the simple truth for those who choose to see it.

Amazing how the present mirrors the past: >I will never forget that phrase, "tendentious reporting".

tendentious also ten·den·cious
adj. Marked by a strong implicit point of view; partisan: a tendentious account of the recent elections

 

[NameOfBeast]

BusinessDay Cartoon and Letter on Biko

Editorial Cartoon:
http://www2.businessday.co.za/cartoons/big/20070913.jpg

An angry letter, Biko hypocrites:
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A564325

Now that it’s the anniversary of Steve Biko’s death, suddenly everyone conveniently remembers what a great thinker, activist and human being he was, Biko helped keep struggle alive — Mbeki (September 13).

How rich, in a country that is always fighting against the majority of its citizens, where the pursuit of filthy lucre is a national preoccupation, where mediocrity, sycophancy, corruption, intolerance and political arrogance have become virtues.

Mosibudi Mangena, the well-paid self-appointed torchbearer of the spirit of Black Consciousness in the Union Buildings, has never spoken out against the many policy and political failures of this government. Yet suddenly he speaks loudly of the legacy of an individual whose intellectual honesty, integrity, compassion and humility find no resonance in the entire brood of our current politicians.
Baba Shomang