His Life, Death Shaped Generation of S. African Activists : Steve Biko--Black Consciousness Opened Way

Steve Biko: A decade after his death in police custody, the name of the South African black consciousness leader itself remains a political statement here.

Biko, the eloquent, charismatic advocate of black pride, still symbolizes the determination of the country’s black majority to claim what they believe is their birthright and to end apartheid, South Africa’s system of minority white rule and racial separation.

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” Biko declared, urging blacks to rid themselves of their “slave mentality.” Blacks should take pride in being black and their achievements as blacks, Biko argued, and they should then use this pride to unite and throw off “the shackles of servitude.”

“The strength that we see in the struggle today stems very substantially from Biko and black consciousness, from getting over our feelings of inferiority and from our resulting determination to liberate ourselves,” the Rev. Allan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and a leading anti-apartheid activist, said this week in Cape Town.

First, Sense of Own Worth

“You can’t deal with whites without first coming to a sense of your own worth. Biko played an incredibly important role in articulating what we felt, but what we didn’t know how to say. . . . Black consciousness was an essential process, psychologically and politically, for us to rid ourselves of these feelings of impotence.”

Biko, 30, a former medical student, died in detention 10 years ago today from brain injuries suffered during what security police maintained was “a scuffle” while he was being interrogated a week earlier. He had received only cursory medical care and then was driven, chained and naked on the floor of a police vehicle, 700 miles from Port Elizabeth to the capital, Pretoria.

A magistrate found that neither the police nor any other official was criminally responsible for Biko’s death, but the government paid the equivalent of $78,000, then a record, as an indemnity to his widow. Nearly eight years later, the two government doctors who failed to treat him were reprimanded for improper conduct, but virtually all the policemen in the case were promoted.

Death Stunned Nation

His death stunned the country--more than 15,000 people attended his funeral--for Biko had emerged as the pre-eminent leader of the young black activists who had begun to fill the political void here after the African National Congress and the offshoot Pan-Africanist Congress were outlawed.

His black consciousness ideology had already inspired a whole generation of black youths, and some of their parents, and the South African Students Organization and Black People’s Convention, both banned in October, 1977, had resumed the anti-apartheid struggle after nearly a decade of limited activity.

“Black man, you are on your own,” Biko had said, urging blacks to formulate their own anti-apartheid strategy and break with even liberal whites. With that rallying cry he galvanized a generation.

“Steve Biko came at a time when blacks needed to rediscover their humanity,” the Rev. Frank Chikane, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches and a member of the South African Students Organization in the early 1970s, said this week. “Blacks had been so dehumanized that they began to believe, just as apartheid maintained, that blacks were less than human. With this view of ourselves, what could we achieve?

“We needed to liberate ourselves from the psychology of oppression before we could liberate ourselves from the physical and political oppression under which we still suffer.. . . Steve Biko led the way in changing the outlook of a whole people.”

The impact that black consciousness was having showed itself in the student uprising that began in Soweto on June 16, 1976, over new government regulations that black students be taught in Afrikaans, the Dutch-based language of the descendants of early white settlers. The riots continued for nearly a year, leaving at least 575 dead.

“For a people reasserting their dignity and demanding their due, the government orders were a provocation, the proverbial match in the tinderbox,” says a black journalist, himself a member of the Biko generation. “That year confirmed thousands upon thousands of youngsters in their activism, in their militancy, in their determination to change this country. Today, we call them the ‘class of ’76.’

“Black consciousness with its ‘Black is beautiful, black is better’ slogans gave them the confidence to stand up to the system, and the South African Students Organization and Black People’s Convention had them organized for action. We didn’t bring the government down, but we did see a bit of what black power could do.”

Biko’s full legacy is becoming increasingly evident, however, as blacks who came of age politically during the 1970s move into leadership positions, not only in political groups such as the United Democratic Front, but in the country’s churches, labor unions, business, theater, the press and many community organizations.

Jay Naidoo, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, Sidney Mafumadi, his deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, and Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, assistant general secretary of the National Council of Trade Unions, were all active in the South African Students Organization and Black People’s Convention.

Patrick Lekota and Popo Molefe, two top officials of the United Democratic Front now on trial for treason, were also prominent in the black consciousness movement in the 1970s as was Aubrey Mokoena, a close Biko associate, who now heads the Release Mandela Campaign. Murphy Morobe, another senior UDF official, and Zwelakhe Sisulu, editor of the weekly newspaper New Nation, who are both currently in detention, emerged as activists during that time.

The leadership of the Azanian People’s Organization, which continues to adhere strictly to the black consciousness ideology, comes almost entirely from the Biko era. Peter Jones, one of its officials, was with Biko when he was detained by police in August, 1977.

Influenced Clergymen

Boesak, Chikane and Father Smangaliso Mkhwatsha, general secretary of the Southern Africa Catholic Bishops Conference, were among the clergymen who merged the philosophy of black consciousness with liberation theology, and who today are among the influential church leaders in South Africa.

The list of leaders runs through scores of black lawyers, physicians, social workers, educators, writers, artists, actors, musicians and businessmen, most of whom are now 30 to 40 years old.

Others, now in exile, have been recruited by the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress and are rising into the senior ranks of both groups.

“They are our best and brightest,” Nthato Motlana, a Soweto community leader and an anti-apartheid activist since the 1950s, said of the Biko generation. “They have helped restore dignity and pride to our people, they have brought political renewal, they have brought action and, I think, they will bring change.”

But most of the Biko generation have moved beyond his black consciousness philosophy to advocate a “non-racial” democracy for South Africa.

“The masses decided it was time to work with whites,” Mokoena said in an interview this week. “We activists were told by the masses, the black masses, that there should be a place for whites in a free and democratic South Africa. Black people are magnanimous, and they will not support those who take black consciousness too far and say the whites should be thrown into the sea.”

Lekota, testifying at his treason trial, said in Pretoria this week that he and most other leaders in the South African Student Organization, which gave birth to many of today’s anti-apartheid groups, believe that whites have a place in the future South Africa and that their participation should be sought.

“Some people took the extreme view that we should not have anything to do with whites,” he said, explaining the non-racial nature of the United Democratic Front. “I always felt it more realistic to accept that at some level there must be cooperation between black and white.”

Blacks Divided on Issue

The point is highly contentious, dividing those in the mainstream anti-apartheid groups, which support “non-racialism,” from those in the smaller, though still influential, black consciousness movement, such as the Azanian People’s Organization. Rival groups have clashed many times over the past three years, accusing one another of escalating their increasingly bitter political feud into civil war.

“I wish that Biko had not died,” Chikane commented. “Then we would know where he would stand today. Everybody uses him to justify his own position, and in the process I am afraid they distort the character of Steve Biko and the content of black consciousness. . . .

“To rediscover our own humanity, to reassert our pride, we had to take hard positions and to use extreme language, which looks racist out of context. But black consciousness was always a means to an end, not an end in itself.”

Boesak describes in similar terms his move from black consciousness, for which he offered a theological defense in his doctoral dissertation. “I came to understand myself and South Africa through that philosophy, and I have no regrets about what I said then,” he remarked, “but to cling to that philosophy today is a mistake.”

But those who still adhere strictly to black consciousness insist that the basic tenets of the philosophy are still relevant and that the go-it-alone strategy, shunning cooperation with liberal whites, remains correct.

“Non-racialism to us seems absurd,” said Muntu Myeza, a Biko associate now in the Azanian People’s Organization, “because it puts blacks right back into the hands of whites, ready to be manipulated for white purposes, not ours.

“The task of ridding our people of this inferiority complex is never-ending, and it will continue until we have triumphed over the forces of oppression and liberation is achieved--and probably even beyond that.”

Researcher Michael Cadman of The Times’ Johannesburg Bureau contributed to this article.