Steve Biko: Black Hero and Father of Black Consciousness

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Shymmex
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Stumbling is not falling....Malcolm X

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Steve Biko: Black Hero and Father of Black Consciousness Dec 30, 2015 23:56:42 GMT

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Post by Shymmex on Dec 30, 2015 23:56:42 GMT

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Steve Biko, in full Bantu Stephen Biko (born Dec. 18, 1946, King William’s Town, S.Af.—died Sept. 12, 1977, Pretoria), founder of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. His death from injuries suffered while in police custody made him an international martyr for South African black nationalism.

After being expelled from high school for political activism, Biko enrolled in and graduated (1966) from St. Francis College, a liberal boarding school in Natal, and then entered the University of Natal Medical School. There he became involved in the multiracial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), a moderate organization that had long espoused the rights of blacks. He soon grew disenchanted with NUSAS, believing that, instead of simply allowing blacks to participate in white South African society, the society itself needed to be restructured around the culture of the black majority. In 1968 he cofounded the all-black South African Students’ Organization (SASO), and he became its first president the following year. SASO was based on the philosophy of black consciousness, which encouraged blacks to recognize their inherent dignity and self-worth. In the 1970s the Black Consciousness Movement spread from university campuses into urban black communities throughout South Africa. In 1972 Biko was one of the founders of the Black People’s Convention, an umbrella organization of black consciousness groups.

Biko drew official censure in 1973, when he and other SASO members were banned; their associations, movements, and public statements were thereby restricted. He then operated covertly, establishing the Zimele Trust Fund in 1975 to help political prisoners and their families. He was arrested four times over the next two years and was held without trial for months at a time. On Aug. 18, 1977, he and a fellow activist were seized at a roadblock and jailed in Port Elizabeth. Biko was found naked and shackled outside a hospital in Pretoria, 740 miles (1,190 km) away, on September 11 and died the next day of a massive brain hemorrhage.

Police initially denied any maltreatment of Biko; it was determined later that he had probably been severely beaten while in custody, but the officers involved were cleared of wrongdoing. In 1997 five former police officers confessed to having killed Biko and applied for amnesty to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (a body convened to review atrocities committed during the apartheid years); amnesty was denied in 1999. Donald Woods, a South African journalist, depicts his friendship with Biko in Biko (1977; 3rd rev. ed., 1991), and their relationship is portrayed in the film Cry Freedom (1987).

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Last Edit: Dec 30, 2015 23:57:09 GMT by Shymmex

Good friends, good books, peace of mind, beautiful women, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Shymmex
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Stumbling is not falling....Malcolm X

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Steve Biko: Black Hero and Father of Black Consciousness Dec 30, 2015 23:59:36 GMT

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Post by Shymmex on Dec 30, 2015 23:59:36 GMT

Time Magazine: Remembering the Death of Steve Biko 35 Years Later

The life and legacy of Steve Biko, leader of the South African Black Consciousness movement, is remembered on the 35th anniversary of his death while in police custody.

“Yah, but tell me Karon, did you know this Steve Biko?”

The purpose of the question was derisive, an Afrikaans student seeking to silence his uppity liberal classmate’s protests at the brutal murder in prison of a black political activist—the 20th to have been killed behind bars by the policemen enforcing South Africa’s apartheid system in the face of rising tide of black protest. And, of course, everyone in our high school playground huddle that sunny September day knew that I couldn’t possibly have known Steve Biko, or even to have heard of him before his name hit the headlines.

Never mind voices or rights, history or family, black people didn’t even have last names in white South African suburbia in the late 1970s. They were known only by first names easily pronounced by their white employers for purposes of instruction and command. The very presence of black people in white “Group Areas” was not tolerated, under law, except to the extent that they were in servitude to white people as housemaids, gardeners or day laborers. Any black person found on the streets of our neighborhoods who could not prove they were in the employ of a local white family faced arrest by a brutal police force for whom the adjective “racist” would have been redundant, because enforcing a white supremacist racial order was their raison d’etre.

We may have been raised and nurtured by black women, surrogate mothers named Patience or Rachel, but the black people in our world had no last names, never mind voices or opinions. There were no black people as independent actors in our world.

So, no, I did not know, or know of Steve Biko before reports of his death as a result of a savage beating by drunken security policemen made it into our newspapers. I knew nothing of his ideas about how South Africans would one day live together on the basis of equality, judged not by color or ethnicity but simply as individual citizens. I knew nothing of the inspirational work of the brilliant young medical student who had, in the finest traditions of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, challenged the psychology of oppression in the minds of black people that allowed white supremacism to keep them down. I knew nothing of his quick wit: Biko was once asked by a white judge in a political show trial, “Why do you people call yourselves black? You look more brown than black.” He shot back, “Why do you call yourselves white? You look more pink than white.”

But I knew apartheid was evil, having watched the regime bulldoze the shacks of peasants driven by rural poverty to settle on the periphery of Cape Town; and having watched on the TV news as the regime’s police shot dead hundreds of black high school students my age, who’d taken to the streets in the Soweto uprising to demand their rights as citizens. We were ordered, during the rebellion, to patrol our school’s grounds at night, lest the black kids – the ones with last names, and very strong opinions, and little patience for racism or patronizing colonial liberalism – came to burn it down. (They never did; if they had, we’d have gladly supplied the matches.)

I didn’t know Steve Biko. But his death made clear to me, and hundreds of young white people like me, what millions of black South Africans knew from experience – that our country’s rulers were not only ignorant racists, but were vicious thugs to boot.

“I am not glad and I am not sorry about Mr. Biko,” Minister of Police Jimmy Kruger told a conference of the ruling party two days after Biko’s death. “It leaves me cold. I can say nothing to you. Any person who dies… I shall also be sorry if I die.” And they laughed. Like B-movie Nazis (which many of them were, having been in youth organizations aligned with Germany during WWII) they erupted in uproarious laughter, cheering on their brandy-and-coke bully boys who had beaten to death a chained captive, in their eyes nothing more than a cheeky “kaffir” (the Afrikaans equivalent of the n-word, curiously enough borrowed from the Arabic for infidel) one who had dared speak back to the white “baas” (master). Even now, it’s hard to hold back the tears of rage that poured freely when I read the detailed account of Biko’s murder.

Biko’s story reached us via the work of Donald Woods, editor of the Daily Dispatch who had the courage to break out of the white suburban bubble and had gotten to know Biko as a friend. And knew him as the leader of the Black Consciousness movement that had captured the imagination of a generation of city-born black youth in South Africa that were not prepared to accept the indignities routinely suffered by their parents. Filling the void left by the banning of the African National Congress a decade earlier and the imprisonment of its leaders such as Nelson Mandela, the BC movement saw itself as leading, in Biko’s words, “the cultural and political revival of an oppressed people”, bringing to South Africa the anti-colonial struggle for liberation that had swept across the continent. Woods, able to see the future in the making, was impressed, eventually earning a banning order and being forced to flee into exile. His editorial on Biko’s death introduced us to the man we would never know:

“My most valued friend, Steve Biko, has died in detention. He needs no tributes from me. He never did. He was a special and extraordinary man who at the age of 30 had already acquired a towering status in the hearts and minds of countless thousands of young blacks throughout the length and breadth of South Africa.

In the three years that I grew to know him my conviction never wavered that this was the most important political leader in the entire country, and quite simply the greatest man I have ever had the privilege to know.

Wisdom, humour, compassion, understanding, brilliancy of intellect, unselfishness, modesty, courage—he had all these attributes… The government quite clearly never understood the extent to which Steve Biko was a man of peace. He was militant in standing up for his principles, yes, but his abiding goal was a peaceful reconciliation of all South Africans.”

Biko’s funeral service was led by then Bishop Desmond Tutu, an Anglican cleric whose unwavering willingness to speak truth to power earned him a Nobel Peace Prize and still, today, marks him as a unique voice for justice in South Africa. It was a fitting tribute, even if many thousands of those who tried to reach the event were prevented from getting there by the cops, many of them dragged off buses and brutalized.

Still, Biko’s burial was an impressive send off, some 15,000 voices joined as once in chants of “Amandla! Ngawethu!” (Power is ours!) signifying the dawning recognition that black collective action would make apartheid untenable.

That spectacle was supposed to terrify me, sitting in my white suburban ghetto. But in light of Biko’s murder, and the massacre of protesting students the year before, I burned with a mounting—if, at that stage, impotent—rage at the racist brutality being unleashed in my name. Instead of scaring me, the idea of thousands of young black people armed with nothing but the stones in their hands and the courage in their hearts standing up to Jimmy Kruger and his thugs filled me with hope that justice would be done—and that I would see the birth of a different South Africa. Two years later, I arrived at the University of Cape Town, our portal from white suburbia into the wider, black-led political struggle.

There I finally “met” Steve Biko, through his writings, equal parts rage, humanity, profound insight and the irrepressible humor common to the truly brilliant political communicators. As we marched around our campus demanding freedom for Nelson Mandela and later, as we joined the ANC and its allied organizations fighting to end the monstrous system of apartheid, we were beginning, in our own tiny way to build the country that Steve Biko died fighting for, 35 years ago today. The fight to end apartheid had claimed many thousands of lives before his, and many thousands more would be killed after Biko’s murder. But no death shook my world, and the country all around me, more than Steve Biko’s. He lives on in the best achievements of the South Africa he helped birth, and in the best instincts of those who continue to challenge its flaws.

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Last Edit: Dec 31, 2015 0:00:34 GMT by Shymmex

Good friends, good books, peace of mind, beautiful women, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Shymmex
Ogbontarigi Omo Egbe

Stumbling is not falling....Malcolm X

Posts: 2,829

Steve Biko: Black Hero and Father of Black Consciousness Dec 31, 2015 0:04:49 GMT

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Post by Shymmex on Dec 31, 2015 0:04:49 GMT

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

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — 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
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Last Edit: Dec 31, 2015 0:06:51 GMT by Shymmex

Good friends, good books, peace of mind, beautiful women, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Shymmex
Ogbontarigi Omo Egbe

Stumbling is not falling....Malcolm X

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Steve Biko: Black Hero and Father of Black Consciousness Dec 31, 2015 0:13:26 GMT

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Post by Shymmex on Dec 31, 2015 0:13:26 GMT

Tribute to my hero and the forgotten black hero.

The father of black consciousness.

He died for what he believed in and created an ideology that has inspired thousands of people and keeps inspiring many more. BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS.

Black Consciousness
Black Consciousness has therefore been defined by Biko as:

“the realization by the Black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression – the blackness of their skin and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. It seeks to demonstrate the lie that black is an aberration from the normal which is white. It is a manifestation of a new realization that by seeking to run away from themselves and to emulate the white man, blacks are insulting the intelligence of whoever created them black. Black consciousness therefore takes cognizance of the deliberateness of God’s plan in creating black people black. It seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook to life.”

http://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-what-black-consciousness-seeks-to-do-is-to-produce-real-black-people-who-do-not-regard-steven-biko-72-69-50.jpg

https://black1stland1st.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/steve-biko-black-consciousness.jpg

Last Edit: Dec 31, 2015 0:13:45 GMT by Shymmex

Good friends, good books, peace of mind, beautiful women, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

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Steve Biko: Black Hero and Father of Black Consciousness

Post by Shymmex on Dec 30, 2015 23:56:42 GMT

Post by Shymmex on Dec 30, 2015 23:59:36 GMT

Post by Shymmex on Dec 31, 2015 0:04:49 GMT

Post by Shymmex on Dec 31, 2015 0:13:26 GMT

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