Dida Halake
3 September 2007
opinion
Accra — 30th Anniversary Tribute
"It is better to die for an idea that is worth living for than live for an idea that is not worth dying for".
The photo of Biko illustrating this article has an uncanny resemblance to that of Kenya's Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi - who was killed in 1954 while fighting the British settlers who had disposed Kenyan Africans of their land. Biko was also murdered, by the racist South African Boers, at the tender age of thirty.
Thirty years ago, as young man (only nine years younger than Biko) I had a fiery argument with a Boer couple in Scotland when the Soweto Massacre was shown on British television. The British Government had tried to ban the programme - the first ever television programme the British Government had tried to ban! And the "pro-Black" Boer couple thought the programme should be banned!
They also thought the Soweto children should have accepted Apartheid - that is, "not rioted". The British Government did not want to annoy the Boer rulers of racist South Africa because Britain was the biggest investor in Apartheid South Africa (I think 8 billion pounds was invested there by UK plc, with the USA as the next biggest investor).
Stephen Biko was born in King Williams Town which I believe President Mbeki's ANC government should re-name "Biko Town". Steve was also a student at the University of Natal and I call on President Mbeki and the University of Natal authorities to rename it "Biko University". I call on the South African authorities to re-name every single main street, in every town and city in the Republic of South Africa, "Biko Street".
I'll go further: I call on Mbeki and the ANC government to re-name the so-called Republic of South Africa itself - and give it its rightful name of "Azania". Then we will know that true independence has arrived in the Boers' so-called Republic of South Africa - and in Black Africa itself. Then the world will know that we have stopped that old Uncle-Tom shuffling about - and we can start to truly live out the real meaning of a "New African Renaissance" for the twenty-first century.
Steve Biko deserves this honour and pre-eminence because without his Black Conciousness Movement (BCM), the Soweto Uprising of 1976 would never have happened, and if the Soweto Uprising of 1976 had never happened Nelson Mandela would have died in jail, and the Black people of racist South Africa would have remained in bondage for another generation.
The BCM was born out of the South Africa Students Organisation (SASO) co-founded by Biko in 1968. He became SASO's first President. The BCM's philosophy was simple and straight-forward: Black South Africans needed to stop seeing themselves as inferior (even though the Boer's law told them they were), and White South Africans needed to stop seeing themselves as superior (even though the Boer's law told them they were). Speaking specifically to Black South Africans, Biko said simply: "Man, you are okay as you ar; begin to look upon yourself as a human being".
In a racist South Africa whose law stated that 20 million black citizens were not citizens at all, and that they were officially classified as the fourth-class of humanity in the country (barely up from being homo-erectus!), Biko's statement that Blacks were "okay" shook the Apartheid system to the core. Remember, this was a Racist Government that was so paranoid about its Black people that they banned the story book "Black Beauty" - Sewell's book about a girl and her horse - because they thought it was about Black people! Or maybe they just feared the phrase "Black Beauty". Anyhow, Biko adopted the phrase "Black Power" from the Black Panther brothers across the Atlantic and incorporated it into the BCM's motto.
Once Biko became the honorary President of the Black Peoples Convention, the racist Boer Government moved fast. He was slapped with a "banning order" in March 1993 - which meant that he could not speak in public, he was not allowed to speak to more than one person at a time, and he was restricted to certain areas where he had to remain (i.e. if the banning order restricted him to an island in the ocean all by himself he had to remain there twenty-four hours). Nevertheless, the well organized BCM was able to play the major role in the Soweto Uprising of 16th June 1976 which, though bloodily put down, like Kenya's Mau Mau, marked the beginning of the end of white-rule, again like what Kenya's Mau Mau achieved in the fifties.
The Boer police arrested Steve Bantu Biko on the 18th of August 1977 and tortured him for about four weeks in an effort to break him. On the 11th of September 1977, they dumped the barely conscious Biko into the back of a truck and drove him to Pretoria where he died on 12th September 1977. The Boer Minister of State Security remarked that "the death of Steve Biko lives me cold" - meaning it doesn't matter to him at all.
On the 7th of October 2003, the ANC government (the ANC had opposed Biko, SASO & the BCM throughout the 1970s and 1980s) forgave the five policemen who admitted to killing Biko - leaving Mrs. Biko and much of Black Africa hot with rage.
Steve Bantu Biko will forever occupy his place as the pre-eminent martyr of the Azanian Freedom Struggle - the face of the thousands of Africans who fought tanks and bullets with stones and shed their blood for a Free Azania. In the words of the song and my generation's anthem:
"Oh, oh, Biko, because, because of Biko".
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