Johannesburg — STEVE Biko was the greatest political thinker in the history of our land. To be sure, all social struggles are collective endeavours. But if that was the entirety of the human experience, we would have no business being fascinated by the biographies of individual leaders such Vladimir Lenin, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

The recognition of individual talent does not negate accumulated social wisdom. The relationship between the individual and society is best captured by C Wright Mills in his book, The Sociological Imagination: "We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove."

No leader in our history paid as much attention to the everyday social organisation of black community life, and built on those social foundations a nationwide revolution in how black people thought about development, identity and their relationship to political freedom. The black consciousness movement was thus not built on thin air or cynical nationalism, but on the recognition of the centrality of community in the life of any nation. Black Community Programmes, for which Biko worked as a field worker, was the quintessential example of this political and cultural revolution. It was called the b lack r enaissance, epitomising in so many ways the creativity of the black world. I sometimes look at the mediocrity around us and ask: d id all that political, cultural and intellectual creativity die with Biko?

A week ago, the veteran African-American civil rights leader, Angela Davis, shared with us how a group of women in Alabama chose Martin Luther King to be their representative. From that community base, King built a formidable civil rights revolution in the US. People such as Walter Sisulu identified Mandela as their representative because he was the best person to articulate their vision. In time, Mandela would be the universal embodiment of the very idea of freedom and justice.

Biko drew on the insights of people such as Robert Sobukwe, Anton Lembede, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Aime Cesaire and Jean-Paul Sartre to fashion the most formidable political movement this country has ever seen. Prior political movements had spent a great deal of their time writing petitions for the repeal of apartheid laws. But as Noel Mostert put it: "Biko was a phenomenon of the time. His was the first original, late 20th century voice to emerge from African protest." Mostert further noted: "Biko, himself missionary-educated, represented the last African generation to be beneficiaries of that tradition ... yet he represented a rupture with that tradition."

This was much more than a political rupture. It was a revolution in the intellectual and cultural underpinnings of not only liberalism, but even the white left. It came also as a shock to black people themselves, because even the progressive among them had internalised white supremacy. The people of our little township, particularly his mother, feared for Biko's life. He was saying the unsayable, and his preachings were shaking the ideological foundations of the apartheid system.

As a young boy, there was something that attracted me to Biko beyond his courage. I was only 10 or 11 at the time. But he is the person who inspired me to my first political act -- cutting out every newspaper picture and article that featured him and putting it into a makeshift album I hid beneath my desk at school. There was a certain intellectual finesse and political sophistication about him. He was so bright that his teachers promoted him from standard three to standard five. When he got to standard five, he jumped once again to the head of his class.

At high school, he organised evening classes to teach other students history and English with his friend, Larry Bekwa.

Even as he moved further afield to places such as Lovedale and St Francis College at Marianhill, he was the genius from Ginsberg, ultimately earning himself a place at the University of Natal Medical School. And then he gave it all up so he could work full-time for the black consciousness movement, organising communities and students to rise to challenge the apartheid system head on.

It was perhaps inevitable that he would be a casualty of that system. He was too dangerous, and way too smart for the system to handle.

For a little boy growing up in Ginsberg, there could be nothing more alluring than the power of his mind. And yet he remained ubhut' Bantu -- connected to the people who did so much to sustain him, and for whom he ultimately gave his life. The least those people can do is honour him. Declare a public holiday in his name, for God's sake.

Mangcu is executive chairman of the Platform for Public Deliberation, and a visiting scholar at the Public Intellectual Life Project at Wits University.