STEVE BIKO: An Enduring Legacy
A fact that is often lost sight of in much that one reads about Steve Biko, is that he was a
mere 23 years when he developed his own thinking and ideas about black consciousness.
He not only developed the ideas in splendid isolation, he worked with friends and fellow
students who gathered around him and formed what was clearly an intellectual cell. It
was out of that cell that a movement developed much along the lines of similar social
change and revolutionary intellectual movements throughout the history of Europe.
This came about not because Steve Biko was any more brilliant a scholar than any of his
colleagues. He was not. He did not possess wealth of resources and financial backing to
attract others to him and to his ideas. He did not. What he did extremely well was to read.
Steve was a voracious reader. He read everything he could lay his hands on. As a medical
student, he could debate with me an English major the finer points of literary criticism of
Shakespeare and the novels a of George Eliot. He understood the politics of
decolonisation in Africa and India. He had insight into the anti-imperial wars throughout
Africa and in Vietnam. And he had a critical understanding of the politics of the civil
rights movement in the United States. Black Consciousness for him was moulded by a
diversity of intellectual forces and fountains: from the liberation history of South Africa,
the pan Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah, the African nationalism of Jomo Kenyatta, the
negritude of the west African scholars like Leopold Sadar Senghor, Aime Cesare and
others in Paris. Biko taught himself a political understanding of religion in Africa. He
devoured John Mbiti. Ali Mazrui. Basil Davidson, he understood the critical writings of
Walter Rodney and he interpreted Franz Fanon. He laid his hands on some philosophical
writings like Jean Paul Sartre and made ready use of some philosophical concepts like
syllogism in logic and dialectical materialism in Marxist political thought. All this by a
young medical student.
It is remarkable, with the benefit of hindsight, that in the particularly brutal circumstances
of the South Africa of the 1970s, there could emerge out of the inauspicious social
environment of his home, township and schools, someone with a precautious mind, a
public intellectual ahead of his time and a philosopher whose ideas were to shape the
future. I believe that the second gift of Steve’s was instrumental. He could write well and
he loved writing. His loved for the written word translated into his ability to craft words
and ideas. It is important to realize that unless one can write and write words and ideas
that have a precision of expression and a beguiling simplicity, one will never be able to
reach one’s audience. Steve would sit through the night, often after an all-night party and
wrote articles and pamphlets to the student unions and SASO branches across the
country. An interesting aspect of this and his method of engagement was that the pieces
he wrote would most likely have be the subject of furious debate in his room over a glass
of beer. He would engage the debate largely in an interrogative mood. In the process
discussion was participative and all contributions were valued. I have no recollection of
Steve lording it over everyone else. But he was relaxed among peers and comrades. The
Allan Taylor Residence in Merebank, Durban had a group of students who practiced the
Platonic art of the rhetoric. This rhetoric was also translated in the dialogues Steve
engaged in with a large number of others: David Russell and Fr Aelred Stubbs, CR;
Richard Turner and the NUSAS leadership, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi (as he was then
known as), Donald Woods in later years and many other overseas correspondents. His
letters have become a mine of information and insight into his own evolving thinking.
Black Consciousness was ultimately not about mind games. It was as is now common
knowledge, a “way of life. That explains why BC had such a strong commitment to
community development. That helps one to understand how transformational intelligence
was possible during the repressive and claustrophobic atmosphere of the 1970s That is
how he could appeal so successfully to the intellectual curiosity of young, black and
proud South Africans. To be with Steve was a life-changing experience.
N Barney Pityana
Principal and Vice Chancellor
University of South Africa
Pretoria, 1 October 2002.