As the crisis has grown over the leadership of South Africa's ruling African National Congress - President Mbeki was an Aids-denialist and supported Robert Mugabe, while President Zuma is weak, indecisive and corruptible - there has been an increasing tendency for media commentators to bemoan the two lost leaders, Chris Hani, the charismatic Communist Party leader, assassinated in 1993, and Steve Biko, the equally magnetic Black Consciousness leader, murdered by the apartheid security police in 1977.
Hani's Communist loyalties inevitably limit his appeal, but Biko has virtually universal appeal precisely because his Black People's Convention never became a major party and because the values of self-reliance and black pride that he stood for, as also his exceptional bravery, are essentially timeless.
The Marikana massacre has greatly increased this tendency. Nothing could have illustrated the bankruptcy of the ANC leadership more acutely than the fact that it has now emulated the Sharpeville massacre of the apartheid regime, right down to the fact that in both cases many of the victims were shot in the back and that the Zuma government, like the Verwoerd government before it, is unwilling to countenance any criticism of the police who carried out the massacre.
The result has been more and more newspaper articles on the theme of "What would Steve Biko say if he were alive today ?". Inevitably, each year, such longings for the lost leader peak on the anniversary of Biko's death (September 12) and his mass funeral (September 25).
Biko, a Xhosa from King Williamstown in the Eastern Cape, was one of four children of a struggling lower-middle class family. His father was a policeman and then a clerk in the Native Affairs department - both professions Steve would later characterise with venom as sell-outs - but he died when Steve was very young and Steve was agonisingly aware of how hard his mother had to struggle as a single parent.
Like many boys deprived early of a father, Steve was somewhat wild and naughty in his youth but his high intelligence was immediately apparent and he was soon admitted to the elite Lovedale mission school - but almost as quickly expelled. This was largely because his elder brother, Khaya, had become embroiled in radical politics. Khaya's jail sentence marked Steve's own introduction to political life.
Steve then gained admission to St Francis College, a Catholic mission school at Mariannhill, just outside Durban. He flourished in its liberal atmosphere and in 1966 was admitted to the elite blacks-only medical school at the University of Natal, Durban. I had graduated from Natal only three years earlier and although I never knew Biko, we knew a large number of people in common. One of Steve's old professors, a man who had given his life to teaching black students, told me that Steve and his girl friend, Mamphela Ramphele, were "very difficult - I regretted having them in my class". But there was no doubting Steve's magnetism. He was wildly popular with both men and women - and not only black women. He seemed to regard apartheid restrictions as mainly a great nuisance which he had no intention of observing.
Steve became heavily embroiled in student politics, which is to say in the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), then the most radical anti-apartheid force in the country. The ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) were banned but ANC-inclined black students tended to join NUSAS while the PAC-inclined refused to work with it because of its overwhelming white majority.
For three years Steve worked inside NUSAS - and he never rejected its strongly multi-racial ethic - but the problem was that that meant accepting white leadership, something he increasingly felt was incompatible with African pride, for Africans were the overwhelming majority in South Africa. In 1969 he established a separate blacks-only South African Students Organisation and became its first President, by which time he had already developed his Black Consciousness (BC) philosophy.
Biko is often compared with Franz Fanon. They both studied medicine and both became fascinated with the psychology of the oppressed. Both of them came to feel that however important physical de-colonisation was, there also needed to be a psychological de-colonisation of the minds of the colonised.
For Biko, indeed, this was the necessary first step since he believed that far too many South African blacks actively collaborated in their own oppression. He was not a Marxist but he instinctively understood Gramsci's point that a ruling class usually rules through the consent of the ruled because the underclass has accepted the hegemonic culture of its rulers and tends to see things through its eyes. And, for Biko, that was exactly what needed to be exploded.
Biko began by insisting that most Africans had imbibed the negative stereotypes whites had of them and, as a result, suffered from a deep inferiority complex. This had to be completely discarded: black people must fully accept themselves and be proud of what they were, not as a lesser breed but as full human beings deserving of the same respect as whites.
Secondly, while it was fine to co-operate with whites - and Steve himself continued to have many links with NUSAS - it was essential for blacks not to become dependent on whites because in the end that would mean accepting a white-led agenda and black liberation could not be achieved by that route. In the last analysis whites had many options that blacks lacked and that simply meant blacks could not rely on them and especially not as leaders. "Black man", he wrote, "you are on your own".
Accepting that cheerfully was the first necessary step to black self-reliance. In the first instance this meant demanding - and insisting on - complete equality. Hence one of the most striking Biko legends: blacks would talk in awed voices of how Steve, when interrogated by the fearsome security police, had been struck by a white policeman - whom he immediately hit back. He knew, of course, the terrible retribution that would bring, but it was more important to assert complete equality.
In an era when all the major African parties were suppressed, Biko's philosophy struck an immediate chord with students and schoolchildren and the BC movement spread like wildfire. The medical school threw Biko out in 1972 - he had lost all interest in medicine and decided to study law instead, studies he never finished. Instead he was soon banned and confined to King Williamstown where he ran a Black Community Programme. By this time he had attracted the attention of the banned PAC leader, Robert Sobukwe, who attempted to reprimand Steve for his endless womanising (he had children with at least three different women) and heavy drinking, but this Steve cheerfully brushed aside.
The Soweto revolt of 1976, clearly driven by the BC movement, made it clear that there were now three major black movements in the field - the ANC, Mangosuthu Buthelezi's powerful Inkatha movement and BC, which had largely absorbed the PAC current. Biko disapproved of Buthelezi, who he felt was collaborating with the system - though the ANC maintained an alliance with Buthelezi in good part because it felt deeply threatened by the rise of BC. Biko broke his ban and stole away to Cape Town to try to meet with the leaders of the (Coloured) Unity Movement and he dreamt of meeting the ANC leader, Oliver Tambo, in Botswana. But he also realised he was in a competitive situation.
The white liberal, Walter Felgate (later a controversial figure in South African politics when he betrayed his long commitment to Inkatha by stealing Buthelezi's papers and going over to the ANC) moved between the three camps, trying to achieve a Buthelezi-ANC-Biko accord and thus black unity. He later told me that Biko had realised he could never compete fully with the ANC unless he had his own guerrilla movement - for which he needed arms. The problem was that the Soviet bloc and most African states supported the ANC, while the Chinese supported the PAC. At last he found a source willing to supply him with arms - Uganda's Idi Amin.
None of this ever transpired. The security police caught Biko on his way back from Cape Town, beat and tortured him and finally drove him, manacled, naked and in a coma, the 700 km to Pretoria where he died. He was immediately adopted as a martyr, a model of heroic resistance. In reaction France at last joined the arms boycott of South Africa, depriving the apartheid regime of its last source of weapons. Today he is a secular saint, an African nationalist Jesus.
As is also the case with Hani, Biko's various human faults are now air-brushed out of the picture, as is the fact that his Black Community Programme was funded by the Anglo-American Corporation. It is ironic that in life he created enormous anxiety among the ANC leadership that he was stealing their constituency from them. In death he still seems to be doing the same thing.
Biko clearly stood in the Africanist tradition of Sobukwe and the PAC. It is a tradition of principled intransigence and when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission appealed to the Biko family to come forward to tell its story and seek reconciliation it met with a stony refusal. The family said it still mourned for Steve and had no wish for any sort of reconciliation with those who had tortured and beaten him to death. Subsequent appeals by the TRC chairman, Archbishop Tutu, met with an icy response.
Most of the BC militants of the 1970s were ultimately folded into the ANC but the ANC and its trade union partners in Cosatu (the Congress of South African Trade Unions) are dominated by the Marxist traditions of the South African Communist Party (the SACP). This leaves a vacant Africanist space which is a permanent temptation to black politicians who are all mindful of how both Sobukwe's breakaway from the ANC and Biko's later assertion spread like wildfire, demonstrating the populist potential of a straightforwardly Africanist appeal.
Thabo Mbeki, keen to escape the controlling embrace of Cosatu and the SACP, continually flirted with the BC tradition, appointing numerous BC figures such as Mojanku Gumbi and Barney Pityana to powerful positions and exalting "the African Renaissance" as his overall goal.
But Mbeki was a remote intellectual with little popular appeal and after he made the mistake of sacking his deputy president, Jacob Zuma, Zuma was able to put together a crushing popular coalition of SACP, Cosatu and the Zulu bloc to evict Mbeki from power. Mentions of the African Renaissance have vanished from political speech and even from school textbooks.
There has been no successor to Biko. The renegade ANC youth leader, Julius Malema, has occasionally indulged in anti-white populism - "all whites are thieves" - but mainly he has attempted to exploit ANC tradition, demanding the complete and immediate implementation of its 1955 Freedom Charter. In general, he has used whatever comes to hand - he is an inspired opportunist and was quick to capitalise on the Marikana tragedy - but not only he is neither as educated nor as articulate as Biko but he also more or less openly corrupt.
He is currently facing an arrest warrant for money laundering as well as a demand for R16 million in unpaid taxes. No one, indeed, from the ANC tradition ever invokes the name of Biko - it is something of an embarrassment to the ANC that the liberation movement's outstanding martyr did not come from their side. Ironically, the liberal and white-led Democratic Alliance has been far more willing to do so. Recently, the DA mayor of Cape Town and the DA leader, Helen Zille, together with Biko family representatives, inaugurated the main road in and out of Gugulethu ("Our Pride") township as the Steve Biko highway
RW Johnson
This article first appeared in the German edition of Le Monde Diplomatique
Click here to sign up to receive our free daily headline email newsletter
