Thirty-one years ago today Steve Biko, the young South African black consciousness leader, was brutally murdered by Apartheid police.
Here is a short excerpt from an essay on Biko’s postapartheid legacy that I wrote and should be published soon (more details on that soon):
Biko is being reclaimed by the ANC. In the 1970s ANC intellectuals in the 1970s had referred to BC as “petty bourgeois national opportunism” and a “retrogressive perversion” or at best ill informed. Now Biko is an equal included in a pantheon of South African nationalist leaders. A monument was erected in East London and Nelson Mandela (who in his biography stopped just short of characterizing BC as a juvenile stage in activists’ growth into fully-fledged ANC cadres, would in 1997 publicly declare Biko declare “a great man.” Thabo Mbeki also became an ‘enthusiastic proponent’ of BC and panAfricanism.
In tandem with this canonization by the state and the ruling party, Biko is also being invoked by the Steve Biko Foundation, run by the eldest of his three sons. Outside of more formal political and intellectual spaces, Biko emerged as a style icon. On t-shirts that retail for about $30–a large sum in South Africa–in Johannesburg’s upmarket shopping malls.
In none of these spaces does Biko appear challenging or disruptive. Biko comes to stand for Black Economic Empowerment, for the politics of uplift and respectability, or a freedom based on consumption.
History Matters, a blog started by South African History Online, has an item with lots of links to provide context here.
31 years ago