by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Along with Mandela, Remember Steven Biko
“It is ended,” South African premier Jacob Zuma said yesterday, and the finality of the statement – biblical echo intended or not – captured just how long a journey Nelson Mandela’s long walk to freedom was.
No one now would wish Mandela’s life had gone some other way than the way it did. But the ennobling of his years of imprisonment by his eventual freedom and triumphant leadership – and by the arranging of these events into a narrative of purpose and destiny – makes it possible to forget that there were many, many people (thousands; no, tens of thousands; no, more) whose lives ended in prisons like the one on Robben Island that Mandela walked out of with his smile wide and his head held high.
Steven Biko was one of those people. He died in prison in 1977, age thirty, bludgeoned to death by one of his guards.
In an essay a few years ago – almost twenty years ago, I realize – I proposed that, had he lived, Steven Biko, even more than Nelson Mandela, likely would have emerged as the president of a democratic South Africa. As an organizer of the Black Consciousness Movement, Biko showed exceptional leadership qualities, even after he was placed under a “banning order”:
Deprived of a public role, he developed a King William’s Town branch of the BCP; headquartered in a disused church, it became a vital agency for blacks of the district, and a focal point for political activity as well. Then and until the end of his life he led the Black Consciousness movement by working in stealth mode – holding clandestine meetings, using associates as go-betweens, and flouting the banning order as he dared.
Challenging the apartheid government’s account in the death of a colleague, he brought a hard truth to light:
Working behind the scenes, he was a key figure in the inquest into Mohapi’s death. It was established that Mohapi had “died by strangulation” but that no one was at fault – a blatant equivocation on the government’s part, but nonetheless a rare acknowledgment that a detainee had died suspiciously.
Imprisoned, he made his status as a “detainee” come to stand for all the ways in which apartheid was a system of detention:
What was being detained was the development of justice in South Africa, the long march toward notions of universal human rights.
Murdered, he called forth an extraordinary homily from Archbishop Desmond Tutu:
For Biko – Tutu uses the language of scripture – had been called by God to be his servant in South Africa, to proclaim God’s righteousness by calling blacks to the fullness of their humanity. Biko’s great insight was to see that “until blacks asserted their humanity and their personhood, there was not the remotest chance for reconciliation in South Africa.” (Tutu fiercely adds, “You don’t get reconciled to your dog, do you?”)
And from his friend the Anglican priest Aelred Stubbs:
In the purified church that will be reborn out of the destruction of this racist society, in that church he will be venerated everywhere, as he is by some of us now, as a true martyr of Christ, the Christ whom he maybe could not consciously be often in communion with because of the disfiguring guises with which the churches had distorted him.
Biko’s story began in the west with Richard Attenborough’s film Cry Freedom and Peter Gabriel’s song “Biko.” Now, as Nelson Mandela’s life story is capped with the film of Long Walk to Freedom, let’s not forget all the people of South Africa whose stories, lacking happy endings, need to be told even so.