Nyameko Barney Pityana
I have a distinct recollection of the exhilarating times we lived in as young students in a community of radical activists in Durban in the early 1970s.
Those were times of strangeness and challenge, and the freedom of imagination, and of palpable capturing of the vision of a possibility of a brave new world bereft of apartheid. We were young, free-spirited and fearless.
Bantu Stephen Biko was a central figure in the community of would-be revolutionaries. In that window of time, a “brief candle” in Shakespearean language that will splutter and the flame lights up only for a short while.
September 12 1977 could have been just such a day, but it was not. Biko challenged young black South Africans to think afresh, to take pride and to believe in themselves.
Black Consciousness gave new momentum to the idea of being fully human.
In 1969 Steve Biko was 22, a medical student from the Eastern Cape. He was determined black people should never again live as if their humanity did not matter in an apartheid world of non-being. Black Consciousness was born. New, fresh and revolutionary. Black person in solidarity. Black Consciousness began as a challenge to the black person never to be complicit in their own oppression.
There was an openness to new ideas. Blackness was no longer a state to be pitied but which gave power to be human – and to be free. Biko was the architect of creatively translating new ideas into essays shared for debate and conversation.
I highlight only two to illustrate the thesis of this essay: “We Blacks” is one of the least celebrated and cited essays among Biko’s papers. It invites the reader into an introspective inquiry about the “self” in an oppressive society.
The psychology of oppression normalises “a state of being” and a mind that accepts “non-being”, as a universal state of blackness, and to normalise white superiority. His point is that black people were never created to become pliant slaves.
Black Consciousness calls upon black people to rebel against all that denies their humanity, to reclaim their human dignity.
The second one is the more renowned essay, Black Consciousness, and the Quest for a true Humanity. Biko affirms that Black Consciousness is a statement and “a being of freedom” – the “ability to define oneself with one’s possibilities held back not by the power of another”. To be free is never to allow restrictions of thought, ideology nor history, or culture, to become the means of one’s imprisonment.
This week the nation mourns the death of UMntwana waka Phindangene, uShenge – the senior statesman in present-day South Africa. The death of Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi appears to have caused South Africans to let off steam in condemnation of some issues that appear to have been suppressed since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
I can attest in 1971, the then Chief Gatsha Buthelezi invited Steve Biko and colleagues in the South African Student Organisation/The Black People’s Convention to a discussion about his plans to establish Inkatha. He disclosed to us confidentially he believed the IFP could be the manifestation of the ANC at home and would be upholding the banner of freedom. We were sceptical.
The strength of his argument was the matter had the approval of the ANC, and he was about to travel to London for scheduled meetings with ANC. We feared this would open the floodgates to tribal sentiment and that the ethic of the solidarity of the oppressed masses would be dissipated. That is exactly what happened. I draw two lessons from this story: first, human nature and conduct is never linear. One cannot be judged entirely on actions and behaviours only at certain points in one’s life. We take responsibility for our lives in totality, not just sections of it.
The IFP in the years preceding the accession to democracy became a weapon in the hands of the apartheid state and its killing machine to snuff out the embers of freedom burning in the hearts of the people.
The second thing, South Africans have engaged in deep conversations about the past that might have been suppressed in the early stages of the high confidence in our constitutionality that has ebbed in recent times. What we are missing overall in relation to Biko’s teachings about Black Consciousness is the duty that we all must reclaim our human agency.
Ironically, the democratic system we designed for ourselves has served to deny the people the power of agency, and to rest that in the power of political parties.
I sincerely believe the fundamental principle of Black Consciousness has been betrayed in our country: the quest for a true humanity.
• Professor Pityana is former Unisa vice-chancellor, a priest and lawyer
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