Bantu Stephen Biko was a South African anti-apartheid activist. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he was at the forefront of a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign known as the Black Consciousness Movement during the late 1960s and 1970s. His ideas were articulated in a series of articles published under the pseudonym Frank Talk.
Background
Bantu Stephen Biko was born on December 18, 1946, in King William's Town, South Africa, in what is now the Eastern Cape province into the family of Mzingayi Mathew and Alice 'Mamcete' Biko. His father was a government clerk, while his mother did domestic work in surrounding white homes. The third of four children, Biko grew up with his older sister Bukelwa; his older brother Khaya; and his younger sister Nobandile. In 1950, at the age of four, Biko suffered the loss of his father who was studying law.
Education
Biko began is primary education at Brownlee Primary School and Charles Morgan Higher Primary School. He was sent to Lovedale High School in 1964, a prestigious boarding school in Alice, Eastern Cape, where his older brother Khaya had previously been studying. During the apartheid era, with no freedom of association protection for non-white South Africans, Biko was expelled from Lovedale for his political views, and his brother arrested for his alleged association with Poqo (now known as the Azanian People's Liberation Army).
After being expelled, he then attended and later graduated from St. Francis College, a Roman Catholic institution in Mariannhill, Natal.
After graduating from St. Francis in 1966, Biko began attending the University of Natal Medical School, where he became active with the National Union of South African Students, a multiracial organization advocating for the improvement of black citizens' rights.
Biko devoted his time to activist activities. His concept of black consciousness continued to develop as he next went to work for BCP (Black Community Programmes). By 1973 his political activities had caused him to be banned from Durban and restricted to his hometown. Back in King Williamstown, undaunted, he set up a new branch of BCP—only to have it banned there as well.
Still, Biko continued to work for black consciousness. This led to repeated detentions and caused him to be placed in security over and over again. Yet he was never charged.
Biko's short 30-year life was consumed with the development of an acute awareness of the evils of apartheid, the social system under which non-Whites lived in South Africa. Apartheid is based on the idea of institutionalized separate development for blacks and whites. To paraphrase Biko, he was able to outgrow the things the system had taught him. One of his unique characteristics may be summed up in the title of an edited collection of his writings, I Write What I Like (1978, Aelred Stubbs). Much of what Biko "liked to write," not surprisingly, dealt with the definition of black consciousness and setting it out as an approach to combatting White racism in South Africa. One such essay was accompanied by the by-line "Frank Talk," an aptly chosen pseudonym.
During the late 70s, Biko was arrested four times and detained for several months at a time. In August 1977, he was arrested and held in Port Elizabeth, located at the southern tip of South Africa. The following month, on September 11, Biko was found naked and shackled several miles away, in Pretoria, South Africa. He died the following day, on September 12, 1977, from a brain hemorrhage—later determined to be the result of injuries he had sustained while in police custody. The news of Biko's death caused national outrage and protests, and he became regarded as an international anti-apartheid icon in South Africa.
The police officers who had held Biko were questioned thereafter, but none were charged with any official crimes. However, two decades after Biko's death, in 1997, five former officers confessed killing Biko. The officers reportedly filed applications for amnesty to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after investigations implicated them in Biko's death, but amnesty was denied in 1999.
Biko's death echoed around the world—an irony, given the repeated attempts made to silence him while he lived.
Achievements
Steve Biko is regarded as the father of the Black Consciousness movement in the Union of South Africa. Biko's fame spread posthumously. He became the subject of numerous songs and works of art, while a 1978 biography by his friend Donald Woods formed the basis for the 1987 film Cry Freedom.
Religion did not play a central role in his life. He was often critical of the established Christian churches, but remained a believer in God and found meaning in the Gospels. Woods described him as "not conventionally religious, although he had genuine religious feeling in broad terms". Mangcu noted that Biko was critical of organised religion and denominationalism and that he was "at best an unconventional Christian".
Politics
Strongly opposed to the apartheid system of racial segregation and white-minority rule in South Africa, Biko was frustrated that NUSAS and other anti-apartheid groups were dominated by white liberals, rather than by the blacks who were most affected by apartheid. He believed that even when well-intentioned, white liberals failed to comprehend the black experience and often acted in a paternalistic manner. He developed the view that to avoid white domination, black people had to organise independently, and to this end he became a leading figure in the creation of the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) in 1968. Membership was open only to "blacks", a term that Biko used in reference not just to Bantu-speaking Africans but also to Coloureds and Indians. He was careful to keep his movement independent of white liberals, but opposed anti-white racism and had various white friends and lovers. The National Party government were initially supportive, seeing SASO's creation as a victory for apartheid's ethos of racial separatism.
Influenced by Frantz Fanon and the African-American Black Power movement, Biko and his compatriots developed Black Consciousness as SASO's official ideology. The movement campaigned for an end to apartheid and the transition of South Africa toward universal suffrage and a socialist economy. It organised Black Community Programmes (BCPs) and focused on the psychological empowerment of black people. Biko believed that black people needed to rid themselves of any sense of racial inferiority, an idea he expressed by popularizing the slogan "black is beautiful". In 1972, he was involved in founding the Black People's Convention (BPC) to promote Black Consciousness ideas among the wider population.
Biko never addressed questions of gender and sexism in his politics. The sexism was evident in many ways, according to Mamphela Ramphele, a BCM activist and doctor at the Zanempilo Clinic, including that women tended to be given responsibility for the cleaning and catering at functions. "There was no way you could think of Steve making a cup of tea or whatever for himself", another activist said. Feminism was viewed as irrelevant "bra-burning".
Views
Quotations:
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
"Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude."
"Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time."
"It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realize that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality."
Membership
In 1977 he became honorary president of the Black People's Convention he had founded in 1972.
Black People's Convention
1972
Personality
Biko and many others in his activist circle had an antipathy toward luxury items because most South African blacks could not afford them. He owned few clothes and dressed in a low-key manner. He enjoyed parties, and according to his biographer Linda Wilson, he often drank substantial quantities of alcohol.
Surrounded by women who cared about him, Biko developed a reputation as a womaniser, something that Woods described as "well earned". He displayed no racial prejudice, sleeping with both black and white women. At NUSAS, he and his friends competed to see who could have sex with the most female delegates. Responding to this behaviour, the NUSAS general secretary Sheila Lapinsky accused Biko of sexism, to which he responded: "Don't worry about my sexism. What about your white racist friends in NUSAS?" Sobukwe also admonished Biko for his womanising, believing that it set a bad example to other activists.
Physical Characteristics:
Tall and slim in his youth, by his twenties Biko was over six feet tall, with the "bulky build of a heavyweight boxer carrying more weight than when in peak condition", according to Woods. His friends regarded him as "handsome, fearless, a brilliant thinker".
Quotes from others about the person
Woods saw him as "unusually gifted ... His quick brain, superb articulation of ideas and sheer mental force were highly impressive." According to Biko's friend Trudi Thomas, with Biko "you had a remarkable sense of being in the presence of a great mind". Woods felt that Biko "could enable one to share his vision" with "an economy of words" because "he seemed to communicate ideas through extraverbal media – almost psychically." Biko exhibited what Woods referred to as "a new style of leadership", never proclaiming himself to be a leader and discouraging any cult of personality from growing up around him.
Interests
Music & Bands
He had a large record collection and particularly liked gumba.
Connections
Biko married Ntsiki Mashalaba in December 1970. They had two children together: Nkosinathi, born in 1971, and Samora, born in 1975. Biko's wife chose the name Nkosinathi ("The Lord is with us"), and Biko named their second child after the Mozambican revolutionary leader Samora Machel. Angered by her husband's serial adultery, Mashalaba ultimately moved out of their home, and by the time of his death, she had begun divorce proceedings. Biko had also begun an extra-marital relationship with Mamphela Ramphele. In 1974, she bore him a daughter, Lerato, who died after two months. A son, Hlumelo, was born to Ramphele in 1978, after Biko's death. Biko was also in a relationship with Lorrain Tabane, who bore him a child named Motlatsi in 1977.
Father:
Mzingayi Mathew Biko
Mother:
Alice 'Mamcete' Biko
Spouse:
Ntsiki Mashalaba
Sister:
Bukelwa Biko
Sister:
Nobandile Biko
Brother:
Khaya Biko
Son:
Hlumelo Biko
Son:
Samora Biko
Son:
Nkosinathi Biko
(b.1971)
Daughter:
Lerato Biko
(b.1974 )
Daughter:
Motlatsi Biko
Partner:
Mamphela Aletta Ramphele
(born 28 December 1947)
She is a South African politician, a former activist against apartheid, a medical doctor, an academic and businesswoman.
Friend:
Donald Woods
(15 December 1933 – 19 August 2001)
He was a South African journalist and anti-apartheid activist.
