I Write What I Like: 40th Anniversary Edition

By Steve Biko

I Write What I Like features the writing of the famous activist and Black Consciousness leader, Steve Biko. Before his untimely death in detention at age 30, he was instrumental in uniting Black Africans in the struggle against the apartheid government in South Africa.

This 40th anniversary edition includes a Foreword by Njabulo S. Ndebele, personal reflections on Steve Biko and Black Consciousness, as well as Biko’s first known published piece of writing. In addition, it features all the material of the original Picador Africa edition: a collection of Biko’s columns entitled I Write What I Like published in the journal of the South Africa Student Organisation under the pseudonym of ‘Frank Talk’; other journal articles, interviews and letters written by Steve Biko at the time; an Introduction by Nkosinathi Biko; a preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; and a moving memoir by Father Aelred Stubbs, which pays tribute to the courage and power of this young leader, who was to become one of Africa’s heroes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Picador Africa
• Release date: May 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781770105119

Steve Biko

Steve Biko was born in Tylden, Eastern Cape, South Africa in 1946. As a medical student, he founded a black student organisation in 1969 and created a national 'black consciousness' movement. The movement's aim was to combat racism and the South African apartheid government. He was banned in 1973, which prohibited him from speaking in public, writing for publication and any travel. Biko was arrested by police in September 1977 and died in detention, naked and manacled, from extensive brain damage, six days later. He left a widow and two young children. His death caused international protests and a UN arms embargo. Biko became a symbol of the antiapartheid movement. An inquest in the late 1980s found no one responsible for his death, but in 1997 five former policemen admitted being involved.

Book preview

Cursive writing of the phrase, I Write What I Like

STEVE BIKO

A Selection of his Writings

40th Anniversary Edition

PICADOR AFRICA

First published by the Bowerdean Press (London) in 1978

First published in South Africa by Ravan Press in 1996

Published in 2004 by Picador Africa

This 40th anniversary edition published in 2017 by Picador Africa

an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa

Private Bag X19, Northlands, Johannesburg, 2116

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN 9781770105102

eISBN 9781770105119

© NM Biko 1978

© Preface DM Tutu 1996

© Introduction Nkosinathi Biko 2004

© Foreword Njabulo S. Ndebele 2017

© Mosibudi Mangena 2017

© Ames Dhai 2017

© Tracey Gore 2017

© Silvio Humberto dos Passos Cunha 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Cover photograph courtesy of The Biko Foundation

Contents

Note on this Edition

Foreword: ‘The Envisioned Self’ by Njabulo S. Ndebele

Personal Reflections on Steve Biko and Black Consciousness

‘Au Revoir’, St. Francis College

Acknowledgements

Preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Glossary

Introduction by Nkosinathi Biko

1. Biographical Summary

2. SASO – its Role, its Significance and its Future

3. Letter to SRC Presidents

4. Black Campuses and Current Feelings

5. Black Souls in White Skins?

6. We Blacks

7. Fragmentation of the Black Resistance

8. Some African Cultural Concepts

9. The Definition of Black Consciousness

10. The Church as Seen by a Young Layman

11. White Racism and Black Consciousness

12. Fear – an Important Determinant in South African Politics

13. Let’s Talk about Bantustans

14. Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity

15. What is Black Consciousness?

16. ‘The Righteousness of our Strength’

17. American Policy towards Azania

18. Our Strategy for Liberation

19. On Death

Martyr of Hope: A Personal Memoir by Aelred Stubbs C.R.

Note on this Edition

For this 40th anniversary edition of I Write What I Like, the publisher has elected to retain all of the material in the original Picador Africa edition of the book. In addition, in the republication of this work, the integrity of the original material has been preserved. As a result, subsequent events, including changes to place names, have not been altered, and should be considered in the light of the time in which the author created this work.

Foreword

‘The Envisioned Self’

by Njabulo S. Ndebele

‘The envisioned self!’ This expression has lain innocuously between the covers of I Write What I Like, Steve Biko’s enduring book. I must have read and re-read this expression over the years. But how come I didn’t see it? How come my mind didn’t take in what my eyes must have seen? Or was it that my mind’s eye skipped over the expression each time? Can a reader read unseeingly? I think so. This realisation made sense when, on an impulse in January 2017, a few days into the writing of this foreword, I retrieved from my bookshelf a treasured gift of thirty-eight years ago.

It was the hard cover of the Bowerdean Press edition of I Write What I Like. 1978, the year of its publication, had just ended when this book, with its black and white cover, came into my life. With nostalgia stirring inside of me, I re-read Father Aelred Stubbs’ inscription on the title page of the book he had edited: ‘For Njabulo and Mpho Ndebele, with gratitude & affection and in hope of better things yet to come’. He dated it January 1979. I pondered his small, neat handwriting, inscribed with so light a touch as if he had not wanted to leave a mark on the page, even in the very act of inscribing word marks on it with indelible ink.

‘Martyr of Hope: A Personal Memoir’ is the last chapter of I Write What I Like. In it Fr. Stubbs reflects on his enduring relationship with Steve Biko. It is the last paragraph of the memoir that is now the subject of my reflection.

The entire paragraph is a long quotation from a letter by Malusi Mpumlwana, described by Fr. Stubbs as ‘a devoted friend of Steve’. A Christmas card from Fr. Stubbs elicited effusive gratitude from Mpumlwana. ‘When the Son of Man called himself that, during his lifetime on earth’, Mpumlwana wrote, ‘his followers never knew the meaning of the term.’ But now, Mpumlwana, a follower of Christ, has grasped it. The Son of Man was ‘a prophet powerful in speech and action before God and the whole people’. The power of this meaning hits home in retrospect. Significance emerges in the slow cooking of time.

It has taken me thirty-eight years to grasp a piece of Fr. Stubbs’ inscription ‘better things yet to come’. Suddenly, it flashed across the sky like lightning, at the end of which the expression ‘the envisioned self’ revealed itself. Its full meaning, while Fr. Stubbs was still alive, had simply washed over me. Thirty-eight years later, I finally noticed and grasped it.

If Stubbs’ ‘better things yet to come’ was like the second coming that Christians patiently wait for, Steve Biko’s ‘envisioned self’ was the form of its coming. What could it be in South Africa today that has crystallised the meaning of ‘the envisioned self’ with such emergent clarity?

In the slow cooking of time I read yet missed the resonance of ‘the envisioned self’ in my reading of the Ravan Press edition of 1996, eighteen years after the edition of my gift. I missed it yet again with the 2004 Picador edition with its phenomenal eleven reprints. For the purpose of writing this foreword, HB pencil in hand, I chose the Ravan Press edition reprint of 2000 to mark it purposefully, without Fr. Stubbs’ soft, hesitant markings. Perhaps it is this edition’s moving preface by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and insightful introduction by Malusi and Thoko Mpumlwana that predisposed me to discover ‘the envisioned self’.

‘Blacks are out to completely transform the system and to make of it what they wish,’ writes Biko. ‘Such a major undertaking can only be realized in an atmosphere where people are convinced of the truth inherent in their stand. Liberation is of paramount importance in the concept of Black Consciousness, for we cannot be conscious of our selves and yet remain in bondage. We want to attain the envisioned self [my emphasis] which is a free self.¹

Every truth, it seems, has its time. Before that time arrives, the truth may be seen, perhaps even intuited, but never really grasped. The intuition of it may have a great deal to do with the circumstances in which the truth originated. If we ‘want to attain the envisioned self which is a free self’, it is because the source of that intention is the prevailing condition of un-freedom. The conditions of un-freedom and their effects on people, unless they are ended soon, are transferred from one generation to another. Each generation may find something to emphasise; and the next, something else, such that there is change and yet continuity in witness. My own journey towards an ‘envisioned self’ whose significance I could not grasp fully at the time was how in the years of un-freedom, Black Consciousness reduced significantly my fear of the white oppressor. As I feared him less, the freer I felt in an un-free country. I could claim a space of personal freedom that was well beyond the oppressor’s reach. I think this is what thousands of students must have experienced at the University of the North (now Limpopo) on the many times that the apartheid South African Defence Force occupied their campus for a few years. The physical occupation of the campus by the army could not extend to the occupation of the students’ minds and hearts. These were beyond the reach of the meanest oppressor.

There can be no greater symbol of a free mind in an un-free country than that of Onkgopotse Abram Tiro, President of the Students’ Representative Council. On 29 April 1972, forty-five years ago, he delivered his historic graduation address.² In that address he named the contradiction and hypocrisy of a campus ostensibly made for black people but run entirely by white people. The white management of the University heard him clearly and did not like his message. Tiro was to die in 1974 in Botswana when he opened a parcel bomb.

Four years after Tiro’s speech, the Soweto student uprising occurred on 16 June 1976. This was followed some years later by a countrywide State of Emergency declared by President P.W. Botha on 20 July 1985 which was to last for several years. The path to 27 April 1994 may not have been clearly visible, but was an imaginable reality. Up to April 1994, with the space of freedom open within themselves, the oppressed of South Africa focused on the means of removing the shackles of over one hundred years of conquest.

It is against this kind of background that it has taken thirty-eight years for Aelred Stubbs’ words ‘better things to come’ to leap off the page and strike me in ways they never did when I read and then re-read the chapter entitled ‘The Definition of Black Consciousness’ in I Write What I Like. It seemed as if Steve Biko’s ‘the envisioned self’ prefigured Stubbs’ ‘better things to come’.

There is a journey of the body through places and the journey of the mind through avenues of meaning. The journey of both body and mind finally put Tiro in that particular place and time to reveal his ‘envisioned self’ with an effulgence never to be forgotten. Perhaps the journey of the mind is spurred on by reading. Reading, it seems, includes noting and, quite clearly sometimes, instant forgetting. But it is forgetting of a special kind. It does not equate with erasure. This forgetting is a kind of retained essence of experience, a kind of subliminal remembrance, a kind of presence of memory as a beacon to draw you back should you need to reconfirm it. Perhaps with pencil in hand, I had predisposed myself to find gold and diamonds to underscore, and rectangles in which to encase passages of rediscovered significance.

‘The envisioned self’ was Biko’s futuristic concept by which he called for more than just the recovery of a human essence dismembered, distorted, disorientated, and oppressed, but also for how that essence could be recovered and remoulded under new historical circumstances spanning more than one hundred and fifty years of a painful yet purposeful effort of seeking to reconstitute it into a new human being.

I would like to arrive at this new human being through another remarkable thinker of Steve Biko’s time, the poet Mafika Gwala. I remember him as one of its most incisive philosophers on Black Consciousness in South Africa in the 1970s. In 1973 he wrote: ‘… it is not our Black awareness that determines our Black being. Contrawise [sic] it is our Black being – the fact that we are Black in a white-dominated society – that determines our Black awareness.’³ ‘Black awareness’ then for Gwala is a manifestation of history, not an inherent state of being.

General Smuts, following Cecil John Rhodes earlier, made a very categorical statement about the ideological nature of race and racism. ‘Long before the Nationalists came to power’, Smuts declared, ‘there are certain things on which all South Africans are agreed. The first of these is that it is a fixed policy to maintain White supremacy in South Africa.’⁴ What Smuts is asserting is that ‘whiteness’ would always precede ‘blackness’, because ‘whiteness’ as power created ‘blackness’ to be its powerless opposite. It is Gwala’s insistence that since such precedence is historically determined, it can also be historically terminated. How it gets to be terminated has something to do with the ‘envisioned self’ of oppressed people when they become free.

Free ‘black’ people erase ‘whiteness’ when the latter ceases to be a historic condition of oppression in which ‘black being’ has been constructed.

Mafika Gwala, aware of the impermanency of racial categories despite their brutal reality in societies which are ordered by them, conveyed his awareness of their limitations: ‘we didn’t take Black Consciousness as a kind of Bible, it was just a trend . . . a necessary one because it meant bringing in what the white opposition couldn’t bring into the struggle.’⁵

The ‘white opposition’ would naturally assume the permanence of what brought them daily benefits through the denigration of those who were ‘black’, and whose denigration was an essential factor of white privilege reproduced through a structured system of oppression. By definition, ‘blackness’ would have to end when those oppressed, now free to achieve their ‘envisioned self’ upon ending their nightmare, set out to create a new person for a new society.

Gwala foresaw the historical moment when the notion of ‘black being’ would cease to have any meaning in the determination of human identity. Then perhaps those who once partook of ‘black being’ would cease to exist always in opposition to something else, with the implication that that something else was immanently constitutive of ‘black being’ outside of ‘black being’s’ own agency.

It is precisely this condition of no longer being the opposite of someone’s definition of themselves that leads us to Steve Biko’s ‘envisioned self’. The ‘envisioned self’ is not an essence; it is a living reality achieved in the social sphere out of the agency of free people. What becomes critical for millions of South African citizens who were enfranchised in 1994 is the question: what is it that constitutes their agency?

‘The envisioned self’ believes in the ‘righteousness of its strength’⁶. Believing in its humanistic goals, it is inclusionary, creating room for all who wish to participate in its emancipatory norms.

What is the likelihood that the ‘envisioned self’, reflecting on the achievements of its visionary, purposeful agency, might in 2044 write a book called I Write What I Live?

Meanwhile, in 2017 this new edition of I Write What I Like builds on the history of a book that became a symbol of the triumph of free human agency in un-free conditions. How far has ‘the envisioned self’ gone in setting up a new human norm in the terms once described by Steve Biko in the evidence he led under cross-examination in May 1976 in the SASO/BPC Trial? Defence Counsel Advocate David Soggot leads Biko:

Soggot: Mr Biko, would you refer to Resolution 42 on page 249? In paragraph (2) there you have referred to the definition of black people which I will not trouble you with, but paragraph (3) I should like you to deal with. ‘SASO believes’ – if you will read (a) please?

Biko: Yes. ‘SASO believes that (a) South Africa is a country in which both black and white live and shall continue to live together.’

Soggot: Now what does that mean?

Biko: Well, this means that we accept the fact that the present South African society is a plural society with contributions having been made to its development by all segments of the community, in other words we speak of the groupings both black and white. We have no intention of – of course we regard ourselves as people who stay here and shall stay here. And we made the point that we’ve got no intention whatsoever of seeing white people leave this country; when I say leave, I mean leave this country.

Soggot: Leave?

Biko: Yes.

Soggot: L-e-a-v-e?

Biko: That is right. We intend to see them staying here side by side with us, maintaining a society in which everybody shall contribute proportionally.

Soggot: I wonder, in this context, would you please have a look at SASO G. I, Resolution 45? On page 206.

Biko: Right?

Soggot: Would you read from: ‘This country belongs …. ‘?

Biko: ‘Therefore we wish explicitly to state that this country belongs to black people and to them alone.’ Whites who live in our – who live in our – who live in this country on terms laid down by blacks and on condition that they respect black people. This should not be construed as anti-whitism. It only means that in as much as black people live in Europe on terms laid down by Europeans, whites shall be subjected to the same conditions. ‘We further wish to state that in our opinion it shall always be ….’.

Soggot: Can you explain what SASO meant by this resolution?

Biko: Well, I must explain I was not at this particular meeting but from reading this document, what I understand it to mean is that this country is essentially a country in Africa, a continent which is inhabited always naturally by black people, and what whites – it is conceived that whites are here and they may live in the country, depending on their relationship with blacks, and their acceptance of whatever conditions blacks in this country shall lay at a certain time, I don’t know what time the resolution is referring to.⁷

Did 1994 become that time? In 2017, what exactly is the state of ‘the envisioned self’? How deep are the responsibilities of becoming the norm? What is the work to be undertaken? What will it require to undertake it? In the third decade since 1994 the questions cry out to be answered by all South African citizens. But the burden of agency in seeking answers rests squarely with those once oppressed, who, in the third decade of their freedom, must pursue their ‘envisioned self’.

NJABULO S. NDEBELE is an established scholar, public figure and best-selling author whose critical and creative writing has tackled the effects of apartheid on oppressed communities, the rhetoric of protest, democracy and reconciliation, and the system of higher education in South Africa. He is currently the chairperson of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and he regularly plays the role of public intellectual through his interventions in the media on topical issues facing South Africa.

Notes

1 Steve Biko. I Write What I Like. Aelred Stubbs C.R. (ed). London: The Bowerdean Press, 1978. p. 49.

2 See http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/graduation-speech-onkgopotse-tiro-university-north-29-april-1972 (accessed on 18 April 2017).

3 Mafika Gwala. ‘Priorities in Culture for Creativity and Black Development’. In Ben J. Langa (Editor). Creativity and Black Development. Durban: SASO Publications, 1973. p. 41.

4 Quoted in Cosmas Desmond. The Discarded People: An Account of African Resettlement in South Africa. Penguin Books, 1971. pp. 222–223.

5 See http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/18109/10/mafika-pascal-gwala (accessed on 18 April 2017).

6 Steve Biko. Ibid. pp. 120–137.

7 Steve Biko. Ibid. pp. 121–122.

Personal Reflections on Steve Biko and Black Consciousness

In this 40th anniversary edition of I Write What I Like, a book first published in the year of Steve Biko’s death, there is an opportunity for reflection not only on the words in which he expressed his philosophy, but also on the practical impact of these words on the lives of people all over the globe. In this brief section we include the observations of four activists, geographically separated across three continents, but all united in their acknowledgement of the motivation, guidance and encouragement that each obtained from this book. Each contribution records how, even in different decades of this and the last century, Steve Biko’s seminal writings resulted in a personal epiphany that led to a course of action with consequent positive, indelible influence on the daily lives of those most oppressed.

Mosibudi Mangena

Honorary President, Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO)

I was born on a white man’s farm where my parents and other black people lived under feudal conditions. All the adult black people on that farm had to give the farmer three months of free labour every year in lieu of rent for their stay on the farm. They could work for a meagre payment in the remaining nine months of the year, if there was work available.

The white farmer lorded over all of us like a godly colossus and, as a child, I assumed that the superiority and inferiority dynamic playing out in the relationship between whites and blacks on that farm and the neighbouring ones was the natural order of the universe. Even as I traversed teenage years away from the farm, my basic understanding of the socio-economic-political situation in our country did not change much.

It was my interaction with Black Consciousness during my university days that finally and decisively cleared the fog in my mind and enabled me to find my place in the cosmos. It debunked the myth of white superiority and black inferiority once and for all. It gave me a new world view that has guided my life ever since.

Black Consciousness liberated me from the shackles of mental slavery and inspired my whole-hearted involvement in the struggle for freedom. Adherence to Black Consciousness did not only generate anger against white oppression and arrogance, it also compelled me (and all those who are adherents to the philosophy of Black Consciousness) to seek the restoration of the worth and dignity of all black people in the country of their birth.

The philosophy of Black Consciousness taught me to behave in a manner that contradicts all the negative stereotypes that are geared at demeaning black people and at justifying their oppression and exploitation.

The equality of human life that Black Consciousness implies has reinforced my respect for all people who I interact with. The inherent dignity that all human beings possess has required that I treat and serve them with dedication and honesty. Even if my best is not always enough, it should be my best. There should be no disrespect to other people in what I do or say to them.

Ames Dhai

Director, Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

I recall vividly the first time I got off the bus and walked into the Medical School grounds of the University of Natal, Black Section, at the Wentworth Campus. It was the early 1970s. I remember this campus, an old naval barracks of prefab rooms in the midst of the so-called Coloured area in Durban, not for the space in which I received my pre-med training but for my first encounter with the notion of Black Consciousness – a notion that served as the catalyst for an emancipation of my mind from ‘Baas’ mentality subservience to one of assertion of the power in being Black. The metamorphosis from the Indian girl who had received her secondary schooling at the Durban Indian Girls’ High School to the Black woman who was now being schooled into believing in herself and holding her head high in defiance to the white man was abrupt, dramatic and, at times, surreal.

Steve Biko had been banished from campus and excluded from medical school, but his sudden appearances, albeit against all odds, ensured that the education fellow students and I received from him remained ingrained in our beliefs and entrenched in our souls. For many of us, there was the new realisation of the oneness of being Black. We were no longer Coloured, Indian or African in contempt of each other. We were no longer non-white non-entities. And with this solidarity emerged a newfound pride in the inherent beauty, infinite value and worth within each one of us. Steve got us to realise that the plot of the day was systematically orchestrated by that white regime to eradicate any feasible unity between us Blacks. He brought home the realisation that we were all oppressed and the varying degrees of oppression were deliberately designed to tear and keep us apart.

It was with this same passion that in 2007, and thirty years after Steve’s brutal murder, that I established the Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Apartheid health care in South Africa, with its legacy of inequity in resources, its race-based access to health care and its contravention of human rights, all place a special duty on health science faculties to ensure that health professionals understand the past and are committed to a strong human rights culture. Steve’s murder in detention, the wilful disregard by the doctors in failing to care for him and their collusion in covering up the cause of his death, marked a low point in the ethical and human rights standards of the medical profession in South Africa. It is my hope that the Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics will serve to immortalise Biko’s legacy and highlight the collective responsibility of the profession and the public to promote ethical practice.

Forty years later, while much has been achieved, there is so much more still to be done. Pigmentation differences have re-emerged to erode the solidarity and freedom that Steve Biko died for. It is clear that the task of Black Consciousness is incomplete. A re-awakening of the energy to drive forward the work of Black Consciousness is an ethical imperative. After all, is that not what Steve would want?

Tracey Gore

Director, Steve Biko Housing Association Liverpool, United Kingdom

It was with honour, pride and great humility that I received the request to contribute to the 40th anniversary edition of I Write What I Like.

The request comes at a time that sees great turmoil in the world. Our world has become polarised, intolerant and indifferent to the suffering of many. The Black Lives Matter movement registered with the African diaspora; it is a cry that has been made before.

Black Consciousness came to me as a young child; when I was called a Black ***** by a white police officer, I realised I was black. As a teenager I read about the black power movement in the States and I wore my afro with pride. My consciousness was completed as an adult, confronted by the racism that the black community and I were born into. The insidious nature of racism that perpetuates a feeling of inferiority, of not belonging, of lack, that seeks to rob you of your dignity.

The words of Steve Biko had meaning for me and for the black people of Liverpool in England. Biko spoke directly to us: ‘Being black is not a matter of pigmentation – being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.’ ‘Black Man you are on your own.’ Black Consciousness was real, young black people were proactive in the 1980s, creating black community development organisations and programmes, legal aid centres, education establishments, employment agencies, and even our own housing provider, Steve Biko Housing. Most of those organisations are now gone, seemingly having done what they were set up to do. The reality is different. The exclusion of blacks from an equal society is still alive and kicking. I work for Steve Biko Housing, celebrating our 30th year. We put race equality and community development at the heart of our work. Black Consciousness feeds the soul. It enables me to continue to fight for racial equality; it demands that I continue to raise awareness with our black youth and to celebrate them. The black lives that matter, the youth, they fill me with hope.

Silvio Humberto dos Passos Cunha

Honorary President, Instituto Cultural Steve Biko (ICSB) Translated by Luciana Reis, Salvador, Brazil

Our South African and Afro-Brazilian histories come together, the Atlantic connects us. I owe my political formation to the Brazilian Black Movement that has been fighting against racism for decades. We have never lived, and still do not live, in a racial democracy in Brazil. Despite the achievements during the past ten years, poverty has colour, age and gender: it is black, young and female.

The struggle against apartheid is an important chapter in Brazilian Black Movement history. In addition to marches and manifestos, songs from Afro groups in Carnival were used to make it more popular. Thus, the Brazilian people, particularly in Bahia, knew the struggle against apartheid and its leaders. This is how Steve Biko came to us, we overcame the language barrier, initially with the movie Cry Freedom, followed by the reading of I Write What I Like.

On 31 July 1992, we founded Instituto Cultural Steve Biko (ICSB) to increase the black population’s access to university. In the beginning, we did not