T Mbeki: Steve Biko Memorial Lecture

12 September 2007

Director of Ceremonies
Members of the Biko family
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen

We meet here today to commemorate the death of an outstanding young South
African patriot, Stephen Bantu Biko. The bloody decade of the 1970s in our
country, which included the Soweto Uprising of 1976, took the lives of many
fighters for our liberation, both young and old. I stand here this evening to
speak in celebration of one of the martyrs of this period, Stephen Bantu
Biko.

The distinguished and learned audience in this auditorium and the thousands
in our country and continent who are listening to this Lecture, which is
carried live by our public broadcaster, the South African Broadcasting
Corporation (SABC), will know that I would have asked myself the question, what
should I say on this historic occasion! Echoing the views of the 19th Century
United States (US) poet, Walt Whitman, expressed in his poem, "A child said,
What is the grass?" I too would like to say: "I wish I could translate the
hints about the dead young men and women, and the hints about old men and
mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. What do you think has
become of the young and old men? What do you think has become of the women and
children?"

Perhaps, today, I have no choice but to translate in the context of our
current realities, the hints about our dead young men and women of the 1970s
and the following decades, such as Steve Biko, and the hints about old men and
mothers, and the offspring, including Steve Biko, taken soon out of their laps.
We have gathered here exactly 30 years to the day after Steve Bantu Biko was
murdered by those responsible for the apartheid crime against humanity. We have
convened here not to mourn his death but to celebrate his life, his thoughts
and the immense contribution he made to the liberation of our country and
people.

I would like sincerely to thank his wife and my sister, Sis' Ntsiki, his son
Nkosinathi, the rest of the Biko family, the Biko Foundation, and all who were
his close friends and comrades, for the honour they have given me to deliver
this particular Biko Memorial Lecture, exactly thirty years after the dark
forces of evil cruelly robbed our country, our Continent and the world of an
outstanding young revolutionary who would, today, have been one of the eminent
architects of the new world we are striving to build.

In what now seems to be a long time ago, during the years of our exile, I
had the rare privilege to reflect on who Steve Biko was, what his ideas were,
what he fought for, how and with whom he strived to realised his ideals, what
impact he had on his comrades, our country and people, and what his cruel and
untimely death meant to those who had recognised him as a harbinger of a future
that, distant as it might have seemed, was nevertheless certain to become
tomorrow's happy reality.

The unique opportunity for all this was provided by the visit to Lusaka,
Zambia, by an eminent English worker in the creative arts, a militant opponent
of oppression wherever it might occur, a passionately loyal friend of our
people, a good man, Richard Attenborough. He came into our midst to discuss
with the African National Congress (ANC), especially those who knew or had
engaged in struggle with and under the leadership of Steve Biko, the script he
used to construct the film, Cry Freedom.

He came to Lusaka from London, England because he was determined that the
remarkable Steve Biko story should be told to the whole world, and told
truthfully. He was convinced that the telling of the story of Steve Biko, that
would become known to millions of cinema goers across the globe, would mobilise
these millions to stand up to fight the apartheid crime against humanity that
had killed Steve Biko. He came also to tell us the unadorned truth that all
feature films of the day could not be produced and successfully marketed
without access to the necessary finance, all of which would be provided by
people who, regardless of their good souls, nevertheless had to demand that the
films they financed would earn the necessary return on the money they had
invested.

In the end, regardless of what we thought and said as we interacted with
Dick Attenborough, and the impact of all this on the film script, we conceded
the right to the film-maker to produce and direct the film that ultimately
appeared on the cinema screens across the world as Cry Freedom, whatever its
limitations in terms of a comprehensive representation of who and what Steve
Biko was, and what he died for.

During this particular week of intense discussion with Dick Attenborough, I
learnt many things about Steve Biko, his life and times, and thoughts and
actions, sitting, as it were, at the feet of younger comrades who, inspired by
his message and example, had joined the ANC in exile to fulfil the mission for
which he had perished in the most painful circumstances.

Born in 1946, Steve Biko was 16 years old when I left our country to go into
exile in 1962. A year earlier, in 1961, when we organised for and launched the
African Students Association (ASA), the historical parent, with Admiral Systems
USA (Asusa), of South African Society of Orthodontists (Saso), I did not meet
him.

However, my political history from my early youth at school, and since then,
has to some extent overlapped with the political life of a close friend and
comrade of Steve Biko, Nyameko Barney Pityana. Barney and I were students and
members of the ANC Youth League at Lovedale Institution during the latter years
of my studies at this once renowned centre of learning at Alice, across the
Thyume River that separates Lovedale from the neighbouring Fort Hare.

I mention this today because the young Barney Pityana served as a vital link
between the accumulated national experience and wisdom of the struggle for
liberation concentrated in the ANC until it was banned in 1960, and the time in
1969, when he and Steve Biko established Saso, the first organised formation of
the Black Consciousness Movement, nine years after the long-established ANC and
the very young Pan African Congress (PAC) were banned.

I am very pleased that today, 30 years after the death of his comrade, Steve
Biko, Barney Pityana, is also delivering a lecture on Steve Bantu Biko, far to
our North, at the University of South Africa (Unisa) campus in
Pretoria/Tshwane. It must surely be something of note that members of the ANC
Youth League of 50 years ago speak on the same day, in different geographical
settings in our country, to pay tribute to a young patriot who assumed the
mantle of leadership during some of the most difficult years of our struggle
for liberation, and perished as a result.

In his great epic work, 'The Rise of Shaka,' the late Mazisi Kunene says:
"Those who feast on the grounds of others often are forced into gestures of
friendship they do not desire. But we are the generation that cannot be
bypassed. We shall not be blinded by gifts from feasts. With our own fire we
shall stand above the mountains, as the sun." These words, which could easily
have been uttered by the militant generation of the 1970s to which Steve Biko
belonged, are attributed to Shaka, an equally young militant of some one and
half centuries before the turbulences that defined the 1970s.

Faced with the resistance of his superiors to the far-reaching military
changes that he wanted to introduce, Shaka argued that if the status quo
remained they would not be able to withstand the military assaults of their
enemies and thus his people would continue to feast on the grounds of others
and accordingly be forced into gestures of friendship they did not desire.

Today we mark the 30th anniversary of the death of an African patriot who,
at a particular time, lit our road to freedom like a burning meteor, shining
brighter than the system that had sought to minimise his humanity, along with
that of the people whose yearnings he symbolised. To celebrate the life of
Stephen Bantu Biko is to invoke a vision that has over the years inspired all
freedom loving South Africans decisively to defeat the monster of apartheid and
racism and realise the dream of liberation. As it must, our commemoration of
the death of Steve Biko resonates with heroism, a steely human resolve and a
remarkable vision for human freedom, the antithesis of the intolerable racism
in our country which the whole world came to characterise as a crime against
humanity.

In this regard, we may be forgiven for making so bold as to suggest that in
remembering this brave patriot we could use this occasion as a metaphor for all
that is bitter and all that is sweet in South African history. We are surely
entitled to feel bitter at the needless snuffing out of the pulsating life of a
freedom fighter by small-minded human beings who had arrogated to themselves
the absolute right to determine, with impunity, who should qualify to be
considered and treated as a human being. On the other hand, our souls are
surely sweetened by the certain knowledge that the high principles of freedom
and equality for which Biko struggled and died have, over time, and because of
the determination of our people relentlessly to sustain the struggle for
freedom, given birth to the reality of today’s free and democratic South
Africa.

Like Shaka and many others that came before him, Steve Biko understood very
well that 'those who feast on the grounds of others often are forced into
gestures of friendship they do not desire.' Biko himself said that: "What Black
consciousness seeks to do is to produce at the output end of the process, real
black people who do not regard themselves as appendages to white society. This
truth cannot be reversed. We do not need to apologise for this because it is
true that the white systems have produced throughout the world a number of
people who are not aware that they too are people."

It would seem to me that three particular historical circumstances were
central to the formation of Steve Biko as an outstanding leader of our
revolutionary struggle and an eminent representative of his generation. The
first of these is that Steve Biko's life was defined by the apartheid reality
of 'separate development, which the National Party sought to create from the
first day of its electoral victory in 1948. The second is that as Steve Biko
came into his maturity, the national liberation struggle was in full retreat,
arising from the banning of the ANC and the Pan African Congress (PAC), the
destruction of the organised structures of the liberation movement, and the
systematic decapitation of the movement by the arrest of its leaders and
activists.

The third is that this period of extreme reaction following the Sharpeville
Massacre, intended to perpetuate the apartheid system into which Steve Biko was
born, seemed totally to have demobilised the oppressed through fear of arrest,
torture, imprisonment and death in the hands of the repressive security organs
of the apartheid state. With regard to the first of these historical
circumstances, Steve Biko has said: "Born shortly before 1948, I have live all
my conscious life in the framework of institutionalised separate development.
My friendships, my love, my education, my thinking and every other facet of my
life have been carved and shaped within the context of separate development. In
stages during my life I have managed to outgrow some of the things the system
taught me."

Relating to the second of these circumstances, Steve Biko wrote: "Since the
banning and harassment of black political parties, a dangerous vacuum has been
created. The African National Congress and later the Pan-African Congress were
banned in 1960. Ever since there has been no coordinated opinion emanating from
the black ranks."

"Perhaps the Kliptown (Freedom) Charter, objectionable as the circumstances
surrounding it might have been was the last attempt ever made to instil some
amount of positiveness in stating categorically what blacks felt on political
questions in the land of their forefathers. After the banning of the black
political parties in South Africa, people's hearts were gripped by some kind of
foreboding fear for anything political. Not only were politics a closed book,
but at every corner one was greeted by a slave-like apathy that often bordered
on timidity."

With regard to the third of the historical circumstances to which we have
referred, Steve Biko wrote: "Black people under the smuts government were
oppressed but they were still men. They failed to change the system for many
reasons which we shall not consider here. But the type of black man we have
today has lost his manhood. Reduced to an obliging shell, he looks with awe at
the white power structure and accepts what he regards as the 'inevitable
position.' All in all the black man has become a shell, a shadow of man,
completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the
yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity."

A critically important part of the strategic brilliance of the intervention
that Steve Biko and his comrades in the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) made
to reenergise our liberation struggle was to mobilise the black oppressed
around one message that would respond to these three historical circumstances.
In a manner of speaking, this meant that the BCM threw one stone to kill three
birds! But what was this stone, this particular weapon of struggle! Authentic
and honest African scholarship has consistently recognised the integrity and
interconnectedness of the African experience through many centuries, including
the experience of the Africans of the Diaspora.

One of us among the latter, whom we will always salute as one of our own
leaders, was the immortal African-American giant, Web du Bois. More than a
century ago, in 1903, du Bois' groundbreaking treatise, 'The Souls of Black
Folk,' was published in the United States. Among other things, relevant to what
we have to say this evening, Web du Bois wrote: "Between me and the other world
there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of
delicacy, by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All,
nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of
way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly,
How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word Du Bois then told a
story of how white children had suddenly excluded him while they we playing
together. He wrote: "Then it dawned upon me with certain suddenness that I was
different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but
shut out from their world by a vast veil. With other black boys the strife was
not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into
silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything
white, or wasted itself in a bitter cry, why did God make me an outcast and a
stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about
us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow,
tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation,
or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch
the streak of blue above.

"After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted
with second-sight in this American world - a world which yields him no true
self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the
other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense
of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s
soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

Steve Biko understood that to attain our freedom we had to rebel against the
notion that we are a problem, that we should no longer merely cry out, why did
God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?, that we should stop
looking at ourselves through the eyes of others, and measuring our souls by the
tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. He understood that
to defeat the brutal racial oppression of the apartheid system, we had to rise
up against the very ideology of racism, to internalise in our hearts and minds
as the critical driving force inspiring the risen masses, a complete and
thoroughgoing repudiation of all racist ideas and all their consequences.

In this regard, Steve Biko wrote: "The philosophy of Black Consciousness
expresses group pride and the determination by the blacks to rise and attain
the envisaged self. At the heart of this kind of thinking is the realisation by
the blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the
mind of the oppressed. Once the latter has been so effectively manipulated and
controlled by the oppressor as to make the oppressed believe that he is a
liability to the white man, then there will be nothing the oppressed can do
that will really scare the powerful masters. Hence thinking along lines of
Black Consciousness makes the black man see himself as being entire in himself,
and not as an extension of a broom or additional leverage to some machine. At
the end of it all, he cannot tolerate attempts by anybody to dwarf the
significance of his manhood. Once this happens, we shall know that the real man
in the black person is beginning to shine through…Various black groups are
beginning to rid their minds of imprisoning notions which are the legacy of the
control of their attitude by whites."

It was to this that I referred when I said: "A critically important part of
the strategic brilliance of the intervention that Steve Biko and his comrades
in the Black Consciousness Movement made to reenergise our liberation struggle
was to mobilise the black oppressed around one message that would respond to
(the three historical circumstances that conditioned Steve Biko's development)
(And as I said), In a manner of speaking, this meant that the BCM threw one
stone to kill three birds! This one stone was the militant and uncompromising
offensive to defeat what Steve Biko described as the most potent weapon in the
hands of the oppressor, (this being) the mind of the oppressed."

This strategic intervention recognised that to defeat the pernicious
apartheid system that held the country in thrall, to rebuild the national
liberation movement, to defeat the pervasive atmosphere gripping the country,
and therefore resume the offensive for the overthrow of the apartheid regime,
the black masses of our country had to refuse to feast on the grounds of
others, often forced into gestures of friendship they did not desire.

The historic struggle waged by the Black Consciousness Movement against the
inhuman ideology of racism put the spotlight on the fact that the racism upheld
by the captains of apartheid was, in fact, but the most pernicious expression
of white anti-black racism that emerged in Europe especially in the 18th
century.
In his 2007 book, 'Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other',
Professor Ben Magubane quotes the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment
philosopher, David Hume, thus: "I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general
all other species of men to be naturally inferior to whites. There never was a
civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual
eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures among them,
no arts, no sciences…Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen in
so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction
betwixt these breeds of men."

Professor Magubane also quotes one Edward Long, an admirer of David Hume,
who wrote 'The history of Jamaica,' published in 1774. In this book, Long
describes Africans as: "proud, lazy, treacherous, thievish, hot, and addicted
to all kinds of lust, and most ready to promote them in others, as pimps,
panders, incestuous, brutish, and savage, cruel and revengeful, devourers of
human flesh, and quaffers of human blood, inconstant, base, treacherous, and
cowardly, fond of and addicted to all sorts of superstition and witchcraft,
and, in a word, to every vice that came in their way, or within their reach.
They are inhuman, drunkards, deceitful, covetous and perfidious to the highest
degree. It is as impossible to be an African and not lascivious, as it is
impossible to be born in Africa and not be an African (Their) faculties are
truly bestial, no less their commerce with other sexes, in these acts they are
libidinous and shameless as monkeys, or baboons. The equally hot temperament of
their women has given probability to the charge of their admitting these
animals frequently to their embrace."

To come closer to home, Professor Magubane quotes Cecil Rhodes, then Premier
of the Cape Colony, as having said: "I will lay down my own policy on this
native question. Either you receive them on an equal footing as citizens, or
call them a subject race. Well, I have made up my mind…that we have to treat
the natives, where they are in a state of barbarism, in a different way from
ourselves. We are to be lords over them…The native is to be treated as a child
and denied the franchise." Contributing his share to the deluge of demeaning
racist insults, General Smuts said: "atives have the simplest minds, understand
only simple ideas or ideals, and are almost animal-like in the simplicity of
their minds and ways…They are different not only in colour but in minds and in
political capacity, and their political institutions should be different, while
always proceeding on the basis of self-government."

When Steve Biko said, "What Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce at
the output end of the process real black people who do not regard themselves as
appendages to white society," he signalled a revolutionary uprising against
more than two centuries of a racist ideology that had been used to justify
slavery, imperialism, colonialism and apartheid. He argued that the black
people had to reassert their self-worth, their confidence in themselves as
makers of history, reclaim their human dignity and define themselves, rather
than look at themselves through the eyes of others, measuring their souls by
the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity, to use Web du
Bois' words. He argued that these masses had the obligation to undo the damage
that had been done by 'white systems (that) have produced throughout the world
a number of people who are not aware that they too are people.'

None of us present here today can question the reality that what the Black
Consciousness Movement brought into our liberation struggle during a decade of
the greatest general retreat of the liberation movement on many fronts since
the ANC was formed in 1912, served as one of the principal catalysts that ended
the general retreat. It helped to open the way to the two-decade long general
offensive on all fronts that triumphed with the victory of the democratic
revolution in 1994. However the challenge posed by Steve Biko and the Black
Consciousness Movement especially to the black people, did not lose its
relevance with our historic victory of 1994.

I speak here of the challenge to defeat the centuries-old attempt 'to dwarf
the significance of our manhood,' to treat us as children, to define us as
sub-humans whom nature has condemned to be inferior to white people, an
animal-like species characterised by limited intellectual capacity, bestiality,
lasciviousness and moral depravity, obliged, in our own interest, to accept
that the white segment of humanity should, in perpetuity, serve as our lord and
master.

As I speak here today, to celebrate the life of an outstanding son of our
people, a selfless patriot and fearless revolutionary, Steve Bantu Biko, I must
respond to what Walt Whitman commanded, and try with reference to our
contemporary reality, thirteen years after the victory of the Democratic
Revolution, to 'translate the hints about the dead young men and women, and the
hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their
laps.'

Together, including the latter-day admirers of Steve Biko, some of whom seek
to redefine him by stripping him of his revolutionary credentials and place him
outside the continuum of our more than century-old national democratic struggle
and movement, we must critically examine our society today. In this context, we
must ask ourselves whether the majority of our people, for whose freedom Steve
Biko sacrificed his life, are truly aware that they too are people, and whether
they do not, still, regard themselves as appendages of our self-appointed
superiors.

Together we must pose the question and answer it honestly, have all of us
accepted that nobody should be obliged to feast on the grounds of others! Has
the majority taken advantage of its victory in 1994 to repudiate the practice
of resorting to forced gestures of friendship it does not desire! Have we all,
the former oppressor and former oppressed national groups, broken down the
walls of what Web du Bois described as a 'prison-house,' which was constructed
to represent and give permanence to the seemingly incontrovertible truth that
those who are white had a manifest destiny to govern and civilise those who are
black, and those who are black should, in their own interest, accept the white
people as their benevolent and caring guardians, however cruel, insulting and
inhumane their conduct!

In his work, 'The coloniser's model of the world,' the historian, J M Blaut,
says: "This belief is the notion that European civilisation – the West – has
had some unique historical advantage, some special quality of race or culture
or environment or mind or spirit, which gives this human community a permanent
superiority over all other communities, at all times in history and down to the
present…Therefore, the world has a permanent geographical centre and a
permanent periphery; an Inside and an Outside. Inside leads, Outside lags.
Inside innovates, Outside imitates."

Reflecting on this racist and hegemonic Eurocentrism in his 2001 paper, 'The
Metamorphosis of Colonialism,' immanent in the commercial process of
globalisation, Jeremy Seabrook writes: "Alien values are implanted into the
lives of the people… alien, not merely in the sense of foreign or exotic, but
alien to humanity…At first it was partly resisted, but with time, it became
more and more acceptable, until it has now become a major determinant on the
lives of the young, displacing all earlier forms of acculturation, other ways
of answering need, other ways of being in the world. This process of
forgetting, beyond recall, but perhaps not quiet beyond reclamation, is a form
of colonialism far more effective than that which held so much of the world in
thrall in an earlier empire."

Caught between the pincers of a mind-set that educated us to imagine and
internalise the notion of an Inside that leads, and an outside that lags, an
inside that innovates, and an outside that imitates, and objective social
reality that dictates that we should forget our identity and historical and
human value systems, beyond recall, we must ask ourselves the challenging
question, have we liberated ourselves from what Steve Biko identified as the
'imprisoning (and demeaning) notions which are the legacy of the control of
(our) attitude by whites"'

In this regard he said: "One writer makes the point that an in effort to
destroy completely the structures that had been built up in the African Society
and to impose their imperialism with an unnerving totality, the colonialists
were not satisfied merely with holding a people in their grip and emptying the
Native's brain of all form and content, they turned to the past of the
oppressed people and distorted, disfigured and destroyed it. No longer was
reference made to African culture, it became barbarism. Africa was 'the dark
continent'. Religious practices and customs were referred to as
superstition.

The history of African Society was reduced to tribal battles and internecine
wars. No wonder the African child learns to hate his heritage in his days at
school. So negative is the image presented to him that he tends to finds solace
only in close identification with the white society. No doubt, therefore, part
of the approach envisaged in bringing about 'black consciousness' has to be
directed to the past, to seek to rewrite the history of the black man and to
produce in it the heroes who form the core of the African background. Person
without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine. Then too one
can extract from our indigenous cultures a lot of positive virtues which could
teach the Westerner a lesson or two."

In his well-known book, Decolonising the Mind, the Kenyan novelist and
writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, describes a stormy debate that once took place at
the University of Nairobi about the restructuring of the English Department.
Ngugi says: "Three African lecturers and researchers at the University
responded by calling for the abolition of the English Department as then
constituted. They questioned the underlying assumption that the English
tradition and the emergence of the modern west were the central root of Kenya’s
and Africa's consciousness and cultural heritage.

They rejected the underlying notion that Africa was an extension of the
West, and then followed the crucial rejoinder:
"Here then, is our main question: if there is a need for a study of the
historic continuity of a single culture, why can't this be African? Why cannot
African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in
relationship to it?" This of course raises the question – what is African
culture? What constitutes an African identity, the opposite of negative
stereotype of ourselves which colonialism and racism presented to the African
child so that he or she tended to finds solace only in close identification
with the white society?

During our years of liberation, many voices have been raised expressing
grave concern at the prevalence of many negative developments in our society.
One of these is the incidence of crime and the particular forms some of these
crimes assume. These would include the rape of children and women, including
the elderly. They would also include murders that suggest the most callous
disdain for the value of human life. Similarly, many have expressed concern at
what seems to be an entrenched value system centred on the personal acquisition
of wealth at all costs and by all means, including wilful resort to corruption
and fraud.

These negative social phenomena and others, which occasioned the call for
moral regeneration, have suggested that our society has been captured by a
rapacious individualism which is corroding our social cohesion, which is
repudiating the value and practice of human solidarity, and which totally
rejects the fundamental precept of Ubuntu, umntu ngumntu ngabanye! The question
is therefore posed correctly is this the kind of society that Steve Biko
visualised, that he fought and died for! When he wrote that, "The philosophy of
Black Consciousness…expresses group pride and the determination by the blacks
to rise and attain the envisaged self," surely he did not imagine an 'envisaged
self' characterised by the rapacious and venal individualism we have just
mentioned!

To reclaim or rediscover the African identity and build a society that is
new not only in its political and economic arrangements, but also in terms of
the values it upholds, somewhat tentative calls have been made to re-educate
our society about the Ubuntu value system. As did the African lecturers and
researchers at the University of Nairobi, perhaps we too should ask the
question
why can't an African world view, such as Ubuntu, be at the centre so that we
can view other cultures in relationship to it? Ubuntu, which reminds us that 'a
person is a person through other people,' does not allow for individualism that
overrides the collective interests of a community. It stands in
contra-distinction to the idea that an individual is the be-all and end-all,
without, at the same time, positing that an individual is right-less or
dispensable in the grand scheme of things.

Ubuntu places a premium on the values of human solidarity, compassion and
human dignity. It is a lived philosophy which enables members of the community
to achieve higher results through collective efforts. It is firmly based on
recognising the humanity in everyone. It emphasises the importance of knowing
oneself and accepting the uniqueness in all of us so as to render meaningless
the complexes of inferiority and superiority. Indeed, Ubuntu connects all of
humanity irrespective of ethnicity or racial origins.

Clearly, the onset of democracy has opened up space for our indigenous
cultures to assert themselves as historical agencies in and of themselves, of
course influenced by the imperatives thrown up by current socio-political
conditions. And yet we must admit that we have so far failed to use these
historical agencies to infuse into our society the new value system that must
replace the value construct that was an attendant part of the socio-economic
reality that emerged during and out of the long years of colonialism and
apartheid. In that sense we must admit that we have not as yet accomplished all
the tasks that Steve Biko and his comrades set when they called for an uprising
against the ideology of racism, which was born in Europe, and the reassertion
of our pride and dignity.

In this regard, Steve Biko wrote: "In rejecting Western values…we are
rejecting those things that are not only foreign to us but that seek to destroy
the most cherished of our beliefs that the corner-stone of society is man
himself not just his welfare, not his material wellbeing but just man himself
with all his ramifications. We reject the power-based society of the Westerner
that seems to be ever concerned with perfecting their technological know-how
while losing out on their spiritual dimension. We believe that in the long run
the special contribution to the world by Africa will be in this field of human
relationships. The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving
the world an industrial and military look, but the great gift still has to come
from Africa – giving the world a more human face."

When Steve Biko made this prophecy, saying after Mazisi Kunene, "With our
own fire we shall stand above the mountains, as the sun," he was following in
the footsteps of other great giants of our liberation struggle. In his famous
1906 article, 'The Regeneration of Africa,' Pixley ka Isaka Seme said: "The
regeneration of Africa means that a new and unique civilisation is soon to be
added to the world. The African is not a proletarian in the world of science
and art. He has precious creations of his own, of ivory, of copper and of gold,
fine, plated willow-ware and weapons of superior workmanship. Civilisation
resembles an organic being in its development - it is born, it perishes, and it
can propagate itself. More particularly, it resembles a plant, it takes root in
the teeming earth, and when the seeds fall in other soils new varieties sprout
up. The most essential departure of this new civilisation is that it shall be
thoroughly spiritual and humanistic indeed a regeneration moral and
eternal!"

In his 1961 Nobel Lecture, entitled 'Africa and Freedom', Inkosi Albert
Luthuli enlarged on this vision and said: "Still licking the scars of past
wrongs perpetrated on her, could (Africa) not be magnanimous and practise no
revenge? Her hand of friendship scornfully rejected her pleas for justice and
fair-play spurned, should she not nonetheless seek to turn enmity into amity?
Though robbed of her lands, her independence and opportunities this, oddly
enough, often in the name of civilisation and even christianity should she not
see her destiny as being that of making a distinctive contribution to human
progress and human relationships with a peculiar new African flavour enriched
by the diversity of cultures she enjoys, thus building on the summits of
present human achievement an edifice that would be one of the finest tributes
to the genius of man? She should see this hour of her fulfilment as a challenge
to her to labour on until she is purged of racial domination, and as an
opportunity of reassuring the world that her national aspiration lies, not in
overthrowing white domination to replace it by a black caste, but in building a
non-racial democracy that shall be a monumental brotherhood, a 'brotherly
community' with none discriminated against on grounds of race or colour.

Africa's qualification for this noble task is incontestable, for her own
fight has never been and is not now a fight for conquest of land, for
accumulation of wealth or domination of peoples, but for the recognition and
preservation of the rights of man and the establishment of a truly free world
for a free people. The challenging question we must ask ourselves is, have we
used the freedom for which Steve Biko sacrificed his life to position our
country to contribute to an African civilisation that is 'thoroughly spiritual
and humanistic - indeed a regeneration moral and eternal!,' as Pixley Seme
said, that will make "a distinctive contribution to human progress and human
relationships with a peculiar new African flavour enriched by the diversity of
cultures she enjoys, thus building on the summits of present human achievement
an edifice that would be one of the finest tributes to the genius of man," as
Albert Luthuli said, that will bestow 'the great gift (to humanity of) giving
the world a more human face,' as Steve Biko said? We dare not allow this noble
vision handed down to us by these great titans of our struggle to perish. Its
translation into reality, first of all in our own country, must surely be the
monument we build in memory of a dear son of our people, Stephen Bantu
Biko.

Steve Biko, like Shaka, belonged to a generation that could not be bypassed.
As he died only 31 years old, his life's work had just begun. But he left us
with the task to translate into our programmes intended to give birth to a new
society, the hints about the dead young men and women of his generation, and
the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their
laps. Wendy Orr has written in the Sunday Independent that in the Steve Biko
file kept at the Headquarters of our Department of Justice, Steve is reported
as having said to his killers: "I ask for water to wash myself with and also
soap, a washing cloth and a comb. I want to be allowed to buy food. I live on
bread only here. Is it compulsory for me to be naked? I am naked since I came
here."

These few and simple words, which speak to the most basic human needs, tell
everything that needs to be told about why Steve Biko was right to dedicate his
life to the defeat of the criminal ideology of racism, to liberate our country
from the clutches of racist fanatics to whom the souls of black folk meant
nothing.

When he ceased to breathe, in the cruel and callous hands of his torturers,
his was what the poet Ben Okri would describe as 'a gigantic death.' But, at
the same time, this gigantic death of a man deliberately kept by his captors
naked and unwashed also constituted 'an enormous birth.' And so it is that we
must listen carefully to what the poet, Ben Okri, said in his 'Mental
Flight.'

A sense of the limited time we have here on earth to live magnificently to
be as great and happy as we can to explore our potential to the fullest and to
lose our fear of death having gained a greater love and reverence for life and
its incommensurable golden brevity so it is with this moment a gigantic death
and an enormous birth in timelessness. From the gigantic death of Stephen Bantu
Biko thirty years ago today, must, in time, arise an enormous birth. Stephen
Bantu Biko died, but his vision has not perished.

I thank you for your attention

Issued by: The Presidency
12 September 2007
Source: The Presidency (http://www.thepresidency.gov.za)