BIKO'S BEACON
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 8/21/01]
Copyright 2001 Mumia Abu-Jamal
It has been almost a quarter of a century since the great South African freedom fighter, Steve Bantu Biko, was assassinated and tortured by the apartheid regime's police.
The white supremacists of South Africa could not abide the brilliance, the courage or the rebellious spirit of Biko. As one of the leading voices of the Black Consciousness Movement, Biko, and his fellow anti- apartheid students, filled the vast vacuum made by the banning, imprisonment and forced emigration of thousands of key activists from the older ANC (African National Congress) and PAC (Pan-Africanist Congress) movements.
In his relatively short life Biko served the African liberation struggle in a series of positions: founder of the South African Student Organization (SASO), SASO's first president, honorary president of the Black People's Convention, and a full-time organizer for Black Community programs.
In his posthumously titled "I Write What I Like" (1978) Biko's courageous voice range around the world. Biko loathed liberals, who held polite tea parties in the face of repression:
First, the black-white circles are almost always a creation of white liberals. As a testimony to their claim of complete identification with the blacks, they call a few "intelligent" and "articulate" blacks to "come around for tea at home," where all present ask each other the same old hackneyed question "how can we bring about change in South Africa?". The more such tea-parties one calls the more of a liberal he is and the freer he shall feel from the guilt that harnesses and binds his conscience. [Biko, 22]
In a later interview, Biko touched on the future of South Africa and the danger of maldistribution of wealth:
The whites have locked up within a small minority of themselves the greater proportion of the country's wealth. If we have a mere change of face of those in governing positions what is likely to happen that black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks filtering through into the so-called bourgeoisie. Our society will be run almost as of yesterday. [Biko, 149]
Shortly before the racist government assassinated Biko, the brilliant activist was attending medical school at the University of Natal (under its Non-European Section, of course), in Durban. The fight for black liberation was so all-encompassing that he had to leave (or was kicked out of) med school.
For many observers of the African scene, the state's terrorist attack on, and assassination of, Stephen Bantu Biko robbed the people of the nation of a commited freedom fighter, who was destined to lead a free South Africa.
That terrorism merely delayed the inevitable.
Copyright 2001 MAJ
Text © copyright 2001 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
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