Biko, South Africans are not at ease…
DEAR BIKO, since you’ve been gone, a lot has happened in Azania.
When you left 41 years ago, Luthuli was long gone under suspicious circumstances. We will soon mark the 51st anniversary of his passing. Like Timol, maybe your death and that of Luthuli will soon be subjected to an inquest so that we can know the truth and bring perpetrators to justice.
Fortuitously, when Luthuli died he had inaugurated the armed Struggle and bequeathed powerful ideas about a peaceful South Africa.
The liberation movement remained banned when you were entombed.
Tambo was leading from Zambia. Mandela was a prisoner. Sobukwe’s health was rapidly deteriorating. Oh remember how Tutu saved Buthelezi at that funeral! Only poor health from years of unbearable conditions in solitary confinement freed the professor from the draconian “Sobukwe Clause”which made him into a lifetime prisoner without rights.
When your lifeless body was pulled to its final resting place by a donkey cart in the dusty streets of Ginsberg, many young people were leaving the country to join the Struggle. Jails were getting full; so were the cemeteries. This was long before limousines carried coffins. You wouldn’t have imagined the phenomenology of Zodwa WaBantu and Babes Wodumo. Iyoh, brother Steve, they break legs, those young women.
But Biko, since you left a lot has happened.
Remember the ANC which was longed banned when you died; yes that one which once led the liberation movement, self-styled as the broad church! Today you’d frown if you saw the extent of its internal divisions.
Even its own documents tell tales of a ruling party increasingly at odds with the people. They talk of the “social distance” between the leadership and the masses.
Oh, they kill each other today, Biko, religiously sacrificing ideology at the alter of greed and factionalism. So much for the broad church. Maybe, just maybe the post-54th elective conference will unleash a thuma mina to save the South African spirit.
Since you’ve been gone, Cosatu was formed, and became a force in the body politic of South Africa, or Azania as you preferred to call it. Even as it fractured and its star started to dim, it still fought for the national minimum wage and partially remains at the dinner table making thin noises
You were long dead when the UDF and the MDM solidified in the 80s. You did not live to witness 1985, the year of the youth, as declared by the UN. From that year on, old people couldn’t tell us anything. We were burning Putco buses and stoning municipal buildings. We made this country ungovernable; in fact we still do. Take comfort, however, comrade Biko, albeit momentarily, that the ideas of our martyrs never died. They tower among us.
They remain an inspiration even to the “born frees”, free to vote and associate but oppressed economically, culturally and psychologically. Yes, the self-love and black solidarity you told us about is disappearing into thin air.
If we don’t agree with you, politically, we annihilate you. If we see you as being weak, we rob and rape you. We burn schools and libraries, although you warned us against such.
Biko, you are not dead. At least not yet. Lack of economic, linguistic, psychological and epistemological freedom keeps you alive. Your fight was beyond shelter, bread and butter. Advances in material conditions are but a pit-stop in the long walk to remembering ourselves as human beings with history, agency and feelings.
Biko, we are not at ease. Biko lives!