Biko letter to go under the hammer in Britain
SA’s heritage body vows to fight UK auction ‘tooth and nail’
AHANDWRITTEN letter from the late Black Consciousness Movement leader and liberation struggle hero Steve Biko is set to be auctioned in the United Kingdom this weekend.
However, the South African National Heritage Council (NHC) has since written to International Autograph Auctions (IAA), one of the leading autograph and manuscript auction houses in Europe, and has vowed to do everything it can to stop the auction.
The Biko letter was penned on October 29 1973 to a King William’s Town magistrate.
In it, the struggle icon pleads for the magistrate to grant him permission to visit his wife Ntsiki, who was working at St Matthews Hospital in Keiskammahoek at the time.
As part of his house arrest conditions in Ginsberg at the time, Biko was not allowed to leave the King William’s Town magisterial district without a written permit from court. He died in police custody in 1977. The letter, listed in the company’s catalogue as “item 229 Beko Steve”, is of utmost rarity and is expected to fetch between £2 000 and £3 000 (R36 000 and R54 000).
The NHC has set its heart on halting the planned auctioning of the “precious archival piece”.
NHC’s chief executive, advocate Sonwabile Mancotywa, yesterday said it was “displeasing” for the heritage sector to experience “this commodification and monetisation of historic objects that bear rare testimony to the hardships of struggle activists and the South African liberation struggle”.
Mancotywa, who described Biko’s letter as sentimental, said such document should instead be handed over as part of the country’s national heritage.
“The letter, if auctioned, may become untraceable,” he said, adding that the council would fight tooth and nail to prevent the letter from going under the hammer this weekend.
Numerous attempts to get comment from both Biko’s widow and their son Nkosinathi, who is the chief executive officer of the Steve Biko Foundation, proved fruitless at the time of writing yesterday. —