Thugs in red overalls desecrate Steve Biko’s black pride legacy
EFF makes mockery of legitimate protest against Clicks' racist advert about black women's hair with criminal acts
Tomorrow marks the 43rd anniversary of the murder – at the hands of the police – of one of the black community’ foremost thinkers, Bantu Stephen Biko.
Steve Biko, as he was better known, had not planted any bomb, had not petrol-bombed any government building, and had not shot a government official.
All he had done was to call on black people to take pride in who they are, to take charge of their destiny.
Under the banner of Black People’s Programmes, the campaign started in his hometown of Ginsberg, Eastern Cape, with people cleaning up their neighbourhood, growing their vegetables, establishing their own clinic.
The idea was to spread the campaign countrywide, culminating in black people writing their history, promoting their languages, gaining back their land, establishing their own schools, and other tools and institutions of development without government support.
The Afrikaners – who had wrestled themselves out of English oppression by using the same tactics of selfreliance through building their own institutions – immediately recognised the potency of Biko’s efforts.
A proud, unified, selfsufficient black community was a threat bigger than a bunch of AK47-wielding gangs.
So they killed him on September 12 1977. They immediately banned organisations driven by his philosophy.
Because history does not like vacuums, with the disappearance of Black Consciousness as the rallying front for black people, the likes of Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Kaizer Matanzima and other fellow surrogates of the apartheid regime took the gap.
Suddenly, Zulu nationalism of the worst kind took root, as did all manner of “nationalisms” promoting the basest ethnic proclivities.
All of these were sold as expression of black pride. The distortion of Black Consciousness reached its dangerous low with the emergence of the thugs in red overalls.
The Clicks imbroglio is a legitimate issue to organise black people around. With that series of adverts Clicks insulted the entire black population.
And, let’s face it: Clicks only added petrol to a fire that had been smouldering for some time.
There is anger in the land. Anger about government corruption, anger stemming out of job losses as a result of Covid-19.
Until the Clicks debacle, this anger had not found an outlet. This week it did.
People sitting comfortably in their air-conditioned offices proclaim that the protest was irrational.
Anger can never be put on a continuum and be measured for rationality. Rage is rage.
Whatever damage Clicks sustains this week – both physically and reputationally – is well deserved.
You have to respect black people, firstly because they are human beings, but secondly because they are your customers.
I don’t want to get into the side issue about black women having lost love for their natural hair. It’s a whole different debate.
When you suggest in your adverts that black hair is bad, and the hair to aspire to is white straight hair, you are sending a subliminal message to young black people, teaching them to hate themselves.
This fits in with the agenda of perpetuating mental slavery in the absence of laws that would otherwise continue the subjugation of black people.
So, yes, the Clicks protest was and still is legitimate. It’s every black person’s struggle, whether they realise it or not.
Yet the thugs in red overalls have made it all about them. This week they abused and attacked the very people they are supposed to be fighting on behalf of – poor black people.
After sexually harassing a black woman, after trashing the shops, in the process robbing some of these poor black people of an income, the thugs in red overalls got into their expensive cars.
They drove to wherever they sit to drink their expensive booze, laughing at how easy it is to manipulate the masses, after which they went home to dream middleclass dreams, behind tall walls.
Shame on the clowns in red overalls for desecrating Steve Bantu Biko’s legacy.