What kind of Africans are we to harass Biko?
Desecration of his grave abominable as his death
Steve Bantu Biko, even in death, continues to be harassed and hounded by the evil forces for which he spent his young life seeking to exorcise.
And, if his grave and his tombstone and the bronze fist that represents black solidarity were last week desecrated by thieves and vandals, we must ask, what kind of society have we been nurturing throughout our democracy and freedom?
Vandalism seems to be the direction our country is taking, and the government we elected to protect life and limb, and we might add property, sleeps on the job and seems to be overwhelmed by it all.
The police strategy to significantly reduce the crime rate seems to be poorly conceived. Criminals do as they please and, in a manner of speaking, get away with murder.
Those who destroy the country’s infrastructure, including traffic lights that are harvested at intersections, are never detected, which suggests that the police lack an effective dragnet or the wherewithal to apprehend criminals, and so criminals are let off the hook.
As a student many years ago, when with a friend we visited Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, he asked us: “What are you doing with your young lives?”
We told the grand dignified man of letters we were studying, but presently, during holidays, we worked on a temporary basis at a food processing company in Germiston as laboratory assistants, upon which with a fleshy smile all written on his face, Sobukwe retorted: “What kind of Africans is your company, African Products, producing?”
Today, we must ask, what kind of Africans has this country been producing for the past 30 years? Nyaupe or drug addicts, thieves, hardened criminals who do not think twice about using a lethal weapon to end another person’s life if that would earn them a few hundred bucks.
The other question that must be posed is: What is so difficult for our society to commit itself to working hard, pull itself by its own bootstraps, and with great determination, carve for itself a better future?
The desecration of Biko’s statue last week, with its bronze fist clenched in a black power salute, stolen by thieves, is not only an abomination as it is also troubling for it reminds us we are not conscientised enough to differentiate between what is right or wrong.
Nearly 50 years ago, Biko was thrown into the back of an apartheid-era police van en route to Pretoria from the then Port Elizabeth, now Gqeberha.
A battered and dying Biko, unattended by any health professional for the duration of a nearly 1 000km trip to Pretoria, was inhumanely and callously treated by the apartheid system.
This was after he was brutally assaulted by his apartheid captors, and through beatings, suffered serious brain damage that led to his death in a prison cell in Pretoria.
This cruelty was meted out to silence him along with his comrades from vigorously pursuing a Black Consciousness project of instilling in the minds of black people liberatory seeds.
Biko’s assassination on September 12, 1977, was brutal; it was callous; it was diabolical; it defied all human understanding for its indecency and callousness.
Human life is precious with incalculable value, yet Biko’s life was not spared by the apartheid regime that claimed to espouse Christian and ethical values, an expression that is nonsensical as it is also a contradiction in its nature not only for its absurdity but also for its irrationality.
In his book, I Write what I Like, Biko makes this important point: “Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of life, the most positive call from the black world for a long time. Its essence is the realisation by the black man [person] of the need to rally together with his brothers [and sisters] around the cause of their oppression – the blackness of his skin – and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind themselves to perpetual servitude.”
It is under these circumstances that the desecration of Biko’s tombstone should be viewed. First, local authorities who are unable to protect infrastructure and communities from all elements of criminal actions by perpetrators of violence and vandalism are a contradiction to Biko’s teachings of black solidarity.
If the local authority is unable to erect a perimeter fence secured enough to protect the Steve Bantu Biko Garden of Remembrance in Biko’s birthplace of Ginsberg, eqonce, in Eastern Cape, what pride is there to be gleaned from the local government officials?
Biko laid down his young life for all South Africans. His statue at his gravesite is a constant reminder – an epitaph – of the prize he paid with his life that we may have a better life.