Steve Biko's paradise lost

Under the terms of the negotiated settlement of the early 1990s, the ANC won political - but not economic - power. Less than 5 percent of the country's land has changed hands from white to black since 1994 and four white-owned conglomerates continue to control 80 percent of the Johannesburg stock exchange.

Black economic empowerment (BEE) schemes have created black millionaires in the thousands, making South Africa the fourth-fastest growing location for millionaires after South Korea, India and Russia.

But the vast majority of South Africans remain at the other extreme - these are the 45 percent of South Africans who are unemployed; the one in four who live in shacks located in shantytowns without running water or electricity. This is the country Biko continues to haunt, and to inspire …

Rather than a stage of psychological liberation, Biko considered "real needs" - the experience of "our common plight and struggle" - the challenge for black consciousness philosophy. At the same time, he insisted that radical intellectuals not only reject the racist regime and its invention of "Bantustan" politics but play an important role by using what they have learnt in the apartheid schools and colleges against the regime itself.

Biko's concept of black liberation anticipates the post-apartheid reality of black poverty and exclusion alongside white wealth, legitimised by a black presence in government.

It has often proven difficult to describe this phenomenon, especially since the 1994 "miracle" destabilised discourses and ways of seeing which were rooted in the black experience such as black consciousness. How do we name a social political formation that is managed by former liberation fighters, but remains in the service of the apartheid status quo?

When black consciousness appeared on the scene [in the mid-1960s] it loudly proclaimed its own name in its own language and created a new black whose raison d'être was the audacity to be, particularly, in the face of white supremacist power. When young activists of the black consciousness movement entered prison on Robben Island, they confronted the old political leaders who had been sitting in jail for decades with little hope and little fire for rebellion.

The new blacks appeared like a whirlwind, confounding the old leaders. Listen to Nelson Mandela recall the shock of this defiant quest to claim one's right to be:

"These fellows refused to conform to even basic prison regulations. One day I was at head office conferring with the commanding officer. As I was walking out with the major, we came upon a young prisoner being interviewed by a prison official. The young man, who was no more than 18, was wearing his prison cap in the presence of senior officers, a violation of regulations. Nor did he stand up when the major entered the room, another violation. The major looked at him and said, 'Please take off your cap.' The prisoner ignored him. Then in an irritated tone, the major said, 'Take off your cap.' The prisoner turned and looked at the major and said, 'What for?' I could hardly believe what I had just heard. It was a revolutionary question: What for?"

There are at least three main memories of Biko contending in South Africa today. The first finds expression in the black business class, through its claim to be entitled to the white wealth created from the exploitation of colonialism and apartheid. The BEE programme mobilises the common historical experience of oppression and exclusion by black South Africans to carve for itself a slice in the white world. The 1994 political settlement made it possible for those blacks most prepared to occupy the position of the whites in society to do so in the name of transformation without transforming the very structures of accumulation, production and redistribution created by colonialism and apartheid. Click here!

Biko advocated the rejection of such a scheme: "We believe that we have to reject their economic system, their political system and values that govern human relationships … We are not really fighting against the government; we are fighting the entire system."

Biko had foreseen that an economic model which integrates blacks into the very structures of colonialism and apartheid would create an unhealthy and self-defeating competition among blacks: "It is an integration in which black will compete with black, using each other as rungs up a stepladder leading them to white values. It is an integration in which the black man will have to prove himself in terms of these values before meriting acceptance and ultimate assimilation, and in which the poor will grow poorer and rich richer in a country where the poor have always been black."

The second contestation of Biko's memory comes from the state-linked political and bureaucratic classes. Their ascendance into the higher echelons of the post-apartheid bureaucracy has in practice also mobilised a version of black consciousness which, on the face of it, privileges blackness. The discourse of "transformation", "representivity" "and reflecting the demographics" of society are the concepts employed in the process …

As a bureaucracy, this confronts the majority of blacks as a cold, arrogant, often violent and indifferent system. The Biko who these two main post-apartheid black classes have appropriated is a Biko who is mute in the face of continued black suffering, exclusion and humiliation.

The business and political classes have nothing to say to the multitudes who live in the shacks and the RDP [reconstruction and development programme] houses that have been described as dog kennels; who continue to suffer unacceptable infant mortality rates; whose hospitals are less than places of abandonment and death; who continue to die from Aids. In a sense, Biko's thought has been reduced to slogans on T-shirts weaned of all its radical content as a philosophy of black liberation, and images of Biko have come to adorn glossy magazines.

The third contestation of Biko is the shout of the black majority for whom the formal ending of apartheid has not yet altered circumstances in any meaningful way.

This living Biko finds expression in the everyday struggles of the black masses for dignity and freedom. As Imraan Buccus writes, "Since 2004 an unprecedented wave of popular protest has ebbed and flowed across the country … This makes South Africa 'the most protest-rich country in the world'."

It is the explicit contention of the editors that Biko lives in these spaces of resistance which now appear and disappear and are revived in different forms and different parts of the post-apartheid society. The legacy carriers of the black consciousness philosophy are the excluded majority who continue to make life under extreme conditions and who, as Frantz Fanon once put it, cannot conceive of life otherwise than in the form of a battle against exploitation, misery and hunger.

An array of movements and organisations are demanding a dignity and a recognition that fundamentally challenges neoliberal post-apartheid South Africa. Every election cycle since the 2004 national election has seen movements across the country lift cries of "No Land! No Vote!" or "No Housing! No Jobs! No Vote!" signalling their refusal to participate in an unsatisfying "ballot box democracy".

Instead, they demand a genuine reciprocity, a different notion of politics, "a true humanity", as Biko puts it "where power politics will have no place".

If a politics that transcends the current reality is to emerge, it would in all likelihood emerge as these new movements and forms of self-activity continue to develop their own voice.

* Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko is edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel C Gibson and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This extract first appeared in the September 7th Sunday Independent.

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org