Stephen Bantu Biko: Do not rest!

On 12 September 1977 we were on long vacation in preparation for going into our final year as students of government secondary school, Funtua (then part of the north Central State of Nigeria but now in Katsina state), when news broke that Stephen Bantu Biko, the militant charismatic leader of the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania (BCMA) had been murdered by the apartheid security forces.

We were heart broken and angry. Steve had come to prominence and became our idol as a result of the Soweto protests of 1976 that thrust a new generation of militant youths into the leadership of the liberation war in South Africa. A popular musician, Sonny Okosun had ingrained that struggle in our popular consciousness in his album ‘Fire in Soweto’ just as Peter Tosh did with ‘Get Up Stand Up’ or Bob Marley’s ‘Exodus’, ‘Africa Unite’ and other songs.

Nigeria, though under a military regime (the charismatic Murtala Mohammed later succeeded by Olushegun Obasanjo) was in its most radical and assertive Pan-Africanist foreign policy regime in those days. Nigeria chaired the UN Anti-Apartheid Committee, even though it did not share borders with the apartheid state of South Africa. But by virtue of its readiness to put its money, diplomatic and political resources where its mouth was, it became a very active member of the frontline states.

Murtala Mohammed had been decisive in resolving the Angola impasse that pitched MPLA and many African states against UNITA and its Western masters - principally the USA. There was a celebrated public exchange of words with President Gerald Ford (who had taken over from disgraced Nixon as US President) just before the OAU Special Summit in Kampala on 11 January1976. Ford had written to all African leaders basically instructing them not to recognize the MPLA. The decision to recognise MPLA hung on a balance with a number of states dithering or just too cowardly to resist America’s pressures. On his way to the summit, Murtala took the unusual step of publishing not just Ford’s offensive letter but also his own brand of diplomatic response to it that basically meant: SHUT UP FORD! In Kampala he gave a powerful speech that is still remembered by many of my generation today: AFRICA HAS COME OF AGE. To crown it all the Nigerian Government refused to allow the haughty US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger from visiting Nigeria pleading they could not ‘guarantee his personal security’!

We used to follow these events and read the speeches in the media. As secondary school students we used to be impatient to enter the university so that we could be joining in the protests, marches and public demonstrations organised by university students.

The media in Nigeria - especially the newspapers and the radios (more accessible at the time than the TV) were full of stories on Southern Africa, the racism faced by Africans on their own soil, the duplicities of the west in aiding and abetting the criminal system simply because the lure of gold and other minerals blinded them to their own professed religion and pretences to loving humanity.

Oscar Wilde’s prayers of ‘praying to live in interesting times’ could not have been better answered. We grew up in that anti-imperialist and pro-liberation and unapologetically Pan-Africanist era with popular support for the struggles in South Africa, Angola, Mozambique and southern Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe). It was a period when even the old OAU was most united on the liberation agenda. There was concrete solidarity in most of the countries except reactionary ones like Banda's Malawi or Mobutu's Zaire, (who openly collaborated with apartheid) and later on states like Moi's Kenya, Houphoet Boigny's Ivory Coast (that were allowing their countries to be used as conduits for breaking trade sanctions).

You can imagine the outrage, public and private grief of many when the sad news broke about Steve Biko's assassination. There were mass protests, public outpourings of grief and declaration of continued support for the struggle for liberation in Southern Africa. Some of us were even young and certain enough to demand that the Nigerian government should allow us to enlist in a volunteer army to go and fight in South Africa!

No one was deceived by the official line then that he had hung himself in his cell. A white Journalist, Donald Woods, who was a close friend of Biko’s, was one of the bravest people to have exposed the lies about Biko's death right from the start. He had to go into exile but he did not relent turning the tragedy into a mass selling book and even more widely seen movie ‘Cry Freedom’. Subsequent revelations during the truth-and-no-reconciliation (reconciliation without truth) hearings confirmed the more gruesome aspects of the evil act against humanity by the apartheid state.

Biko was young, passionate, fearless and visionary. In less than a decade he led a whole generation of young South Africans to reject Bantu education, to be proud of their African heritage and to refuse to be second class citizens in their own country.

While the older generation of liberation fighters in the older organisations were mostly ‘gentle men’, anxious to prove that they are or could be as educated and 'civilized' as the whites, the Biko generation not only asserted their equality but believed that they are better than whites in many areas especially culturally, spiritually and morally. It was South Afrioca’s moment of SAY IT LOUD , I AM BLACK AND PROUD. For a people that have been made to feel inferior through deliberate miseducation and religious manipulation, the arrival of Steve Biko changed things both psychologically and philosophically.

Only recently I was watching the film, Good Bye Bafana, about Mandela and his jailer in Robben Island. In it you hear white prison warders and their immaculately dressed island trophy wives in their officers’ parties reaffirming their fate that apartheid was god's way of things. Biko helped many Black youth to reject such gods and helped opened the eyes of many whites too, even as he frightened the apartheid powers that be.

He and his colleagues did not just hope and pray for freedom one day. Deep in their burning hearts it was not overcoming their oppression one day: they believed in freedom and wanted it there and then. Biko's vision and courage resonated with the young, the most critical social category in any project of social transformation. They are the ones with much to gain and much to lose. The movement inspired doomsday scenario in the Boers and the apartheid state that their future was no longer as secured as their propaganda made them believe.

In killing Biko and doing so in the most fiendish way, they sought to kill the hope and aspirations of the youth of South Africa. However, you cannot murder the future. Instead they martyred him, making him an icon of the liberation struggle. Biko's life and example again proves that to make a lasting difference it is not how long one lived but how well one served. His was a very short life but one that is continuously remembered and revered for his dedication and commitment to freedom. Not just in Africa, but also among all strugglers for justice and human dignity.

I remember going to Belfast in the 'trouble days' in Northern Ireland as a guest (part of an all black delegation from mainland Britain) of Sinn Fein students (terrorists in those days!). The Irish take very seriously the tragedy of dying and martyrdom. They tend to gravesides with the same passion of their sectarian divide. They also have beautiful murals all over the place celebrating their mostly young dead partisans. I was stuck by the number of Steve Biko murals I saw along with those of Bobby Sands (the IRA prisoner whom Margaret Thatcher allowed to die on hunger strike in the infamous Maze Prison).

There was another part of the many experiences of that trip. I became very popular (in republican circles) during the two weeks we spent there because many of our hosts thought that I was Steve Biko's brother and would never allow me pay for anything! Maybe it was because in those days I was a bonafide revolutionary perpetually in jeans and beret with huge beards to match! Thank God there were not many BOSS (apartheid's intelligence) operatives around in Belfast. However come to think of it our Irish hosts did not make mistakes because Steve Biko was indeed one of the greatest brothers in the struggle.

On the 30th anniversary of his assassination we say to him, as he stands by the ancestors, that his soul should not rest, because it is not yet Uhuru in Azania though some 'comrades' have been privatised as Rand multibillionnaires.