Apartheids Child, Freedoms Son

It was a bit of a family joke—whenever his mother sent him out to sell apples at a football match to earn some extra money, he invariably gave a few away to the hungry, despite shorting his own profits. So many were killed. But Hector Pieterson was the first. So he rewound the film mid-roll and stuffed it in his sock. He started on a fresh roll, as enraged students turned on the police. He was burnt beyond recognition. Nzima often thinks about the two scenes he captured that day.

One of a boy being killed by the police, and another of students killing a policeman. Only one image made it back to The World. When the photos were developed a few hours later, an argument broke out among editors at The World over whether or not to run the now iconic image of a clearly traumatized Makhubo carrying a dead boy in his arms, his sister running alongside in anguish.

Children had been killed by the apartheid police. The latter argument won, and The World published an evening Extra edition. No one was prepared for the impact. Suddenly the world could no longer ignore the horror of apartheid. In South Africa the picture helped launch a civil uprising and emboldened the black liberation movement.

But it raised eyebrows for other countries that this is not right. How can kids be killed for claiming their rights? Nzima started getting harassed by the police. Then you come and fill the forms here that it was a stray bullet. Three months later the police caught up to him and put him under house arrest. He never took a photo again. The government shut down The World two years later, and raided the office. Sithole buried her brother two weeks later, on July 3. But over time she was able to put it into a kind of perspective. More than people died that day, and hundreds more in subsequent uprisings.

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I think he felt bad that Hector died. His intention was to save him. Soon the police started coming around. They accused Makhubo of posing the photo in order to embarrass the government. Makhubo slipped deeper into depression. SASO decided after a debate to remain non-affiliated with NUSAS, but would nevertheless recognise the larger organisation as the national student body.

The early focus of the Black Consciousness Movement BCM was on criticising anti-racist white liberals and liberalism itself, accusing it of paternalism and being a "negative influence" on black Africans. Biko argued that NUSAS merely sought to influence the white electorate; in his opinion, this electorate was not legitimate, and protests targeting a particular policy would be ineffective for the ultimate aim of dismantling the apartheid state.

Biko voted in favour of the group's creation but expressed reservations about the lack of consultation with South Africa's Coloureds or Indians. Mayatula became the BPC's first president; Biko did not stand for any leadership positions. While the BPC was primarily political, Black Consciousness activists also established the Black Community Programmes BCPs to focus on improving healthcare and education and fostering black economic self-reliance. Biko's banning order in prevented him from working officially for the BCPs from which he had previously earned a small stipend, but he helped to set up a new BPC branch in Ginsberg, which held its first meeting in the church of a sympathetic white clergyman, David Russell.

By , the government regarded Black Consciousness as a threat. This prevented him from leaving the King William's Town magisterial district, prohibited him from speaking either in public or to more than one person at a time, barred his membership of political organisations, and forbade the media from quoting him.

In December , attempting to circumvent the restrictions of the banning order, the BPC declared Biko their honorary president. The state claimed that Black Consciousness philosophy was likely to cause "racial confrontation" and therefore threatened public safety. Biko was called as a witness for the defence; he sought to refute the state's accusations by outlining the movement's aims and development. In , Biko had enrolled for a law degree by correspondence from the University of South Africa.

He passed several exams, but had not completed the degree at his time of death. During his ban, Biko asked for a meeting with Donald Woods , the white liberal editor of the Daily Dispatch.

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Under Woods' editorship, the newspaper had published articles criticising apartheid and the white-minority regime and had also given space to the views of various black groups, but not the BCM. Biko hoped to convince Woods to give the movement greater coverage and an outlet for its views.

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Biko acknowledged that his earlier "antiliberal" writings were "overkill", but said that he remained committed to the basic message contained within them. Over the coming years the pair became close friends. The security services took Biko to the Walmer police station in Port Elizabeth, where he was held naked in a cell with his legs in shackles. Biko was examined by a doctor, Ivor Lang, who stated that there was no evidence of injury on Biko. News of Biko's death spread quickly across the world, and became symbolic of the abuses of the apartheid system.

Speaking publicly about Biko's death, the country's police minister Jimmy Kruger initially implied that it had been the result of a hunger strike , a statement he later denied. His account was challenged by some of Biko's friends, including Woods, who said that Biko had told them that he would never kill himself in prison. Both domestic and international pressure called for a public inquest to be held, to which the government agreed.

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The verdict was treated with scepticism by much of the international media and the US Government led by President Jimmy Carter. After the abolition of apartheid and the establishment of a majority government in , a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to investigate past human-rights abuses. In , the Constitutional Court ruled against the family, allowing the investigation to proceed. The ideas of the Black Consciousness Movement were not developed solely by Biko, but through lengthy discussions with other black students who were rejecting white liberalism.

Biko rejected the apartheid government's division of South Africa's population into tribal and ethnic groups, instead dividing the population into two categories: In case it has a rebound effect on them because they are white". Biko saw white racism in South Africa as the totality of the white power structure. He noted that white South Africans were poorly suited to this role because they had not personally experienced the oppression that their black counterparts faced.

Biko and his comrades regarded multi-racial anti-apartheid groups as unwittingly replicating the structure of apartheid because they contained whites in dominant positions of control, [] and therefore did not participate in these multi-racial organisations.

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I reject only the concept that black liberation can be achieved through the leadership of white liberals. Biko's approach to activism focused on psychological empowerment, [54] and both he and the BCM saw their main purpose as combating the feeling of inferiority that most black South Africans experienced. One of the ways that Biko and the BCM sought to achieve psychological empowerment was through community development. Biko opposed any collaboration with the apartheid government, such as the agreements that the Coloured and Indian communities made with the regime.

Biko believed that while apartheid and white-minority rule continued, "sporadic outbursts" of violence against the white minority were inevitable. A staunch anti-imperialist , [] Biko saw the South African situation as a "microcosm" of the broader "black—white power struggle" which manifests as "the global confrontation between the Third World and the rich white nations of the world".

Biko hoped that a future socialist South Africa could become a completely non-racial society, with people of all ethnic backgrounds living peacefully together in a "joint culture" that combined the best of all communities. Biko was neither a communist nor capitalist.

In conversation with Woods, Biko insisted that the BCM would not degenerate into anti-white racism "because it isn't a negative, hating thing. It's a positive black self-confidence thing involving no hatred of anyone". Our main concern is the liberation of the blacks. Tall and slim in his youth, [] by his twenties Biko was over six feet tall, with the "bulky build of a heavyweight boxer carrying more weight than when in peak condition", according to Woods.

His quick brain, superb articulation of ideas and sheer mental force were highly impressive. Biko and many others in his activist circle had an antipathy toward luxury items because most South African blacks could not afford them. The Nationalist government portrayed Biko as a hater of whites, [] but he had several close white friends, [] and both Woods and Wilson insisted that he was not a racist.

Vorster and Andries Treurnicht , instead hating their ideas. Biko never addressed questions of gender and sexism in his politics.

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Feminism was viewed as irrelevant "bra-burning". Biko married Ntsiki Mashalaba in December Nkosinathi, born in , and Samora, born in Biko is viewed as the "father" of the Black Consciousness Movement and the anti-apartheid movement's first icon. Although Biko's ideas have not received the same attention as Frantz Fanon's, [] Ahluwalia and Zegeye wrote in that the men shared "a highly similar pedigree in their interests in the philosophical psychology of consciousness, their desire for a decolonising of the mind, the liberation of Africa and in the politics of nationalism and socialism for the 'wretched of the earth'".

Woods held the view that Biko had filled the vacuum within the country's African nationalist movement that arose in the late s following the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and the banning of Sobukwe.

Kin Bentley reviews the recently published book on successful businessman Mkhuseli Khusta Jack.

Biko was commemorated in several artworks after his death. A triptych, it depicted the three police officers implicated in Biko's death. Biko's death also inspired several songs, including from artists outside South Africa such as Tom Paxton and Peter Hammill. The inquest into his death was dramatised as a play, The Biko Inquest , first performed in London in ; a performance was directed by Albert Finney and broadcast on television.

Following apartheid's collapse, Woods raised funds to commission a bronze statue of Biko from Naomi Jacobson. It was erected outside the front door of city hall in East London on the Eastern cape, opposite a statue commemorating British soldiers killed in the Second Boer War. Buildings, institutes and public spaces around the world have been named after Biko, such as the Steve Bikoplein in Amsterdam.

As a reporter on the Evening Post where the late Jimmy Matyu was my mentor and later on the Eastern Province Herald, I wrote myriad stories in which Khusta featured prominently. On the right in a picture taken in after Khusta and other UDF leaders had just been released from St Albans prison following one of many spells in security police detention, there I am dutifully taking notes. Interestingly, Khusta cites one of the first cases I covered of injustice against the people of the Port Elizabeth townships as having given added impetus to the spirit of rebellion and resistance to the puppet black local authorities in charge of Ibhayi.

That was one of the first political stories I recall covering after moving to Port Elizabeth from East London in August The pass laws were a particularly pernicious part of his early life, making even attending school in a town or city a breach of the law. Yet, against all the odds, after starting school aged 10, being arrested umpteen times, being expelled from one school for his activism and losing several years of schooling through boycotts and detention, he finally got his matric at Cowan High School — when he was already in his mids.

He had also endured ongoing encounters with the security police and in particular Gideon Niewoudt. Khusta was picked up and held captive by the Special Branch so often I lost count while reading this book. A fortnight here, four months there, a couple of days here, a year there … He was subjected to myriad forms of torture and intimidation and was clearly lucky to come out of it all alive. But finally, he and most of the leaders of the UDF in the Eastern Cape ended up in St Albans prison outside PE, where they were held for the last few years of the s.

And Khusta and a handful of other Eastern Cape UDF leaders were among those he wanted to consult as he navigated the ANC still banned at this point towards the ground-breaking deal with the National Party in the early s which ushered in non-racial democracy.