Biko’s barren legacy

South Africa’s liberation would likely have been long delayed, had it not been for the brave leadership of Steve Bantu Biko — the struggle hero beaten to death at age 30, exactly 30 years ago this month.

It was of course “his” Black Consciousness movement that reignited resistance and fed the youth rebellion, which in turn revived the weak and exiled African National Congress in the 1970s.

But because he was not ANC as such, his contribution has never received the recognition it deserves in our post-1994 democracy.

At least, Rhodes University today announced its student union would be named after the Eastern Cape martyr.

This is, significantly, the same campus whose refusal to break the 1960s apartheid laws and accommodate visiting black students proved the catalyst Biko to break away from the white National Union of South African Students and create the black-only South African Students Organisation.

Rhodes’s gesture is overdue — and the positive symbolic significance is to be welcomed. But name changing can all too easily mean co-option rather than transformation. Or, at least, offer an excuse for dodging the tougher changes.

Perhaps the saddest comment on Biko’s legacy, however, is his forgotten identity project.

For him, skin colour was not destiny: to be “black” was a purposeful political identity. It was a state of mind, not a physical or even cultural characteristic.

To be “black” for Biko was a construction — the mirror image of the way the Pretoria regime back then successfully mobilised Afrikaners and Engelssprekende blankes into “whites”.

Today, however, the word “black” is used to refer to phenotypical features of Africans. It excludes other people of “colour” whose oppression under apartheid still echoes today. It includes many people whom Biko would have dismissed as “non-whites”, unworthy of a “black” liberatory appellation.

The point is that South Africa has neglected the project of building a new, non-racial identity. Instead, we’ve reverted to a pre-Biko reification of strains of skin colours as a central determinant. So while Biko helped to bring us freedom, we’re failing dismally to continue his creative contribution.

As a Rhodes student myself at the time of Biko’s murder, the significance of the man was not only to assist in building a black identity for liberation. In so doing, he also helped to liberate me from an upbringing that assumed white supremacy.

It is recorded on a plaque at Biko’s graveside: “It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.” His generation’s ideas deserve better than they’re getting today.