Steve Biko I Write What Like

[Amabella Batton]

Despitehis banning, he clandestinely continued his work. He spoke prior to his banning across the nation. In this 1971 speech he spoke about the need for Blacks to break the shackles of being told by White people how to advocate for change.

The first time I read his writings in a book called I Write What I Like, I became an instant fan of Biko. I was so proud of his insistence that no one could tell him what to write. The Apartheid government tried so hard to silence him that they eventually had to kill him to do so. He wrote a letter to his family apologizing for putting his work before them.

The dedication and passion for freedom that Biko displayed in his writings continues to inspire and guide me to this day. Speaking truth to power is often overrated. For Biko it was everything. Not allowing the oppressively racist Apartheid state to control the minds of Black people was the mission of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa.

Black people like King and Biko have realized that there can be a duality in Whites who profess to be allies. On the one hand they denounce wrong doing, but on the other hand they sit back and continue to watch it play out.

I have endeavored to learn American history in a very odd way. I look at the histories of all Americans. I have studied the history of enslaved Africans, White indentured servants, American elites, immigrants from Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Indigenous people of this land. The diversity of lived experiences has taught me to see history as parallel journeys in time.

To study the history of people of color is to study the history of White people in this country. It is impossible to study the history of Native Americans since the fifteenth century without learning about White people. No study of the lives of African and African ancestored people is devoid of White people. The study of immigration to America by Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Hmong, Vietnamese and others from Asia requires you to see the role of Whites in those experiences. I have learned more about White people by studying the history of people of color than I could have ever hoped for.

We can see what these parallel journeys look like if we study time periods in history and explore what was going on in all of the different communities present at that time. A study of the American Revolution must include Europeans, Africans and Native Americans to be complete.

I will continue to use my voice as a weapon. Weapons are designed to protect and to destroy our enemies. They can be used for defensive purposes and offensive purposes. Mine are used to defend the honor and integrity of communities of people of color and to battle against those who want to do them harm.

A celebration of Steve Biko's legacy of freedom

Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness philosophy, was killed in prison on 12 September 1977. Biko was only thirty years old, but his ideas and political activities changed the course of South African history and helped hasten the end of apartheid. The year 2007 saw the thirtieth anniversary of Biko's death. To mark the occasion, the then Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Mosibudi Mangena, commissioned Chris van Wyk to compile an anthology of essays as a tribute to the great South African son. Among the contributors are Minister Mangena himself, ex-President Thabo Mbeki, writer Darryl Accone, journalists Lizeka Mda and Bokwe Mafuna, academics Jonathan Jansen, Mandla Seleoane and Saths Cooper, a friend of Biko's and former president of Azapo. We Write What We Like proudly echoes the title of Biko's seminal work, I Write What I Like. It is a gift to a new generation which enjoys freedom, from one that was there when this freedom was being fought for. And it celebrates the man whose legacy is the freedom to think and say and write what we like.

Duncan Innes was student activist and is currently executive director of the Innes Labour Brief and a lecturer in the School of Economic and Business Sciences at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Jonathan Jansen is Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, current President of the South African Institute of Race Relations and President of the South African Academy of Science. He is a prolific writer and educationist in South Africa.

In what would have been his sixty-seventh year, Biko lives only as a memory we use to claim our present. He is dead and past and although we mourn him, we must admit that his continued life is subject to the whims of we who live. Maybe in his 66th year we will be honest about this, and stop claiming that he would recognize himself in our writing, in our policies, in our pretensions. We might instead aspire to do the best we can to twist and distort him, to write what we like, and thus to contribute to the creative and ongoing production of the present, in hopes that it might live to become a past worth remembering.

The media is how we share ideas, information, news and even culture. Whether that is through traditional journalism, drama, or even through dance videos on social media. And it is through this sharing of ideas, information, news and culture that our minds and beliefs are shaped.

Being able to write what we like is meaningless if we are not given access to the platforms to be able to spread that message. And in talking about spreading that message, I do not mean being able to post something on YouTube or social media in the hope it goes viral.

There is not a single major UK TV news bulletin with a non-white person in charge, that includes BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. And in terms of drama, despite non-white people representing over 14% of the UK population, the number of non-white directors for EastEnders is around 2%. (I do not have specific figures for the number of black directors).

When I have given talks about this in the past, people are quick to understand the impact that effectively excluding certain sections of society from the most important media platforms has on free speech. But it goes deeper.

It is argued the residents of the Grenfell Tower were denied this basic human right when the block burnt down on 14 June 2017. A lot of journalists also argued that one of the reasons it burnt down is because predominantly white newsrooms did not think the known safety concerns were important enough to report on before the fire and therefore the issues were never taken seriously by the policy makers who could have addressed them.

That is why I am honoured to be part of the Black Lives Matter takeover this week and, to echo the words of Steve Biko, I hope we can all do our little bit to ensure we can control our minds by ensuring representation in who controls the sharing of ideas, information, news and culture.

The Black Lives Matter movement must be more than a passing moment. As a small step towards this end, EachOther is lending its platform to four Black guest editors who are working to fight injustice. They will examine the themes of justice, education, charity and journalism in the UK. Our journalism editor is Marcus Ryder, visiting professor in media diversity at Birmingham City University.

When Vasco da Gama set foot at the Cape in 1498, it was part of the general period of what has come to be known as the European renaissance, the founding moment of Capitalist modernity and Western bourgeois ascendancy in the world. It was also the beginnings of the wanton destruction of many city civilisations along the coasts of Africa, East Africa in particular.

Steve Biko, whom we have come to honour, is among this great gallery whose work and devotion have impacted those beyond the native shores and make it possible for us to even talk about the possibilities of a new Africa out of colonial ashes of the latter day empires.

I therefore feel honoured, humbled in fact, to have been asked to give the Fourth Annual Biko lecture in memory of this illustrious son of the soil. He combines the cultural, the intellectual and the political in the same person. He exemplifies the public intellectual in its finest tradition. In one of his interviews reproduced in I Write as I Like, Biko describes a confrontation with his jailers in which he asserts his right to resistance for as long as he is able.

In both cases, their words and lives add to the rich intellectual legacy of African heroes and heroines of Pan-African struggles. One associates Sobukwe and Biko with consciousness, Mandela with the Renaissance. But it is significant for me that the three lives, while inextricably linked to Black and social imagination everywhere, are South African and the concepts of consciousness and renaissance have found new life in South Africa today.

As a Kenyan, an African, and a writer, South Africa holds a special place in my social experience and intellectual formation. It was as an educational presence that I first became aware of this country. I had just started primary schooling when it was announced that one of our teachers, moreover from my village, was leaving us. He was going to Fort Hare for more learning. The image of Fort Hare as a Mecca of learning was reinforced when later yet another from the same region, this time a minister of religion, followed suit.

However, it was while I was a student in an independent African school that I first became aware of the South African story as also my story. The independent African-run schools in Kenya were started in the thirties of the twentieth century and their coming into being had been inspired by the Ethiopian movement in South, Central and East Africa. But it was the way our teacher taught the South African story, from the perspective of the Black experience, that brought it home to us and the names of Shaka, Moshoeshoe, Cethswayo became part of our collective memory.

Fortunately, the other image of the South African story as my story never disappeared. In fact it was rekindled with greater intensity when later in high school, a missionary-run school, I one day saw one of the only two African teachers in the school holding a copy of Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom. It is difficult to quite describe the impact of the title on my imagination, encountering it, as I did, when Kenya was in the midst of the War of Independence. The title was to lead me to the works of Abrahams and to the great gallery of South African writers, some of whom I was later to interact with as fellow writers and friends.

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