The question is about Steve Biko and his significance to young people today both here and elsewhere. And I happen to think that Steve Biko – or Steve Bantu Biko, as he called himself – is a critical voice in not just the entire apartheid movement, but in the Black freedom movement worldwide. His book “I Write What I like” is not just kind of a solitary voice of resistance but it is a collective yearning for resistance.
He was a central figure in the Black consciousness movement and the state executed him by brutality because they feared that so many people would hear him and respond to him that Biko would become the president of a new South Africa. And I don’t mean a continuation of the state South Africa but a break with the state South Africa and the rise of something Biko called “Azania” – a new state, a new African state. Of cause the repressive Apartheid government executed him out of fear of his influence ’cause it was growing and growing and growing.
But I think we put sometimes too much weight on the movement of the past and we don’t think about movements of the present. There is a group in South Africa today that is in resistance to the political leaders of South Africa today. It is a collective of homeless people or what they call the “shack dwellers” and their name is “Abahlali baseMjondolo” [Zulu for “the residents of the shacks”] and they consider Steve Biko one of their ancestors. And they also are students right now of Frantz Fanon and they call out how South Africa is not living the freedom that was yearned for for decades after decades after decades and how it has become, in some ways, a neo-liberal state as opposed to a new free African republic where education, housing, the land is returned to the African people.
To give you just a smidgen of information about the present versus the past: We are in the present, right, we are in the new world, right? Guess what percent of land in South Africa is owned by Africans today? Take a wild guess. I bet you did not say eight or nine percent. But guess what: That’s the truth! So these are some of the lessons that Biko fought for. These are some of the lessons that Biko was killed by the apartheid government for. And these are some of the struggles that Biko still resonates among in South Africa, outside of South Africa and throughout the Black world who read him and thinks about his life, his sacrifice, his struggle, and the struggles to come.
With love, not fear – this is Mumia Abu-Jamal. Thank you.
