If Steve Biko Were Still Alive…

Almost 40 years since the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, South Africa is crying out for someone with his vision to lead it.

- Thandi Xaba

Naked, shackled and suffering from severe head injuries is how South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko died in a prison cell. It was a death that changed South African politics forever.

The Steve Biko Foundation says it was at this moment, on that cold Sunday on September 12, 1977, the country was robbed of its “foremost political thinkers”.

Kwandiwe Kondlo, a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Johannesburg, says that South Africa would be a different place if Biko was still alive. He says Biko would have made President Nelson Mandela reconsider his approach to introducing democracy to South African.

“If Steve Biko did not die, there is a probability that he would have actually forced and influenced the African National Congress (ANC) to change their approach. He would have been a factor that compelled the ANC to rethink its strategy of national liberation,” says Kondlo.

“Biko was not ANC, he was not PAC (Pan Africanist Congress), but he was standing for a movement of black solidarity. He sought to make known the deliberateness of God’s plan of making black people black,” says Kondlo.

Biko was one of the founders of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO), a body for black, Indian and colored students in the country. SASO evolved into the anti-apartheid Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in the early 1970s. Biko’s ideologies were instrumental in people rekindling their pride in being black, and culminated in the Soweto Uprising in 1976. The student riots against Bantu education led to other protests spreading across South Africa and greater pressure on the government to end apartheid.

Now, almost 40 years since Biko’s tragic death, his philosophies could be as important as they were then.