for serious political reflection” (Mangcu 2012, p. 110). In 1965, he graduated from St. Francis and, by 1966, was admitted to Durban Medical School at the University of Natal Non-European (UNNE).
Throughout Biko’s time at UNNE, he became more politicized and conscientized by serving on the Student Representative Council (SRC) under the umbrella of the multiracial student organization, National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). The early 1960s had proven to be a time when “Black students discovered that this liberal formation afforded one of the few remaining legal avenues for national dialogue among blacks” (Hopkins 1989, p. 21). This situation rapidly changed as Biko began to hone in on the color issue within NUSAS. He saw blacks being treated differently by their white counterparts, especially at the Rhodes University in Grahamstown NUSAS Conference in 1967. It was here that Biko would be painfully reminded of the two separate worlds divided by race that existed when the black African students had to stay at a church off campus and white students could attend the conference and receive meals on campus.
Gail Gerhart, a political science professor and author at Witswatersrand University, known for her rare interviews with Biko and Robert Sobukwe, records Biko stating his perception of white liberal students in NUSAS:
They had this problem…of superiority, and they tended to take us for granted, and they wanted us to accept things that were second class. They could not see why we could not consider staying in that church, and I began to feel therefore that our understanding of our own situation in this country was not quite coincidental with that of the whites. (Gerhart and Karis 2013, p. 96)
She further states:
Biko was convinced that black students needed their own organization in which they could speak for themselves instead of relying on liberal whites to articulate their goals and prescribe their modus operandi. (Gerhart and Karis 2013, p. 97)
This led to the formation of the South African Students’ Organization (SASO), an all-black student organization, in 1969, of which he was the founding president. This was another pivotal moment in Biko’s Christian thought development. It was in presenting the manifesto of SASO and the concept of black consciousness that there appears an ideological paradigm shift from a Westernized missionary or European hermeneutic of Christianity to a black South African concept of black theology simultaneously born during the Black Power Movement in the United States. Biko and other members of SASO gleaned from James Cone, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, and other US political activists a new perspective on how to encounter and understand God through black lens. For him, these lens portrayed a different hermeneutical base from which a message and image of Jesus could emerge in a radical new way that grappled with black experience in South Africa.
Biko (1978) states:
We must agree also that tacitly or overtly, deliberately or unawares, white Christians within the churches are preventing the church from assuming its natural character in the South African context, and therefore preventing it from being relevant to the black man’s situation. (pp. 58–59)
This new message helped erode the fear blacks had of white supremacy in the form of apartheid and a white God that punished them for being black Africans. What Biko and his medical school colleagues who were part of SASO created was a collective idea that spoke to the black religious, political, and socioeconomic conditions prevalent among blacks in South Africa under apartheid. He had become a staunch activist against the system of apartheid and for black liberation. He had an uncanny ability to take everyone’s ideas and articulate them into one cohesive thought to present them in written or verbal form.
Mangcu (2012) states:
It is within this context of a search for a practical religion that Steve and his colleagues began to search for a theological framework that spoke to the practical needs of black people…Or, as Magaziner puts it “South Africans gave Black Theology an African twist… Black Theology offered South Africans the possibility of restoring [a radical] Christ to African Theology”—so that the latter could speak to a broader black political constituency that included Coloreds and Indians. Thus Biko and his colleagues reframed both European and African Christianity into something more inclusive and relevant to the struggle… Through this reframing of Christianity, Steve and his colleagues had put Christianity at the forefront of the struggle, and in the process gave the movement an entry point into the heartbeat of the community. (pp. 173–175)
The University Christian Movement (UCM) was very influential in introducing James Cone’s concept of black theology to university students. Black theology was really important to Biko as he shared that his own Anglican Church structure was foreign to him and without substance but that he found the other to be relatable and this was why black theology “seem to be so attractive” to him (Biko 1978, p. 212). This concept caught fire and helped expose many black students to an existential Christianity that related to their current situation in an oppressed South Africa. Even though this was another multiracial organization, the leaders were not afraid to address and protest injustices against black South Africans as was the case with NUSAS.
Basil Moore, one of the founding Methodist clergy of the University Christian Movement (UCM), helped uplift the truth and power behind black theology. Moore believed this theological viewpoint was relevant to the racial dynamics between black and whites in an apartheid South Africa. Additionally, Magaziner (2010) stated, “Moore set the context for black theology’s emergence in South Africa” (p. 99). However, the government became aware of the radical movement of UCM and began to harass NUSAS too, introducing a law that prohibited blacks and whites from gathering more than seventy-two hours at a time. Moore believed that Christ had a more powerful message that had been overlooked by conservative orthodox Christians and, like Cone, believed that Christ’s message was political and instrumental in helping the oppressed to see themselves as human beings who were free.
Magaziner states:
Rather, Christ was appealing to believers to look inside themselves, to affirm themselves in recognition that every person “has value simply by being loved by God.” Although such therapeutic language might appear benign, Moore argued that it was politically potent, for with it, Christ had lit “the dangerous fire of [the people’s] sense of dignity and worth as human beings.” Such an awakening made oppression intolerable. Moore’s Christ thus spoke in language similar to that of Black Consciousness… Moore made the allusion explicit: “Jesus fits the situation of South African blacks…[and] the Roman rulers fit the situation of South African whites.” (p. 99)
Biko’s rearing, institutionalized education, organizational involvement, engagement with his scholarly colleagues, and reading of the literary works of theologians on distant shores helped shape his Christian mind-set. He delved deeply into what he thought it meant to be a Christian, which was not to focus on individualized petty sins. Rather, Biko believed that Christians have a greater responsibility and should focus on sins that harmed the greater good of humanity; it was not possible to operate in ubuntu principles founded in community, love, and respect for others with a Europeanized Christian paradigm that focused on the self.
Black consciousness was about uplifting, embracing, and unifying the black community, and when it came to adhering and walking in what had become “the gospel of black consciousness,” Woods stated that Biko better exemplified this message than any one of their contemporaries.
Biko, for this reason, criticized the missionary hermeneutics and ethical application of Christianity that he believed was whitewashed and used as a tool to subjugate blacks and strip them of their culture and traditions during colonization and apartheid. Even though he believed that European-taught Christianity was skewed, he did not abandon Christianity and its tenets but applied it to his new sociopolitical and utilitarian hermeneutical expression. In so doing, Biko appeared to be truthful to his calling as a revolutionary destined to fulfill both the call of his God and of his people. Like Jesus, he became an enemy
