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I Remember Steve Biko
By Xolela Mangcu
Adapted from Biko: A Biography by the same author.
TAFELBERG
1
In My Mind’s Eye
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of
memory against forgetting.”
MILAN KUNDERA
It was 12 September 1977. I remember my mother remarking on the oddity of the rain in the midst of the sunshine. AmaXhosa call that type of rain ilinci, and it is a bad omen. I also remember that it was a weekday because my mother – who was also my primary school teacher – and I had just returned from school. She had been preparing something for me to eat before I returned for after-school classes when someone knocked at the door. As she so often did, my mother asked me to answer the door. I called out: “Forbes Nyathi is here to see you,” and returned to the serious business of my lunch. Forbes is Steve Biko’s first cousin, as his mother Eugenia was Steve’s father Mzingaye’s younger sister. I took a second glance at Forbes, normally a cheerful fellow, and noticed the sombre look on his face. They both disappeared into my mother’s room, and all I could make out were whispers. When my mother came out of the room, she looked distressed. Something terrible had happened, she said: “uBantu uswelekile” – “Bantu is no longer with us.” Everyone in our community called Steve by his first name – Bantu, a name which signifies being at one with the people.
Before I could ask more, she rushed me back to school.
Back at our school, chaos reigned. Steve’s niece Nompumezo was crying inconsolably in our Standard Five (Grade 7) classroom. The older boys summoned us out of class and instructed us to go back to the township. We would not be returning to school for weeks on end. This was of great concern because that meant there was a chance I would miss the exams for the last year of primary school. I had already expressed my desire to go to one of the more prestigious boarding schools for junior high school the following year. Given what was going on around me, this seemed like a self-indulgent thought. Community members streamed from all corners of the township to gather in the public square in front of our house. The question – and there seemed to be no satisfactory answer – was what had happened to Bantu?
The minister of justice, Jimmy Kruger, had issued a statement that Steve Biko had died from a hunger strike:
He was arrested in connection with activities related to the riots in Port Elizabeth, and inter alia for drafting and distributing pamphlets, which incited arson and violence . . . Mr Biko refused his meals and threatened a hunger strike. But he was regularly supplied with meals and water which he refused to partake of.[1]
The community was outraged. This explanation for deaths in detention had been offered too many times for anyone to take it seriously. I remember the anger of the crowd – especially the youngsters. I particularly remember the agitation of the twin brothers with biblical names, Joseph and Daniel, who lived at the back of our house. The youths were urging the assembled group to take revenge on the whites in town. Cooler heads prevailed and that line of action was abandoned. The anger turned inward. The discussion suddenly turned into speculation about who might have been the police informer. The next thing, a large group of youths went on a rampage. I ran home.
For the next few days a dark cloud of smoke hung over our township – literally and figuratively – as government installations and homes of suspected police informers went up in flames.
The youth targeted teachers because they were seen as part of the system of Bantu Education. My brother, who was a school principal at the nearby township of Zwelitsha, had his house destroyed by a mob of students and he moved into our home in Ginsberg. I was afraid for our home as well but nothing happened to us. My mother sent me to the shops to check out a group of youngsters who had threatened my brother about coming to find him at our house. The boys saw through my mission and warned me not to tell on them.
In the ensuing mayhem over the next few days I found myself staring at a policeman with a rifle. He was in camouflage behind a shrub. I turned and ran back as fast as I could. That kind of near encounter with death never left my memory. Under apartheid too many people were killed by being shot in the back, fleeing from the police – from Sharpeville to June 1976. I was lucky to come out of that experience alive, to somehow tell the story not only of Steve’s death but also of his life.
Over the next two weeks our little township became the focus of the world. Hundreds of people from all over the country and from all over the globe descended on Ginsberg to hold a vigil at the Biko home in Leightonville. Every night I escaped my mother’s watchful eye to listen to the fiery speeches and the freedom songs. By this time I knew the songs by heart, for I had grown beyond my years. My brother, who was a friend of Steve’s, would later tell me that Steve would compose some of these songs by simply taking popular Bible hymns and replacing them with revolutionary lyrics.
Whatever their authorship, these revolutionary songs became our heritage. The people at Steve’s home sang them as if they were singing from the same hymnal sheet, with a fervour similar to that described by Pityana.
The youth from Johannesburg’s Soweto township seemed particularly fearless as they did their famous call-and-response throughout the period of the vigil. Someone would shout at the police: Niyabesaba na? –“Are you scared of them?” – and the crowd would respond: Hayi, asibesabi, siyabafuna – “No, bring ’em on”. From a distance I had been fascinated by the militancy of the Soweto youth since the outbreak of the 1976 student uprisings the year before. I followed the news about Soweto student leader Tsietsi Mashinini whose famed disguises and escapes from the police were the stuff of legend throughout the country. Now Soweto had come to Ginsberg.
Steve Biko’s funeral was set for 25 September 1977 at the Victoria Stadium in King William’s Town – many of the most visible symbols of this most colonial of towns are named after 19th-century British monarchs or governors. The whole region is peppered with colonial names, many dating back to the arrival of German settlers in 1857 – East London, Berlin, Hanover, Hamburg, Frankfort, etc. Giving the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture in Cape Town in 2003, the famed African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o spoke about the inappropriateness of these names in an African country. It was as if African memory was made over and dressed in the garb of European terminology. Of course, the towns had their original names too, such as Qonce or Bhisho for King William’s Town. My granduncle, Benjamin kaTyamzashe (popularly known as B ka-T), composed a song for the town titled Bhisho ikhaya lam – Bhisho is my home. This name was later usurped by the homeland leader Lennox Sebe to build a boondoggle of a capital for the Ciskei Bantustan. Ultimately, the colonial names became the official ones.
And so there I was – an eleven-year-old, joining the throngs of adults on their way to Victoria Stadium. There are many things about that day that I don’t remember. One thing that has stayed with me is that I was wearing a shirt that Bandile, my cousin from Cape Town had given to me, and that I did not have any shoes on.
It was unusual for the funeral of a black person, let alone a revolutionary leader, to be held in town. But there was no venue big enough in our township. The community had sent a delegation, led by my granduncle B ka-T Tyamzashe, to negotiate with the municipality for the use of the Victoria Stadium. When the municipality gave the go-ahead, the white people in the neighbourhood packed their stuff and left town for the weekend.
According to newspaper reports
