We Write What We Like , livre ebook
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102
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English
Ebook
2007
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Publié par
Date de parution
01 novembre 2007
Nombre de lectures
2
EAN13
9781776141296
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Publié par
Date de parution
01 novembre 2007
Nombre de lectures
2
EAN13
9781776141296
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
WE WRITE WHAT WE LIKE
EDITED BY CHRIS VAN WYK
Stephen Bantu Biko, 1946–1977
Courtesy of The Herald , Johnnic Communications.
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
South Africa
http://witspress.wits.ac.za
© selection, compilation and introduction, Chris van Wyk, 2007
© individual essays, authors indicated, 2007
© cover photograph, Daily Dispatch , Johnnic Communications
© photographs, individuals and institutes, as indicated
This publication was commissioned by the Biko Memorial Convention and financially supported by the Department of Arts and Culture
First published 2007
ISBN 978-1-86814-464-8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express permission, in writing, of both the copyright holders and the publishers.
Cover, layout and design by Hothouse South Africa
Printed and bound by Paarl Print, Paarl, South Africa
History from time to time brings to the fore the kind of leaders who seize the moment, who cohere the wishes and aspirations of the oppressed. Such was Steve Biko, a fitting product of his time; a proud representative of the re-awakening of a people.
Nelson Mandela
Contents
Introduction: Chris van Wyk
Acknowledgements
Timeline of Steve Biko’s life
1. Lizeka Mda
Dear Steve
2. Mosibudi Mangena
Thirty years on and not much has changed
3. Thabo Mbeki
Steve Biko: 30 years after
4. Darryl Accone
Through chess I discovered Steve Biko
5. Veli Mbele
Biko’s influence on me
6. Mandla Seleoane
Biko’s influence and a reflection
7. Bokwe Mafuna
The impact of Steve Biko on my life
8. Mathatha Tsedu
He shaped the way I see the world
9. Zithulele Cindi
White carnations and the Black Power revolution: they tried us for our ideas
10. Saths Cooper and Pandelani Nefolovhodwe
Steve Biko and the SASO/BPC trial
11. Duncan Innes
A white man remembers
12. Jonathan Jansen
King James, Princess Alice, and the ironed hair: a tribute to Stephen Bantu Biko
13. Achille Mbembe
Biko’s testament of hope
14. Steve Biko
Black Consciousness and the quest for a true humanity
Contributors
Introduction
In paying tribute to Steve Biko I cast my mind back to two specific moments in my life.
It is a hot summer day in September 1971. I am 14 years old and in standard 7 (grade 9). I am sitting at the diningroom table in our tiny matchbox of a house in Riverlea, south of Johannesburg. The heat is almost worse than the homework I am struggling with. The front door is open for some relief. Our wire gate swings open and I hear footsteps approaching. This is exactly what I need – some distraction. It’s probably one of my friends coming to chat. I don’t know yet who it is but I will know any second now as the footsteps make their way up the small stoep.
It’s a policeman, blond and blue and white like the South African flag, and barely out of his teens.
‘Hullo, can I help you?’ I say.
He ignores my greeting. ‘Where’s Van Wyk?’ he barks in Afrikaans.
He must mean my father! What has my dad done wrong?
‘He’s in the bathroom,’ I tell the young cop.
He wastes not a moment more but turns on his heel and goose-steps to the bathroom – where he bangs on the door barking out our surname.
Suddenly there is consternation in our home. Curious, big-eyed siblings peep out from rooms and Ma comes to see what’s the matter.
‘Get out of there!’ the cop demands.
Within seconds my father flies out of the bathroom, clothes sticking to a wet body, steam rising from him, rubbing a towel through his hair.
‘ Fok! ’ says the cop, stepping back from my father, ‘ jy’s nie die Van Wyk wat ek soek nie!’ (You’re not the Van Wyk I want). He flounces out of the door, leaving behind, in place of an apology, his rudeness and the smell of his sweat.
Fast forward ten years to a hot Friday morning in January 1981. I am married and my wife Kathy has this very morning given birth to our first son. I am still in Riverlea, sitting with my two best friends in my mother-in-law’s tiny yard celebrating with a bottle of wine.
The grass is green, the garden is in bloom, a peach tree is so laden with its ripe fruit that some of its branches lean into the neighbour’s yard. It’s a perfect day – until a car pulls up on the pavement.
A fat white policeman heaves himself out of the car and makes his way to the neighbour’s door. But he’s very interested in the doings of the three coloured men on the other side of the fence. And as he passes us he gives us a look of disdain and utters the inevitable remark:
‘The bushmen are at it again huh – drinking your lives away.’
All three of us rush to the fence and shout out our anger. The cop is so shocked that he hobbles out of the yard. He gets back into his car, mutters a threat and races away.
Why was my reaction to a white policeman that day so different from my dad’s ten years ago, I asked myself. And the answer came easily. I grew up with Steve Biko; my father did not.
When my dad was a young man the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and African National Congress (ANC) were banned and apartheid was a cocky juvenile growing into a selfish, greedy bully.
In the sixties and seventies our coloured township had settled very nicely into just the kind of community the apartheid government wanted it to be – poor but obedient.
I learnt quickly which entrance to the post office I should use. If an adult spoke about his or her boss, my imagination conjured up a picture of a white man. The books I read were about white people, whether they were teenage detectives or a bare-chested adventurer in an African jungle. The announcers and DJs and songs and adverts on the radio all involved white people. And if for some reason a black character appeared in a soapie, he was played by a white actor with a ridiculous Zulu accent.
The world I lived in was white, and I was not a part of it.
When I was growing up, my mother had an expression for those times when my brothers and I tried to get involved in adult conversation: ‘Children should be seen and not heard,’ she would say.
With their laws the apartheid government went one step further, saying, ‘Non-whites should neither be seen nor heard.’
Like the black American writer Ralph Ellison observed, I was an ‘Invisible Man’.
When I was mentioned it was by the prime minister as a problem, as in ‘the coloured and African problem’.
Once or twice, in a barbershop, somebody would dare utter the name ‘Mandela’ – but this would be followed by a chorus of loud shouts of ‘Shut up! Wanna get us into trouble?’
There were, of course, men and women who were different. But they were regarded as oddities, freaks.
A man living in the next street was banned. I didn’t know why nor would anyone tell me. ‘He must’ve done something terrible,’ I concluded in the absence of a reasonable explanation.
A history teacher began talking politics, but was fired or relocated or something, I don’t know what. All I know is that one day he was there saying, ‘apartheid is wrong’. And the next day he was gone.
A student had gone home to tell his parents, the parents complained to the principal, the principal alerted the department (of Coloured Affairs) and the history teacher was history.
There is an old African proverb that says: ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ But apartheid would call for more than a mere village. It needed a village plus Steve Biko.
And Steve Biko came to me in the seventies. The first words of Black Consciousness I ever heard or saw was this simple phrase, printed in a newspaper as a caption below a photo of one Hlaku Rachidi, a BC activist: ‘We are not carbon copies of white people; we are human beings in our own right.’
I stared at the text. This was a new thought, but at the same time so old that I felt I had known it for centuries longer than my 18 or so years. At about this time I became acquainted with the poetry of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. In his poem, ‘Poetry’, he describes his feelings at the moment when poetry first entered his soul, feelings similar to mine upon discovering Black Consciousness:
I wheeled with the stars
My heart broke loose on the wind
I was black. I am black. I am a person too. I am not invisible. I am here. But I was not unique. More and more black South Africans were becoming militant and proud to be black as the philosophy swept off the university campuses where it had begun, like Neruda’s wind. In fact, here is a wonderful linguistic coincidence: in IsiXhosa, Biko’s mother tongue, the word for wind, moya , is also the word for spirit. And so it was that this new spirit was abroad – on the campuses, in the high schools, in the township streets.
It was palpable, visible and dynamic – dashikis, afros, clenched fist salutes, students on the march, a renaissance of militant theatre, poetry and the arts.
In 1977, when Biko died, I wrote this poem:
He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself while washing
He slipped from the ninth floor
He hung from the ninth floor
He slipped on the ninth floor while washing
He fell from a piece of soap while washing
He hung from the ninth floor
He washed from the ninth floor while slipping
He hung from a piece of soap while slipping
I read the poem in township and church halls in Riverlea, Soweto, Lenasia, Braamfontein, Cape Town. The audiences were appreciative and angry. But lurking amongst them were the apartheid government’s security police. They picked me up one day and took me to John Vorster Square in Johannesburg. They had brought me here to interrogate me. But first there was a little game they needed to play out. They took me up to a ninth floor office and to a window overlooking the city.
‘S
