UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE BIKO INQUEST: AN INTERROGATION OF THE DECIMATION OF OUR MORAL CONSCIENCE AND THE DEARTH OF MEANINGFUL POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

September month in South Africa is Black Consciousness month. It is in this month that we reflect on the life and death of the giant of our struggle for liberation and an icon of the Black Consciousness Movement, Stephen Bantu Biko. Steve Biko gained world renown when he died in police custody at the hands of the Apartheid regime’s security branch. He had been gruesomely subjected to torture and beatings leading to his death on the 12^th   September 1977.

This edition of Black Consciousness Month, to commemorate the death of Biko and to celebrate the triumph of his ideals over his death, is wrapped in a sombre atmosphere; it is foregrounded by an imposing shadow of the reopened inquest into his death.

Unsurprisingly, the 1977 inquest – conducted under the auspices of the Apartheid regime in a political climate that was highly charged and volatile, and under the watchful and critical eye of the world media – aligned its findings with the police claims that Biko died following a scuffle with the police. It was simply a whitewash.

Whilst the reopening of the inquest was important to find out what really happened in that cursed week that ultimately led to his untimely death on 12^th September 1977, so that the perpetrators could be brought to book and that the family could finally find closure, we all know what the 1977 inquest failed to pronounce on, or what it was even incapable to pronounce on, and why?

Whilst the bruises, the cuts, the wounds and the expert analysis from the autopsy reports in the new inquest may point to the brutality of the torture and beatings he was subjected to, Biko’s death had the fingerprints of the Apartheid regime written all over his lifeless body. Those who understood what Black Consciousness stood for, also understood why the regime would not simply incarcerate him and throw the keys away; they had to make sure they ended his life with the hope of killing his ideas and the Black Consciousness Movement itself. Needless to say, they were wrong.

Biko did not simply die because he was a stubborn young Blackman who would not turn the other cheek. He died because his ideas were too dangerous for white supremacists to contend with. Biko’s Black Consciousness posed an even greater threat to white supremacy and the Apartheid regime than an insurrection or even the armed struggle could ever pose.

Biko did not ask for reconciliation or integration with whites. He did not ask for a seat at the master’s table.  He saw Black Consciousness as the antithesis to the thesis of white supremacy in its totality. He understood that before a new non-racial society could emerge, the thesis of white racism and the antithesis of black consciousness had to be set on a collision course to birth a lasting synthesis of a non-racial society.

Understood in the context of the global geopolitics of the time, in the minds of the Apartheid regime, the idea of Black Unity, Black Solidarity and Black Self-Determination, was too great a threat for the Apartheid/colonial project, and it was not an imagined threat. The riots by the class of 1976 – inspired by the black consciousness movement –   were fresh in the minds of white supremacists, and the sporadic fires that had engulfed black townships across the country were still smouldering, even under the blanket clampdown of the banning orders against the Black Consciousness Movement and its formations.

As the proceedings of the Biko inquest unfold in the Gqeberha High Court, the black world needs to use this Black Consciousness Month to hold its own inquest to interrogate the reasons behind its decimated black values and moral conscience, as well as the floundering political consciousness of black politics post national liberation.

Owing to over three hundred years of colonial conquest, land dispossession and Apartheid subjugation, the black body had been emptied of its culture, its religion, and its specie essence. It had been reduced to the other of the Whiteman; an empty shell and a mere vessel, veritably stripped of its humanity.

It is for this reason that Biko and his cohorts understood the importance of Black Consciousness as a vehicle for the transformation of black people so they could regain their dignity and their humanity. In I write what I like, Biko asserts: –

“The first step therefore is to make the black man come to himself, to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth.”

Seemingly, our experimentation with democracy and freedom, under arrangements of a constitutional democracy, has interrupted the mission of Black Consciousness and has thus robbed black South Africa of its antithetical moment. A necessary moment to bring South Africa back into balance from the imbalance of the hegemony of the thesis of white supremacy, which obtained from the time of colonial conquest until 27^th April 1994, which inevitably would result in a lopsided multiracial, post-Apartheid society which we are witnessing thirty-two years into the democratic project.

Biko ominously warned us against the premature integration of unequals. His rejection of the integration of unequals was neither obstructionist nor aimed at frustrating the synthesis of a non-racial society as some of his detractors have charged.

In ‘The Blackness in Me’, Malefane writes:-

“Black Consciousness’s rejection of the antithesis of non-racialism, as opposed to being obstructionist, and far from frustrating the synthesis of a non-racial society, is a rejection of the inevitable.  It is a rejection of the inevitable synthesis of the obliteration of Blackness into a lopsided multiracialism that will result from the approach of those who propagate the integration of ‘unequals’.  It is a rejection of the premature integration of hegemonic racist white values and systems with decimated black values and systems, which inevitably would result in the assimilation of Blacks into the Whiteman’s ways i.e. his racist values and systems which the Whiteman has established as the standard of being. This integration inevitably relegates black people to an unbearable bleakness of being, alienated from themselves and not good enough to be white.”

We may not want to admit; however, the interruption of the Black Consciousness project means that we have failed to regain our dignity, our moral conscience, and our humanity as a people. And indeed, we have been assimilated into the Whiteman’s perverted ways of being as Biko prophetically warned.

If Whiteness in the post liberation society remains the standard of being, and our children are subjected to white ways of being from kindergarten till matric, and the working youth subjected to a white corporate culture as they enter the corporate world, are we to be surprised that we have lost moral authority over our children and the youth? Are we to be surprised at the unbecoming behaviour of the young people whom we saw splashing the elderly with water in the name of fun on the first day of Black Consciousness Month?

If thirty-two years into the democratic project the Black government cannot point to any industrialisation project of significance it has championed to transform the economy and we still rely on an economy entirely owned by Whites, what is to be said of our collective conscience?

 If the Black government has created nothing of its own to transform society but found it convenient to default to the coloniser’s political system, its juridical system, and its state bureaucracy, what is to be said of our independence of thought?

And if the presumed leader of the liberation movement has abdicated its leadership role and opted to go to bed with the erstwhile oppressors for its political survival, what are we to make of our political consciousness?

As we ponder the proceedings of Biko’s Inquest let us find the moral courage to conduct an interrogation of the reasons for the glaring failures of the democratic project and the decimation of our moral conscience and the subversion of the mission of Black Consciousness.

It is only when we have the moral courage to be truthful, first to ourselves, to admit our shortcomings, that we shall first regain our moral conscience and the trust of our children. Only when we have regained the trust of our children shall we command the moral authority to chaperone their lives.

Secondly, we need to regain our dignity by exercising respect for ourselves and our fellow blacks. Only when we treat ourselves and our fellow blacks with respect, shall we set ourselves on the path to engage in true and meaningful political consciousness necessary to uplift black people wherever they find themselves on the planet and to restore their dignity.

We should be mindful that we entered Black Consciousness Month with our feet still cold from the frosty winds of the strained relations with fellow blacks on the continent. Blacks all over the world suffer under global white supremacy irrespective of where they come from or where they find themselves on the planet merely for being black. Therefore Africa should be their natural refuge.

If our political consciousness is truly incisive, we should understand the pragmatism of a global Black Consciousness, Black Unity, and Black Solidarity. Black people of the world should understand that they have a common enemy and must join their efforts of struggle against their common enemy. It is for the same reasons that Biko in his letter to SRC presidents wrote: –

“Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. Its essence is the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression – the blackness of their skin – and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude.”

 It is imperative for the proponents of Black Consciousness and the purveyors of Pan Africanism to realise that the two ideologies are in fact two sides of the same coin of political consciousness.

Black Consciousness is a frequency modulation of a state of consciousness, and being African is our true north i.e. our natural state of being. To be a fully functional people, we need to regain our humanity. To regain our humanity, Africans on the continent and Blacks spread in the diaspora need to have the antennae of their mental compass pointing to their true north so they can catch the full signal of the frequency modulation of blackness necessary to regain their consciousness and attain their natural state of being.

Each of the two groupings needs to come out of their cocoon of isolation and forge a collective effort in the struggle to realise their common destiny as true sovereigns. We need to find ourselves if we are to restore our dignity and our humanity. But first we need to admit that we are in the clutches of a mental psychosis and a political malaise.

Black Consciousness is the instrument to extricate us from our mental aberrations, and Pan Africanism the compass to guide us to our natural state of being. However, as children of Africa, the continent that birthed humanity, we cannot afford to do it at all costs. The world is full of ruins that are monuments to pursuing political ambitions at all costs.

We are children of a higher God. In keeping with the strivings of Black Consciousness, as articulated by Biko, we need to strive “to give the world a human face.”  However noble our pursuits, however important our ideals, we need to always default to the African ethos of Ubuntu. After all, it is our unmistakable trait that distinguishes us as a people. It is our undeniable trait locks us to our god-nature.