Abstract
One of the greatest challenges the Pan-African world has faced has been the assault of European modernity on its existence. Undoubtedly aware of this, Xolela Mangcu’s Biko: A Biography (2012) places Bantu Steve Biko within the historical resistance of the peoples of the Northern Cape in South Africa to Afrikaner and British colonial ambitions. Emphasizing the intellectual, cultural, and political interpenetration between the Khoi-Khoi, Xhosa, and San, how they interacted, grappled with, and resisted this European modernity; Mangcu constructs a radical South African intellectual tradition that to him attained its highest expression with Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). He builds on the earlier work of Donald Wood’s Biko (1978) as well as contextualizes texts such as Aelred Stubbs’s I Write What I Like: Selected Writings (2002) and Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko (2008) edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander, Nigel Gibson, which deal with Biko’s political thought. Sparing no details, this work builds a comprehensive biography that excavates Biko’s personal life while maintaining its focus on his political contributions and historical significance.
Biko: A Biography begins with Mangcu recounting his reaction as a child to the news of Biko’s murder by the Apartheid South African government and how this news affected his community. Mangcu then proceeds to briefly trace the history of White colonial activities in the Northern/Eastern Cape from the 17th century up to Biko’s birth in King Williamstown in 1946. Emphasizing the African confrontation with European modernity, particularly the different strands of African thought on how this was to proceed, Mangcu demonstrates the intellectual tradition that Biko emerged in. Following this, some adventures of a young and naughty Steve are sketched with Mangcu then moving on to how he became politicized in Apartheid South Africa.
Essential to this political maturation was Biko’s work with the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). NUSAS was dominated by White liberal/radical students whose unwillingness to seriously confront the race question lead Biko and other Black students to form the South African Student Organization (SASO). With the founding of SASO in 1969, the BCM was launched. Believing that their struggle on campuses to define their own reality was a microcosm of a national problem, SASO, in collaboration with community organizers created the Black People’s Convention (BPC) in 1972. In speaking of Black Power, Walter Rodney wrote that it was, “ . . . a rejection of hopelessness and the policy of doing nothing to halt the oppression of blacks by whites” (Rodney 1969/1990, p. 20). Biko’s BCM organizations, SASO and the BPC, channeled this intellectual current through their belief in their potential to challenge this condition.
However, due to his radical activism, which filled the hole left by the arrested ANC and PAC members, the Apartheid regime banned Biko to his township. Despite this, he continued organizing and constructing Black self-help/community service programs all while breaking his curfew to give talks and organize nationally. Biko was eventually caught breaking curfew and after being tortured in prison died on September 12, 1978. Mangcu concludes this impressive biography by detailing the progression of the national liberation struggle in South Africa and then proceeds to a critical analysis of South African society post-independence from the perspective of Biko’s Black Consciousness (BC).
The strengths of Mangcu’s Biko: A Life are his detailed analysis of the historical contexts within which the BCM emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in South Africa. He furthermore unfailingly confronts many of the questionable choices Biko made in his personal as well as political life. Together, these strengths give the reader a vibrant understanding of the whole man and his movement, faults and all.
That said, this book could have been made stronger by Mangcu locating Steve Biko not only within a radical South African tradition but also as a powerful expression of the global Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Incontrovertibly, great work is done showing what influenced Biko in South Africa and how he shaped the political and social currents within the country; but Biko was and still is a world-historical Black Power figure not to be bound by national borders.
In conclusion, this text is a solid contribution to the recuperation of Steve Biko’s legacy. Mangcu convincingly shows how born in the bosom of European modernity Biko, “ . . . did more than any other to form a political movement whose primary aim and achievement was to challenge the intellectual foundations of European modernity while engaging with that modernity itself through the weapons it had itself furnished” (p. 39). Although Mangcu confines and constrains Bantu Steve Biko to South Africa’s political heritage, his, “ . . . vision, on a wide scale, of the interrelationship between consciousness and culture . . . and developmental and political action on the other” (pp. 272-273) has lent much to the global struggle for Black Emancipation. Works like this ensure that this Pan-African martyr will never be forgotten.