THERE is a pleasant rumour that when Steve Biko walked into a room and found Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe he exclaimed: "God is here."

The respect Biko held for Sobukwe comes through in the long interview he had in 1972, when asked about what he thought of Sobukwe and his position on the emergent Black Consciousness Movement, Biko said: "I have never heard him express an opinion about details of the ideology, which makes him again an admirable guy."

Last month many activities were undertaken to honour Sobukwe.

The place of Sobukwe and Biko in the history of black people's struggle for liberation is often misrepresented or underplayed.

Also often because of narrow-mindedness and lack of imagination of the organisations that have come to claim their respective legacies, these two are not accorded the kind of role they can still play to take South Africa out of the current politics, where leaders abuse the mandate to govern.

It's sad that the PAC and Azapo are incapable of unifying black people. Also it's depressing that these parties that claim the great names of Biko and Sobukwe have become irrelevant.

The lament that the media doesn't give them attention or that they are broke has become tiring.

Sobukwe's great contribution was in his bravery and capacity to inspire a people to revolt as manifested in the Sharpeville protest which exposed once and for all the brutality and fascism of the apartheid regime.

So effective was he that the apartheid regime kept him isolated from other political prisoners on Robben Island and even passed a special law to keep him in jail.

Furthermore, Sobukwe's Pan Africanist ideas, including his promotion of the anti-racist declaration that "there is only one race, the human race", were major breakthroughs and linked South Africa to the broader African reality.

We know it was the PAC as a result of this thinking that first spoke about "non-racialism" as opposed to the ANC's more backward "four nations" philosophy, which meant the acceptance of the Verwoerdian notions of multiracialism.

But the Pan Africanists were not always consistent; from their "one human race" thinking they at times included whites in the struggle. In other words they denied the salience of race and skin colour.

At the same time they were ambivalent about the Indians and Coloureds.

Biko and his black consciousness movement improved on the ideas already developed by Sobukwe and others.

For instance, there was an acceptance of Azania as the future name of a liberated South Africa.

Where the Pan Africanists hesitated about the place of Indians and Coloureds, Biko developed the notion of all the oppressed were black. Biko linked blacks in South Africa not only to the African continent but the whole world.

Sobukwe and Biko's contributions are so great and enduring that they need to be rescued from the mediocrity of organisations that claim to represent them.