PEDRO MZILENI | Biko gave us the language and ethics for black liberation

Tomorrow will mark 46 years since the assassination of Bantu Biko by the white apartheid regime. His teachings concerning the black condition in the white settler colony of SA remain stubbornly relevant and they are influencing the strong emerging movement of black young people today.

The power of Biko’s ancestral spirit is just unavoidable and this speaks to the accurate diagnosis of his conception of white racism. Biko correctly said black people cannot coexist with a system of whiteness – a global condition of systematic, structural, institutional, spiritual, cultural and personal enslavement of black people to a permanent state of non-being.

This system of whiteness therefore is executed on behalf of all white people with the intention of cementing them at the apex of humanity, with endless benefits in economic, political and epistemic terms. SA in essence was built from this paradigm and this racist structure was then constitutionally institutionalised in 1994 to ensure that it remains in place today.

Black people today in SA are still located out of the human family. They are the landless labourers, a race of people without any form of security, dignity and honour. The territory of SA treats them as problems whose knowledges, livelihoods and aspirations are completely negated, silenced and destroyed.

The only knowledges, economies, political convictions, cultures and spiritual conceptions that SA recognises and upholds as the standard are those invented by whiteness. And if there is any aspiration by a black person to be human, the standards of the white settler colony prescribes to them how to behave, think, speak, act and move like a white person.

It is on these basis that Biko invalidated the white settler colony of SA. He correctly diagnosed that black people will never survive in such a territory. Biko dismissed the conception of racial integration, where black people must be invited into a white world and tolerate being regulated by white people on how they must exist.

The ANC tried to enforce this condition of black existence in a white world for almost 30 years – and that strategy has evidently and thankfully self-destructed. The supremacy of white people in SA in every sphere of life is an unhealthy condition of hell that is now beginning to explode. The concept of non-racialism has been exposed to be nothing else but a political system of maintaining the racist power relations generated from apartheid.

The socioeconomic profile of SA released in 2022 by the World Bank and Statistics SA shows that white people as a settler minority race remain the wealthiest group in SA – with full access to the best structures of housing, business, education, safety and the economy. At the core of enabling the transfer of these privileges to white people is their control of the land, which is a powerful factor of production that they obtained through the colonial system of apartheid structural racism.

These political and socioeconomic dividends enjoyed by the white race today were achieved at the brutal expense of the indigenous people of this land – black people. It is on these basis that the 1973 Convention of the United Nations declared apartheid a crime against humanity. This crime against black people remains an unaddressed sin of our times, and its white perpetrators are yet to be punished and its black victims are yet to receive their reparations.

Biko gave us the language and the ethics to formulate community struggles in this white settler SA to fight for the liberation of black people. The first task is to destroy racism and white supremacy by conscientising black people about their condition and making them overcome their inferiority complex. The labour of the mind therefore is the crucial site of struggle that Biko emphasised.

For black people to build institutions of learning, centres of economic power, strong families, united communities with values and leaders with ethics to see black people as human beings to love, serve and uplift – we need to converse with ourselves for this purpose and demand the highest standards of service from each one of us.

This Black Consciousness movement has emerged in our times and black young people are foregrounding it today using the arts, student movements in universities, hubs of reading and conscientisation in communities and the rising spirit of questioning in the political theatre of today. This spirit must be maintained and accelerated indeed to truly realise ‘iphupho lika Biko’ – the greatest gift possible – a more human face.