STEVE BIKO is renowned as one of the best the black world has produced in its struggle to contribute to world history and civilisation.

Biko's mission included preparing black and white people to learn to live in an open society as a measure of common humanity.

Implied in common humanity is equality. Equality makes separation of people redundant.

With this vision in mind, South Africa was gifted with the light to find its way clear to championing the true quest for humanity to which Biko had so fearlessly committed himself.

His life helped the oppressed in the darkest hour of subdued consciousness that had drilled black people to consent to designed hardships as though God-given.

The awakening power of Black Consciousness that Biko infused wielded an accusing finger at white society and its culpability in churning out dehumanising schemes from which it benefited.

It also had a caustic tongue that expressed uncompromising truths, revealing the connivance of blacks in their own oppression.

Confronted with a sickening system populated by willing patients who voluntarily kept taking doses for further poisoning, Biko attacked both the oppressor and the oppressed with unflinching resolve.

The racism that allowed whites to base the advancement of "their humanity" on the dehumanisation of blacks was a convention Biko decidedly confronted and turned the tables on.

This shines through in his treatise "Black Consciousness and The Quest for a True Humanity".

Black people's inferiority complex, which allowed for their own subjugation in a system that denied them full-blooded and common humanity, did not escape Biko's condemnation.

His radical introspection confronting black people's connivance in their own oppression finds uncompromising exposure in his essay "We Blacks".

He fought for higher beings that potentially reside in us all.

Biko's crowning vision was that of a country where there would be no protection of minority rights, "as there would be no majorities or minorities but just people".

 It is this rabid fear to "be just people" that led to Biko's excruciating murder in custody on September 12 1977.

With danger stalking him all the way, Biko's hope of a normal future never died: "We have set out on a quest for true humanity, and somewhere on the distant horizon we can see the glittering prize. In time we shall be in a position to bestow upon South Africa the greatest gift possible - a more human face."