Biko Bunk - The Deep Flaws of Biko and his Followers

Steve Bantu Biko is today the most popular South African philosopher. While he was a valiant martyr for the anti-apartheid struggle, his philosophy is not only flawed, it is very bad, and feeds racial hatred and ignorant historical revisionism.

For most of my life as a South African, I have been at least tangentially aware of Saint Biko. Having learned about his life, it is impossible to ignore the man's courage, charisma and singlemindedness. But having been forced to read his works at university, I can truly say that they are utter trash. Most of the factual claims he makes are false, his theories sophomore, his morality flexible, and his prejudices deep. Where he is not cynical, he is naive, and where he is not wrong, he is only trivially right. That could easily describe anybody at 24, the age of Bantu Biko at the time of having written the bulk of I Write What I Like. It certainly could have described me, a callow, lazy and entitled communist wannabe, tagging along to protest events for the atmosphere and the hope that something exciting would happen.

Since witnessing the mindless groupthink, mendacity and genocidal rhetoric which billowed out of the tyre fires of the Fallist protest movement, I was shocked out of my dogmatic slumber, and into a newly critical frame of mind. I had the distinct pleasure of being forced by my lecturer to read a collection of texts whose full content served to demonstrate that everybody of my kin was so evil that genocide was too good for us. But in a way I am thankful for it. It exposed me to Biko, as well as Franz Fanon, an actual intellectual who, though flawed, has much to say on matters of race, self-respect and war. I realise that by attacking a sacred cow like Biko, my only redemption may well be my obscurity and irrelevance. But I think that reality must catch up to South Africa some day, and if I can add a drop of grease to the runway, all the better. Popularity and right are not the same thing.

Biko, for any not yet acquainted with him, was a poor young Xhosa student activist from the University of Natal, and a member of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS - we like our pronounceable acronyms here in SA: COSATU, NEHAWU, APLA, etc. Makes life easier than belching an alphabet soup every time you have to talk politics). He was a prominent partisan writer, defending the cause of the students' arm of the struggle against apartheid domination. He rose to prominence within the student movement, and became a key organiser of the student uprisings which themselves were a key domino in the chain reaction which finally toppled apartheid. All the while, he wrote many fiery and rhetorically gifted articles, which drew police attention, leading to him being banned, and eventually arrested, and cruelly martyred. He was beaten to death in his jail cell at the age of 30, leaving behind a wife and child.

During his activist days he was a dynamic and vigorous writer and public speaker. Throughout the 1970s, his movement saw cooperation across the racial boundary in opposition to apartheid, something which carried severe punishments. However, he also encountered a phenomenon all too familiar these days - "white liberals". No doubt taking his cue from Malcolm X, Biko recognised that most whites who join the struggle aren't 100% invested in it. Anybody who has met these holier-than-thou types cannot but cringe. Regardless of the sense or reality of a position, if it is radical, if it is pro-black, these folk clamour to show their support, their "allyship". Biko recognised how many of these activists wore their acquaintance with blacks as some fashionable badge, to show how enlightened and tolerant they were, without taking risks for what they purported to believe in. The numerical dominance and greater capacity for political articulation of these white students in the student unions led to them dominating the very movement for black liberation in the education sector.

Biko quite rightly observed that black people under segregation lacked self-confidence, and made serious attempts to foster an autonomous race-based separatism in political organisation. However, his early critique lacked the capacity for nuance. In order to make the argument that on no account can any white person be trusted or cooperated with, he chose to slander the Liberal activist Alan Paton, and accuse him of defending apartheid while sitting in state-mandated exile in London. This, I suppose, was to have the effect of demonstrating that even the most well-meaning whites were not capable of escaping a supremacist consciousness. Unfortunately, Paton caught wind of this, and published a rebuttal, refuting the quote attributed to him. It is a fascinating little exchange, because it is also an entertainingly facile refutation of Biko's pretentious neo-Hegelian argument for Black power.

Basically, Biko heard the Hegelian idea of thesis, antithesis and synthesis as the mechanism of historical progress, digested it uncritically, and regurgitated a simplified version of it which goes like this: white supremacy (apartheid/colonialism) is the thesis, the antithesis is black power, and the synthesis would be a more "fully human society". This turn of phrase is an interesting one. Reading through I Write What I like, Biko's observations on "white culture" are that whites are barely human, incapable of emotional expression, musical appreciation, dance or mutual affection, a mass of soulless, alien parasites with no redeeming qualities except capitalist efficiency.

He then goes on to detail how gentle, intelligent, compassionate and culturally rich his own people are, pointing out that Indians and Coloureds have "some" of this quality, and that by including themselves within a black consciousness, they will benefit from the positive influence of African culture. And only by embracing the African culture, he reasons, can the white settlers become truly human. This diatribe, which has all the sensitivity of a colonial tribal field guide, casts his little Hegelian syllogism into perspective. What he really is arguing for is Black Supremacy. Which is of course what is now emerging under the decolonisation movement in South Africa. A major feature of Black Consciousness is the idea that white and black should not organise or struggle together, but remain active only in their own communities, taking cues from the demands of Black leaders.

What Alan Paton warns, is that the "synthesis" Biko speaks of is just as likely to be war. Pitting two races against each other in a mortal power struggle bears no resemblance to a rational exchange of scientific theories. Biko's analysis, while bad, should not be given the credit of mere logical inconsistency. His historical illiteracy is just as important. His claim that Europeans are uniquely cruel to blacks may have some basis as a vague generalisation, but feeling the need to underscore it with a historical counterexample, Biko declares that the worst that has happened from wars between European nations has been a bit of ethnolinguistic admixture. This, coming from a man born after the Second World War, is such unbelievable tripe, it ought to count as comedy. Nevertheless, Biko's writings remain the most stolen library book in the country, and his writings are raised aloft by the same preening white middle-class hypocrites they were meant to criticise.

While Anglo elites and guilt-ridden Afrikanermeisies ingratiate themselves with a perverse sense of moral superiority by embracing the moral codes of intersectionalism, which demand an unconditional supplication and surrender of authority and autonomy to the demands, declarations and wants of those with the label of "oppressed", the vast majority of white South Africans are, just practically speaking, unlikely to find the capacity within themselves to sacrifice their right to pursue life liberty and happiness. If the current generation of political youth leaders, raised on the segregationism of Steve Biko, the absolutist essentialism of Kimberlé Crenshaw and the valorisation of slaughter found in Franz Fanon make their way into higher office, I can imagine there will be little happy "synthesis".

The most pernicious aspect of the Black Consciousness ideology in practice however, is what it does to non-white minorities. In his system, "Black" means anybody struggling against the whites. By identifying with the African struggle, you dissolve your identity and submit yourself to the cause. If you waver, or betray the movement, you are merely "non-white". What this means practically (and I have witnessed it first-hand) is that racism against Coloured or Indian minorities, or the more persecuted African minorities like the Tsonga, must just be calmly tolerated, since standing up for oneself against the movement, or differing politically results in one losing ones Blackness, one's full humanity.

I suppose the main redeeming feature of Biko, aside from his obvious testicular fortitude, is that he didn't stay 24 forever. Much of the racial absolutism of his student-union articles disappeared by the time he gave his final interview, where it appears he had shifted to a nonracial Socialism, even remarking (perhaps optimistically) that once Socialism and economic equality was achieved, race would cease to be an issue. His basic theories had not changed, but he had acquired a nuance not seen in the early articles compiled in his most famous work. However, this will not save the subjects of his undead theory.

One of the more ironic consequences is the barrier it creates to native-language intellectual development. The Africanists hit a wall in the decolonial protests starting in 2015. While many students wished to no longer express themselves in European languages, the lack of mutual intelligibility across the language barriers forced them into using English exclusively. The continuity of the traditional resistance to Afrikaans as a medium of instruction has been the last nail in the coffin for Afrikaans tertiary education. This has created the ironic situation where no university in South Africa now can have any medium of instruction but English. I observed that a fair number of black South Africans have already lost true native fluency, being far more fluent in the lingua franca. The loss of the function that universities provide - an institution for reproducing rich and deep cultural expression - is now cementing the hegemony of the language of the former oppressor, and reducing a complex patchwork of cultural heritage to the same homogenous mass the apartheid system designated them as: "blacks".