Two Men Speaking Truth to Power: South Africa’s Ebrahim Rasool today and Steve Biko yesterday

A few days ago, a white South African news editor named Pieter Du Toit went on a rant on News 24 about the comments of Ebrahim Rasool, who just got expelled by the Trump White House as South Africa’s ambassador to the U.S.

What is comical is how Du Toit — though calling Rasool’s comments mindless — made a concession that the remarks about Trump’s administration being nativist and racist “might be true” and “his logic might even be spot on.” Might be true? Are you fucking kidding?

One casual look at Du Toit will tell you that he clearly grew up in the privileged environment still enjoyed by most whites in his country. Rasool, who is only a few months older than me, grew up classified as “Colored” under the apartheid system and his family got kicked out of a district declared “Whites Only.”

So yeah, as much as Du Toit has a couple of investigative bestsellers and is a supposedly accomplished journalist, I think I’ll believe the guy who fought apartheid when he says he sees hardcore American racism. And I sure as hell don’t think we need the fig leaf of might.

But the core of Du Toit’s argument is that “the job of an ambassador abroad is not to antagonize his hosts. It is not to get involved in political debates, or policy issues, or to deliver comment or pass judgement on how another country arranges its affairs.”

This has never been realistic, let alone accurate, for diplomacy. It is one of those concepts that some would like to be true. In 1935, Anthony Eden told off Mussolini in a private meeting while the dictator had a full-blown tantrum, insisting he should be allowed to invade Ethiopia. Eden had to go toe-to-toe with Adolf Hitler, and he refused to be obsequious.

This “play nice” mentality was never even true for South Africa. I was running a talk show in Brandon, Manitoba in the mid-80s and got the chance to interview the molding rind of cheese named Glenn Babb, apartheid South Africa’s ambassador to Canada. He was a lying sack of horse dung who has an effusive page on Wikipedia, but who is hopefully now burning in hell.

In trying to put the best face on a racist and brutal regime, he shamelessly exploited Canada’s aboriginal communities — whom no one could say weren’t suffering — and gleefully celebrated the success of his misdirection.

When he spoke to me by phone, I pointed out that there were black South Africans who went to bed at night in squalid conditions under tents of plastic bags. His reply stayed with me: “When you talk about democracy, you can’t just think in terms of majoritarianism.”

Uh-huh.

Even if we want to keep to today’s events, I find it interesting that a white South African journalist wants a black ambassador and veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle to keep his mouth shut and nod and say, “Yes, sir, yes, sir!” as a thuggish white demagogue spews vitriol.

And even if you take race out of the equation, the old rules of “we’re all chums here” simply don’t work anymore with Trump, Putin, Netanyahu and Erdogan. Many of us in Canada are frankly getting impatient with our leaders continuing to play the game of, “Well, we don’t have to respond to every inflammatory thing Trump says” or “We should keep posturing as statesmen even if he doesn’t.” I suspect many black South Africans respect Rasool more for speaking truth to power, diplomatic role or not.

It is no accident, of course, that Martin Plaut — the most right-wing of supposedly “liberal” white South Africans — chose to reprint Du Toit’s op-ed on his page. Recently, he also wrote a little spiel on his site which was a bit surprising and unusual for its intellectual cowardice. “The ANC,” he tells us, “has, since it came to power in 1994, chosen to put race ahead of inequality… No matter how rich you are if you are black, you deserve support. No matter how impoverished you are if you are white, you must pay. It is as simple as that.”

But then he goes on to write this mealy-mouthed line: “Is [Trump] right [on diversity, equality and inclusion] or is the ANC right to insist on race as a criteria? It depends on your perspective.”

This is a cute sidestep because Martin then lets us know his perspective by sketching a landscape of woe: “White Afrikaners found themselves excluded from jobs in the state, parastatal institutions and even in private companies. Universities founded to encourage and support their language were forced to teach in English. They believed their lives on farms were under threat.”

I don’t doubt tales of ANC’s corruption. I don’t doubt some policies have led to gross unfairness for some whites. But I do find it interesting that we are expected to forget centuries of colonization and exploitation of Africans and a searing racism that lasted right into our own lifetimes, but hey, some of these pale folks who used to be on top can’t get certain jobs and aww, what a pity, they can’t use the language in a classroom that they forced on others.

So, I think it’s fitting to offer this excerpt from my book, The Gifts of Africa, about a different way of thinking. In fact, the whole book is about different ways of thinking, about the rich intellectual legacy that Africa has given the world.

Here is my section about South African activist and writer Steve Biko, who is still remembered as a martyr but whose words and ideas should be more carefully studied.

**

A lawyer for Steve Biko’s family summed up his fate with a stark eloquence: “He died a miserable and lonely death on a mat on a stone floor in a prison cell.”

It happened like this. He was arrested with his friend and fellow activist, Peter Jones, at a roadblock late one night in mid-August in 1977, accused of driving from the community of King William’s Town to the city of Cape Town, where he supposedly intended to distribute pamphlets to incite a riot. Leaving his hometown was a crime — he was a “banned” person, restricted in his travel. Meeting more than one person at a time (aside from family members) was a crime. Speaking out was a crime. Distributing pamphlets was a crime. So now they had their excuse, and they hauled him away, keeping him under Section 6 of South Africa’s Terrorism Act in a cold cell at the Walmer Police Station in Port Elizabeth, naked and in manacles for days.

And one day, probably September 6, they beat him to a pulp so horribly in Interrogation Room 619 that he bled into his spinal fluid. By September 11, he was in a coma, and the authorities had to do a better cover-up. So they tossed their suspect into the back of a Landrover — naked and shackled to its floor — and drove 750 miles to a prison hospital in Pretoria. He was pronounced dead the next day. Stephen Bantu Biko was only thirty years old.

The excuses that emerged were pathetically far from convincing. The public was first told he was on a hunger strike, and that he starved to death. For the inquest later, police testified that he had a wild expression on his face and threw a chair during an interrogation. When it came out that he had suffered brain injuries, the government stooge of a doctor who first saw him in his cell expressed shock that Biko had died in custody. “It was quite obvious that we had missed something.”

Worse was how the apartheid regime inevitably reacted when the outraged black majority — and the world — vented its anger and dismay over the murder and cover-up. When more than 1,200 students at the University of Fort Hare (450 miles south of Johannesburg) held a memorial service for Biko in a sports field, a small army of police and attack dogs descended on them and tossed people in jail for ten days. At a National Party conference, South Africa’s Justice Minister James Kruger earned laughs from his white audience when he remarked that Biko had the “democratic right to die” and that his death “leaves me cold.” He was still offering grotesque bon mots weeks later, telling reporters, “A man can damage his brain in many ways. I can tell you that under press harassment, I’ve also felt like banging my head against the wall, but now reading the Biko autopsy, I realize it may be fatal.”

South Africa was already an international pariah, but Biko’s murder inspired a fresh wave of revulsion. Lest we forget, in 1977 there was not one, but two white supremacist governments still functioning in Africa, one in Pretoria and the other in Rhodesia. And the more “enlightened” nations were shocked that the South African regime would exercise its savagery on a prominent activist — a strange reaction, given that it never hesitated to show its true face when challenged. The world had let the Sharpeville Massacre happen in 1960, and it expressed its impotent shock again when police slaughtered children in the Soweto Uprising in 1976.

Though apartheid was in its last gasping years, you would never know it from the institutionalized permanence of it. Even when faced with sanctions, it found its way around them, buying weapons from Israel. Headline performers like Frank Sinatra and Elton John quietly flew over and performed at the country’s luxury resort, Sun City. Ronald Reagan shamelessly vetoed anti-apartheid legislation passed by both Houses of Congress in 1986 and argued disingenuously that sanctions would only hurt the country’s blacks. A little more than a decade earlier, he had referred to African delegates to the UN as “monkeys” in a private phone call with Richard Nixon.

As you strolled through Trafalgar Square in London in the mid-eighties, you often saw a group of anti-apartheid protesters chanting and dancing on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields, which as close as they were allowed to get to the target of their outrage, South Africa House. Nelson Mandela was not a white-haired, smiling grandfather, he was a young man in black-and-white posters and placards that called for his release; since no one outside Robben Island had seen him in years, his features were frozen in time in that black and white photo.

Biko understood what could happen to him. Interviewed by an American businessman, he recalled how the authorities had killed a friend days before one of his own recent arrests. “You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care anyway. And your method of death can itself be a politicizing thing.”

But his tactical thinking went deeper than mere acceptance of the inevitable. As is common in despotic regimes, the torturer, the brute muscle, has instructions to go only so far. Biko counted on this. In a previous interrogation, he had told police officers, “Listen, if you guys want to do this your way, you have got to handcuff me and bind my feet together, so that I can’t respond. If you allow me to respond, I’m certainly going to respond. And I’m afraid you may have to kill me in the process even if it’s not your intention.” If he put up a fight in his last hours, it wasn’t out of a last impulse of defiant machismo but knowing he could make his death politically useful.

At first, commemorations were small. South Africa’s great artist in exile, Gerard Sekoto, painted an homage to him in 1978, depicting his mother with downcast, mourning eyes. In 1980, Peter Gabriel created the haunting requiem for him which incorporated in its lyrics the Xhosa phrase, Yehla Moja — “Come Spirit” — and which featured an excerpt of the anti-apartheid song, “Senzeni Na?” (“What Have We Done?”) In fact, Gabriel used a recording of the song as sung at Biko’s funeral at the Victoria Stadium in King William’s Town. South African censors promptly banned it (and somewhat comically let it slip past them when it was used as background music for an aired episode of the cop show, Miami Vice).

And still Biko grew as an icon. A decade after he was beaten to death in his cell, he was brought back to life in the film, Cry Freedom. Directed by Richard Attenborough, it suffered from a poor script that chose to see Biko, played by Denzel Washington, mainly through the eyes of the liberal reporter Donald Woods, portrayed by Kevin Kline. Half the movie didn’t even focus on Biko at all but followed Woods and his family’s desperate escape from South Africa after the murder. Even while South African censors dithered — and then surprisingly allowed it to be shown — pirate videotapes were already being smuggled into the country. Still, the subject matter was too much for ten British Tories, including former prime minister Edward Heath, who all declined to attend the film’s London premiere.

It’s been said many times that Steve Biko achieved a fame in death that he never had in life. While true, this does him a disservice; had he lived, his notoriety would have been assured through recognition of his eloquence and his charisma. If his murder has eclipsed his ideas, it’s mainly because the man himself isn’t around to champion them, to refresh them and take them in new directions. We can only guess how his views might have changed in a post-apartheid South Africa, but we can be certain from his powerful intelligence that they would have evolved. And they’re worth reconsidering.

Unfortunately, the circumstances of his death will always compete for significance, and as we’ll see, these circumstances still test a much-cherished doctrine that secured the peaceful transition of South Africa from the hated apartheid era to its new dawn as a democratic nation.

**

Steve Biko’s thinking came out of a gradual disillusionment in the way student political groups were fighting apartheid while he was a young medical student at the University of Natal in the 1960s. The National Union of South African Students was dominated and funded at the time by mostly white liberals, who seemed to be big on talk but short on making the same sacrifices or commitment as their black counterparts. Things came to a head in 1967 for a NUSAS conference at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, when the whites and Indians had places to stay in the dormitories, but no one gave any thought to the black delegates.

The primary opposition to apartheid had been a multi-racial integrated approach. The implication was: take away the brutal segregationist machinery, and everything will be fine. But the hypocrisy of the white students for NUSAS amply demonstrated to Biko that no, all will not be fine, and that apartheid was simply the ugliest manifestation of deeper problems in South African race relations. He and others formed their own group in 1968, the South African Students’ Organization, known as SASO, and as he became more immersed in recruiting, fundraising, travelling to conferences, he developed what came to be called “Black Consciousness.”

At its root, Biko saw Black Consciousness as restoring the self-esteem of black citizens, an essential step before they could achieve their freedom from apartheid. Black people had to know they were worthy of their own emancipation. Biko liked to use the old catchphrase “Black is beautiful” and made it clear that black was also inclusive. The Black Consciousness Movement was happy to ignore the traditional tribal categories and open the door to Indians, as well as those the regime defined as “colored.” Apartheid had always liked to pit one racial segment of the non-white majority against the other with different economic privileges and levels of acceptance. The Black Consciousness Movement plowed through this distraction. Biko probably never heard of Malaku Bayen, Ethiopia’s activist who in the 1930s insisted African Americans “Think black, act black and be black,” but each was dealing with an apartheid, and so the same philosophical approach had to be summoned.

Biko also had some scathing criticism for white liberalism, noting how “even those whites who see much wrong with the system make it their business to control the response of the blacks to the provocation.” They conveniently “vacillate between two worlds,” making the right complaints while still enjoying their “exclusive pool of white privileges,” but they needed to understand that black people didn’t need a go-between.

No surprise, both the apartheid regime and the liberal press (including at first his future friend, journalist Donald Woods) cast the Black Consciousness Movement as extremist, pushing a form of black racism. But Biko wasn’t rejecting white allies — he merely insisted they defer to black leadership in efforts for emancipation.

Reading the phrases above, there’s another frisson of recognition for our own era, with its bitter debates over cultural representation and what’s now being called the “politics of respectability,” i.e. just how those in the group try to police themselves and their marginalized members. Who gets to be an ally? What are the best tactics to use? However they’re decided, the essence of Biko’s approach still holds: black people speaking for themselves and setting their own agenda. Black Lives Matter would explore this ideological terrain generations later.

By 1972, Biko had neglected his medical studies so much that he was kicked out of the University of Natal. He was interested in taking law, but this would also fall by the wayside as he committed his time to the struggle. The government did not make it easy. In March of 1973, he was served with the banning order that penned him up in King William’s Town and made it illegal for him to be quoted in the media.

Though he was a vital leader for Black Consciousness, the movement kept going, and organizers found ways around the restrictions. Black Consciousness birthed the Black People’s Convention, and in 1974, some in SASO and the BPC wanted to hold mass rallies to celebrate the independence of Mozambique. Biko opposed the idea, knowing the official response would be more bans and arrests, and sure enough, the regime landed hard on activists across the country and put nine of the SASO/BPC leaders on trial. Biko volunteered to speak on behalf of the accused, and though nothing could save the men in the dock from being shipped off to Robben Island, he used his testimony over four days in May of 1976 as a “platform for spreading the cause of Black Consciousness.” His biographer Xolela Mangcu has highlighted how Biko had to avoid handing the judge the noose to hang him with while conveying an articulate, reasonable defense of the movement’s ideas.

While the men on trial faced charges over their words, he talked about “police charging against people in places like Sharpeville without arms, and I am talking about the indirect violence that you get through starvation in townships.” Such acts indicated “more terrorism than what these guys have been saying.” When the prosecution asked him, “What do you think of Africans who work for the Security Police?” his answer was blunt: “They are traitors.” He said this in a room “ringed” by armed white and black officers.

The great historian of the Xhosa, Noël Mostert, had the chance to meet Biko once and considered him the “first original late twentieth-century voice to emerge from African protest,” and that he “personified, through his lack of anti-white sentiment, his gentleness and articulate rationality, so many of the characteristic attributes of the missionary-educated African elite which had assumed African leadership after the last of the frontier wars exactly a century before; yet he embodied as well a complete rupture with that tradition.” This is highly perceptive: Mostert is suggesting that Biko inherited the mantle of such figures as Harry Thuku and John Chilembwe but carved out a path of his own. Xolela Mangcu went further and traced Biko’s intellectual lineage all the way back to the views and resistance efforts of prominent Xhosa chiefs of the 17th century.

Steve Biko had his own opinions on history. In correcting the abysmal self-image the black man had of himself, Biko recognized how white authorities didn’t just graft their version of the past on to the colonial mindset, they also distorted the native individual’s understanding of his own roots, depicting his history as a parade of tribal conflicts. Instead of deliberate migrations, the African was supposedly always fleeing another despotic chief. Of course, the black child absorbing such textbook libels naturally identified with the most successful model presented to him: white civilization. Fanon had made a similar point.

Biko used the term African culture in a slightly ambiguous way, one that could be taken as both generic but also specific to Xhosa or South African contexts. Nevertheless, we can find echoes in his work of several themes regarding African antecedents that we discussed earlier. “One of the most fundamental aspects of our culture is the importance we attach to Man,” he wrote in a paper delivered at a conference. “Ours is a Man-centered society. Westerners have in many occasions been surprised at the capacity we have for talking to each other — not for the sake of arriving at a particular conclusion, but merely to enjoy the communication for its own sake.”

Biko went on to describe a gregarious, mutually supportive culture, and while his portrait might be a little too rosy, it has truth in it. He mentioned how a stranger knocking on a door in the West will be typically met with a challenge. And he’s right; the standard “Can I help you?” really translates to “What are you doing here? Why are you in my space?” To Biko, the African is not suspicious by nature. “This attitude to see people not as themselves but as agents for some particular function either to one’s disadvantage or advantage is foreign to us.” Having to live together isn’t a “mishap” that requires people to fiercely compete, it’s an “act of God” that’s intended to inspire a collective solving of life’s problems. Nor was poverty thought about as it is in the West. If it happened, it was due to some natural disaster, and it wasn’t taboo or offensive to call on neighbors to help you out.

His short analysis of cultural concepts wasn’t the first of its kind, and he quoted Zambia’s president Kenneth Kaunda twice to help make his case (one wonders, however, what he would have made of Kaunda’s later career and stubborn clinging to power). But Biko articulated these concepts well — so well that a comparison to humanism is unavoidable. Biko’s line about “the importance we attach to Man” and how “Ours is a Man-centered society” is right up there with the maxim we learn in school from Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.”

But there are differences between these belief systems, too. If you’re European or from North America, think back to how you were first taught humanism, probably in secondary school. You were likely given examples of a man, a great scientist-artist like Leonardo da Vinci, a thinker like Erasmus or Voltaire. Individual accomplishments radiating out, affecting the Renaissance and Enlightenment civilizations. Great institutions like say, the formation of the American system of government, we were told, sprung out of the debates of keen minds and strong individual personalities.

Without straying too far down other roads, consider how the Enlightenment philosophers thought of what’s known as the “Social Contract.” Having no recourse to anthropology, most of those keen minds fell back on speculation about early human beings and assumed they were competitive savages. And then their debate turned to just when and how humans developed society and government, and how values were — and should be — imposed by a chosen power. That Africans developed their own society in a more organic way — as cultural practice and tradition, and with accountability for their leaders that wasn’t necessarily written down — was beyond their comprehension and imagination. Both are philosophical ideals, but we might even go so far to say that African humanism is far more humane.

Want to read more about African ideas and contributions to the world? You can buy The Gifts of Africa here.