“A people without a
positive history is like a vehicle without an engine.” Steve Biko as Frank Talk
(We Blacks)
“Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of
life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time.”
Steve Biko
(Black Consciousness
and the Quest for A True Humanity)
Thank you Program Director: Greetings ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to the Steve Biko Centre, a project of the Steve Biko
Foundation.
And welcome to the special edition of the FrankTalk Dialogues
entitled:
‘What is Black Thought?’
I would like to greet our Guest Speaker, Professor
Lewis Gordon. I welcome him very warmly to the spiritual home
of black consciousness, right here in Ginsberg, King William’s Town (eQonce).
I am the Librarian at the Steve Biko Centre Library and
Archive. Our concern is with both the past and the future, honouring the legacy
of Steve Biko and facilitating the application of his philosophy to help improve
the prospects of our fellow South Africans, and the prospects of future
generations.
In furtherance of this ideal, the Steve Biko centre, through
the children’s library, main library and archive, is working on a pilot project
to eradicate, within the next five years, any illiteracy that might remain in
Ginsberg (we will pilot Ginsberg first and move from there). Another pilot
project emanating from the Centre, focusing on secondary schools is an
indigenous languages essay competition to be run in collaboration with DSRAC
(Eastern Cape Department of Sport, Recreation, Arts and Culture).
It is relevant here to recall that, in delivering the Fourth
Annual Steve Biko
Memorial Lecture at the University of Cape Town, in 2003,
Ngugi wa
Thiong’o, internationally celebrated Kenyan activist,
novelist, essayist, playwright and academic, examined the power of indigenous
literature in the self-realization of African communities. He quoted, among a
long list of prominent African intellectuals, Dr B.W. Vilakazi (of the Vilakazi
Age in African Literature), who argued that African “writers
themselves can learn to love their languages, and use them as vehicles for
thought, feeling and will. After all, the belief, resulting in literature, is a
demonstration of people’s ‘self’…. That is our pride in being black and we
cannot change creation.”
Ngugi wa Thiong’o places Steve Biko’s philosophy in the
context of this tradition, and asks: “Is this not a literary expression of
black consciousness long before Biko gave it a name and currency?”
Having grounded the centre in both its intellectual
tradition, and in its geographical locus in the Eastern Cape, home of legends,
I would like to include a more direct reference, to illustrate the key role of
Steve Biko, whose influence radiated from this historically rich region,
especially as I am a perpetual student of history, specifically the history of
the Amakholwa, Mission Stations and Early African Intellectuals. I will
quote briefly from a book that was recommended to me by Mr Nkosinathi Biko: Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and
the Tragedy of the Xhosa People, by award-winning journalist and author Noel Mostert,
published in 1992. The book contains the following insightful role of Steve
Biko whom Mostert met in the 1970s:
“Biko provided … as no one else could have done during the time I spent in South Africa, the powerful bond of continuity between the history I was engaged with and that which was being made daily in the land. Nothing made it more clear than the fact that we met in King William’s Town and, appropriately in a nineteenth-century church… that served as the centre of black community programmes that Biko helped to organize. Biko, himself missionary educated, represented the last African generation to be beneficiaries of that education. 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.”
Noel Mostert writes of Steve Biko’s funeral: “In King
William’s Town, in retrospect, I felt that I had attended the last great event
of the Eastern Cape struggle…”
Within our present “Eastern Cape” context, it’s a particular
pleasure for me to formally greet and welcome my friend, Dr Richard Pithouse of
Rhodes University Political Science Department. While I welcome
Richard I want to also thank him for contacting us some weeks ago and telling
us that Professor Lewis Gordon would be in South African as the visiting Nelson
Mandela Professor at Rhodes University. By telling us about this
visit he launched the organizing of today’s Dialogue session.
Just in passing, it is interesting to remember Steve Biko’s
vital “Durban connection”, as I recall that way back, in the late 90s and early
2000s, during our UDW and UKZN days, Dr Richard Pithouse was organizer of the
Frantz Fanon Memorial Lecture, and through that he brought some of
the the best and the brightest scholars to KZN, such as Professor Mandani,
Professor Nigel Gibson and Professor Lewis Gordon himself to mention
but a few.
Moving forward I would like to greet Mr Biko, and Mama Biko,
to greet academics, colleagues and students from the University of Fort Hare
and other academic institutions, greet intellectuals, researchers, colleagues
within the heritage and information sector, greet friends of the Steve Biko Foundation
and Centre, greet friends, our neighbors, greetings to all and welcome. Having
only briefly referred to the work of the Steve Biko Centre, I would ask you to
keep visiting the Centre and to spread the word about the work of the
Foundation and Centre. I can only reiterate that the Steve Biko Centre is a response to the concerns of Steve Biko and his
Colleagues. And it is situated within the locality of the issues it seeks to
address.
To put things in context, it’s important that I say a few
words about the FrankTalk Dialogues. At the1st General Students Council of
SASO in July 1970 Steve Biko was elected Chairman of SASO Publications.
The following month the monthly SASO newsletter began to appear, carrying the
articles by Steve Biko called ‘I write what I like’ and signed Frank
Talk. The first article was entitled Black
Souls in White Skins? The other articles were entitled as follows: We Blacks, Fragmentation of the Black
Resistance, Fear an Important Determinant in South African Politics and Let’s talk about Bantustans. Frank Talk is the pseudonym under which Steve Biko wrote. Hence the
name FrankTalk Dialogues.
Since 2010, The Steve Biko Foundation has partnered with the
Open Society
Foundation in delivering the FrankTalk initiative. Now in its
third phase,
FrankTalk continues to provide a platform for
intergenerational dialogue and critical analysis of social issues in South Africa’s
young democracy. The primary objective of the intervention is to create a
non-partisan platform for engagement with socio-economic and political issues
in order to strengthen democracy and to advance a culture of human rights.
Through ongoing interaction with FrankTalk participants, the Steve Biko
Foundation aims to perpetuate a culture of engaged citizenship and public
participation. We have on air dialogues that we do with YFM, and schedule
off-air dialogues in various localities, such as the Durban University of
Technology, University of the Western Cape, Tshwane University of Technology
and here at the Steve Biko Centre.
This October sees the 37th anniversary of Black Wednesday. As
we all remember, on the 19th of October 1977, following the death of Steve
Biko, the regime banned Black consciousness organizations and black newspapers.
On the same day, raids were carried out all over the country, and almost all people
in leadership positions of all the Black Consciousness Movement formations were
arrested. In commemoration of Black Wednesday the theme of our dialogue today
is: What is Black Thought?
Thank you
Mwelela Cele
