Nat Nakasa Memorial Dialogue at The Steve Biko Centre - 27 July.

Tribute to Black Consciousness Era Poets

Mandla Langa - The Texture of Shadows: Launch at the Steven Biko Centre

Welcoming Address by Mwalela Cele at the Presentation by Professor Lewis Gordon at the FrankTalk Dialogues, Steve Biko Centre, 3 October 2014

“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).

FrankTalk Dialogues: Lewis Gordon on 'What is Black Thought?'

I'm Not Your Weekend Special - Book Launch at the Steve Biko Centre

Welcome Remarks 'Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation'

Mwelele Cele

Book Launch: Welcome Remarks

Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation

Good evening honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen, colleagues … My name are Mwelela Cele, and 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.

It is indeed an honour to welcome you all this evening to the launch of a very significant new book: memoirs of a born free: reflections on the rainbow nation. Warmest greetings to the author Malaika Wa Azania, to Mama Biko, to representatives from government, friends of the author and friends of the Steve Biko Foundation and Centre. It is a particular pleasure to have with us our colleagues from heritage institutions in our region - librarians, archivists, curators, museum professionals. We appreciate the support of our friends and colleagues from Amathole museum here in King William’s Town eQonce. It is a pleasure to greet political and cultural activists, intellectuals and lovers of books and knowledge. I want to also welcome our partners in different projects, and welcome the neighbours of the Steve Biko Centre. I want to take this opportunity to thank Jacana Media, the publishers of memoirs of a born free: reflections on the rainbow nation, our partners in organising this event.

Africa is still waiting for the dawn

Pumla Gqola

Pumla Gqola, Mail & Guardian

I want to conjure up an image of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe that is slightly out of focus in post-apartheid Southern Africa: we concentrate usually on the man who gave us the Pan Africanist Congress in 1959, was imprisoned in 1960 on Robben Island, a revolutionary whose vision, words, humaneness is known.

I want to talk about Sobukwe’s valuing of the imagination, the Sobukwe who took great pleasure in the nonobvious, who relished works of the imagination.

But he also understood the value of the imagination when unbounded, not limited to the pages of a novel or a performance on a stage.

That is what the iconic image of Sobukwe letting soil fall through his fingers is: recourse to the metaphoric, the poetic, the symbolic, when ordinary words were both unavailable and inadequate.

Pumla Gqola: 8th Robert Sobukwe Memorial Lecture

The Steve Biko Centre: Ginsberg, King William's Town (eQonce), Eastern Cape

Picture by Mwelele Cele

The Steve Biko Centre Library is Now Open to the Public