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Biko In His Own Words

Text: Compiled by Veli Mbele
Artwork: Supplied

“Black people-real black people-are those who can manage to hold their heads high in defiance rather than willingly surrender their souls to the white man.”

-Bantu Biko.

“…I am against the superior-inferior white- black stratification that makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil (and a poor one at that).

I am against the intellectual arrogance of white people that makes them believe that white leadership is a sine qua non in this country and that whites are the divinely appointed pace-setters in progress.

I am against the fact that a settler minority should impose an entire system of values on an indigenous people.”

-Bantu Biko

“We Black people should all the time keep in mind that South Africa is our country and that all of it belongs to us. The arrogance that makes white people travel all the way from Holland to come and balkanise our country and shift us around has to be destroyed.”

– Bantu Biko

“…you know. That’s a problem with people who are in the struggle; they are so keyed-up, screwed up with this kind of nonsense: are you pro-this or pro-that. And we have refused for three years now, four years, to identify ourselves in any direct sense with any group.

People don’t commit themselves to ANC or PAC these days. You get people who commit themselves to the struggle. The distinction between ANC and PAC, incidentally, in the eyes of the masses is terribly thin… And the nuances of whether one is socialist, one is nationalist, one is this, one is that, never got down through into their minds.

So that it’s an intellectual debate that is meaningless. At home, some guys are emotional about the ANC. But okay, what is ANC? “It’s a party for Africans!” You know? It’s all he knows about ANC. He might know a leader and admire one-Mandela is the darling of ANC people, and Sobukwe of course darling of the PAC people.

But you ask them what the difference is; they don’t know. The radical difference that people see at the moment between those groups and us is this solidarity approach we’re adopting….”

-Bantu Biko

All in all the black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity.

-Bantu Biko

Our attitude is here is that you cannot in pursuing the aspirations of black people achieve them from a platform that is meant for the oppression of black people.

-Bantu Biko

‘…it became a sine qua non that before you even started entering the arena of politics and fighting for social change you must be a non-racialist. And this explains why in fact it became necessary for SASO to mount such a heavy attack on liberals. They did a quick and good job. In one year, I think the campuses obliterated any strong trace of liberalism. And in the larger society, now going out of campus, blacks began to see that in fact it was a fallacy to think that before you fight you need to have a white man next to you, for the sake of depicting a non-racial society.’

-Bantu Biko.

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 politicisng thing.

-Bantu Biko

“Blacks no longer seek to reform the system because doing so implies acceptance of the major points around which the system revolves.

Blacks are out to completely transform the system and to make of it what they wish.

Such a major undertaking can only be realised in an atmosphere where people are convinced in the inherent truth in their stance…”

-Bantu Biko

“It’s not a question of whether people are ready or not. It’s a question of whether people should be made ready or not. You see when you talk of people being ready, I’m looking at it from a different sense. Are people ready for the final action, you see?

Now the political party that is formed may not necessarily be the final form that we need to take, but it is some kind of measure, right? It needs to be there anyway to promote us towards the final step. So that whether people were ready or not is irrelevant.

The point is what’s happening right or wrong. If it’s wrong, then we need some kind of platform that’s going to tell us what is right. And what to do in order to get towards that right.

This is our justification for the existence of a political party…We want to come in at a stage when people have not been so thoroughly affected by the system and its little cocoons of racialism and oppression as to make them believe that in fact our solution lies in that system.

If the silence is continued any longer this is inevitable. It has become a big problem already. So this justifies the need for the emergence, the creation of a political party at this stage, as a constant reminder to the people that there’s something wrong in this system…”

-Bantu Biko

There is in South Africa an over-riding idea to move towards ‘comfortable” politics, between leaders. And they hold discussions among themselves about this.

Comfortable politics in the sense that we must move at a pace that doesn’t rock the boat. In other words people are shaped by the system even in their consideration of approaches against the system.

Not shaped in the sense of working out meaningful strategies, but shaped in the sense of working out an approach that won’t lead them into any confrontation with the system.

So they tend to accommodate the system, to censure themselves, in a much stronger way than the system would probably censure them.

-Bantu Biko.

“Material want alone is bad enough, but coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills”

-Bantu Biko

“I think there is no running away from the fact that in South Africa there is such an ill distribution of wealth that any form of political freedom which does not touch on the proper distribution of wealth will be meaningless.

The whites have locked up within a small minority of themselves the greater proportion of the country’s wealth. If we have a mere change of face of those in governing positions what is likely to happen is that black people will continue to be poor, and you will see a few blacks filtering through into the so-called bourgeoisie.

Our society will be run as of yesterday. So for meaningful change to appear there needs to be an attempt at reorganising the whole economic pattern and policies within this particular country.  -Bantu Biko

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