Writer: Thami John | Photographs: Supplied
This Friday, 12 September 2025, at 17:30, Mutapa Afrocentric Dialogues will host “Touched by Biko: The Unfinished Business of Black Liberation” at Lit.Culture, Breezeblock Café, 29 Chiswick Street, Brixton, Johannesburg. The event features author and academic Dr Andile M-Afrika, whose forthcoming memoir, Touched by Biko: My Battles with Inferiority Complex, situates Biko’s thought not as a relic but as living guidance for a generation still grappling with the legacies of racial oppression.
The National Prosecuting Authority has reopened the inquest into Biko’s death, nearly five decades after the original ruling controversially absolved the apartheid police. This decision, echoing similar reopened cases, underscores a persistent truth: the pursuit of justice and the pursuit of liberation are inseparable.
“On 11 September 1977, he was loaded, unconscious, still naked and shackled, into the back of a police Land Rover and transported to a prison hospital in Pretoria, 1 200 kilometres away. He died outside a Pretoria hospital on 12 September 1977 at the age of 30,” the NPA said.
Forty-eight years later, Stephen Bantu Biko’s words continue to echo through South Africa’s political and cultural consciousness. “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,” he wrote. His death was brutal, carried out by the machinery of the apartheid state, yet the clarity of his vision remains unbroken, demanding that the unfinished business of liberation continue in our hands. Biko’s critique of white supremacy was unflinching. “I am against the superior-inferior white-black stratification that makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil,” he argued. He challenged the intellectual arrogance of whites who assumed leadership as a divine mandate and called for Black people to reclaim authority over their own society.
For Biko, political readiness was not a precondition for action.
“It is not a question of whether people are ready or not. It is a question of whether people should be made ready or not.” He refused to accept a framework in which Black people were spectators in a game they were supposed to be playing. His insistence that Blacks must completely transform the system, rather than merely reform it, still resonates today:
“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.” Writing under the pen name Frank Talk, Biko exposed the cognitive colonisation of Black people by white liberals and articulated a coherent framework for self-reliance, dignity, and solidarity in his seminal collection I Write What I Like.
Biko’s legacy is global. From Brazil’s Quilombos to the Caribbean and the United States, Black communities have waged resistance against white supremacy. In Salvador, Bahia, the Cultural Institute Beneficent Steve Biko draws inspiration from his philosophy, reinforcing that the struggle he championed is both local and transnational. Remembering and affirming this umbilical cord that binds Black people globally was central to Biko’s thought. Remembering Biko is not enough. His assassination on 12 September 1977 remains a stark reminder of how oppression sought to silence Black voices. The reopening of his case reflects a continuing struggle for accountability.
At the Mutapa and Lit.Culture event, Dr M-Afrika will reflect on how Biko’s thought inspired the Azanian People’s Organisation, contemporary Black Consciousness movements, and student uprisings such as #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall. These movements draw directly from Biko’s insistence that dignity, solidarity, and radical thought are prerequisites for meaningful change. In a South Africa still grappling with economic inequality, fragmented leadership, and racialised power structures, his vision remains urgent. Biko’s approach to leadership was magnanimous. He treated leaders of the ANC, PAC, and NEUM with respect, advocating for unity and recognising that shared purpose outweighed individual rivalry.
“I personally would like to see fewer groups. I would like to see groups like ANC, PAC, and the Black Consciousness Movement deciding to form one liberation group. It is only when black people are so dedicated and so united in their cause that we can effect the greatest results.”
As Biko reminded us:
“You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead you cannot care anyway. And your method of death can itself be a politicising thing.”
To honour his life is not merely to recall his brilliance, but to confront uncomfortable truths, ask what the Black community is doing to reclaim its agency, and act. Biko’s life and work leave a challenge for South Africa and the world: to transform, not simply survive; to unite, not simply coexist; to build, not simply remember. His life demands that Black people remain vigilant, conscious, and unapologetically defiant. The unfinished business of Black liberation is ours to carry forward.
