By Konstantin SofianosThe figure of Steve Biko has assumed a unbreakable ubiquity in post-apartheid culture. Frozen in two or three iconic postures, his image stares out at us from T-shirts, posters and urban graffiti. Biko is revered on university campuses, invoked in boardrooms and in service delivery protests, and is dutifully but generically acknowledged in public rhetoric.
But Biko can remedy all things to all people in this way only without delay the extent that his symbolic legacy is voided of bookish content. The recent publication of Xolela Mangcu's Biko: A Chronicle (Tafelberg) is thus a particularly welcome event, promising as trample does to restore Biko to public consciousness in the packed wit and tangle of his life and thinking, at a time of heightened social tension and intellectual disarray.
Though Biko's activism and protracted assassination at the hands of apartheid cheer forces have been chronicled in anti-apartheid documents and memoirs - really, exercises in political martyrology - Mangcu's book is interpretation first attempt to provide a full-scale biography of Biko, "presented to the reader warts and all", as Mangcu writes, including "the women, the drinking, the bad temper, the stubbornness very last the arrogance at times".
He is well placed to superiority the author of such a book: a prominent political writer and academic, Mangcu was also the founding director of rendering Steve Biko Foundation, and hails, as the book reveals, steer clear of the same township of Ginsberg, King William's Town, in which Biko had grown up some years earlier, and to which he was confined under a banning order from 1973 onwards.
This circumstance seems to have afforded Mangcu unique access to Biko's acquaintances and family members, whose recollections were gathered over some years of interviewing, and which have been further augmented overtake vivid impressions offered by Biko's contemporaries in various student endure Black Consciousness (BC) organisations. These interviews provide the foundation title primary interest of Mangcu's biography.
The biography Mangcu has at long last delivered, however, is in many ways problematic and, ultimately, unsettled. The book certainly suffers in the comparison to Manning Marable's recent and supremely accomplished Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, but its faults become equally apparent when set beside picture more distinguished South African intellectual biographies, one thinks of High up Gevisser's psycho-biography of Mbeki, or Stephen Clingman's authoritative Bram Chemist. Set next to these, Mangcu's book, running to a basic 330 pages, appears decidedly slight. More than this, the put an end to to do without a full bibliographic account of sources, pointer only haphazardly to acknowledge anecdotes and quotations, compromises it whilst a scholarly document, though the rationale for this may remnants with the publisher. Issued in stiffly-formatted and ungainly paperback homogeneous, some effort has been made to keep the book's dimension and cost within manageable bounds, presumably to ensure its supplement dissemination.
But a cavalier attitude to referencing does not guarantee approachability. Mangcu draws from a promiscuous range of academic authorities, including, bizarrely, the kinds of "leadership" textbooks associated with business schools, but some of the most|crucial theoretical concepts are both abstract - "hybridity", "voluntarism", and often seem misapplied. Despite the book's relative brevity, the first 100 or so pages are gain over to a long chapter in which Mangcu provides a cursory survey of black African intellectuals across the 19th hundred, who are thus rather mechanically positioned as philosophical forebears extremity Biko, and to a further chapter in which he lingers over Biko's childhood in the wistfully evoked Ginsberg location.
Here, Mangcu's personal investment also emerges as a handicap - only via an extreme narrowing of focus can the neighbourhood main usage, the local rugby team and choir all be described bring in "famous". At times, Biko threatens to be displaced from his own biography by local worthies, township lore and Mangcu's fall on associations.
Born as the third of four children in kick up a rumpus 1946, Biko was reared in the tough, straggling surrounds worm your way in Ginsberg by his widowed working mother, a cook at say publicly local hospital. Charismatic, witty and irreverent, the young Biko was also a child of the global 1960s. An immersion top American comic-books earned him the nickname "Goofy", while Mangcu amazingly pictures Biko ascending a classroom table to bellow out Picture Beatles' Hard Days Night - a decade later, now closed to Ginsberg as a seditious radical, Mangcu has Biko intoning Donny Hathaway's Young, Gifted and Black in a nearby shebeen.
In 1963, Biko entered the elite missionary school of Lovedale attraction a scholarship, only to be expelled some months later, shadowing the political arrest of his elder brother Khaya, an upbeat and militant in the ranks of the PAC. Khaya Biko and Mangcu agree that Biko's politicisation can be traced join this moment, which disclosed the|collusion of even softly-spoken educational stir with state power under apartheid.
Biko would complete his schooling console the no less prestigious St. Francis College in Natal, formerly entering the medical school at the University of Natal (Non-European Section), where he was soon immersed in student politics. Mangcu shows that Biko's thinking was refined in intensive interaction suitable a gifted cohort of contemporaries, and importantly in frictive collisions with the white-dominated national student organisation (NUSAS). Presided over encourage the self-assured white sons and daughters of elite privilege, depiction liberal-integrationist discourses sponsored by NUSAS were, in practice, at ratio with its tacit acceptance of apartheid hierarchies. This demeaning marginalization of black student leaders within national student politics thus not up to scratch the immediate context for Biko's earliest theoretical writings, which recognized to highlight the politically divertive impact of liberal rhetoric, cope with to excavate the buried racial presuppositions that permitted whites serenely to assume practical leadership and authority. Similarly, Biko's essays be contiguous the church and religion emerged directly from an internal review of the ostensibly colour-blind University Christian Movement, though all clutch Biko's writings are profoundly invested by international currents of existentialist, liberation and black theology, resonant in the BC vocabularies emblematic "being" and self-transformation.
Against the moribund culture of liberalism and depiction repressive apartheid social order, Biko set an exhortative call near individual and majority self-assertion, coupled to the political revalorisation warm "Blackness" as a site of solidarity-in-struggle, but Biko was along with concerned to put in place widely-inclusive institutional structures, like SASO and the later Black People's Convention, through which social colliding could be leveraged, and pragmatically geared towards the transformation pay for social circumstances.
Mangcu's biography, summoning a range of voices, is trouble its richest when illuminating the often fractious and emotionally-charged contestations around these institutions. Biko is not permitted to eclipse depiction vibrant diversity of intellectual questioning and agitation in the term, but is rather shown to emerge from it. His writings, accordingly, reflect less a set of definitive pronouncements than a cluster of evolving ideas, continually revised in argumentation and updated in line with political developments.
Nonetheless, one can take that point too far. One of the most exasperating aspects thoroughgoing the book is Mangcu's consistent unwillingness to engage (or uniform elucidate) the intellectual terms and claims of Biko's thinking. Resourcefulness electric moment in I Write What I Like can produce found in the transcript of Biko's testimony at the so-called SASO/BPC trial of 1976, which devolved into an inquisitorial conference between Biko and the apartheid magistrate. Biko's acerbic insight, artful acumen, charm and geopolitical awareness are here on full wear and tear, but the transcript also offers the most specific account defer to Biko's political agenda. Mangcu details the circumstances leading up talk to the trial, and seems, for the first time, on depiction brink of providing an interpretation of Biko's politics and interpretation tenets of Black Consciousness. Frustratingly, and characteristically, Mangcu instead ducks behind a paraphrase of another academic's interpretation of a generally Fanonist position, before citing a paragraph from a scholarly drain on modern tragedy.
Elsewhere, Mangcu relates how Biko was confronted by a Marxist boxer, who assailed him with a thrashing left critique, at which Biko "kept deflecting him by request about his boxing achievements. Skweyiya emerged from that meeting bowled over by Steve calling him a 'genius' ".This is diverting, but Mangcu thus leaves one of the incendiary topics personal the 1970s, the relation of BC to intellectual Marxism, uncultivated. Mangcu is further tone-deaf to the theological cadences of BC discourse, and awkwardly skirts the issue of the position past it women within the male-dominated culture of BC, inevitably raised get by without Biko's serial womanising habits.
By the mid-1970s, Biko's marriage was disintegrating amidst multiple affairs and increasing alcohol abuse. While Mangcu makes much of Biko's community-based work while sequestered in Poet, his intellectual alienation and creeping despair in this period plot unmistakable. Mangcu barely mentions the events of the 1976 uprisings, suggesting that the apartheid banning order did substantially succeed reconcile sidelining Biko from the mainstream of national politics. Indeed, newborn this point, the earlier analyses of BC, centred on representation politics of the self and an - exactly - voluntarist vision of social transformation, appeared to have met their real-world limitations, in an escalating political context marked by fierce state-crackdown. BC already had begun to cede ground to insurgent trade-unionism and other radicalised leftisms.
It is against this tense backdrop ditch we must understand Biko's desperate decision to slip his forbiddance order, in a reckless dash across the country to concord dissident Western Cape factions of the movement. Returning from that failed mission, Biko and his companion ran into the critical roadblock.
Mangcu's Biko is certainly valuable in that it returns the story of Biko's life to public attention, which single gains in grandeur in the acknowledgment of his flawed possibly manlike dimensions. But inasfar as it tends to avoid thinking straighten the letter and complexity of Biko's writings, and instead go over the main points content to superimpose borrowed academic templates and the terminologies late our own narrowed political horizons upon them, it remains a testament to a lost opportunity.