A church floor at a student conference turned Steve Biko against liberal nonracialism
At a 1967 student conference, white and Indian delegates were given dormitory beds while black Africans were told to sleep in a church. Steve Biko walked out, and the insult convinced him that black South Africans had to organise on their own terms. The result was the Black Consciousness Movement.
Biko was born on 18 December 1946 in Tarkastad, in what is now the Eastern Cape, and grew up in Ginsberg township, where about 800 families shared water and toilets four households at a time. His father, a former policeman studying law by correspondence, died when Steve was four, leaving the family on his mother's wages as a domestic worker and hospital cook. His sister believed watching her hard working life first politicised him. His name Bantu means people, which he linked to the Xhosa saying that a person becomes a person through others.
A bright pupil who skipped a year, he won a community bursary to the elite Lovedale school, only to be expelled within months after his brother was accused of links to a banned group; no evidence tied Steve to it. He later said the episode taught him to hate authority. At a liberal Catholic college he found heroes in anticolonial leaders such as Ahmed Ben Bella, and in 1966, steered away from law, he enrolled at Natal's medical school.
The student union NUSAS opposed apartheid but was white-dominated and cautious, and Biko came to see well-meaning white liberals as paternalistic. He helped found the South African Students' Organisation, launched in 1969, open to all who were oppressed, including Coloured and Indian students, and became its first president. Drawing on Frantz Fanon, the movement stressed psychological liberation and popularised the slogan black is beautiful. He kept white friends and rejected anti-white hatred.
The apartheid government at first welcomed SASO as separatism in action, then saw Biko as subversive and banned him in 1973. He kept organising community projects such as a clinic and a crèche in Ginsberg. Arrested in August 1977, he was beaten to death by security officers; more than 20,000 people attended his funeral. His friend Donald Woods's biography became the 1987 film Cry Freedom.
Source: Steve Biko
