Event: The Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, 2002
Speaker: Professor Chinua Achebe
Title: Fighting apartheid with words
Date: 2002

In early 1961, a few months after Nigeria was granted independence by Britain, I set out on my first African journey beyond the familiar bounds of my West African home. I planned to visit two regions—East Africa and Southern Africa. In the first six weeks I had "done" Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar. It had been, by no means, plain sailing. The first touch-down, in Nairobi, was preceded by an astonishing immigration ritual in the air. The landing card distributed to passengers asked them to indicate their identity as (1) European (2) Asiatic (3) Arab (4) Other. I realized then that I was heading into interesting times; and I was not disappointed, so to speak. I realize that to you my experiences in East Africa would seem tame and not worth talking about. I mention this only because it was the first and still stands out in my memory for the jolt it gave me; I had so little experience of dealing with the cruder forms of racial abuse. But, as I ended my six weeks in East Africa and turned southwards my problems had increased enormously. I dare say, however, that even those would still not merit discussion here. But they were enough to make me call off my voyage of discovery and return home. I knew that some day, after Southern Africa’s liberation from racial oppression I would complete my journey. I must say, however, that in 1961 the prospects seemed very distant indeed.

But, miracle of miracles, it happened in 1994! I should have been in the first crowd arriving to verify the incredible story with their own eyes and, like the magi, take it back to their places, these Kingdoms. Unfortunately, my ability to get up and go had been severely curtailed three years earlier in a quotidian voyage within Nigeria, and so I am this late in coming. But soon or late, here I am. And to make up for my slowness I have brought my wife and children to make it a big family visit.

A visit that was 40 years in the making might be expected to come with a memorable message. I have brought the simplest of words – THANK YOU. Thank you for the epic struggle you waged for South Africa, for all of us in Africa and for all peoples oppressed and their oppressors everywhere in the world. I say thank you to Nelson Mandela and his colleagues who inspired and led that heroic struggle. I say Thank You to all the people of South Africa—men, women, even children who came out in support, too often with their lives.

I want to thank the Steve Biko Foundation who took the initiative to invite me at this particular time, the 25th year of Biko’s death, to deliver the third Steve Biko Memorial Lecture, and who made all the complicated and expensive arrangements for our visit. I consider it the highest of privileges.

It is a particular honor, a rare privilege and pleasure to have the Chancellor of the University of Cape Town presiding at this special Convocation. The admirable Graça Machel has a name to conjure with in postcolonial Africa and beyond. Thank you, ma’am.

And to my friend and fellow-writer, Njabulo Ndebele I owe special gratitude for this opportunity to address a great university. I appreciate the honorary Doctor of Literature you have thrown into the bargain. I must tell you I love honorary doctorates and have never understood why anybody should still want to get a doctorate degree the hard way. This is infinitely better.

My gratitude to my introducer, Nuruddin Farah - a long-time friend and an admirable novelist - who has stepped forward more than once in the past to pay tribute to my work.

Twenty-five years ago the government of South Africa added to its bad record of racial oppression the brutal murder of a young black man, Steve Biko - a student activist with a burning passion for freedom and equality in his native land, a prophet impatient for change and fairness.

Steve Bantu Biko was born on December 18, 1946. He died on September 12, 1977, three months before his 31st birthday. He had come of age in that bleak period of discouragement and despair following the banning of the ANC and the locking up of its leadership for good, as it seemed. A young man with a sharp intellect and a flair for organization and leadership, Biko realized the need to raise the sagging morale of black people, to raise their consciousness and self esteem; in his own words to "overcome the psychological oppression of black people by whites."

Biko’s encounter with the South African police was inevitable; it finally came in 1973 when a banning order was clamped on him. Two years later, in 1975 he was arrested and imprisoned for four months without charge or trial. The following year, 1976, he was held for over three months. In 1977 he was held in March, then again in July, and finally he was arrested at a road block and imprisoned in Port Elizabeth. For 24 days he was held naked and manacled in his cell and was severely beaten. Post-mortem examination would show three severe wounds to his head "caused by the application of force to his head". In a state of unconsciousness he was carried in the back of a truck to Pretoria, 750 miles away. An inquest would find the police not guilty of wrong-doing.

My excuse for this short recital of a story you know much better than I is to indicate with one or two examples how faithfully South African literature, particularly its fiction, has played the role of witness to this country’s appalling history, and why it was able to do so.

The death of Steve Biko is almost straight out of Alex La Guma’s novella, A Walk in the Night, first published in Nigeria in 1962, fifteen years before Biko’s dreadful ordeal.

A Walk in the Night is a densely-packed story of one hell of a night in District Six, a neighborhood where, in the words of the narrator, "people are thrown together in the whirlpool world of poverty, petty crime and violence".

La Guma does not give us political or any other commentary on District Six; he gives us instead a dizzying succession of unforgettable images. For example, he introduces us to perhaps the only gentle person in the entire story – a homeless, eccentric boy called Joe; he is going up the street "trailing his tattered raincoat behind him like a sword-slashed, bullet-ripped banner just rescued from a battle".

A few lines later La Guma gives us what amounts to a companion image, of two policemen on beat:
They strolled slowly and determinedly side by side… cutting a path through the stream on the pavement, like destroyers at sea.

The reader’s mental walk through this harrowing night in District Six ends with the quite unbearable portrayal of the death of another young character, Willieboy, hunted down remorselessly for a crime he did not even commit, shot and gravely wounded by a trigger-happy policeman on patrol, Constable Raalt. Raalt’s patrol-mate and driver is quietly unhappy at the shooting and suggests they call an ambulance — a suggestion Constable Raalt sneeringly overrules. They throw the wounded boy in the back of their van and drive away from a gathering crowd in an ugly mood. On their way to the Police Station Raalt orders the driver to stop at a roadside bar for him to buy cigarettes and have a little chat.

It seems to me quite apparent that a literature which draws its sustenance from the life lived around it and develop imaginative identification with that life has a good chance of achieving the quality and the authority of prophetic utterance. Alex La Guma knew District Six like the palm of his hand. He was born there and grew up there. He knew the poverty, the despair, the alcohol, the squalor, the pain. He knew apartheid South Africa, the police and their ways. He knew the country’s obsession with skin color and hair texture. He was political; he joined trade unions, organized a strike and was fired from his job. Add all this to his brilliance as a story-teller and you have a seer and prophet of the South African racial malaise.

Biblical scholars tell us that the Old Testament prophets performed a dual function – to foretell and to forth tell; to predict the future and to speak out against the ills of the present. Alex La Guma exemplified and fulfilled this dual mandate in his life and work, as did so many of his contemporaries.

In 1962 when A Walk in the Night was published, apartheid was at the height of its vigor, virulence and arrogance.

Almost 20 years later, in 1981, Nadine Gordimer published July’s People, a prophecy about the end of apartheid in a violent revolution. The interesting thing about this prophecy is that it did not come about although it had seemed so inevitable. As we now know – to our great relief – South Africa performed the miracle of an orderly transition from fascism to democracy. What happened? Was there indeed a miracle, or was Nadine Gordimer’s prophetic vision somehow flawed? I think it might be helpful to consider this question alongside another novel bearing a prophecy that also apparently failed. I refer, of course, to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a dreadful story of a waxing totalitarian state which holds its citizens hostage through brainwashing, perversion of language and perpetual surveillance by a Thought Police. Such was the impact of Orwell’s novel on the world that words and phrases, such as Big Brother and 1984 itself have gone straight out of its pages into political language and even everyday speech.

As a very young man George Orwell had gone from Eton College to work in the Indian Police in Burma in the heyday of British imperialism. But he was quickly disillusioned by the imperial vocation. His subsequent experiences included fighting in the Spanish Civil War and living the life of a tramp in England. He was clearly a political animal looking for an acceptable position in the highly ideological 1930s – when capitalism, communism, fascism and socialism struggled for ascendancy.

What I am getting at is that people who write books whose vocabulary moves into common speech, or whose imagery grip the popular imagination do not stumble accidentally into their status; they achieve it through the deep knowledge they have acquired, often painfully, about their society. With the power and authority of this status George Orwell became a prophet able to scare the world with the starkness and urgency of his vision and, perhaps, make us a little better behaved than we were inclined ordinarily to be. There was a deep sigh of relief in many places when the year 1984 finally came and the nightmare world of Orwell’s imagination did not happen. The English novelist and critic Anthony Burgess celebrated the non-event with the publication in 1984 of a book he called Ninety-nine Novels: the best in English since 1939 – as though to take our minds off the narrow escape we had just had.

Alex LaGuma knew his South Africa thoroughly and left us indispensable images of the cruelty of apartheid at the height of its notoriety. Or take another writer: Nadine Gordimer’s literary career began simultaneously with the birth of apartheid. From her close and attentive observation she gave us a scenario for its imminent fall convincing enough to give a healthy scare to her headstrong countrymen.

Although apartheid is gone the legacy of Steve Biko will grow in this country and in Africa for the clarity of his political thought and for his physical and moral courage. One will inevitably hear criticisms and reservations concerning his strong language about white liberals, and for such actions as his alleged abandonment of a multiracial student organization in order to found an all-black association. One will hear, I am sure, the handy phrase "reverse racism." But Biko insisted that what he saw was not a multiracial but a pseudo-multiracial organization in which "the whites were doing all the talking and the blacks [all the] listening." He understood that hundreds of years of discrimination and dispossession of black people in South Africa had seriously damaged their self-esteem. For a young man in his twenties, brilliant and impatient for freedom, Steve Biko’s rhetoric was neither extravagant nor out of place. His insistence that black people and their white liberal associates should take a hard, critical look at their relationship was appropriate, and really no different from Nadine Gordimer’s X-ray examination of that same problematic relationship in July’s People and indeed in practically all her work. And it is not even a peculiarly South African necessity. It was, for example, a major concern in the civil rights movement in America. I do recall watching a short dramatic sketch on an off-off-Broadway stage in New York in the late 1960s. The play opened with a group of black revolutionaries discussing their plan of action, with one white liberal in their midst. Their plan, it turned out, was to kidnap Mrs. Kennedy, the President’s wife during a visit to New York. The white liberal was opposed to this project and argued very strongly against it. In the second and final scene the same people were in the same room, the same posture, still discussing their plan. But something had changed. They were now discussing how to kidnap not Jacqueline Kennedy but Martin Luther King.

That was a rather bizarre way you might say to pose a perennial question: How much credence can a victim of racial oppression place on the disinterestedness of any member of the oppressor group who is, or claims to be, a liberal sympathizer while enjoying the benefits conferred automatically on him by his skin color? Is it fair that the victim should be saddled with the additional burden of sorting out this ambiguity when all his energies should be channeled into his struggle?

I hope you will believe me when I say that I am not in the habit of going about knocking liberals but I really don’t think that the awkwardness in their condition should be blamed on the likes of Steve Biko, but on those whose racial arrogance, greed and stupidity made skin color such a red flag in the first place. In a decent, humane society Steve Biko would have been cherished as a young man of great promise; even when in an access to youthful conceit he can say that "it was a waste of time to try and change the mind of anybody over 40, as they have already made up their minds", his countrymen over 40 should have bestowed on him an indulgent smile rather than a barbaric execution.

The sum total of what I have been trying to say is congratulations to the good people of South Africa for bringing the long nightmare of apartheid to an end; to the brave warriors who took on the enemy on every theater of that war; to the writers, in particular to the very first South African writer I ever met – Eskia Mphahlele, the doyen of African literature; novelist, short story writer, autobiographer, critic, scholar, teacher. And then the group of gifted writers I met in exile in America in the 1970s – Willie Kgositsile, Dennis Brutus, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Daniel Kunene and Mazisi Kunene, Bessie Head. I should mention here the poets Mafika Gwala, Mongane Serote, Sipho Sepamla, Oswald Mtshali. The list goes on and on and I think I should invoke the Igbo wisdom which says that when you have 400 dignitaries to salute you can either go on doggedly and call each man by his title, or you can wave your hand over the crowd and speak the formula: every man and his own and that magic phrase — onye na nke ya – absolves you from the obligation to remember and pronounce 400 salutations.

But it is particularly important to recognize the high hopes we have for a great literary harvest in the post-apartheid era. These hopes are encouraged by the work of a vibrant group of new writers. I hope your promise will be fulfilled in abundance. If you don’t mind I will leave a word of advice with you. If someone comes from afar and tells you admiringly that you are Africa’s answer to Latin American magic realism, or something equally profound, you should smile and slip away as soon as you can. Your admirer has obviously never heard about Africa’s oral tradition, nor about that incredible Igbo cultural event called mbari in which gods and people and beasts real or imaginary assemble on one grand concourse to celebrate the spirit of creativity; and finally he has never heard of Amos Tutuola, a Yoruba Nigerian coppersmith who began publishing magic realism in 1954 without hearing about Latin America. You must learn to relish the adoring presence of the world at your doorstep but remember that if you buy every ware it peddles on the side, you will be broke.

I cannot end my salutes without giving the biggest one to Mrs Biko who made such a heart-breaking sacrifice to South Africa.

Earlier this year I saw on American television an interview of Mr. Mandela in the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah was suitably deferential, but there was something she refused to accept. Mr. Mandela was at pains to explain to her that the victory was not his alone but the work of a group and the whole country. He kept stressing the collegiate, the co-operative; she kept insisting on the self, the individual. It all seemed to me like a little war game between the Western and African psychologies, between "I think, therefore I am" and "A human is human because of other humans". South Africa’s victory over apartheid will teach many powerful lessons to the world. Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is one lesson. The fact that President Nelson Mandela stepped down for a successor after four years – in a continent of Presidents-for-Life – is another.

Because your success was so great you have, and are entitled to have, the highest expectations of dividends. Your leaders whom you have chosen to manage the assets of this beautiful land on your behalf have the responsibility to address those high expectations. Along with your well-wishers in Africa and around the world, I wish you and President Mbeki and his government great success.

© Copyright 2006, Steve Biko Foundation