What would Steve Biko make of today's SA?

I have been thinking a lot about Steve Bantu Biko.

Biko is the brilliant Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) leader who was brutally murdered by the apartheid government in 1977.

I am haunted by what he would think of us as a country today.

I fear that this proponent of black pride, excellence, and ubuntu (humanity) would be ashamed of us.

He would ask: “What kind of message are you sending to our young people when you steal from your own, collapse your own institutions, reinforce discredited and false racial stereotypes of black corruption, and behave as though you have no agency?”

Many of our current government leaders joined the ANC after being conscientised by the BCM in the 1970s.

President Cyril Ramaphosa, for example, was detained for long periods for organising for the Bcm-inspired Black People’s Convention and the SA Students Organisation.

Animated by Biko’s elaboration on the Black Power philosophies spreading through the US in the 1960s and 1970s, the BCM sought to free black people from centuries of “mental slavery” — the propaganda that they are inferior to whites.

The movement was wildly popular.

Across the globe, black people asserted themselves and fought in various ways for their rightful place in all aspects of life.

Black was not just beautiful, as the slogan asserted, but it was also smart, savvy, capable, unapologetic, and anything positive you wanted to add.

What Black Consciousness recognised was that centuries of oppression and false messaging that blacks were inferior and fit only for labour had dehumanised many of us.

It recognised that the work that had to be done was not just fighting and destroying the apartheid system, but also rebuilding (among black people) a sense of their own full humanity.

Of course, the work of liberation also included rebuilding (among whites) a recognition that they were human, not superior.

Part of achieving this goal was striving for, celebrating, and highlighting black excellence.

It involved building black-led, black-owned institutions of excellence even under apartheid.

While under banning orders (this included not being able to meet more than one person at a time or being able to leave his house) in the 1970s, Biko helped establish a clinic in Qonce, a children’s daycare centre in Ginsberg township, a bursary scheme, a leather goods company that employed women, and a trust to help families of political prisoners.

At the same time, he reached out to liberal whites to help them understand that black self-love and affirmation did not equate, as was the propaganda of the apartheid government at the time, to white hate.

This point did not need to be made, particularly to a regime that was built on the systematic dehumanisation of blacks, but Biko did it anyway.

Now, with all this in mind, imagine a child born in 1994 in Biko’s home township of Ginsberg.

At the age of thirteen, in 2007, that child would have experienced the first bout of electricity blackouts.

Today, at the age of 29, that product of Ginsberg has been living with the ANC’S failure to provide secure, consistent, electricity for 16 years — and the incessant racist tropes of black incompetence and corruption that this has watered and fed.

That child, instead of growing up celebrating the defeat of apartheid in 1994 and the ushering in of a people-centred, black-led, democratic government, now only hears that Buffalo

City Metro under which their home falls cannot provide electricity, that the water needs to be boiled, that the municipality’s leaders have stolen monies meant for Nelson Mandela’s funeral, that there has been no proper forensic investigation of what happened to the nearby Enyobeni tavern, that infrastructure collapse is the norm. That black life is cheap.

That black leadership is corrupt and inept.

The same child (today a 29year-old adult) hears these leaders of the municipality and of the governing ANC in general make excuses every day about what’s gone wrong.

They blame white monopoly capital, they blame the West, and a whole bunch of others, for their failures.

How are our kids supposed to grow up proud and assertive when every day they see their leaders fail at the most basic levels of governance?

It is impossible not to conclude that since 2007 the ANC has been engaged in an act of great betrayal of black people. Since the day the ANC danced in support of a man whose “adviser” was convicted of bribery , the betrayal has been in super-drive.

Since that day, the party has used its place in power to undermine talented, professional, black people and to feed the racist narratives that blacks cannot govern and are corrupt.

It says to these kids, subliminally and overtly through its actions: Hate yourself.

There can be no greater betrayal than this.