classes when someone knocked at the door. As she so often did, my mother asked me to answer the door. I called out: “Forbes Nyathi is here to see you,” and returned to the serious business of my lunch. Forbes is Steve’s first cousin, as his mother Eugenia was Steve’s father Mzingaye’s younger sister. I took a second glance at Forbes, normally a cheerful fellow, and noticed the sombre look on his face. They both disappeared into my mother’s room, and all I could make out were whispers. When my mother came out of the room, she looked distressed. Something terrible had happened, she said: “uBantu uswelekile” – “Bantu is no longer with us.” Everyone in our community called Steve by his first name – Bantu, a name which signifies being at one with the people.
Before I could ask more, she rushed me back to school.
Back at our school, chaos reigned. Steve’s niece Nompumezo was crying inconsolably in our Standard Five (Grade 7) classroom. The older boys summoned us out of class and instructed us to go back to the township. We would not be returning to school for weeks on end. This was of great concern because that meant there was a chance I would miss the exams for the last year of primary school. I had already expressed my desire to go to one of the more prestigious boarding schools for junior high school the following year. Given what was going on around me, this seemed like a self-indulgent thought. Community members streamed from all corners of the township to gather in the public square in front of our house. The question – and there seemed to be no satisfactory answer – was what had happened to Bantu?
The minister of justice, Jimmy Kruger, had issued a statement that Steve Biko had died from a hunger strike:
He was arrested in connection with activities related to the riots in Port Elizabeth, and inter alia for drafting and distributing pamphlets, which incited arson and violence . . . Mr Biko refused his meals and threatened a hunger strike. But he was regularly supplied with meals and water which he refused to partake of.[1]
The community was outraged. This explanation for deaths in detention had been offered too many times for anyone to take it seriously. I remember the anger of the crowd – especially the youngsters. I particularly remember the agitation of the twin brothers with biblical names, Joseph and Daniel, who lived at the back of our house. The youths were urging the assembled group to take revenge on the whites in town. Cooler heads prevailed and that line of action was abandoned. The anger turned inward. The discussion suddenly turned into speculation about who might have been the police informer. The next thing, a large group of youths went on a rampage. I ran home.
For the next few days a dark cloud of smoke hung over our township – literally and figuratively – as government installations and homes of suspected police informers went up in flames.
The youth targeted teachers because they were seen as part of the system of Bantu Education. My brother, who was a school principal at the nearby township of Zwelitsha, had his house destroyed by a mob of students and he moved into our home in Ginsberg. I was afraid for our home as well but nothing happened to us. My mother sent me to the shops to check out a group of youngsters who had threatened my brother about coming to find him at our house. The boys saw through my mission and warned me not to tell on them.
In the ensuing mayhem over the next few days I found myself literally staring at a policeman with a rifle. He was in camouflage behind a shrub. I turned and ran back as fast as I could. That kind of near encounter with death never left my memory. Under apartheid too many people were killed by being shot in the back, fleeing from the police – from Sharpeville to June 1976. I was lucky to come out of that experience alive, to somehow tell the story not only of Steve’s death but also of his life.
Over the next two weeks our little township became the focus of the world. Hundreds of people from all over the country and from all over the globe descended on Ginsberg to hold a vigil at the Biko home in Leightonville. Every night I escaped my mother’s watchful eye to listen to the fiery speeches and the freedom songs. By this time I knew the songs by heart, for I had grown beyond my years. My brother, who was a friend of Steve’s, would later tell me that Steve would compose some of these songs by simply taking popular Bible hymns and replacing them with revolutionary lyrics. For example, the popular struggle song Amabhulu azizinja[2] – “Whites are dogs” – is derived from a famous Presbyterian hymn written by the great 19th-century priest and intellectual Reverend Tiyo Soga on his return from study in Scotland in 1857. Upon arrival at the Port of Algoa Bay (Port Elizabeth) aboard the ship Lady of the Lake, Soga knelt down, kissed African soil and sang this hymn in prayer. Legend also has it that he was inspired to compose the song on his first view of Table Mountain as the ship came around the Cape. Barney Pityana has described the emotional and historical significance of Lizalis’ idinga lakho for black people as follows:
It is a hymn that has taken on the authority of a national anthem. It is sung in churches throughout the length and breadth of this land; it can be heard in political rallies; in times of sadness and in times of joy, Lizalis’ idinga lakho is evocative of our deepest feelings, expresses our prayers in words too beautiful to fathom. It is a plaintive song of remembrance, of pain, of defiance and of dedication. [3]
Whether Steve adapted Lizalis’ idinga lakho into Amabhulu azizinja is not clear. For example, others argue that the song was composed or adapted by Vuyisile Mini – one of the first people to be hanged for ANC underground activities in Port Elizabeth. It is also believed that ANC leader Govan Mbeki co-authored some of these songs. Barney Pityana recalls:
I remember so well growing up in New Brighton with the ANC having something called umjikelezo singing these songs rather like religious revival meetings. The songs grew out of that.
We will probably never know for sure. History, as they say, does not proceed in a straight line. The historian Jeff Peires explains the quest for certitude as springing more from “the understandable wish to bring order into history than it does from history itself”.[4] As Immanuel Kant put it: “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.”[5]
Whatever their authorship, these revolutionary songs became our heritage. The people at Steve’s home sang them as if they were singing from the same hymnal sheet, with a fervour similar to that described by Pityana.
The youth from Johannesburg’s Soweto township seemed particularly fearless as they did their famous call-and-response throughout the period of the vigil. Someone would shout at the police: Niyabesaba na? –“Are you scared of them?” – and the crowd would respond: Hayi, asibesabi, siyabafuna – “No, bring ’em on”. From a distance I had been fascinated by the militancy of the Soweto youth since the outbreak of the 1976 student uprisings the year before. I followed the news about Soweto student leader Tsietsi Mashinini whose famed disguises and escapes from the police were the stuff of legend throughout the country. Now Soweto had come to Ginsberg.
Steve Biko’s funeral was set for 25 September 1977 at the Victoria Stadium in King William’s Town – many of the most visible symbols of this most colonial of towns are named after 19th-century British monarchs or governors. The whole region is peppered with colonial names, many dating back to the arrival of German settlers in 1857 – East London, Berlin, Hanover, Hamburg, Frankfort, etc. Giving the Steve Biko Memorial Lecture in Cape Town in 2003, the famed African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o spoke about the inappropriateness of these names in an African country. It was as if African memory was made over and dressed in the garb of European terminology. Of course, the towns had their original names too, such as Qonce or Bhisho for King William’s Town. My granduncle, Benjamin kaTyamzashe (popularly known as B ka-T), composed a song for the town titled Bhisho ikhaya lam – Bhisho is my home. This name was later usurped by the homeland leader Lennox Sebe to build a boondoggle of a capital for the Ciskei Bantustan. Ultimately, the colonial names became the official ones.
And so there