“In the name we discover a struggle”
Ahmed Veriava and Prishani Naidoo (75)
“some meet the NEW DREAM with a scream”
Lesego Rampolokeng (76)
Steve Biko is a widely circulated icon in post-apartheid South Africa. Like a South African Che Guevara of sorts, Biko’s image, name, and key maxims are recycled on t-shirts, screen savers, and advertisements, and are commonly invoked in the rhetoric of political parties seeking to leverage his popular appeal as a revolutionary martyr. (77)
This was impressed upon me recently in August of 2009 while walking in the Newtown district of Johannesburg. In the course of this five minute walk I encountered posters for Lesego Rampolokeng’s play Bantu Ghost: a stream of (black) unconsciousness at the Market Theatre, vendors selling Biko (and Che Guevara) t-shirts on a sidewalk, and a vehicle painted with advertisements for a hair salon deriving its name from Biko’s. As the proximity of these Bantu Ghost posters to these various commercial strains of Biko’s legacy suggests, Biko poems are produced in relation not only to Biko’s own life and writings, but also in relation to the popular and political revaluation of Biko as a logo and sound byte. This relationship often arises within Biko poems quite overtly, as “the labor of the scream,” (78) the struggle to redeem the transgressive, performative value of Biko’s legacy in the present.
In this chapter, I will explore the manners in which this struggle manifests in contemporary Biko poems. Mphutlane wa Bofelo’s “Conversation with Bob Marley” (79) is a poem that is centrally animated by this struggle over Biko’s legacy. dwelling upon the question posed by Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” (80) namely, “How long shall they kill our prophets,” this poem considers the manners in which Biko, like other “prophets” of the anti-apartheid struggle (dead and living), is conspicuously refashioned in post-apartheid South Africa.
“Conversation with Bob Marley” begins by observing Marley’s question in relation to the manners in which corruption has eroded the progressive politics of those former activist leaders who have become greedy for power and money in the post-independence era:
“How long shall they kill our prophets?”
Hello, Bob Marley
Finally your question has an answer
Or shall we say has to be updated
They no longer kill the prophets
The wallets do the talking and prophets shut their mouths.
Once we deployed comrade Ram
From labor to the government sector
He re-deployed himself to the corporate sector
By chance I met him at a dinner party
Asked him to clarify the difference
Between retrenchment and rightsizing
“It is not cultured to talk while you are eating”, he said
My simple mind got the message:
How can you talk while the mouth is full?
With these images of “eating” as corruption and greed, Bofelo evokes the stuffing and silencing of the mouths of those prophets that survived apartheid only to betray the rank and file of their resistance movements, “re-deploying” themselves from public service to the corporate world. Thus, they no longer “speak” in resistance to oppression because their mouths are metaphorically filled with their new activity of “eating.”
While “Conversation with Bob Marley” depicts former prophets now preoccupied with gorging themselves, we encounter images of the disruptive politics of dead anti-colonial leaders such as Che Guevara and Steve Biko neutralized, hollowed out, and refashioned as commodities and icons for the materialism and privilege of a new black political and economic elite:
How long shall they kill our prophets?
Hey, Mister Bob Marley
This question begs for an update
Che’ is an ornament
Biko is collectors’ item
Designer labels bought with pomp and grandiose
Paraded at exclusive clubs
By strange creatures speaking a strange language
At home in New York, terrified in Soweto
Physical citizens of Azania, (81) mental residents of Europe
Re-minted as icons of buying power upon expensive trinkets and t-shirts, figures such as Guevara and Biko find new worth as commodities consumed by highly mobile elites ill at ease in black South Africa (“At home in New York, terrified in Soweto”). The irony is, of course, that these prophets who stood for socialism and, especially in Biko’s case, black self-love, are refashioned into icons of the opposite: elite capitalist privilege and the phobia of blackness. “Conversation with Bob Marley” thus casts this commodification and de-politicization of revolutionaries as the new method of “killing prophets,” living and dead.
Moreover, this deadly process impinges upon the nation’s art and poetry:
They build false monuments
In the name of the prophets
Turn heroes into iconoclast
Now they engineer cloned poets
Dreaded caricatures ejaculating sterile verses
Rhyme crazy, content shy morons
Spiting nursery rhymes for poetry
This stanza raises the troubling suggestion that prophets are silenced not only through corruption and post-mortem commodification, but also through art. Ossified in “false monuments” to a consumer culture, and praised by a prominent coterie of “cloned poets” with “sterile verses,” prophets are shown to be politically and aesthetically sterilized, assassinated in terms of Marley’s verse.
Yet, in this moment of poetic crisis Biko arises as an unsettling specter in “Conversation with Bob Marley.” Against the defeatism of the last words of “Redemption Song”—“Some say it’s just the part of it/We have to fulfill the book”— Bofelo observes Biko’s ghost lurking in the wings, amongst the shacks of Alexandra Township, pushing back against the fatality of the de-politicization inferred in Marley’s lyrics:
“Some say it’s just the part of it
We have to fulfill the book”
Hello, Mister Bob Marley
The book of real life is unfolding
Today it is murder by memory
Bureaucrats institutionalize
The legacy of our heroes
To build an empire for themselves
From the marginal zones of shanty Alex
Biko’s ghost watches in amazement
As he is re-membered
In a club-members only banquet
In the comfort zone of urban suburbia
This passage is evocative of the range of spectral invocations of Biko within contemporary Biko poems, for Biko’s ghost is cast in conflict with his commodified and “re-membered” status in the service of the interests of a post-apartheid national elite who congregate “In a club-members only banquet/In the comfort zone of urban suburbia.”
Here, Biko’s ghost arises haunting from the marginal shack lands of the country, suggesting the possibility of a politics of subaltern struggle in a context otherwise dominated by anti-humanistic values and the evacuation of hope. Here, Bofelo’s use of “Alex” (Alexandra Township), as the site of Biko’s spectral entrance is also highly symbolic, for this township sprawls with its notoriously convoluted and cramped quarters directly across the street from Sandton City, one of South Africa’s most opulent suburbs. Biko’s lurking ghost of emancipatory politics, this poem suggests, exists in the claims of the most marginalized upon the present, claims that multiply in spite of his “re-membrance” as an icon of elite privilege.
This struggle over the meaning of Biko’s legacy is further evident in poems by Bofelo such as “Verwoed [sic] is Black: Biko is on Holiday,” (82) which invokes Biko as a symbol of lost black self-love. With Biko “on Holiday,” Bofelo scathingly indicts the recent rise of xenophobic violence against “foreign” Africans in South Africa, comparing “negrophobic” South African vigilantes (of color) with the architect of apartheid, the late South African Prime Minister, Hendrick Verwoerd.
Poems such as Bandile Gumbi’s “After the Fact” (83), similarly call into question the presumed emancipation of blackness in these “supposedly post times,” in which Biko “lingers” as both an icon of elite privilege and the potentiality of the opposite, an unsettling subversive politics, a “phoenix,” she writes, of “nakedness and truth.” This struggle takes on rural tones in Vonani Bila’s “The Kowtowing Chiefs”, which contrasts the anti-apartheid leadership of figures such as Biko with the greed and corruption of contemporary rural leaders, who, while presumably assuming the mantle of past leaders such as Biko, are described by Bila as “a gluttonous waste/nothing else.” (84)
Biko poems can accordingly be seen to agitate against the political and aesthetic implications of Biko’s contemporary revaluation as a “name made common” (85) within popular and political discourses antithetical to the premises of Black Consciousness. Construed as “common,” Ahmed Veriava and Prishani Naidoo suggest, Biko becomes politically (and by extension, we may add, aesthetically) conservative, a contradiction to Biko’s articulation of Black Consciousness as a politics of the politically effaced and oppressed. This contradiction, Veriava and Naidoo argue, mak[es] our task of remembering Biko all the more urgent. For the name, Biko—the marker of a seditious style of life—has been made fashionable. Literally. Take a walk through the Zone in Rosebank and peek through one of the shop windows. You might be surprised to find Biko’s face staring back at you from a T-shirt selling for over R300. (86)
Sit down at one of the posh coffee shops and try to listen in on the conversation at the next table. Try not to act confused if you hear some black economic empowerment (BEE) executive expound on “Corporate Black consciousness” and the importance of black pride. Biko is “big” in Rosebank. So “big,” in fact, that one can’t help but be reminded of Walter Benjamin’s warning: “not even the dead will be safe if the enemy wins. And the enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” (87)
As Veriava and Naidoo’s general summation of the struggle over Biko’s legacy suggests, Biko poems arise not innocuously, but within a contested terrain in which Biko’s broader afterlife is being hashed out. Reading contemporary poetry through Biko’s “name” we thus encounter a productive labor in which Biko as “the marker of a [truly] seditious style of life” seeks to separate itself from Biko as “the name made common.”
Here, it is instructive to attend to the recent assertion by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel Gibson that the struggle over Biko’s legacy is animated on three key fronts. (88) The first two fronts, these scholars argue, consist of discourses emanating from the closely intertwined new economic and political elites that the novelist Zakes Mda has collectively called “the Aristocrats of the Revolution.” (89)
The first front in which these scholars locate Biko today is thus within the self-justifications of the new black business elite. These elites are commonly associated with the state-driven Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) program, through which the post-apartheid South African government has leveraged a form of affirmative action within the corporate economic sector to cultivate a small yet extravagantly wealthy new black economic elite. Biko, these scholars maintain, is invoked in this arena largely as an icon of black capitalist empowerment, which ultimately masks residual white economic dominance and the continuing economic exclusion of the majority of the population.
Drawing on the work of Moeletsi Mbeki, (90) Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson thus argue “that BEE was conceived by white business to legitimate itself in the postapartheid era,” and while it has produced a small black economic elite, the program has done little to mend the real racialized disparities in income in the country. (91) Biko is thus detached in this arena from his associations with the economic struggles of the oppressed, and is ushered forth as a symbol of “trickle down” economics antithetical to the systemic transformation of South Africa’s economy.
The second key strain of Biko’s contemporary legacy suggested by Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson emerges from the realm of “state-linked political and bureaucratic classes.” Here Biko is mobilized along with terms such as “transformation” and “representativity” (92) to outwardly signify mass black political enfranchisement while masking the entrenchment of a small black political elite closely intertwined with the new black economic elite. According to Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson, this resignification further obscures the fact that South Africa’s governing practices, like its economy, are seen and experienced by many as still structured upon “colonial and apartheid forms” of governance, which “As a bureaucracy […] confronts the majority of blacks as a cold, arrogant, often violent and indifferent system.” (93)
Together, the BEE Biko and the Biko of state power evoke a Biko who justifies the entrenchment of elite power and privilege, “a Biko”—Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson contend—“who is mute in the face of continued black suffering, exclusion, and humiliation.” (94) Such observations have led Lewis Gordon to argue that, “The structures that now more rigorously subordinate groups of South Africans in poverty (“the poors”) present themselves in ways that at first seem to make Biko’s appeal to a black consciousness problematic” in that they are perpetuated by an ostensibly black government. “Nevertheless,” Gordon continues, “the blacks who now represent blackness in the South African government are clearly not based on Biko’s political designation, but the old South African racial designations” in that the blackness of the state, like that of the BEE elite with which the state is entangled, is defined a priori through biology, without regard to Biko’s definition of blackness as the struggle of the politically effaced.
Gordon thus concludes that these black elites “have taken the reins from the whites and have presented a more rigorous means of disarming the political voice of excluded populations,” ultimately leading to the observation that, “If politics itself is what is at stake in the failure to address blackness,” beyond its associations with conservative elite privilege, “then there is the ironic conclusion that the contemporary South African state is also an antiblack one.” (95)
While Biko circulates through these two entangled (state and BEE) fronts as an icon of elite economic and political power, Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson also point out (like Gordon, as well as Veriava and Naidoo), that Biko’s legacy emerges from a third front as the struggle for political life by the county’s most disenfranchised. As Gibson has asserted elsewhere, the ideas that inspire movements such as the Durban-based shack-dwellers association Abahlali baseMjondolo, and the johannesburg-based Landless People’s Movement, both of which have gained international prominence for challenging the lack of equitable land and housing access in the post-apartheid era, are examples of Biko’s symbolic value in the transgressive politics of the otherwise politically absent. (96)
Key to Biko’s continuing relevance to this transgressive strain of black politics is the acute prescience shown within Biko’s writings about the contours of oppression in the post-apartheid era, what David Theo Goldberg has called “racial neoliberalization.” (97)
Without a fundamental, systemic revolution, Biko foresaw a nominally transformed post-apartheid South Africa, “in which the poor will grow poorer and the rich richer in a country where the poor have always been black […] driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds.”98 In a post-apartheid South Africa that has made the transition to a neoliberal economy at a dizzying pace, yet with simmering racial tensions and some of the world’s highest disparities in income and standards of living, (99) these scholars assert that Biko’s philosophy of black struggle for political life remains as pertinent as ever in “the shout of black majority for whom the formal ending of apartheid has not yet altered circumstances in any meaningful way.” (100)
Thus, Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson argue that it is this third front of struggle which is most aligned with Biko’s life and writings: “The legacy carriers of the BC philosophy are the excluded majority who continue to make life under extreme conditions and who, as Frantz Fanon once put it, cannot conceive of life otherwise than in the form of a battle against exploitation.” (101)
In terms of this dissertation, this analysis and Bofelo’s “Conversation with Bob Marley” are helpful in understanding Biko poems in that they evoke the logic so central to the performative understanding of Biko and Black Consciousness. Because blackness can only be realized in the process of struggle for political life from the margins, it cannot be reconciled with elite power or the status quo. It cannot be banked in monuments.
Blackness, in Biko’s terms, needs to struggle to emerge as the scream of the otherwise politically erased.
This logic explains the pervading sensitivity to (thematic focus upon) the struggle between these three fronts of Biko’s legacy in Biko poems, as well as their intense reflexive engagement with poetry as the performative instantiation of this struggle up from oblivion, what Veriava and Naidoo more generally describe as “the labor of the scream, the haunting presence that threatens to rise up against the present.” (102) As such, Biko poems are typically marked not only by descriptions of “continued black suffering, exclusion, and humiliation”(103) and overt rejections of Biko’s (BEE) commodification and adoption within the rhetoric of state power, but also indictments of other, usually generalized and unnamed, poets whose poetry serves to evacuate blackness from its transgressive performative associations. These, unoriginal “cloned poets/Dreaded caricatures ejaculating sterile verses,” Bofelo’s poem reminds us, are “content shy morons,” who fail ultimately in their inability to realize the political and aesthetic mandate within Biko’s legacy to performatively enact the struggle of blackness for presence.
To poetically invoke Biko in the post-apartheid present, Biko poems suggest, is thus to struggle along these fronts of Biko’s afterlife, to seek to actualize a transgressive, performative poetics from a position of political absence. It is to pursue in contemporary literature the “inward looking process” that Biko called for. This study subsequently unfolds as an inquiry into the manners in which this “labor of the scream” manifests within contemporary South African poetry.
75 Ahmed Veriava and Prishani Naidoo, “Remembering Biko for the Here and Now,” Biko Lives!: Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, eds. Andile Mngxitama, et al. (New York: Palgrave, 2008) 234. 76 Lesego Rampolokeng, “Welcome to the New Consciousness,” Talking Rain (Johannesburg: COSAW, 1993) 33‐34. 77 Veriava and Naidoo 234.
78 Veriava and Naidoo 235. 79 Mphutlane wa Bofelo, “Conversation with Bob Marley,” The Heart’s Interpreter (Qualbert, South Africa: Mphutlane wa Bofelo, 2007) 38‐39. 80 Bob Marley and the Wailers, “Redemption Song,” Uprising, Island, 1980.
81 Azania is a name for South Africa derived from Black Consciousness discourse.
82 Mphutlane wa Bofelo, “Verwoed is Black: Biko is on Holiday,” Bluesology &
Bofelosophy: Poetry & Essays (Braamfontein, South Africa: Botsotso, 2008) 25‐26.
83 Bandile Gumbi, “After the Fact,” Pangs of Initiation (Somerset West, South Africa: H.A. Hodge, 2004) 2‐3. 84 Vonani Bila, “The Kowtowing Chiefs,” Beauty Came Groveling Forward: Selected South African Poetry and Prose, ed. Gary Cummiskey. 2 December 2009
86 Roughly equivalent at the time of this writing to $45. 87 Veriava and Naidoo 234, emphasis retained. 88 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 16‐19.
89 Zakes Mda, The Heart of Redness (New York: Picador, 2003) 33, 171. 90 Moeletsi Mbeki, “Concepts of Transformation and the Social Structure of South Africa,” Visions of Black Economic Empowerment, eds. Xolela Mangcu et al. (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2007) 216‐225. 91 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 16‐17.
92 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 17. 93 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 17. 94 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 18.
95 Gordon, “A Phenomenology” 91, emphasis retained. 96 Nigel Gibson, “Upright and free: Fanon in South Africa, from Biko to the shackdwellers’ movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo),” Social Identities 14.6 (November 2008): 683‐715. 97 Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism passim.
98 Biko, I Write 91. 99 A recent study by the South African Institute for Race Relations suggests that, while the gaps between racialized groups’ incomes have slightly shrunk over the past fifteen years of independence, South Africa remains highly stratified economically, such that, while the per capita income in South Africa in 2008 was R32,599, the per capita income for white South Africans during that period was R135,707, suggesting an almost insurmountable disparity in economic power between racialized groups. “White South Africans Still Top of the Income Pile,” Mail
& Guardian Online 4 December 2009 < http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009‐11‐24‐ white‐south‐africans‐still‐top‐of‐the‐income‐pile>. 100 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 18. 101 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 19.
102 Veriava and Naidoo 235. 103 Mngxitama et al., “Biko Lives” 18.


















