Cape Town - If Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko were alive he would be asking difficult questions of today’s South Africa, Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri said in Cape Town on Wednesday night.
“Has there been a reconciliation with proper consideration? Have the things he fought against merely mutated like a cancer?” Biko, said Okri, was “more than just the unfinished conscience of this land”.
He was delivering the annual Steve Biko memorial lecture at UCT in honour of the activist who was murdered by apartheid security police 35 years ago.
If he were alive today, Okri said, Biko might have expressed concern about the police’s attitude to striking miners.
“He is the finger pointing at the only acceptable future, a land in which everyone can be proud of what they are.”
Okri said South Africa’s Struggle and history had been “the background music” to the lives of Africans. “You have no idea what you mean in the historic consciousness of the world.”
“For most of my life it seemed apartheid could not be overcome. But a great injustice arouses something very deep in the human spirit.”
However, he said, now that the nightmare was over, the question was “what do we do with the day?”
“A nation cannot escape from itself, from all of its truths and all of its lies. The people in the shantytowns feel the shadow of those lies.”Okri said
South Africa needed Biko’s spirit more than ever.
“No one will lead us to the destiny that we want. We must do it ourselves. Freedom may turn out to be a very small part of the true story of a people. The real story begins with what they did with that freedom.” He said some nations never “glimpsed the mountain top”. But the real value of mountain tops was not to live on them but to see from them. “Too often that view is lost.”
Biko would have asked Africa to put its house in order.
Black Consciousness was “an injunction to greatness” and a reminder that everyone should carry the burden of leadership. “The leaders that you have say something about the people that you are,” he said.
“Biko said we should blame or praise ourselves for our leaders,” he continued. “I’m not advocating civil unrest, but people cannot be passive in… the running of their lives.”
“Continued wakefulness is the burden of Black Consciousness. Now is the time to create a society commensurate with the ideals for which so many fought and so many died, producing from the blood of martyrs the gold of a new civilisation.”
Okri said African nations were expected to achieve in decades what other continents had taken much longer to achieve. “America needed two hundred years and a civil war to become itself… Time has speeded up for us.”
“The greater the mistakes the greater the lessons to be learned from them,” he added.
“We have made enough mistakes to be nations of genius. Pass the word along that there are three Africas, the one we see every day, the one they write about and the real, magical Africa that we don’t see, unfolding through the difficulties of our time.”
He concluded: “Our future is greater than our past” to a standing ovation in the Jameson Hall.
Cape Times