Tyrone August looks at the two famous Steves that have been in the news recently and comes to some interesting conclusions.
Johannesburg - The name Steve has cropped up a lot recently. First it was Steve Hofmeyr, the gravel-voiced crooner who once caused a fair bit of excitement with his mushy love songs.
These days he is still causing some excitement. More often than not, though, it is the result of his pronouncements on matters political rather than his gyrations on the music stage.
The man best known for his rendition of compositions like Pampoen and cover versions of songs made famous by American singers such as Neil Diamond and Kris Kristofferson is now the self-appointed spokesman of the disaffected.
In his account, it is white Afrikaans speakers who bear the brunt of most of the ills now afflicting South Africa. Not even empirically verified research to the contrary sways him from this deeply held conviction.
His latest provocation, of course, was his statement on Twitter that “blacks were the architects of apartheid”. Quite how he arrived at that conclusion was never explained, and he remained unrepentant even after losing a court battle with puppet Chester Missing (aka Conrad Koch).
“Can’t say what I think,” he tweeted afterwards. “Can’t say what I see. Can’t rely on court for protection.” There is absolutely no sense of awareness of how offensive his views are; he lives in an idealised past, in which Die Stem still defines his sense of personal identity and nationhood.
In recent months, he performed the old national anthem at the Innibos festival in Mbombela and in Adelaide in Australia. There is a complete disregard of the immense pain and suffering caused by apartheid under that anthem.
The other Steve whose name often came up this week was that of Steve Biko. The circumstances in which it resurfaced revealed a mindset not very dissimilar from the callousness displayed by Hofmeyr.
On Wednesday two siblings, Clive and Susan Steele, tried to sell the autopsy report of Biko – the Black Consciousness leader who was brutally killed in detention by police in September 1977 – at an auction in Joburg.
They received the report from their mother, Maureen, once the private secretary of Dr Jonathan Gluckman who conducted the autopsy on Biko. To prevent the report from being seized by security police, Gluckman gave it to his secretary for safekeeping. It is almost beyond comprehension how the Steele siblings thought it perfectly reasonable to try to profit from Biko’s death. To them, it seems, the sale of the autopsy report was a financial transaction like any other.
There appeared to be no recognition whatsoever of how utterly disrespectful such a sale would be to Biko’s memory. Fortunately his family obtained a court order to prevent the auction, which set the opening bidding price at R100 000. “How can they (the Steeles) believe that file is something they can commodify is beyond me,” said Biko’s son, Nkosinathi.
George Bizos, who represented the family at the inquest into Biko’s death, added: “They thought wrongly that they were the owners of the documents and would become rich if they sold them. The mother was not the owner of the papers, but… the custodian.”
The story of the two Steves is very much the ongoing story of South Africa. The one is not prepared to give up anything; the other gave up everything.
* Tyrone August is
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Cape Times