I Write What I Like

Chapters 4-6 address key aspects of Biko’s activism and the context out of which they emerged. In Chapter 4, Biko describes meeting with Black students across South Africa and listening to their calls for change. These meetings informed Biko’s work with SASO. Biko notes that the students wanted change, but that they lacked the ability to effect it: “Most of the students, while very sure of what they did not like […] lacked a depth of insight into what can be done” (18). According to Biko, students were at a loss that bordered on helplessness: “One found wherever he went the question being asked repeatedly ‘where do we go from here?’” (18). Biko presents the students’ attitudes as evidence of the harmful nature of old approaches to social change, which relied on the direction of white leaders and required no input from Black people: “Our originality and imagination have been dulled to the point where it takes a supreme effort to act logically even in order to follow one’s beliefs and convictions” (18).

While Chapter 4 outlines the desire for change, Chapter 5 provides evidence for the necessity of that change. In other words, the chapters address two aspects of the same issue. Much of Chapter 5 centers on the problem of white liberalism. Biko calls liberals “Black souls in White skins” because they claim “to feel the oppression just as acutely as the blacks and therefore should be jointly involved in the black man’s struggle for a place under the sun” (20). In Biko’s time, most Black organizations in South Africa were run by white people with paternalistic attitudes: “White liberals always knew what was good for the blacks and told them” (20).

Liberals promoted a version of integration that kept white people in leadership positions and Black people subservient: “The integration so achieved is a one-way course, with the whites doing all the talking and the blacks the listening” (20). Biko compares the dynamic between white and Black people to a parent-child relationship, where Black people are “treated as perpetual under-16s” (21). He makes a similar analogy later in the chapter, comparing white people to teachers and Black people to students: “I am against the superior-inferior white/black stratification that makes the white a perpetual teacher and the black a perpetual pupil (and a poor one at that)” (24).

Seeing no future in the liberal approach, Biko urges Black people to reject liberalism and instead embrace The Importance of Pride and Black Consciousness. He anticipates counterarguments to strengthen his position. For example, he refutes the idea that rejecting liberal integration is racist, arguing that racism is “discrimination by a group against another for the purposes of subjugation or maintaining subjugation” (25). Black people do not have the power to subjugate white people. Thus, Black-only groups like SASO are not racist.

Biko uses an analogy to explain his opposition to liberal integration: “It is rather like expecting the slave to work together with the slave-master’s son to remove all the conditions leading to the former’s enslavement” (20-21). Biko hopes that rejecting liberal integration will lead to a true integration based on respect and equality:

Once the various groups within a given community have asserted themselves to the point that mutual respect has to be shown then you have the ingredients for a true and meaningful integration […] Each group must be able to attain its style of existence without encroaching on or being thwarted by another. Out of this mutual respect for each other and complete freedom of self-determination there will obviously arise a genuine fusion of the life-styles of the various groups. This is true integration (21).

Chapter 6 thus introduces The Importance of Pride and Black Consciousness as a central theme in Biko’s activism, with Biko urging Black people to embrace their own agency and to take pride in their history and culture. Black Consciousness is necessary to spur Black people to action. Biko describes the defeatism of contemporary Black people in negative terms: “The type of black man we have today has lost his manhood. Reduced to an obliging shell, he looks with awe at the white power structure and accepts what he regards as the ‘inevitable position’” (28).

Biko’s description becomes even more evocative later in the chapter: “The black man has become a shell, a shadow of man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery, a slave, an ox bearing the yoke of oppression with sheepish timidity” (29). Only through Black Consciousness can Black people stop being complicit in their own oppression and bring about social change. Revisiting the problem of white liberalism, Biko argues that white people cannot be part the solution, as “[n]o white person can escape being part of the oppressor camp” (23). For these reasons, Biko believes, the key to an equal future lies in the hands of Black people themselves.