Steve Biko

4. To love and to work

54 4 To love and to work ‘Freud was once asked what he thought a normal person should be able to do well,’ Erik Erikson tells us. And Freud had replied: ‘Lieben und arbeiten’, to love and to work. Erikson goes on to say that ‘it pays to ponder on this simple formula; it grows deeper as you think about it. For when Freud said “love”, he meant the generosity of intimacy as well as genital love; when he said “love and work”, he meant a general work productiveness which would not preoccupy the individual to the extent that he might lose his right or capacity to be a sexual and loving being.’ Work Biko’s work was to awaken the people: first, from their own psychological oppression through recognising their inferiority complex and restoring their self-worth, dignity, pride and identity; secondly, from the mental and physical oppression of living in a white racist 55 society. Biko explained: ‘I had a man working on one of our projects in the Eastern Cape on electricity … a white man with a black assistant. He had to be above the ceiling and the black man was under the ceiling and they were working together pushing up wires and pushing through the rods in which the wires are and so on, and all the time there was insult, insult, insult from the white man. “Push this, you fool.” That sort of talk. And of course this touched me. I knew the white man very well, he spoke well to me, so we invited them to tea and I asked him:“Why do you speak like this to this man?” And he said to me in front of the guy: “This is the only language he understands, he is a lazy bugger.” And the black man smiled. I asked him if it was true and he said: “I am used to him.” This sickened me. I thought for a moment that I did not understand black society. After some two hours I came back to this black guy and said to him: “Did you really mean it?” The man changed. He became very bitter. He was telling me how he wanted to leave his job, but what could he do? He did not have any skills, he had no assurances of another job, his job was to him some form of security, he had no reserves. If he did not work today he could not live tomorrow, he had to work, he had to take it. And as he had to take it he dared not show any form of insolence to his boss.’ What mattered to Biko, Mpumlwana explained, 56 was what work he needed to do in order for this person to be himself all the time. He further understood that self-realisation and identity also depended on seizing the necessary tools to function in a technological world, tools deliberately denied blacks by the Bantu Education Act. As Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs at the time, had explained in parliament, when speaking about the new laws of segregated education: ‘There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European [white] community above the level of certain forms of labour … For that reason it is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim absorption in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour … Up till now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his own community and partially misled him by showing him the green pastures of the European but still did not allow him to graze there.’ Demanding those denied tools – at the same time recognising that the green pastures of white education were not so green after all – would lead to widespread disruption in the Bantu Education system, which was sustained by black students for a whole generation over the next two decades. In 1972, although reluctant to believehecouldnotmanagebothstudyingandpolitical work, Biko chose the more difficult political road. This was formally affirmed by his dismissal from medical 57 school in June 1972, having only officially passed three years out of six. What was more painful was that he would also have to disappoint his family’s ambitions for him and those of virtually the whole Ginsberg community. The choice he made was one that thousands of black students would come to face: the choice...