Biko’s Ghost: The Iconography of Black Consciousness by Shannen Hill (review)

Thirty-nine years after his murder, there is a renewed scholarly, social, and cultural interest in the life and work of Stephen Bantu Biko. This is evident from the recent spate of works focused on his ideas and the movement he inspired. Some of these publications include Xolela Mangcu’s biography, Biko: A Life (London, 2013); the collection of essays Biko Lives! (New York, 2008) edited by Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel Gibson, which re-examines the intellectual, political, and cultural legacy of Biko and its relevance to post-apartheid South Africa; and Barney Pityana, Mamphela Ramphele, Malusi Mpumlwana and Lindy Wilson’s edited collection of essays, Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko & Black Consciousness (Cape Town, 1991). In addition, the collection of Biko’s essays culled from Black Consciousness newsletters and edited by Aelred Stubbs, I Write What I Like (Chicago, 1978), first published outside South Africa, has been republished in South Africa since 1996 and reprinted in 2010. This is shored up by the steady flow of research papers, commemorative monographs and lectures, as well as newspaper articles published about his murder in 1977. Hill’s book is the latest in the growing body of literature on the impact of Black Consciousness Movement on political and cultural developments in South Africa.

The title of the book is taken from a 1985 poster by Sipho Hlati, titled “Biko’s Ghost Haunts Them.” It is also the slogan printed on the T-shirt of a child in the poster’s depiction of mass unrest during the State of Emergence of 1985. The tiny figure, hemmed in by two anti-riot policemen pointing guns at him, defiantly raises a fist. The image is reminiscent of Francisco Goya’s painting The Third of May 1808 that commemorates the Spanish uprising against the invasion by Napoleon’s army. It depicts the execution of captured Spanish resisters by French soldiers. The central figure is a captured resister on his knees with his hands raised in surrender and pleading for clemency. In contrast, Hlati’s iconography is suffused with defiance. With a raised fist, the boy stands his ground. On the earth behind him Biko’s middle name, Bantu, which means “human being,” is painted on the ground suggesting internment in African soil and signifying nativist nationalism. In the background the banners of the Azanian People’s Organization, a Black Consciousness Movement, and that of the United Democratic Front, aligned to the then exiled non-racial African National Congress, are held aloft by a crowd.

Painted almost a decade after Biko’s death and specific to the revolts of the mid-1980s, the poster visually connects the revolt of 1976, the uprising of the mid-1980s that paved the way for the capitulation of the Apartheid government, and the democratization of South Africa in 1994. This is the iconographic key to the central postulation of the book. The image asserts that while Black Consciousness was brutally suppressed in 1977, it was not completely vanquished despite attempts to displace it by rival ideologies. As Hill puts it in chapter five, which deals with state censorship of art and political opposition under Apartheid:

Although I analyze the works in relation to censorship, there is another kind of silence afoot about these works in the present day. As evidenced in chapter 4, historians have erred by unduly crediting the ideology of nonracialism too much force behind South Africa’s liberation. I argue the term non-racial gained greater currency in the early 1970s as exiled ANC leaders used it to supplant an orientation previously called Charterist. By doing so, the ANC and others subtly cast Black Consciousness as racial, thereby silencing its real focus: the power of voice. As historians continue to adopt the dominant narrative, they perpetuate a kind of censorship over quieter accounts.

Accordingly, the book is an attempt to “redraw the boundaries of South Africa’s liberation history...