Conversations with Biko

Conversations with Biko


"Conversations with Biko"
Creative Writing Competition
16 June - 30 September 2007
(The dateline has been extended to the end of September to allow contributors more time to refine their entries!!!)

The Steve Biko Foundation and Xarra Books
launch
the Biko 30:30 Youth Creative Writing Competition
On 12 September 2007, South Africa will witness the thirtieth anniversary of the murder of Steve Biko. The Steve Biko Foundation is organizing a series of commemorative events to mark the thirtieth anniversary of this leader who died at the youthful age of thirty years. Dubbed Biko 30:30, this occasion will examine the contemporary meaning of Biko in Africa and the Diaspora through a number of events from June to September 2007 which include:
· A conference entitled Consciousness, Agency & the African Development Agenda
· A series of music concerts
· Community festivals including visual, literary and performance arts
Biko made an important contribution to the freedom that many fought for, and which is enjoyed today by all South Africans. In his brief life, Bantu Stephen Biko raised the hopes of the people by cementing the foundations of the liberation of South Africa. Through his death he showed the world the brutality of the apartheid regime, and helped to bring about its ultimate downfall.
For a new generation of South Africans, born in freedom, it is necessary, not only as part of history but as part of our identity to engage with the ideals and consciousness of Biko.
The Steve Biko Foundation, in partnership with Xarra Books will start a wave of discussions about Biko through a national writing competition. We call for aspirant writers to submit a poem or a prose piece (short story, essay) to enter the competition.
Rules of the competition:
· The piece should be about the relevance and impact of Biko’s ideas today or as if the writer were in conversation with Biko.
· Poems should be no longer than three A4 page and prose not more than 10 pages (3000 words). Any pieces that are over the length indicated will be disqualified.
· The piece must be submitted in English.
· The competition is open to anyone from age 14 - 36 years old.
· The piece must be sent via email to This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it">

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writingbiko@xarrabooks.com
This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
by midnight on 30 September 2007. No late entries will be accepted.
· Every entry must have a REGISTERED NAME (not pseudonym/alias), AGE, CONTACT NUMBERS and EMAIL ADDRESS.
· The competition is open to young people of the African continent.
· The judges will select the top 10 writing pieces.
· A piece submitted for the competition may be used in any of the publications of the Steve Biko Foundation, or for the purposes of the 30:30 campaign, or for the Steve Biko archives. It will be taken that the writer accepts this as one of the conditions of the competition.
· The winning entries will be published in a Book with the working title “Biko Today - Conversations with Biko”. Copyright will belong to the Steve Biko Foundation. 10 established writers will also contribute creative writing to the same book.
· The winners will be invited to either of the 30:30 campaign events for readings and to the book launch.
· The judges’ decision will be final and no correspondence will be entered into with the entrants.


Through this series of commemorative activities, we are reminded that history shapes the future and we must look back in order to go forward.
A celebration of creative writing, freedom and the lives of those like Steve Biko.
Let your pen speak!
For more information check http://www.sbf.org.za/ or http://www.xarrabooks.com/

Yesterday’s heroes speak to today’s world

Simphiwe Dana wrote:

THERE had been fleeting references to Steve Bantu Biko while I was growing up, but nothing concrete.
I was born three years after his death. I was not one of the lucky ones who grew up with a politicised family member or teacher. It was not a place for a person with the kinds of ideals that Biko had. It was a place where the Bantu education system had worked.

When I moved to Jozi, my housemate knew where there was live poetry. The minute I stepped into that space, my life changed. Here, everything was music to me, like I had grown up knowing music to be.

And I was properly introduced to Biko for the first time. Not from a book but from the people who had been influenced by his teachings.

Some want to water down the brilliance of his mind by saying that he just read other African writers in the diaspora and was mouthing their words. For me it seemed that at some point in his life he came to the same conclusion before he was exposed to other writers. He was spot-on with his understanding of how our world should work.

Finding the little messages he left behind saved me. For me he is the embodiment of the modern African.

They say he worked hard and pushed his people to work hard. They say he went beyond words and implemented structures to help and empower his people. They say he would not allow anyone to look down on him or beat him up unless he was tied up.

They say he acted the fool at the end of the day to make people ease up and laugh their problems away even for a moment. They say he was a good listener and thus he was wise. He said life was not so important if it was not free. This is why he risked and lost his in his quest for freedom.

Who are we? What makes up our belief of who we are? Is it the truth or is there another truth we are not aware of? ­Today, most people do not seem to care as long as their bread-and-butter issues are taken care of.

Those who do will probably die lonely, poor and miserable. Everyone will be bored by their silly politics and not realise the effect that their ignorance has on our progress and respect from nations.

The difference between the times of Biko and our times is that people then rallied around a cause that was central to their survival. They had a common passion that united them, a dream that surpassed their selfish individual needs. The dream to be free one day. Today, people believe we are free and don’t need a cause to rally around.

So what is freedom? What state of mind is the acquisition of freedom supposed to result in and how do we achieve it? Is freedom only about a state of mind, of being?

Everyone wants to turn us into saints who forgave and embraced with open arms. Yet they read the stories daily of the violence we face.

We celebrate June 16 and do not see the significance of the person who attended the celebrations being the same one who later sneaks into your home, steals from you and kills you. Surely something is crying to be fixed.

Who are we? What makes up our belief of who we are? Is it the truth or is there another truth we are not aware of?

What we possess as Africans is our amazing history. It sounds clichéd but we need to know where we have been so we can have a better idea of where we should be and how to get there.
We need to have heroes from way back then so they can now make sense to us.

There is a quote from Biko that we need to remember: “The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial and military look, but the greatest gift still has to come from Africa – giving the world a more human face.”

The article was first published with the City Press (19/08/07). Dana’s second ­album, The One Love Movement on Bantu Biko Street, won four Sama awards this year.

Project Zabalaza

A wise man once declared that there could be no originality except on the basis of tradition.

He could not have been more correct for all the words we have, all the sounds, all the melodies, all the contemporary practices stands firmly on the shoulders of everything else that “was” said, sang and done.

Contemporary life requires a tradition; a heritage for its meaningfulness. But why then is a black person denied her heritage? For denying her a heritage amounts to denying her a claim to originality and authenticity. It amounts to denying her a “subject” status in history.

Yes, a black person is forever confronted by the fact that the traditions imposed on her, for all their claims to universality, have place in space. And this place is not the one she can claim without contestation and without her appearing a fake and a mockery to humanity.

On the other hand, her invocation of her culture, her own heritage, is forever met with resistance and hostility in much of Africa and the world over.

Those who believe in the goodness of progress brought about by modernisation are insisting that anything indigenous to Africa represents backwardness and, is therefore, detrimental to the developmental needs of Africa and its inhabitants.

The negative view towards indigenous African culture has, also, historically, been reinforced by the dominant Christian theology that has associated indigenous cultural beliefs and practices with danger and evil.

In time, entire theories and theologies have developed to demonstrate the causal links between the practice of African culture and the poverty encountered in Africa.

Exclusion of African indigenous culture in important institutions of our society has also suggested that African culture is not of high value relative to the cultures celebrated in these institutions.

All these factors have historically conspired in the formation of a negative and condescending attitude towards things local and indigenous. The negative attitude is passed to everything associated with African tradition and culture; the ritual, the belief, the philosophy, the aesthetic, and so on.

What is worse, the younger generation has also come to despise the older; the elders in the community, their parents, ancestors and all those who are minimally assimilated into white culture.

Along came Thandiswa Mazwai with her debut album “Zabalaza.” The album is rich with indigenous Xhosa sounds, long rendered archaic by white culture.

One of the songs decries the soul of youth colonised by the white middle-class culture and its values of individualism, indulgence and consumerism.

The song puts into lyrics a reality of rootlessness and centeredlesness among South African black youth: nizilibele ukuthi nizalwa ngobani! With her mellow voice, Thandiswa makes the old sound so new and fresh.

Sounds in the album represent a counter-hegemonic aesthetic rooted in African Xhosa culture. This aesthetic emancipates perception and consciousness about African culture.

No longer are the elders and their culture seen as sterile, static and immobile. There is rhythm, innovation, elaboration and mutation in African indigenous sounds.

What is in the sound evokes an essence; the productive essence that has historically, not only created sounds but has also enabled the elders to survive the harshest conditions under white supremacist powers bent on destroying a people, their culture, their humanity and their very being as subjects participating in the making of history and social reality.

The realization of vital essence; the awareness of creativity and innovativeness in one’s cultural lineage brought about by sounds in the album removes a wedge between sons and fathers, daughters and mothers, that has, in time, developed, when black youth began to associate the capacity to be a subject with white culture.

Sounds in Thandiswa’s album transforms perception about the elder and her culture. The elder emerges as a subject; a being with a sense of the aesthetic and a capacity to create. The young begins to see the elder in a different light. She is now someone they can look up to as they seek to become fully human.

But this emerging vision of self in relation to the culture of the elders and ancestors also affirms the young person herself. Though the colonial enterprise has put a wedge between youth and their elders, it didn’t completely erode the collective cultural unconscious connecting black youth consciousness to the cultural outlook of the elders and ancestors.

The sounds in the album has, in essence, prickled that layer between the repressed collective cultural unconscious (historically repressed for the purpose of survival within a world that rewards assimilation into white culture) and the everyday consciousness among youth, evoking an immediate, instant and excited response.

This response emerges from a sense of affirmation of one’s cultural heritage that the song evokes; a sense countering the pressure to assimilate into the dominant culture. The elders, hearing the sounds, smilingly nod their heads in approval. And I, will only say; Sana!