Biko: A Biography. Xolela Mangcu
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Название: Biko: A Biography

Автор: Xolela Mangcu

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

Серия:

isbn: 9780624058168

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ to King William’s Town to run Zanempilo Health Clinic. Some senior leaders of the political movement, including Robert Sobukwe, expressed their unhappiness about his multiple relationships and the impact these could have on the movement. On this one aspect of his life Steve found himself defensive and faltering. And as Christopher Hitchens writes in a critical essay on Mark Twain’s biography, it is important in biography that “the private person be allowed to appear in all his idiosyncrasy”.[12] This is indeed an ever-present danger for a biographer like me, who is a self-admitted admirer and follower of his subject. But for Steve to be human he must be presented to the reader warts and all – the women, the drinking, the bad temper, the stubbornness and the arrogance at times. As he put it in a letter to his friend Aelred Stubbs: “a lot of friends of mine believe I am arrogant and they are partly right.”[13] To paraphrase his friend Bokwe Mafuna, Steve was a prophet, not a saint.

      Chapter 9 is a discussion of Steve’s elusive quest for unity among the liberation movements – a quest that takes him on his abortive and fateful trip to Cape Town. From the moment Steve was banished to King William’s Town, he lost control of the movement he had started, and oftentimes expressed his sense of guilt that many of the people he had brought into the movement had been arrested or killed. At one point he admitted to Stubbs that even though he regarded himself as “reasonably strong”, the going was quite tough because of the restriction orders placed on him. The chapter takes us through his trip to Cape Town and back, his arrest at a roadblock and his brutal murder at the age of 31 by the South African police.

      As I wrote this book over the years, I kept kicking myself for not spending more time with Steve’s mother. There was a time when both of our families moved from the “Brownlee” section of Ginsberg to the “Leightonville” section that was reserved for Coloureds, until they were moved under the Group Areas Act to the neighbouring areas of Breidbach and Schornville in the 1970s. This opened space for African families to move up, so to speak, in the hierarchy of accommodation from three-roomed houses to five-roomed houses. The Biko home is still in the street behind ours. As a teenager, I would pass Mrs Biko sitting on the verandah of her new home almost every day. Sometimes she would call me over to ask how I was doing, but in all honesty, I always felt she was holding me up from some more exciting youthful engagement – such as hanging out with girls in a local shebeen. And so, in repentance, I dedicate this book to the memory of Alice “MamCethe” Biko.

      1

      In My Mind’s Eye

      “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of

      memory against forgetting.”

      MILAN СКАЧАТЬ