SOUTH AFRICA: The 25th anniversary yesterday of the death of Steve Biko, the founder of the black consciousness movement who played a major role in rallying black resistance against white rule from the late 1960s to his death in a prison cell in 1977, has highlighted an anomaly in contemporary South Africa.
Biko's place as a hero of the resistance is assured. His statue stands proudly in East London, near his birthplace in Ginsberg. But the political organisations that specifically propagate the black consciousness doctrine that he espoused are minuscule and confined to margins of the political terrain.
One explanation for the anomaly lies in the success of the ruling African National Congress in recognising Biko as a national hero after winning the struggle for primacy in the black community against the Azanian People's Organisation (Azapo).
The fight for supremacy between the ANC and Azapo was a physical and, at times, a murderous contest in streets of black townships in the mid-1980s, as much as it was an adversarial encounter in the political and ideological arena.
The extent to which the ANC has laid claim to Biko as a national hero who belongs to the whole of South Africa rather than to a particular political tradition is manifest in an anniversary article by former President Nelson Mandela. He says of Biko: "In his short life he achieved what many would need a lifetime for."
Azapo, established in the early 1980s to replace the black consciousness organisations founded by Biko but outlawed by the white government in October 1977, is today struggling for survival.
The ANC has ensured that some of the symbols and ideas of the black consciousness will live on, even if Azapo expires.
By pressing for "demographic representivity" in the leadership echelons of political, social, economic and even sporting institutions, and thus ensuring that black demographic preponderance is transformed into black hegemony, the ANC has modified its commitment to non-racialism.
There is an irony in that, as it was the ANC's banner of non-racialism that enabled it to garner huge sums of money from white-controlled institutions, in Europe and the US, as well as South Africa itself. Without those funds, the ANC's political ascendancy in South Africa today may have been less complete.