Biko Book

This was not an enjoyable book to read, nor did I expect it to be. Well, actually, there were enjoyable parts to it. I enjoyed meeting the character of Biko and some of the banter in the friendship between Biko and Donald Woods (the author). Even though I knew how it ended, he was such a warm person and so passionate about what he believed, that I enjoyed reading about who he was when he was alive.

It was when I wasn't reading this book that was hard. It was hard to focus on other conversations or little irritations that I would normally complain about when my brain kept going back to the fact that Apartheid was a thing that actually happened--that these people were people who actually died, that these laws were actually in place for several decades. Before I read this book, I knew about Apartheid in that I knew it existed and it was pretty bad for black folks in South Africa. I knew who Nelson Mandela was. I didn't know that many details about Apartheid. And I'm glad that I do know what I know now, because it's something that's important to educate yourself about. But it is pretty awful, and it's an intense reading experience.

A lot of things, unfortunately, felt relevant to things that have been coming to light lately with the Black Lives Matter movement. Not just the police brutality, but the way the Black Consciousness Movement was received and misconstrued. The Black Consciousness Movement was an exclusively black movement to separate the blacks hoping to throw off their oppression from white liberals who were often well-meaning but misguided and more harmful than anything else most of the time. As Biko explained it, the point of the movement was to restore consciousness to black people and make them confident and independent again in a way that couldn't be achieved through another petition or through their white "allies" talking over them. White liberals--including Woods himself, at first--took offense to being excluded and complained that black consciousness was itself racist. It sounds similar to white folks complaining now about "reverse" racism. I've seen arguments, and I'm sorry to say even made the mistake of starting a few, where white "allies" take offense to being excluded from certain conversations about anti-blackness. There's still a whole shit load of "well, not all white people!" And supposedly well-meaning white allies DO still have the bad habit of talking over the people whose voices actually need to be heard, the ones actually being oppressed. I'm only just learning to find the balance between being an ally and not overstepping, and I don't think I'll ever get it completely right.

That does lead to the conflicting thing about this novel: it's about a great black man and influential leader of an anti-Apartheid movement, and it's about the way that Apartheid oppressed the black majority in South Africa, but it's written by his white friend. And I commend Woods for writing it and think it's something he absolutely needed to write. He himself was banned for writing about Stephen Biko and he risked his life writing this and then escaping the country to get this book published, to tell the world who Stephen Biko was and exactly what Apartheid was. And while he talked about his views and how Biko changed those views, he didn't try to make the book about him. The focus was always on Biko, on his life, on the inquiry into his death, on testimonies from the friend that was arrested with him on what actually happened in that prison. But I think the great injustice here is that the person who SHOULD have written this book was unable to because he was beaten to death in prison. In the end, it was Woods' white privilege that allowed this book to be published and I would say it's his white privilege that allowed it to be so well-received. That's probably one thing that bothers me about the movie (Cry Freedom) because the writers made a choice to make the movie less about Biko and more about the process of writing the book (therefore making Donald Woods the main character, rather than the observer/narrator to protagonist Biko). But that's a different review and I would need to watch the movie again to be more thorough in it. The book was good, I'm glad that I read it, but be prepared to be shaken up.