What are we going to do to continue the unfinished struggle for the emancipation of Black people? This – according to Legal scholar and Senior Counsel Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi – is the question that late Black Consciousness Movement leader, Stephen (Steve) Bantu Biko still poses to us amid current formidable challenges in the country.
Ngcukaitobi delivered the keynote address at the Annual Steve Biko Public Lecture at Nelson Mandela University under the theme: The murder of Steve Biko: Is the legal order complicit?
On the 12th of September 1977, a young anti-apartheid activist and the brains behind the black consciousness movement, Stephen (Steve) Bantu Biko was murdered.
He died at a time when his ideals of Black Consciousness were beginning to inspire Black people to act against their oppression – presenting a real threat to the apartheid government.
Decades later, those men fingered in the murder of Biko were not prosecuted prompting a question of whether the legal order is complicit in his murder.
Senior Counsel Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi says, “When the TRC decided that the five men who applied for amnesty would be denied, that imposed a duty on the state to prosecute the failed applicants. are they now dead? can they be prosecuted? if they are dead, obviously they cannot be prosecuted but that is not where it ends. why were they not prosecuted when they were still alive? This is also another layer of complicity by the legal system, the current legal system to avoid doing the right thing which is to bring perpetrators of murder to justice.”
Ngcukaitobi – in his reflection on accountability through the lens of the case of Biko – contends that the failure to prosecute those who did not get amnesty disrespects the Constitution and brings about contempt for the law.
Despite Biko’s death, the philosophy of Black Consciousness and the spirit of black pride live on with questions for South Africa’s constitutional democracy – which today is plagued with many challenges.
Adv Ngcukaitobi adds, “Granted our country is crisis-ridden from multiple fronts – racial inequality, a crime which disproportionately affects black people, capitalism and accumulation which favours whites at the expense of blacks. It’s (unintelligible) of racism and starvation, apartheid tentacles which stubbornly refused to disentangle and deep-seated levels of poverty. biko is still with us, still asking us what are we going to do to continue the unfinished struggle for the emancipation of black people, it is difficult to answer these questions.”
Ngcukaitobi says the root of Biko’s philosophy is not that we should think like him but that we should think for ourselves that the people as a whole are their own liberators.
“But he does demand that we should be better than ourselves, that we should fight for ideals and ideas that transcend us. that we should be impatient with injustice but above all, that we should at least try to make the world a better place.”
Steve Biko Public Lecture I Adv. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi SC delivers the keynote address
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