Echoes from Eternity: 32. Steve Biko address the SA church in 1972

2020-05-29 - Protest-minneapolis-george-floyd

It was simply impossible to keep on the usual trajectory of readings with the horrors on the news. Forget the virus. Forget the Brexit car crash. Forget government incompetence. None of which appear to abate. This is yet ANOTHER atrocity that looms large. So entirely incongruous though it is to read this passage in a leafy and quiet, suburban cemetery, it is the least.

The words of this speech by Steve Biko are 50 years old. But, strip away the particularities of apartheid-gripped South Africa in the 70s (when its crumbling was a vain hope), and it’s hardly dated. Tragically.

So this is a longer Echoes than normal. It is roughly 18 minutes (yes I realise the recent ones have been creeping up – will cut back). But please bear with this one. After a few minutes trying to put it into context, the speech is roughly 13 minutes. Not long at all in the grand scheme of things.

In conversation I might have pushed back a little on the odd detail, naturally. But Biko’s central premise is irrefutable and everything he writes has a lucid and compelling logic to it. His mind was simply brilliant and his heart, courageous. Flawed like us all, of course, but inspiring and correct on the big things. 

Thus, he was prophetic.

Here is a powerful live version of Peter Gabriel’s Biko (sadly with rubbish sound). In South Africa. In front of President Mandela. As part of his programme to combat AIDS:

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