It was just after supper on a hot summer night in 1970 and the dining hall, which doubled as a venue for general student meetings and cultural activities at the University of Zululand (fondly known as Ngoye), was filled to capacity. I was twenty-three years old and studying for a Bachelor of Science degree.

Two students from the University of Natal Black Section walked in and took their seats on the makeshift podium. One was slim and bespectacled, the other tall and imposing. They were introduced as Charles Sibisi and Steve Biko, the President and Vice-President of the newly formed South African Students’ Organisation (SASO). This was the first time I saw Steve Biko in action. Later, after the formal meeting, some of us retired to the student common room to engage in informal conversations with the visiting pair and I had a chance to engage with him personally.

For weeks before this meeting students at the university had been debating vigorously the merits of a blacks-only student organisation, as represented by SASO. Even among those who had accepted the motivation for such an organisation there were some who felt that Indians were sufficiently privileged by the race stratification of the apartheid system to justify exclusion from membership of the organisation.

However, the overwhelming view was that all the oppressed must stand together in solidarity and that they should not allow the practice of different kinds of discrimination to sidetrack them. None of the different components of the black community (Africans, Indians and coloureds) had a say in the degree of their own oppression. It was the white regime alone that parcelled out whatever privileges it desired to the different racial groups. Therefore, black people, as defined to include Africans, coloureds and Indians, must provide the force to bring the evil system down.

Steve and Charles called on the student body to affiliate en masse to the organisation through their Student Representative Council and, after a vigorous debate, the mass meeting voted to affiliate centrally to SASO.

With this decision, Ngoye became a strong and vibrant centre of student political activism in the country. Together with the Universities of the North, Durban Westville, Western Cape, Fort Hare and Natal Black Section we set out to re-engage the black community in the struggle for its own liberation.