Stephen Bantu Biko died 30 years ago. A young black man, he had spent most of his short life thinking about how black people in South Africa could win for themselves a greater degree of intellectual, political and cultural autonomy.

He grew up at a time in South Africa when the physical features associated with blackness (dark skin, kinky hair, full lips) were stigmata of degradation, inferiority and abjection. These were also times when the deadly force of white supremacy denied the rights and severely reduced the life prospects of all blacks.

Like many interpreters of the black condition elsewhere in the world, from the black Americans Frederick Douglass and WEB Du Bois to Frantz Fanon the black revolutionary philosopher from Martinique, Biko realised painfully that whites had refused to accept blacks as fellow citizens. To expect justice from them would be ‘naïve,’ he argued.

White racism had also engendered a social caste that suffered from selfalienation, he thought. Blacks had been rendered incapable of developing an independent collective identity and had been limited to viewing themselves through the eyes of their oppressors. The truncated consciousness they did possess was suffused with feelings of self-doubt. Furthermore, these feelings had been internalised through racist propaganda, fear, material want and deprivation, and merciless brutality.

Gradually he came to believe that if they were ever to transcend the vicissitudes of racial bondage and regain faith in their ability blacks should pursue independent collective development and self-reliance through critical self-examination and self-scrutiny.

For him, critical self-examination and self-scrutiny were essential starting points for the development of true self-consciousness and the healing of the wounds inflicted by centuries of racism, degradation and self-estrangement.

During his short life he taught his people to raise their heads above the wasteland of raw, merciless racism and routine humiliation and to stop being afraid.

For black people to learn to be human again, he asked them to look the world straight in the face and to rise above fear, anger and resentment. ‘It is fear, he said, that erodes the soul of black people in South Africa.’