Biko, Steve

Abstract

Abstract Bantu Stephen Biko (more commonly, Steve Biko) is the intellectual and political figure most closely identified with the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. Emerging to fill the void created by the banning of the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) by the apartheid government in the 1960s, black consciousness as articulated by Biko involved both a rejection of white liberal paternalism and a rehabilitation or revaluation of blackness, guided by the recognition, in the most commonly quoted phrase of Biko's, that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”