Reflections on Biko’s meditations on death

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article I want to argue that, in order to conceptualise death as a transformative historical force in the colonial context, it is important to consider its features within the operations of the real register. The article relies on the insights on death which Steve Biko offers in the two essays, ‘On Death’ and ‘Fear: An Important Determinant in South Africa’ in order to advance this historical materialist conception of death. This assessment is mostly evidenced by the fact that Biko wrote these essays with the intention to describe how the apartheid state killed African natives and to inspire those who had been arrested for political crimes or were engaged in guerilla activities. The first borders on the autobiographical because it is a direct meditation on his own encounter with death at the hands of the officers from the infamous apartheid Security Branch he took on with blows when they started to assault him during an interrogation in order to actively determine the terms of his own death. It is this process of the spontaneity of violence which the experience of death allows that I want to consider through an analysis of both Biko’s works and politics.