Discuss Steve Biko’s political engagement with race in South Africa. Compare and
contrast race politics in South Africa with racial and/or ethnic identity in the part of the
world that you call home.
Steve Biko was without doubt one of the most influential people during the South African
Apartheid. As an anti-apartheid activist, Biko mobilized and enabled numerous black South
Africans. He aimed to destruct the inferiority complex that had developed in many black South
African minds in relation to the white man. During Apartheid (and arguably, currently), non-
whites in South Africa were regarded as inferior to white colonizers. In the opinion of Biko, black
South Africans would not achieve liberation from domination by their white counterparts until
whites are “made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They
must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior.”
Biko helped start the South African Students’ Organization (SASO), whose cause was rooted in
