Keeping it short:
Not much unlike One Hundred Years of Solitude, Biko’s is quite a tantalizing piece, in the ideal world, a mesmerising dream with a more mundane, radical, political trinity featuring angel-saints from the Pan-African pantheon encompassing all Africa and Diaspora, same spirit, 1+1+1=3 : Patrice Lumumba ( Congo) Frantz Fanon ( Martinique) and Malcolm X ( The United States ) - a United States which cowboy angel, genocidal warmonger, sicko wannabe imperial majesty emperor Donald J Trump would like to make great “again”
If he liked, the author - Biko, himself a saint, could have added Marcus Garvey ( I never heard anything about him advocating violence) and for good measure he could have added Martin Luther King Jr. and “ I am prepared to die” Madiba Nelson Mandela to that heavenly constellation of African Martyrs presently breaking bread with the ancestors.
Baba Kadiri says that he “feels disgusted when known professional harlots in Nigeria's politics brazenly present themselves to Nigerians as virgins.” I feel a little uncomfortable with the idea that Ubuntu philosophy is at the root of some of these stalwarts' inspiration when we know full well that it’s their Bible and Quran that are regarded as their wellsprings of inspiration and the main sources of their moral guidance with regard to the use and misuse of what is believed to be divinely sanctioned violence (Joshua) and non-violence ( Jesus)
The perennial question is, how do we resist the violence of the violent ?
There’s the extreme cruelty and barbarity some of them call war. Here’s US warhorse Pete Hegseth boasting with this long list of Iran’s top echelons that his military has murdered
Last week I had the good fortune to meet an Indian military historian at a dinner party and after he delivered a brief discourse on Malcolm X - and I was only coyly praising AHIMSA - one of the most attractive aspects of Jainism and Hinduism, when he assured me that yes, the late great Mahatma Gandhi is most wisely associated with Satyagraha but that he himself said that if pushed to the wall and he had no other alternative then he would, of course, have to fight back.
Jimmy Cliff : Stand Up and Fight Back
We should always bear in mind that the Bhagavad Gita begins at the battlefield of Kurukshetra
Whatever our background, the context is always now ,the most recent and the most current reality, saturating both conscience and consciousness. Within that 100 years framework, some of us post-war children (post WW2) have been inordinately influenced by The War Poets since middle school days and developed an aversion to all kinds of violence during all of our lifetime, to date, whether it was the Algerian War of Independence heroically fought by the Algerians, or the stellar Haitian Revolution of which every African in spirit is so proud, or the bloody January 15, 1966 coup in Nigeria, or the death penalty, or the Vietnam War - which produced flower power and many a Dave Dellinger , or the Yom Kippur War of 1973 or the assassination of Olof Palme and all the wars, including liberation wars in Africa and elsewhere, since 1973….
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