They were not citizens of South Africa, for they had to carry something like a passport to enter cities in order to work this book was called a passbook–every Black person in South Africa had to have one, while whites had full citizenship. In other words, Black people lived in slums, had subpar education, and were made to suffer. Black people, their ancestors originators of the land, were pushed out of cities into townships (what we would call “ghettoes” in the United States), and they were forced to accept extreme poverty and depravation of the self. He was born during apartheid, which, similar to segregation in the United States, made sure that white people in South Africa owned the economy and the political means and the formation of the law. I discovered him my final semester of my senior year at Vanderbilt, which was the point in my life where I was saying: if I’m arguing that white racists, liberals and in-betweens cannot save Black and Brown people, who can? And what’s the role of white people in social justice?īiko answered this question for me in the most poetic way.īiko is a South African Black man, born from Xhosa people and tradition. One of the visionaries I look up to when discussing racial injustice in segregated societies like the United States is Steve Biko.
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