Liberation and Consciousness: Reading Steve Biko’s Struggles Against Inferiority Complex

The Great South African nationalist, anti-apartheid leader, activist and philosopher, Steve Biko (1946-1977), were among few liberation leaders who understood that liberation from colonialism had to start with liberating consciousness before liberating lands. He believed that missionaries Christianity and white education, in south Africa, same as in most of the colonized world established itself by constructing the categories of inferiority/ superiority in the mind of the colonized. In addition, narrating the history of the colonized was another weapon in the hands of the colonizer to enable him reshape the colonized identity and maintain his continuing looking up towards the colonizer. These methods, committed in other parts of the world under the name of ‘Orientalism’, were the main enemies in Biko’s struggle. How did Biko identify these processes of cultural subjugation, how do they work and what were the counter methods that Biko suggested to combat them and achieve liberation? These three questions are the main concerns in this paper. It aims through revisiting Biko’s works and interview to understand how white supremacy is constructed, how a liberation from it can be achieved and how Biko’s legend could offer us lessons in understanding past and current forms of Orientalism and(or) white supremacy. Keywords: Biko; Consciousness; Liberation; Blackness; Apartheid; Inferiority; Whiteness.