Newspaper Page Text
March, 1978 - New National BLACK MONITOR
_MbnttoEMicroscope.
A Close-Up View Os Third World Events"
; A Close-Up Look At Third World Events
. ..And What They Mean To You
ON THE INTERNATIONAL SCENE...
—ln South Africa... The Stephen Biko
case reflects the dangerous excesses of raw
and unbridled power not simply in South
■ Africa but under any situation throughout
the world.
In an eloquent and timeless tribute to
Robert Frost on October 26, 1963, the late
John Fitzgerald Kennedy spoke in away
regarding power which neither the power
less nor the powerful in South Africa
should lightly forget. Mr. Kennedy con
trasted power and poetry as similar in
V their creative potential. He noted: “The
1 men who create power make an indispensa
— ble contribution to the nation’s greatness.”
M
K Both Stephen Biko and the South Afri-
M can authorities represented power in several
of its different aspects. “The nation’s
Wy greatness,” to the white apartheid South
UB African mind, has called for the power of
_ repression. The unbridled abuses of the
M South African police might be said, from
the white South African point of view, to
tap have made an indispensable contribution to
5 the good and glory of South African life.
Cm Such is undoubtedly the prevailing opinion
E in South Africa today.. .at least among its
white minority rulers.
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J But to the majority of South Africa’s
peoples, that is, to those who are blacks,
Stephen Biko represented—in his coura
geous life and person—what some would
■ call the power of personhood. His was a
life bent on impowering himself and all of
his fellowmen with the capacity for the ful
fillment of what they were created for.
Page 4
It might well have been said of Stephen
Biko’s drive for power that it sought to
make an indispensable contribution to the
life of the entire family of human kind’s
becoming what it should be. In this, his was
the power-laden work of the prophet pos
sessed of the poet’s vision.
Mr. Kennedy, in his celebrated remarks
concerning power, offered some solemn
reminders about the dangers implicit in the
prolonged holding of power which bear
directly upon the alleged enormities of the
South African authorities in the Stephen
Biko case.
While South African authorities denied
any “assaults” on Stephen Biko, they
admitted (1) that they had forced Mr. Biko
to spend 19 days in solitary confinement,
(2) that he had been deprived of all clothing
apparently by day and by night, (3) that he
had been questioned at least once for a
twenty-four hour period, and (4) that Mr.
Biko had been kept shackled in handcuffs
and leg irons almost continuously for fifty
hours.
The story does not end there, as attested
to by numerous other allegations and by
government contradictions reported in the
daily press. Perhaps as indicative as any
other fact of the callous indifference to
human life on the part of the white South
African authorities was the statement at
tributed to Major Harold Snyman, the of
ficer in charge of interrogating Mr. Biko.
Upon learning of Mr. Biko’s death, Mr.
Snyman is reported to have said: “I was
sorry because he was worth more alive to
me than dead.”
The remarks by John Fitzgerald Kennedy
are, again, appropriate to our story. Mr.
Kennedy focused on what he saw as the
dangers implicit in the prolonged holding
of undue power. They were, in his view, at
least three-fold. Undue power, he held,
may had men (or nations) toward arro
gance. Inequitable or disproportionate
power may narrow the area of man’s
concern. Then again, as Lord Acton had so
aptly noted, undue power may corrupt.
That all of these negative aspects of
power have been at work in the South
African racial scheme of things should be
abundantly clear. Stephen Biko’s life’s
work—as a leader for human liberation
and for justice, equity and fair play for
all—set him apart in a role akin to that of
the poet, as Mr, Kennedy saw the poet’s
role.
The poet ideally yearns for a nobler
vision and for a higher truth than that
which may be seen and expressed in prosaic
terms. In the sublimest sense of the poet’s
art, the poet looks empathetically—that is,
with the deepest understanding and hopes
for the best—at the life of mankind and
rON THE NATIONAL SCENE- IN THE LAW
Hate you given to Operation PUSH, OIC. SCLC. NAACPor the local Urban League this month?
then he or she speaks as with the tongues of
angels.
The stark and compelling contrast be
tween Stephen Biko, on the one hand, and
Major Harold Snyman (and those whom he
represents), on the other hand, is made
evident in Mr. Kennedy's words: “When
power leads (man) toward arrogance, poet
ry reminds him of his limitations. When
power narrows the area of man’s concern,
poetry reminds him of the richness and
diversity of his existence. When power
corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
In the sense set forth here, Stephen Biko
was both a prophet and one who fulfilled
the poet’s role. The prophets in the Old and
New Testaments were poets in this same
sense. They saw life as it must ultimately
be. They have tended toward martyrdom
because their own sanity and integrity have
impelled them to enter into the fulfillment
which they saw... and to make that fulfill
ment an immediate reality for their fellow
men.
Inevitably, then, the poet in the pro
phetic sense of the term becomes a revolu
tionary whose motive force is represented
by the words: “All! Here! Now!” This was
Stephen Biko...and so are all of his
kind.. .standing in the dockets intended
for death and doom and created by the
crazed minds of all who are the possessors
of undue and unbridled power.
The nature of the hangman and the mind
of a heartless beast tend to become the pro
perty of the South Africas of the world.
The challenge of those who would follow
the Biko path is: “Who among all of us—
and especially among the leaders of the
nations—will carry his torch and will wear
the poet’s mantle and risk facing the pro
phet’s fate?”
MA A&A
ON THE NATIONAL SCENE...
—The issues raised by the Bakke gradu
ate school admissions case cannot be seen
as settled by any current or future pro
nouncements by any of our federal courts.
At the heart of the Bakke case contro
versy is a deeply ingrained national sense
that there is always a higher principle at
work than human law. Thus the contro
versy promises to remain with us, in a
variety of forms, for many years to come.
Some have referred to the principal issue
raised by the Bakke case as the rule of con-
■ a-
F of
science. For black Americans, for example, |ta ®l,
there would appear to be no way for sub- |Jj
mission to anything approximating an us
adverse ruling where the principle of equity Cm
or simple justice, as they might see it, r
would be violated.
__ le
Churchmen, throughout the ages, have yj al
appealed above man-made laws to what BN xl
they have perceived to be “the law of ly
God.” In a similar vein, the framers of the •• ly
Declaration of Independence appealed to :e
the laws of nature and nature’s God. ff
■ r
/TT l ***. 53 ,s
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o >
In jurisprudence and philosophy, what
we are describing here is known commonly H !
as the principle of natural law.
The “bottom line” in the picture being ■
painted here regarding the heart of the
Bakke case’s promise of continuing contro
versy is that there is “a strain of lawless- M 4
ness” which runs throughout the warp and JN -
woof of our nation’s fabric.
M
The appeal to a “higher lawlessness is
not the property of the opponents of liberty w
alone, as we may tend so often to think. Cj
The constant appeals to break “fugitive
slave” statutes and the justifications for the
“underground railroads” in both the North
and South—by which enslaved persons were
aided in their escape from bondage—all •
were representative of appeals to principles
above or higher than the prevailing man- M
made laws. This was lawlessness.
■
The Bakke case controversy, regardless ■
of our attitudes toward its current legal *
status, reflects an ingrained American ten
tency to appeal to “higher laws’ ’ than those ■
made by men. 3m
The famed legal scholar Roscoe Pound
once spoke in an unforgettable and com- |
pellingly persuasive way about this predis- g-|
position toward lawlessness to be found in ■■
all elements of the American population,
In his book, Criminal Justice In The
American City—A Summary ( 1922; Roscoe gj
Pound wrote:
“Popular impatience of restraint is aggra- k
vated in the United States by political and H
legal theories of “natural law.’ Is a political
doctrine, they lead individuals to put into
action a conviction that conformity to the
dictates of the individual conscience is a
test of the validity of a law. \
(Continued on page 7.) K