Reclaiming Black bodies: The enduring legacy of Steve Biko

Remembering the struggle icon is intrinsically linked to the decolonial project

- ITUMELENG MOTHOAGAE

THE commemoration of Steve Biko demands more than a mere historicist recount; it necessitates an epistemic and ontological excavation into the very foundation of Black subjectivity under colonialism and apartheid.

Biko's praxis and philosophy must be apprehended as a radical ontopolitical intervention aimed at reclaiming Black bodies and articulating an ontological Blackness that resists coloniality, its subjugation and epistemic violence.

In this regard, remembering Biko is intrinsically linked to the decolonial project of restoring Black humanity, dignity, and self-determination through a critical foregrounding of black embodiment and consciousness.

Biko's Black Consciousness Movement emerged as a resistance not only against the structural and institutional violences of colonialism and apartheid but significantly against the internalised coloniality that sought to fracture Black subjectivity from within.

The Black body under colonialism and apartheid was subjected to brutal forms of physical violence that mirrored a deeper ontological erasure, the reduction of Blackness to abjection, non-being and absence.

In this vein, Biko's insistence on "Black is Beautiful" and psychological liberation was an urgent corrective, a reclamation of the black body as a site of sacred resistance and ontological affirmation.