The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

declared a national monument on 12 September 1997. At the same time, the cemetery
where Biko had been buried was declared a garden of remembrance, the John Vorster
Bridge over the Buffalo River in East London was renamed the Steve Biko Bridge and a
statue of Biko was unveiled by Nelson Mandela outside the East London City Hall. 97
When the “larger‐than‐life” brass statue of Steve Biko was unveiled, it became “the first
grand memorial to an anti‐apartheid hero in a new South African city landscape still
dominated by images of white men”. 98
The R200 000 statue had been commissioned by the Biko family as well as former editor
and Biko biographer, Donald Woods and was created by Johannesburg sculptor Naomi
Jacobson. It was partly financed by movie director Richard Attenborough as well as actors,
Denzel Washington and Kevin Kline who had worked on the movie Cry Freedom, 99 which
had been based on Woods’ biography of Biko. 100 Also involved in funding the Biko
monument were rock‐star Peter Gabriel, composer of the once‐banned hit ‘Biko’, and
airline tycoon Richard Branson. 101 In spite of initial disgruntlement on the part of some
young members of black consciousness organisation, AZAPO, about the memorial
festivities, the occasion was used by Nelson Mandela as an opportunity to call for unity
among black political parties and organisations. In this memorialisation, with Mandela’s
unveiling of the new statue as its climax, Steve Biko was taken out of a paradigm of
resistance and black consciousness and placed firmly within the sphere of reconstruction,
reconciliation and nation‐building as one of its pre‐eminent symbols. This moment of
unveiling by Mandela served to incorporate Biko into a unified narrative of the nation and
its past.
If one considers the memorialisation of a leader through public statuary and the cultural
and political rituals associated with a statue’s unveiling as a genre of ‘biography’, it
becomes interesting indeed to consider the ‘production of biography’ in a case such as the
97 Cape Argus, 11 August 1997.
98 Cape Times, 9 September 1997.
99 Marble Arch Productions c.1987.
100 Donald Woods, Biko, New York: Paddington Press, 1978.
101 Cape Times, 9 September 1997.
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