Steve Biko Psychology

1. Introduction
Steve Biko’s political thought draws a significant amount of its ideas from Franz Fanon’s political thought. In fact, Steve Biko – in his only publicised works – often quotes Fanon and his ideas. Both Biko and Fanon share similarities in their political thought. Such similarity is seen in their belief on how political emancipation should be achieved. Biko, in similar respect to Fanon, is of the opinion that mental emancipation is a prerequisite to being emancipated politically. Therefore psychology and the psyche play a very significant role in the political thought of Steve Biko and Franz Fanon. This essay will seek to explain, in light of Biko’s political thought, how mental emancipation is a precondition to political emancipation.

Referring again to his book, Biko makes reference to Fanon’s writings by saying that the apartheid government emptied black people’s brain of ‘all form and content’, merely reducing the black man to ‘a shell, a shadow of a man’ (Biko, 1978: 31). Psychological oppression was very significant to the apartheid government because ‘the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed’ (Biko, 1978: 74). This refers to what Hook (2004: 85) describes as ‘psychopolitics’. Psychopolitics refers to the ‘critical awareness of the role that political factors play within the domain of the psychological’ (Hook, 2004: 85). The apartheid government manipulated the minds of black South Africans in such a way that they viewed themselves as incomplete and insignificant, especially in relation to the white man. This made the black man easier to oppress politically, economically and socially.
One could argue that mental oppression or psychological oppression is a precondition to political oppression, particularly the oppression that occurred in apartheid South Africa. If one accepts such an idea, one can begin to see the importance of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement. It is through consciousness that freedom can be achieved by the black man. Mental emancipation is the necessity for political emancipation. Black Consciousness is what is needed

Steve Biko has been vehement in his stance of non-black involvement in the emancipation of black people. His stance of non-black involvement often referred to white liberals for he believed that to be black in South Africa was to be socially, economically and politically discriminated against as a group (Hook, 2004: 105). Steve Biko believed that white liberals served as the ‘greatest stumbling block’ to the unification of black people (Biko, 1978: 99). According to Lockwood (2008: 12) white people have been the source of black people’s problems yet it is still the same group of people who want to dictate to black people how to react to the problem. In other words, white people have provoked the black man but still want to tell the black man how to react to the provocation. Biko identified that the problem in South Africa was always analysed by the white liberal (Biko, 1978: 99). Black Consciousness aims to put a stop to that by giving black people the emancipatory power to identify, analyse and react to the problem however they