I Write What I Like
Steve Biko
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
Collected columns and writings by the founder of South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement, published a year after he was killed in police custody. Biko argued that apartheid's deepest damage was psychological, and that Black South Africans had to reject imposed inferiority and define themselves before political freedom was possible. His ideas galvanized the 1976 Soweto generation of student activists.
Its legacy. The book was banned, and his death in detention made him a global emblem of the anti-apartheid cause.
- Author
- Steve Biko
- First published
- 1978
- Genre
- Black Consciousness essays
- Theme
- Liberation and the Decolonized Mind
More from Liberation and the Decolonized Mind
- The Wretched of the Earth — Frantz Fanon
The psychiatrist of the Algerian revolution anatomizes colonial violence.
- Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism — Kwame Nkrumah
Independence on paper, control in practice.
- Return to the Source — Amilcar Cabral
Culture as a weapon of the liberation struggle.
- Long Walk to Freedom — Nelson Mandela
From a Transkei childhood to Robben Island to the presidency.