Steve Biko was twenty-five when he wrote most of the essays in I Write What I Like, and thirty when he died, beaten unconscious by South African security police in Pretoria in September 1977. He had been held for twenty-six days without charge. The cause of death was officially recorded as a hunger strike. It was not a hunger strike. The book is read in the awareness of how it ends.
The argument it makes is that the prior work of liberation, before any tactical question of armed struggle or negotiation, is the work of the colonized refusing the colonizer's account of themselves. Biko called this Black Consciousness, and he was careful about what it was not. It was not anti-white, or so he kept insisting; it was a precondition for Black political agency, which the apartheid state had organized itself around denying.
The essays were written for the South African Students' Organisation newsletter under the pen name 'Frank Talk.' Biko was eventually banned by the apartheid state, which restricted him to King William's Town and made publishing his writing illegal. He kept writing. The publication of the collected essays in 1978 by Aelred Stubbs (the Anglican priest who had been Biko's confidant) is itself an artifact of the resistance the essays describe.
The 2002 Picador Africa edition has an introduction by Lewis Gordon that is worth the purchase on its own. Five stars without qualification.
Editorial commentary
I Write What I Like, published posthumously in 1978 by Biko's journalist friend Aelred Stubbs, brought together the writings Biko had produced under conditions of escalating state harassment between 1969 and 1976. The volume remains the central documentary record of Black Consciousness as a distinct intellectual and political tradition.
Steve Biko (1946-1977) was the central political organizer of the South African Black Consciousness Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. He helped found the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) in 1968 and the Black People's Convention (BPC) in 1972, was banned by the apartheid state in 1973, was detained four times between 1975 and 1977, and was killed in police detention in September 1977 at the age of thirty. His writings — collected posthumously in I Write What I Like (1978) — remain the central documentary record of Black Consciousness as a distinct intellectual and political tradition.
The Black Consciousness framework argued that the political subordination of Black South Africans under apartheid had been internalized psychologically as well as enforced legally. Effective political resistance required first a psychological-political work of decolonization within the subordinated population. The framework drew on Fanon, on Du Bois, on the American Black Power movement of the late 1960s, and on the African National Congress's earlier internal debates.
Biko's distinctive contribution was a careful institutional analysis of how the psychological-political work could be organized within the constraints of apartheid law. Black Consciousness organized inside the historically Black universities and from those institutional bases extended into the broader Black political population through community-development projects, literacy programs, and political-education circles. The South African state recognized the political danger and responded with the standard apartheid-era instruments: bannings, detentions, deaths in detention.
The 2002 Picador Africa expanded edition, with a foreword by Nelson Mandela and additional essays not included in the 1978 first edition, is the standard contemporary edition. The 1996 Heinemann African Writers Series edition remains in circulation. Biko's essays reward attention to the practical-organizational specifics they engage; Biko is writing as a political organizer working through the specific institutional questions the work poses.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.
Editorial commentary
I Write What I Like, published posthumously in 1978 by Biko's journalist friend Aelred Stubbs, brought together the writings Biko had produced under conditions of escalating state harassment between 1969 and 1976. The volume remains the central documentary record of Black Consciousness as a distinct intellectual and political tradition.
Steve Biko (1946-1977) was the central political organizer of the South African Black Consciousness Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. He helped found the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) in 1968 and the Black People's Convention (BPC) in 1972, was banned by the apartheid state in 1973, was detained four times between 1975 and 1977, and was killed in police detention in September 1977 at the age of thirty. His writings — collected posthumously in I Write What I Like (1978) — remain the central documentary record of Black Consciousness as a distinct intellectual and political tradition.
The Black Consciousness framework argued that the political subordination of Black South Africans under apartheid had been internalized psychologically as well as enforced legally. Effective political resistance required first a psychological-political work of decolonization within the subordinated population. The framework drew on Fanon, on Du Bois, on the American Black Power movement of the late 1960s, and on the African National Congress's earlier internal debates.
Biko's distinctive contribution was a careful institutional analysis of how the psychological-political work could be organized within the constraints of apartheid law. Black Consciousness organized inside the historically Black universities and from those institutional bases extended into the broader Black political population through community-development projects, literacy programs, and political-education circles. The South African state recognized the political danger and responded with the standard apartheid-era instruments: bannings, detentions, deaths in detention.
The 2002 Picador Africa expanded edition, with a foreword by Nelson Mandela and additional essays not included in the 1978 first edition, is the standard contemporary edition. The 1996 Heinemann African Writers Series edition remains in circulation. Biko's essays reward attention to the practical-organizational specifics they engage; Biko is writing as a political organizer working through the specific institutional questions the work poses.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.