New Introduction to Steve Biko's I Write What I Like
by Lewis Gordon
Steve Bantu Biko was a courageous man. This is not to say that he was callously neglectful of the value of life, including his own, but rather he was a man for whom life was so valuable that the fear of death could be transcended. The consequence was that he found a way for word and deed to meet and thus to achieve the urgently political and the genuinely liberating. Brutalized to death in the flesh, he left his words to unfold through three decades in a continued challenge to every human being to carry on the fight for our humanity. Dust though his body has become, his ideas live on.