The Ideal of Educative Communal Utopia: An Integrated View of Steve Biko’s Political Theory

This article introduces an integrated conceptual understanding of Steve Biko's political thought. I contend that serious normative analysis of, and engagement with, Biko’s conceptual and intellectual ideas remains sorely lacking in the scholarly academic literature. I argue that this is because much of the academic literature persists in viewing Biko as ‘merely’ a political activist whose ideas were, first, a solely contextual response to the issues of a specific sociohistorical time and space and which, as a secondary result, make his ideas relevant only to a South Africa structured by the racialized injustices of Apartheid. I argue that this is a thin and shallow understanding of the importance of Biko’s ideas even in the South African context, let alone for the more global sphere to which a deeper understanding of Biko’s views also speaks. I argue that the prevalent ‘activist’ view of Biko has not only been unhelpful in blocking his acceptance by political theorists and philosophers as a ‘serious’ political thinker, it has further hampered concerted study and understanding of Biko’s conceptually integrated, and normatively expansive views regarding the ideal role of history and of education in the formation of ‘communally–sound identities’ and the latter’s relations to the prospects of a universalizable freedom. Examining Biko’s speeches and writings, I propose that not only was Biko a political thinker who ought to be treated seriously by academic scholarship, his views also cohered into a unified political theory whose major normative import the article identifies as an ideal of ‘educative communal utopia