What Steve Biko Meant When He Said I Write What I Like
The phrase carries more weight than most people realize when they toss it around as a slogan. Steve Biko was talking about intellectual independence during a period when black South Africans were systematically stripped of the right to speak for themselves. He wasn't advocating for carelessness. He was advocating for self-definition in a system designed to make you perform within boundaries someone else drew. In practice, this became a framework for how black intellectuals, artists, and activists approached their work under apartheid. The Black Consciousness Movement operated on the premise that your mental liberation had to precede physical liberation. If you spend your energy trying to fit into someone else's definition of respectability, you will never produce work that actually challenges the structure that created the definition. I ran into this directly when I was consulting for a cultural archive project a few years back. We were digitizing materials from the 1970s South African resistance period and kept hitting a wall with how to categorize certain texts. The metadata standards we were using assumed authors were writing for broad audiences. Biko's writings, and the writing of people in his circle, were explicitly not doing that. They were writing for a specific community that needed to hear something, not for anyone who wanted to read it. Every time we tagged them with generic descriptors like "political rhetoric" or "activist literature," we were doing exactly what Biko warned against. We were applying an external framework to something that refused it.
The workaround was straightforward but uncomfortable. We stopped trying to make the collection conform to library science conventions that were never built with this material in mind. Instead, we created a separate categorization system that treated these texts as participatory documents rather than historical artifacts. The difference matters because it changes how researchers approach the material. Artifacts are observed. Participatory documents are engaged with. There is a common misunderstanding that this philosophy means you can write without any standards whatsoever. That is not what Biko meant. He meant you answer to your own community first, not to external gatekeepers who benefit from your compliance. The standard still exists, it just originates from within rather than being imposed from outside. Another nuance beginners often miss: this approach requires genuine self-awareness, not just rebellion for its own sake. If you write what you like without honestly examining what you actually believe, you end up performing independence rather than practicing it. Biko spent years developing the philosophical foundation before the slogan took on the popular meaning it carries now. The shortcut is to skip the development and just adopt the posture, which produces work that sounds radical but functions exactly the same way as whatever you are reacting against.
The downside to this method is that it does not scale well in institutional settings. Universities, publishing houses, and funding bodies operate on metrics and frameworks built for compliance. When you submit work that operates outside those frameworks, you get flagged as unclassifiable rather than recognized as deliberately alternative. I have watched capable people waste years trying to force their work into systems that were never designed to receive it. Sometimes the pragmatic move is to find the smaller networks that actually operate on the terms you are working with. If you want to engage with Biko's original writing on this, the most reliable sources are his collected speeches and essays compiled after his death. The statement itself appears in various forms across different texts, which is partly why people quote it without understanding the full context. Biko wrote extensively about the psychological dimensions of oppression, and this phrase sits inside that larger argument about who gets to define reality for marginalized communities. The practical application today extends beyond politics. Any creative person working in a field dominated by commercial or institutional expectations is dealing with the same question Biko was addressing. The structure of the industry rewards conformity and punishes genuine autonomy. Recognizing that pattern and deciding which battles to pick is where the actual work begins.
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