Peter Gabriel's Best Song

"Biko" remains a momentous anthem 44 years later

As mentioned, my two favorite musicians of all time are Enya and Peter Gabriel.  I covered Enya in one article on January 1st, but Gabriel will require four.  Will start with just one song here in this post.  “Biko.”  

If you’ve never seen the movie “Cry Freedom”, it’s one of my ten favorite films of all time – with Kevin Kline and Denzel Washington both delivering stellar performances – and I highly recommend it.

Peter Gabriel has produced dozens of exceptional songs as a solo artist, including several just last year in his seventies.  For me, his single best and most important song remains the intense and gripping “Biko”. 

“Biko” opens with the beats of a community-summoning drum-call.  The song’s thundering and entrancing and portentous Ghanan and Ethiopian drumbeat rhythm is joined by a commanding electric guitar drone, first with the tonic chord, then distorting around it.  Next, the synthesizer begins to evoke the sound of a bagpipe dirge.  (The Scottish military had helped form the underpinnings of apartheid by participating in the Boer War.)  Gabriel himself adds even more texture with the piano.

In his raspy voice, Gabriel sings a eulogy of Steven Biko, the South African activist for Black empowerment.  He begins with the stark and sinister realities of Biko’s death.  He turns to a grief-filled, distraught-filled lament.  And then he rises to angry defiance.

In each chorus, Gabriel evokes the name of this visionary, hero, and martyr and reminds us “the man is dead”.

In the Xhosa language, we hear the prayerful words for “come, spirit” or “descend, spirit” – calling Biko’s spirit to remain present with his listeners, to give us guiding strength in the struggle.

Gabriel sings the chant – “uh uh uh . . . uh” – several times.  In live performances, Gabriel has held his mic out toward his audience, and thousands of people have joined in the chant, “Uh uh uh . . . uh.”

We hear Gabriel’s warning and promise.  “The eyes of the world, watching now, watching now.”  The racist regime may have blown out one candle, but smothering opposition to the apartheid system would prove futile.  Freedom and justice and the equality of the races have even more momentum and will win out in the end.  It’s just a matter of time, Gabriel declared, before Black Africans would become full citizens. 

As the song ends, we hear the mourners at Biko’s funeral, singing a South African hymn before they abruptly cut off by two drumbeats that sound like gunshots.

To remind us of the real-life story behind the song:

Gabriel heard of the death of the 30-year-old South African medical student Steven Biko just after it happened, in September 1977. 

The police arrested Biko and carried out a 22-hour interrogation of him, during which he sustained brain damage.  But Biko had never been found guilty of a crime.  His “crimes” were founding the South African Students Organization and being a leader of the South African Black Consciousness Movement.  He was murdered by the police solely for his convictions.

Gabriel was shocked.  Gabriel regarded Biko as a highly intelligent and well-reasoned and sensitive thinker and leader who would have become a world figure for young people and a great African statesman.

Gabriel had sung hymns in the Anglican-school chapels while he was growing up, and he liked African hymns and hymn-like anthems.  So he turned his anger into this stirring anthem.

As the song was banned by the South African government, Gabriel spent all the royalties from it to aid Africans.

It’d be an understatement to say that the song had a profound impact.  It struck many people as a revelation.  It aroused people’s conscience. 

“Biko” as a song and a real murder haunted many of us at the time.  It awakened us.  With this song, Gabriel turned tens of thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, into active participants in the struggle.  We became as outraged as Gabriel and we were mobilized. 

In our twenties in the 1980s, we first-wave GenXers really had only one social movement: the anti-apartheid movement.  Many of us donated and many of us spent time urging governments, sports teams, and entertainers to boycott, disinvest from, and sanction South Africa. 

For me, the song is about protesting torture and it’s about much more.  For me, “Biko” is about rising to resist autocratic regimes everywhere they exist.  The song is admonishing any leader or government who would silence those of us advocating for essential liberties.  Peter Gabriel is calling all of us to unite to help every adult on Earth to become a fully free and fully empowered citizen.  For all who love this, the greatest human rights anthem of all time, the flame has been passed to us.