The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - October 11, 2024


Do You Know Steve Biko？ The Ultimate Honey Badger! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_722)

Topics
steven k. Back anti-apartheid activism
Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Stephen K. Back Donald Woods Mamfela Ramfela
Dr. Kent MacDonald, President of Northwood University-On the State of Academia (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_721) A Psychological Explanation of the JD Vance-Martha Raddatz Exchange (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_723)

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

132.14

Word count

824

Sentence count

59

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Steve Biko was an anti-apartheid activist who was instrumental in the development of Black Consciousness in South Africa. He was a man of dignity and poise, who was a beacon of hope and inspiration to so many. In 1987, after seeing the movie Cry Freedom, I was inspired by Steve Biko. A few years later, I stumbled across his biography in an old book collection and I reached out to Dr. Mamfela Ramfela, who had been a colleague of Biko's and a friend of his, to see if she could help me find out more about him.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.340 Hi everybody, this is Gatsad. Some of you may have heard me mention in the past the name Steve Biko, B-I-K-O, but you may not know who he is.
00:00:13.520 So a recent story happened that I thought I would mention who he is and on the small world problem, how we are all connected in so few links.
00:00:26.920 So Steve Biko is someone that I first learned of in 1987, I believe. So I was a young man. I went to see a movie called Cry Freedom, which recounted the story of how Donald Woods, who became a friend of, he was a white South African, became a friend of Steve Biko.
00:00:51.940 And Steve Biko was an anti-apartheid activist who was developing the movement of black consciousness.
00:01:04.320 And I remember I'd seen the movie. I was very, very inspired by Steve Biko.
00:01:10.600 So, I mean, yes, of course, because he was fighting against a very cruel regime, apartheid.
00:01:18.040 But because as you, if anybody who follows my work, I always implore people to be honey badgers. 0.98
00:01:25.300 And in 1987, here I was seeing this honey badger that became a, an exemplar of what it is to speak out, knowing that things can go wrong for you.
00:01:43.140 As you may know, Steve Biko was eventually tortured and killed by the apartheid regime.
00:01:53.500 And the movie Cry Freedom recounts that story.
00:01:57.780 And I ended up picking up shortly after seeing the movie, a book called I Write What I Like, which I referenced, by the way, in The Parasitic Mind.
00:02:08.440 I write what I like. I mean, it can't be more simple than that, right?
00:02:12.280 You're not going to stop me from speaking my mind.
00:02:15.720 And so he struck me as someone who just had this incredible dignity, poise.
00:02:21.460 He knew who he was.
00:02:22.760 And then, you know, you, you move on in your life and 35 plus years later, I want to show you something.
00:02:29.940 This is incredible.
00:02:32.300 So here, if you could see Biko, the biography by Donald Woods.
00:02:38.520 My wife and I had gone to see a person that we know we'd originally met at one of the local cafes.
00:02:45.460 She has a book antiquarian business, and she had kindly invited us, invited me to go there and see if there were any books that I was interested in.
00:02:57.440 And I asked my wife to come with me.
00:02:59.180 And as we were sitting there, my wife shows up to me and says, hey, look what I found.
00:03:04.220 She knew that I was a fan of Biko.
00:03:06.740 So she said, here is, so this is a book from, you know, maybe 45 years ago, which I'm now devouring.
00:03:14.240 You could see I'm right here in the book.
00:03:16.240 And as I was reading the book, which, by the way, is fantastic, I came across a, an individual in the book.
00:03:26.180 Her name is Dr. Mamfela Ramfela, who is a medical doctor, but also a PhD.
00:03:33.680 I think she was the chancellor of the University of Cape Town.
00:03:38.140 And Donald Woods, who has since passed away, is recounting how he first met her.
00:03:44.020 She was a colleague of Steve Biko's in, you know, in the, in the 70s.
00:03:48.980 Uh, and so I thought, wow, I, I want to look up this, uh, this individual, uh, and maybe reach out to her.
00:03:59.000 And so I sent her an email, uh, within, you know, a few hours, her, uh, assistant wrote back to me and said that, uh, she was traveling, but that once she comes back, uh, you know, she'll, she'll put it on her calendar.
00:04:14.540 So, 1987, I read a book, well, I read a book by Biko after seeing the movie, uh, of, you know, his, uh, his trajectory fighting apartheid.
00:04:28.240 I mentioned Biko in The Parasitic Mind. 1.00
00:04:33.860 We're rummaging through all these incredible antiquarian books.
00:04:39.120 We come across the bio of Biko.
00:04:41.740 I start reading it.
00:04:43.320 I find the character, I reach out to her, and hopefully she will be coming on my show.
00:04:48.340 That's the magic, the, the connect, the connectivity of the world.
00:04:53.540 Not only are we connected by ideas, by universal brotherhood, by just a few links.
00:04:59.620 So here I am, potentially in a few days, speaking to someone who knew Steve Biko personally.
00:05:05.220 Now, it doesn't matter whether you, you agree with his politics or not.
00:05:08.080 I mean, most people would certainly agree with the fact that apartheid was a bad, uh, regime. 0.98
00:05:15.200 Uh, he's a real historical figure who died very, very young.
00:05:18.920 Uh, so I would really urge you to learn more about him.
00:05:23.060 These are the types of folks that shape society.
00:05:28.220 And so I'm very much looking forward to talking, talking with the good doctor from South Africa,
00:05:35.740 hopefully next week.
00:05:37.180 So there you have it, folks.
00:05:38.580 Life is beautiful.
00:05:39.900 Life is a playground.
00:05:41.100 Get out there and make meaningful connections.
00:05:43.700 Cheers, everybody.
00:05:44.180 Cheers, everybody.