MANDLA LANGA: Why we remember Martin Luther King
It took a lot of courage to practise nonviolence in the US, where violence, according to the late poet H Rap Brown, "is as American as apple pie"
I was 18 when Martin Luther King jnr was assassinated, on April 4 1968. Apart from the stunned expression on my father's face as he and my brother Ben discussed the news, I cannot truthfully recreate the mood except to recall that the memory was still fresh of the death under suspicious circumstances of Chief Albert Luthuli, on July 21 1967. Both were Nobel peace laureates, honoured by the world community for their untiring commitment to the cause of human rights. In a way, then, the two martyred men became somewhat interchangeable in my mind. Young black people at that period - following the banning of the ANC and the PAC in the 1960s - had gravitated towards the Black Consciousness Movement, which sought to fill the political vacuum.Steve Biko's dictum "Black man, you're on your own" was still to gain wider currency, but we knew instinctively that we needed to augment our collective knowledge of the state of politics in our country - a country that was at once cut off from and sti...
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