I never met Steve Bantu Biko. I tried to attend his burial in Ginsberg, King William's Town, but was turned back by police on my way there from Polokwane. However, I have been to his grave twice since then – once on the day of the unveiling of his tombstone, and again in 2002, the day after former Minister of Police Steve Tshwete was buried.

But Biko has always been part of my life, shaping the way I see and interpret the world, while trying hard to stay true to the values and virtues of being black in South Africa. Born in Louis Trichardt, now Makhado, an area in which, until the 1950s blacks owned freehold title to property, I had relatives who worked at a school for whites.

They looked after the white children, cooking for them and cleaning up after them. Over weekends and late in the day during the week, we would visit our relatives at the school. In reality, we were going for the food. The leftovers from the tables of the kleinbaasies were very delicious.

Even then, at age six or seven, it did not escape my notice that our school, run by Catholic missionary nuns, did not provide these delicacies of bread with peanut butter or jam. Nor did my curious mind fail to note that we lived out of town, while whites lived in town. In fact, ‘town’ meant where white people lived.

These observations did not amount to political consciousness, they were just some interesting realities floating about in my mind. When the National Party, under Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, abolished freehold areas, our very own Masagani was demolished, along with the more famous areas of Sophiatown in Johannesburg and District Six in Cape Town, and we were expected to move into bleak, colourless tworoomed matchboxes in Tshikota.

My father refused to do this and shipped us all off to Nzhelele, a rural area in the bantustan of Venda. I did not realise then that he was making some kind of protest. All I knew was that we were moving out of our comfort zone. There would be no more tasty leftovers from the koshuis (boarding school) and, more importantly, in Nzhelele I had to herd goats in the snake infested bush.