The Biko Bike Project

If you are a student in the University of Manchester (UK), you can rent a bike for one pound a week, with a 40 GBP deposit that's returned to you when you return the bike.

You have your choice of road bikes, mountain bikes or city bikes.   What they all have in common is their colour (it's in the UK, remember!) scheme:  The frame is yellow and the front fork is an Easter-egg purple.

These bikes are rented by the Biko Bikes Project, organized by members of UM's Student Action, the self-described "volunteering arm" of the UM Student Union.  They are involved in community-based volunteer projects that help, among others, the homeless and refugees, and in cleaning up the environment. (Manchester was one of the first cities changed by the Industrial Revolution.)  The Biko Bikes Project aims to promote "the best mode of transportation":  cycling.

The bikes are "rescued" by agreement with the university, having been abandoned in various places in and around the campus.  Then the bikes are stripped, painted an rebuilt by students who take the repair workshops the Project conducts.

In addition to bike repair, the Project also offers workshops in "bicycle confidence", in recognition that for many people, one of the greatest deterrents to cycling is the fear of traffic and other conditions they might encounter on a bicycle.  

The Project is named in honor of Steve Bantu Biko, who is considered one of the "martyrs" of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. 

Like Frantz Fanon, he studied medicine but developed an intense interest in black consciousness, which led him to the organizing activity that would get him banned from the university in which he was studying.  The protests he organized culminated in the Soweto Uprising of June 1976.



A little more than a year later, on 18 August 1977, he was arrested at a police roadblock in Port Elizabeth under the Terrorism Act No. 83 of 1967, enacted specifically as an attempt to thwart activists like Biko.  The arresting officers took him to a police station, where he was subjected to a 22-hour interrogation that included torture and beatings that sent him into a coma.  He suffered a major injury and was chained to a window grille for a day.

On 11 September, police officers loaded him--naked and manacled, and barely alive-- into the back of a Land Rover for an 1100 km (685 mile) drive to Pretoria, where there was a prison with hospital facilities.  He arrived the following day.  Not long after, he died.  The original report said he'd died of a long hunger strike, but an autopsy revealed, in addition to numerous abrasions and bruises, a brain hemorrhage from his massive head injuries.

Were he alive, Steve Biko would turn 70 years old today.  The students at the University of Manchester could hardly pick a better person to commemorate than a man who "they had to kill" at age 30 to "prolong Apartheid".

Who made that trenchant observation?  Somebody named Nelson Mandela.

Update (23 December 2016):  Timothy Loh of Biko Bikes says that, for budgetary reasons, the bikes are no longer painted.  They still, however, are affixed with the Biko decal.

What Else Have We Here?

I haven't yet begun to work on my estate-sale find.  That probably won't begin until next week.  

Funny, though, how I'm thinking about the details, even though I haven't even started to build the wheels or assemble anything else on the bike.

At first, I thought I would wrap the bars--Velo Orange Porteurs with bar-end brake levers (the same setup I have on Vera and Helene, my Mercian mixtes)--in leather or the Deda faux leather tape, which comes in a shade that more or less mirrors a Brooks honey-colored B17 saddle darkened by  few of thousand miles and a couple of applications of Proofhide. (Yes, that's the saddle I plan to use--unless someone wants to trade me a black or blue one for it.)  I prefer the feel of actual leather, but the Deda is pretty nice and is more durable.  My only complaint about it is that it's full of Deda logos.

But, as I was trolling eBay, I chanced upon this:

Pardon the condition of my nails.  It's finals week!

Tressostar cloth tape.  Eight rolls:  four in blue, four in gray.  (No, this isn't a Civil War re-enactment!)  Best of all, the right shade of blue and the right shade of gray for the Trek:

Like much NOS (new old stock) bicycle equipment found on eBay, they came from a bike shop that closed.  

The seller was offering the tape at $10 for two rolls:  a pretty good price these days.  (Around the time  the world was discovering Bruce Springsteen, I paid $1 for two rolls of the same tape in red!)  He had four rolls of each color remaining and I offered to buy all of them.  He asked for $20.  Yes, for eight rolls.

I am thinking about wrapping the bars "barber pole" or "candy cane" style, using both colors.  I would wrap the entire bar, as I did on my Mercian mixtes, because I occasionally use the forward position.  Also, when bar-end levers are used, the cable sits against the bar, as it does with "aero" road levers.  That means they have to be taped or clamped against the bars.  If nothing else, covering them with whatever bar wrap I use will be more attractive than the electrical tape I use to fasten the cable housing to the bar.

Hmm...Now that I'm going to use cloth tape, maybe I should try something I've never done before...Shellac?

Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?

Over the years, I have come to realize that there we have rationales, and we have our  motivatons, for cycling.

The rationales are the reasons why we say we ride:  You can get to work faster than you can on the bus.  It's less expensive than even mass transportation, let alone driving, even if you are one of those people who will commute or go to the store only on top-of-the-line equipment.  When you pedal, there is one less motorized vehicle on the road--which, of course, is good for the environment.  And, it's good for your heart, lungs and everything else in your body (well, almost).  Hey, I know of people who gave up their gym memberships after they started cycling to work.

Now, of course, those are all perfectly good reasons to ride.  But I don't think anyone--even one who fancies him or her self an environmentalist or a "health nut"--has ever become a "lifer" on the bike only because of such rationales.

Professor on a bicycle

In much the same way that the things that the things you live on are not the same as the things you live for, the things that keep us cycling for decades have more to do with our motivations.  Some of them can be the spawn of rationales:  You might keep on riding because it's helping you to breathe or sleep better, or it's saving you money.  But I think that if we keep on riding from childhood into old age (even when other forms of transportation and exercise are available to us), the things that motivate us are not nearly so pragmatic.

The greatest motivator for me is, of course, that I love cycling.  I have not found any other activity that allows me to spread my wings and keep my feet on the ground at the same time:  I feel the exhiliaration of gliding through the city and country and a connection, if not entanglement, with the ground or the street under me.  And it frees my mind:  I sometimes find myself working through a problem or simply generating an idea that I couldn't when I was in my apartment or at my desk.

I suspect that most lifetime cyclists (or, at least, people who ride for as long as they are able) are spurred by the sort of motivation I've described.  A former partner once observed that for me, cycling is as much a spiritual or metaphysical experience as it is anything else.  The long ride I took every Saturday was, she said, "your equivalent of church".

Now, I'm not a very religious person, but I understood what she meant.  For me, cycling has always been expansive:  My mind is as free to move as my body is when I'm astride two wheels.

I must say, though, that not all of my thoughts are profound. (You know as much about me if you've been following this blog!)  Sometimes my mind plays, or I simply get giddy or silly.  But even in my most mirthful moments, I have never come up with the sort of riddle this creature is pondering:

Yes, I give him or her "props" for that.  But then again, he or she has had 40 million more years than I've had to come up with such a witticism!