The Steve Biko Foundation annually hosts a Steve Biko memorial lecture, previously presented by the likes of writers Zakes Mda and Chinua Achebe, leaders Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, thinker Mamphela Ramphele and humanist Desmond Tutu. To this auspicious list, the Steve Biko Foundation can now add Alice Walker - writer, activist, Pulitzer prizewinner and African-American - for the eleventh Steve Biko memorial lecture.

At a briefing three days before the memorial lecture was to be held in Cape Town, Walker answered questions from the mostly-arty media contingent at an event hosted by the Foundation, in Houghton, Johannesburg.

Walker said that the message of black consciousness, which Biko embodied, was still relevant today. There was a need to "hold onto humanity beyond colour", she said, particularly, faced with major change in our world. She cited climate change as such an example.

"Biko and I are definitely sister and brother," she stated, because of the way they both loved the world. Her coming to South Africa for the Steve Biko memorial lecture was, she said, an "exploration of how close [she] feels to Biko".

Walker is most well known for her 1982 novel ‘The Color Purple', which explored the "trials and triumphs of Celie, a largely unschooled, but earnest and increasingly independent young [African-American] woman." Walker was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first African-American woman writer to receive the award.

Walker was deeply involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which fought against racial discrimination, just as Biko had done.

Commenting on her role in the civil rights movement, Walker said that activism was "why artists are born". Her vision, she said, was to "shake the consciousness of people".

Steve Biko Foundation CEO Nkosinathi Biko explained that the Foundation aimed to "foster the intangible but essential building blocks [of] history, identity, culture and values". It was because of Walker's "eloquent articulation of the link between identity, activism and social change" that she had been invited to give the eleventh Steve Biko memorial lecture.

Nkosinathi Biko said that that the lecture had been created as a way to "explore the inextricable link between the individual and society; to explore triumphs over inequality; and to speak to contemporary challenges and opportunities facing people of African descent".

Walker's lecture was entitled "Coming to see you since I was five years old: An American poet's connection to the South African soul."