Steve Biko
Born in 1946 to a poor, Xhosa family in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, Bantu Stephen Biko was the poster child of Black Consciousness Movement, a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign of the 1960s and 1970s. This also was the most dangerous time to oppose the monolithic edifice of white rule in South Africa. With its back increasingly against the wall, white South Africa responded to internal black opposition with all of the insidious resources of a police state.
Biko enjoyed the advantage of a well-funded education, thanks to a liberal interest in ‘Bantu’ education at the time, and the fact that he displayed prodigious intellectual gifts. While studying medicine at the University of Natal, he joined the National Union of South African Students, a powerfully anti-apartheid movement. Universities at the time led the anti-apartheid movement, and it was not only black students and activists who were involved. Despite its retrogressive government, a strong liberal movement infused academic and civil society, and Biko found himself in a fertile social environment to develop his ideas of black consciousness.
Biko, however, was distrustful even of ‘well-meaning’ liberal whites, believing their interest in black liberation in South Africa to be fundamentally paternalistic and patronizing. His message was separate organization and separate institutions of liberation. His definition of black included ‘coloureds’ or people of mixed race, and Indians, equally subject to the race restrictions of apartheid. He was influenced by the Martinican writer and political philosopher Franz Fanon, and he himself wrote and published widely, unaffected by the risks that such overt political activity implied.
Soon enough, Biko was noticed by the authorities, and in 1973, he was the subject of a ‘banning’ order. This restricted him to the vicinity of his hometown of King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape. He was now a person of interest to the authorities, and his every movement was monitored. During his banning, Biko befriended the liberal white editor of the Cape Town Daily Dispatch, a newspaper that published a number of Biko’s articles. It was through this friendship that Biko softened his attitude to whites, and his distrust of the liberal white movement in South Africa diminished somewhat.
In 1977, Biko broke the terms of his banning order by driving to Cape Town, and on the return journey he and his companion were stopped at a roadblock and Biko was taken into custody. He was transported to a police station in the coastal city of Port Elizabeth, and there held naked and in shackles. He endured lengthy interrogation chained naked to a grille, but details of precisely what happened have never been made public. On September 6, he suffered three brain lesions that resulted in a massive brain hemorrhage, the official explanation for which was that he attacked police and was subdued. Although examined by a doctor, he was declared fit, and forced to stand in shackles. He was driven then to Pretoria, naked in the back of a police vehicle, and he died alone in a cell on September 12, 1977. He was thirty-one years old when he died, and he remains an icon of the South African liberation struggle.