BIKO, BANTU STEPHEN (aka Steve Biko, 18 December 1946–12 September 1977), a South African anti-apartheid activist and writer whose martyrdom galvanized the movement to end White rule. Biko was an avatar of the Black Consciousness Movement, which proceeded from the recognition that, in his words, “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” and evolved into a powerful assertion of collective independence from White-supremacist ideology.
Born in Tarkastad in the Eastern Cape province to a Xhosa family, Biko was the third of four children. His name “Bantu,” meaning “the people’s person” in Xhosa, was chosen by his father, Matthew Mzingaye Biko, who worked as a police officer and later as a clerk in the King William’s Town Native Affairs Office. He was frequently transferred, and the family moved several times before finally settling in Ginsberg township in 1948. Mzingaye died suddenly in 1950 before completing a law degree at the University of South Africa. After his death, Biko’s mother, Alice Nokuzola “Mamcethe,” supported the family as a cook and domestic. Despite her meager income, the Bikos eventually owned their house in Ginsberg.
Biko showed an interest in anti-apartheid politics from an early age, but his elder brother Khaya was the first in the family to become politically active, going to meetings of the local branch of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) while in high school. In 1962, while attending Lovedale College with Khaya, Biko was taken into police custody when the authorities came to the campus to arrest Khaya on suspicion of involvement with the armed wing of the PAC. Khaya was sentenced to two years in prison; Biko was released but expelled from Lovedale.
Thanks to Khaya’s persistence, after his release from prison, in ensuring that his brother received an education, Biko was accepted at St. Francis College, a Catholic boarding school in Natal, in 1964. He flourished there, becoming vice chair of the college’s literary and debating society, and was then admitted to the University of Natal’s medical school in 1966, where he became involved with the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). NUSAS was dominated by white liberal allies, however, and Biko soon found that it failed to represent the needs of Black students. Dissatisfied, he resigned from NUSAS in 1969 and cofounded the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) for Black students only, which would become an important vehicle for the dissemination of the Black Consciousness Movement. Under the pseudonym “Frank Talk” Biko was a regular contributor to the SASO newsletter.
In 1972 Biko founded and was elected president of the Black People’s Convention (BPC), an umbrella organization of the Black Consciousness Movement. The BPC would in turn inspire the formation of other organizations focusing on specific aspects of resistance to apartheid, such as the Black Community Programmes (BCP), dedicated to social-improvement projects enhancing the literacy and economic self-reliance of Black communities. His studies suffered as a result of his activism and he was expelled from medical school. He began studying law and political science in 1973.
Because of his work with the BCP and BCM, which were deemed radical by the apartheid government, Biko and other BCP leaders were banned from engaging in political activity in March 1973 and dispersed throughout the country. This marked the beginning of a fullfledged police investigation into the BCP and its allied organizations. Biko was forced to return to Ginsberg, where he lived in his mother’s house, and was prohibited from speaking in public, writing, or traveling for five years. Nevertheless, the family home soon became a gathering place for the movement and Biko remained active in the everyday operations of the BCP. He initiated several grassroots projects, setting up the Zanempilo Health Clinic, which would become the nerve center of BCM activities, and the Zimele Trust Fund to provide support for political prisoners and their families. In 1975 Biko was arrested, detained, and interrogated for 137 days but was neither charged nor placed on trial.
In the last few years of his life Biko often ignored the ban on his political activism, attending meetings, addressing crowds, and continuing his work. His primary focus at this time was the attempt to bring together the various Black-liberation organizations, especially the African National Congress, the PAC, and the Non European Unity Movement. Determined to prevent this, the state repeatedly detained Biko for questioning. In August 1976 he was arrested and held in solitary confinement for 101 days. Not long after he was elected honorary president of the BPC, Biko was arrested once again, in March 1977, and once again released.
On August 18, 1977, while Biko was driving back to Ginsberg from Cape Town with BPC activist Peter Jones, their car was stopped at a police roadblock on the outskirts of King William’s Town. The two men were taken to different police stations in Port Elizabeth. Jones was subjected to severe torture over a prolonged period and never saw Biko again.
On September 6 Biko was transferred to Room 619 of the Sanlam Building in Port Elizabeth and interrogated by a group of South African security police. According to the testimony of Gideon Nieuwoudt, a former policeman, given to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at his amnesty hearing in 1998, during his interrogation Biko sat on a chair facing his interrogator, Daantjie Siebert. At one point Siebert ordered him to stand; when Biko sat down again, Siebert grabbed him by the chest and yanked him to his feet, whereupon five men assaulted him simultaneously and Nieuwoudt attacked him with a reinforced hose pipe. According to Nieuwoudt, Biko “hit his head, fell, seemed confused and dazed. . . . [We] then [chained] him standing to the bars of the security gate with arms outstretched.” For six hours Biko hung in a position resembling crucifixion. Later that night Biko’s arms were unchained and he was left to lie on a urine-soaked mat, still shackled by his feet.
On September 12 Steve Biko became the forty-sixth political detainee to die in a South African prison during interrogation since 1963 (when the government permitted imprisonment without trial). He was only thirty years old.
Although P. J. Goosen, commanding officer of the Eastern Cape Security Police, testified at the inquest into Biko’s death that he had “suffered a stroke,” no doctor appeared on the scene until twenty-four hours after the injuries had been sustained. Even so, Biko was left shackled for another night. On September 11 specialist evidence documented brain damage, and medical approval was given for Biko to be driven—naked—to Pretoria, more than one thousand kilometers away. Bare-skinned and defenseless in the back of a Land Rover, Biko died from his head injuries.
The inquest that followed was a farce, featuring evidence both withheld and fabricated, falsified testimony, and a distorted autopsy. Unsurprisingly, the verdict absolved the police and others involved in Biko’s death from responsibility. It was not until the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996–98), during which the amnesty applications of the five police officers involved in Biko’s murder were denied, that a measure of justice would be meted out.