Steve Biko

Died on 12 September 1977 in Pretoria after beatings in Port Elizabeth security police custody; the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement was thirty years old.

Overview

Biko, the medical student who founded the South African Students Organization and built Black Consciousness as the philosophy of self-liberation, was banned and repeatedly detained. Arrested at a roadblock in August 1977, he was interrogated and beaten in the security police offices in Port Elizabeth, sustaining brain injuries; police drove him a thousand kilometers naked in a Land Rover to Pretoria, where he died in prison hospital. The inquest found no criminal liability, a verdict that scandalized the world; the inquest magistrate finding of a scuffle was demolished by journalists including Donald Woods, whose exile carried the story into the book and film Cry Freedom. In 1997, five former officers admitted to the TRC the beating and cover-up and were denied amnesty. Biko grave and name became a beacon of the anti-apartheid movement, and his killing helped isolate the regime internationally.