It was recently announced that South Africa is reopening the inquest into the death of South Africa’s anti-apartheid freedom fighter and Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) founder, Steve Biko.
His son, Nkosinathi, who was just 6 years old at the time of his father’s death, while incarcerated, said his family welcomed the decision but was also mindful of past disappointments.
“We are cautious. … We’ve been around the block a couple of times,” he told South Africa’s Daily Maverick. According to National Public Radio (NPR), on the 48th anniversary of Biko’s death, the South African government reopened the inquest into the September 12, 1977 case, in what Luxolo Tyali.
A spokesman for South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), said “was an effort to address the atrocities of the past and assist in providing closure to the Biko family and society at large.”
Biko was a medical student. In the mid-1960s, he attended the University of Durban-Westville and participated in activities organized by the White-led National Union of South African Students.
In 1968, after being influenced by Malcolm X, West Indian psychiatrist and political thinker, Frantz Fanon; Black liberation theologian, James Cone; Senegal’s first president Leopold Senghor, and others, Biko began arguing the need to create a separate organization for Black students. This would help Black people regain their identity and self-respect, as well as provide them with a political direction, he argued.
He founded the South African student organization, serving as its president. He also became “the moving force behind the creation of numerous … Black Consciousness organizations, including the Black Peoples Convention and community self-help programs in King Williamstown, in the Eastern Cape, where he lived under banning orders,” reported the London-based Guardian.
He was arrested “violating” a ban that restricted his movements, taken to a prison, where 24 hours later, medical assistance was called for him.
According to the inquest, Biko “was loaded unconscious, still naked and shackled, into the back of a police Land Rover, and transported to a prison hospital in Pretoria, 1,200 kilometers away. He died outside a Pretoria hospital on September 12, 1977, at the age of 30,” NPR reported.
The inquest also includes the 1967 death of Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Luthuli, the killing of attorney Griffiths Mxenge, and the 1985 killings of a group of four Black men who were activists known as the Cradock Four, who were abducted, tortured and killed 40 years ago by apartheid-era security forces, noted the Associated Press.
The inquest is the outcome of a renewed push for the truth by many of the relatives of the thousands of Black people killed by police during the anti-Black apartheid era.
Donald Woods, the White editor of the Daily Dispatch of East London, was a close friend of Biko and called him “the greatest man I have ever met.” The 1987 film “Cry Freedom” was about the life of Steve Biko, who was portrayed by Denzel Washington.
Donald Woods was played by Kevin Kline. However, the trouble with the film is that Biko is killed in the first half of the movie, making the film all about the White man, Woods, escaping from South Africa.
“The problem with this movie is similar to the dilemma in South Africa: Whites occupy the foreground and establish the terms of the discussion, while the 80 percent non-White majority remains a shadowy, half-seen presence in the background,” noted film critic Roger Ebert.
In the aftermath of apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was created in post South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994. The TRC was created to tell the “full truth” of “atrocities committed during apartheid,” but also to give amnesty and forgive those guilty of committing atrocities during that era.
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, during his 1998 World Friendship Tour, criticized the TRC while he was in Johannesburg, South Africa. According to the South African Press Association (SAPA), Minister Farrakhan said the TRC “was being used to sully the reputation of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, whom he called the ‘mother of a great struggle’ and ‘warrior for justice.’”
“It was also not right that the oppressed should suffer, while the oppressor could say ‘I’m sorry’ and go free,” he continued.
During a 1997 interview with TRC Chair, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, journalist Esther A. Armah, author of “Emotional Justice: A Roadmap for Racial Healing,” asked him about the “process of forgiveness.”
She asked: “Why there is so much focus on how White people feel in a nation healing from so much horror and harm perpetrated against Black bodies by a system that enshrined the false superiority of Whiteness?”
She then noted: “I am struck by how limited the language of repair is, but also how individual it is. Even though the TRC body is about forgiving an entire people, the repair seems to be about forgetting that an entire people had been subject to apartheid.”
Despite the challenges, Steve Biko’s son, Nkosinathi, told the Daily Maverick that when it comes to reopening his father’s case, he insists the family will persist.
“As a family, we will not tire from doing what we need to do. We are not doing this because of expectations. We are doing it because it is a constitutionally guaranteed process … and we will do what we need to do to ensure that we close that chapter. Our sense of healing transcends this process,” he said.
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