Steve Biko: Lessons for SA today

Share current article via Email Share current article via Facebook Share current article via Twitter Share current article via LinkedIn Steve Biko was but one of scores of political detainees who were killed in security police detention, victims of torture and severe beatings, says the writer. Archive photo: Story audio is generated using AI The reopening of the Steve Biko inquest, nearly 50 years after his death, is relevant for the country on several levels. First, it should help refute attempts by apartheid apologists to whitewash the system as benign but misunderstood. Second, it is a reminder of how far our country remains from being a more just and fairer society for all and that we are, in many ways, regressing from our founding vision of unity and nonracialism. At the time of his murder by apartheid's security police, Biko was but one of scores of political detainees who were killed in security police detention, victims of torture and severe beatings. He was the 20th political detainee to die in police custody in the short space of 18 months. In its time, a cynical apartheid state sought to blame the dead for their own fate. For instance, in the case of Ahmed Timol, they said he had decided to jump from the top floor of the notorious John Vorster Square police station, where many were detained and tortured. Contrary to an apartheid-era inquest decision absolving Timol's captors and declaring his death a suicide, judge Billy Mothle, in a reopened inquiry in 2017, found the police culpable for Timol's death. He found that the 29-year-old teacher had been tortured by his captors before falling (or being pushed) to his death. Another detainee to lose his life in incarceration was medical doctor and trade unionist Neil Aggett. Despite evidence of torture, assault and nonstop interrogation inflicted on him at the same police station, an apartheid inquest in 1982 ruled that no-one was to blame for Aggett's death and that it was suicide. Yet a 2022 inquest found that his death 'was brought about by acts committed by members of the security branch'. If apartheid rulers were as well-intentioned as claimed, why did they have to kill and terrorise so many who disagreed with them peacefully? In the case of Biko, whose death anniversary is next Saturday, the initial lie by Jimmy Kruger, the apartheid minister of justice (a misnomer if there ever was one), was that Biko had starved himself to death, which was, he said, his 'democratic right'. The lies about the causes of detainees' deaths were later to be mocked in the poem In Detention by Chris van Wyk, one of the leading literary lights of his time. Like their predecessors, such as Hendrik Verwoerd and his cohorts, apartheid's latter-day apologists would have us believe that it was not as bad as it has been made out to be and that it was perhaps a misconstrued philosophy — an innocent system aimed at fostering 'good neighbourliness' among South Africa's racial and ethnic groups. And privately they scoff at all talk of restitution and redress for the harm done by apartheid to the majority of citizens. Instead, they choose to see an excusable harm done in good faith. Yet nothing exposes the singular cold-heartedness and brutality of apartheid governors and the system itself more than Kruger's infamous statement to a National Party congress shortly after Biko's death. To peals of laughter from delegates, Kruger made the revealing confession: 'I am not glad and I am not sorry about Mr Biko. It leaves me cold.' This was after a severely brain-damaged, naked and manacled Biko had been driven the long distance from Port Elizabeth to a Pretoria hospital in the back of a police Land Rover. And if apartheid rulers were as well-intentioned as claimed, why did they have to kill and terrorise so many who disagreed with them peacefully — those who opposed race discrimination and wanted a more just and nondiscriminatory society, whether it be defenceless detainees or the unarmed schoolchildren who marched against Bantu education in 1976? The oppressors tried to justify their enforcement of a globally condemned system by claiming to be the last African bastion against dangerous terrorists and communists. But the truth was that Biko and his followers merely wanted the removal of an unjust system and to replace it with a more just and equitable one. As Biko says in I Write What I Like, a collection of his writings: 'We are looking forward to a nonracial, just and egalitarian society in which colour, creed and race shall form no point of reference.' The vision, he told one interviewer, was (in time) 'to bestow upon South Africa the greatest gift possible — a more human face'. Meaning the antithesis of apartheid itself. Where today we are witnessing the re-emergence of tribalist and racial segregationism, Biko opposed the ethnically based bantustan system, describing it as 'the greatest single fraud invented by white politicians', aimed at fanning 'intertribal competition and hostility'. Bantustan leaders, he argued at the time, were 'subconsciously siding with and abetting in the total subjugation of the black people' of South Africa. When seeking amnesty at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1997, Biko's captors claimed that he had attacked one of them, which resulted in a 'scuffle', leading to him hitting his head against a wall. The country and everyone victimised by apartheid would like to know why influential people in the post-apartheid government would have wanted to give transgressors from the old order a free pass. Contrast this with forensic expert evidence at the reopened inquest this week, suggesting that Biko was repeatedly and severely assaulted over a period of time before his death. Among other things, he suffered brain injury consistent with blunt-force trauma, an expert told the inquest. In 1999 the TRC refused amnesty to officers implicated in Biko's death and recommended their prosecution. Among other reasons, the commission said the killing of Biko was not motivated by a political objective as the law required. It also was not satisfied that the officers had testified truthfully about events leading up to his death and rejected their version as 'so improbable and contradictory that it had to be rejected as false'. The TRC reached the conclusion that the assault on Biko 'appeared to have been actuated by ill-will or spite' towards the Black Consciousness leader. Which brings us to the Khampepe commission and the need to get to the bottom of allegations that certain interests in the state had played a role in suppressing attempts to prosecute apartheid agents. The country and everyone victimised by apartheid would like to know why influential people in the post-apartheid government would have wanted to give transgressors from the old order a free pass. Why did the democratic state get cold feet when required to follow through with the TRC's prosecution recommendations? The delay almost seemed intended to hold off prosecutions long enough to enable apartheid criminals to ultimately go to their graves with their secrets, including the identities of those who may have been the liberation movement's fifth columnists. In that context, the work of the Khampepe commission will be followed with keen interest. Regarding the Biko inquest, justice minister Mmamoloko Kubayi must be commended for doing right by the family, stopping the unedifying haggling and authorising state funding for the family's legal costs at the reopened inquest. To have done otherwise would have been a most unconscionable thing, meaning the family would have been wronged by both the old regime and the new, ostensibly justice-orientated government that replaced it. Like adding insult to injury, really. As a country, we'd be the poorer if the attainment of justice were all about the depth of our pockets. It may very well be assumed that, because he was a leader of the Black Consciousness movement, Biko was addressing himself only and exclusively to black people. But his political message — of nonracialism, of unity against segregation, of fairness and a shared humanity — was to all South Africans, in his time and today.