Ordinary Men - #2 Steve Biko
We continue with the "Ordinary Men" column in which we wish to rediscover some personalities and their testimony of life. "Normal Men" are human beings; they therefore include both males and females. At times when we perhaps find in ourselves a propensity to grasp of life and the world "bad examples," we believe it is important to rediscover people who have lived responsible lives leaving marks that we can grasp and make our own today.
By "Black Consciousness" I mean the political and cultural revival of an oppressed people. Now blacks in Africa know that whites will not be conquerors forever. - Steve Biko
Peter Gabriel - Biko (1987)
On September 12, 1977, Steve Biko died from atrocious torture by the South African police. Although less famous than Ghandi, Mandela, Martin Luther King, Steve Biko is a man whose life left an indelible mark on human history.
In 1997 on the story of Steve Biko and his friendship with white journalist Donald Woods came out "Cry of Freedom", a memorable film directed by director Richard Attenborough and starring Denzel Washington.
In many places in South Africa, particularly among young people and in the suburbs of large cities, even today the myth of Steve Biko is as strong as that of Nelson Mandela himself.
Steve Biko was born in December 1946, in the Eastern Cape province. He studied medicine at the University of Natal in the separate section for blacks.
He soon developed a political consciousness aimed at the need to increase black people's awareness of autonomy. In the beginning he became involved with the National Union of South African Students, then broke away from it in 1969 and founded the South African Students' Organization. His message was clear: we are all human beings, black and white, we all belong to the same world, no one is superior or inferior. He knew that the new South Africa of his dreams, made up of free and equal people, could not be based on hatred and racial discrimination (albeit in reverse), revenge and retaliation. "Hate" - he said. - "cannot be fought with hatred." During those years Biko formed a deep friendship with Donald Woods, a white, liberal journalist who paid for his relationship with his friend with exile. Thanks to the memoir he wrote, we know much about this heroic figure. "The friend I most valued was a special, extraordinary man. In the three years I knew him, I never had the slightest doubt that he was the most important leader in the whole country. He was wise, full of humor, compassionate, brilliant, selfless, modest, courageous. The government never realized how much of a man of peace Biko was. His constant goal was the peaceful reconciliation of all South Africa."
In 1972 Steve Biko was among the founders of the Black Peoples Convention, a federation of some seventy groups that identify with the philosophy of black consciousness. It was in this environment that preparations were made for the protests in Soweto, the Johannesburg township that was the scene of a very harsh police crackdown on June 16, 1976. At least 100 blacks were massacred that day. The uprising spread across the country and within a year there were a thousand victims. A great many were young people, even children. It was not difficult for the regime to link Biko's name to the renewed awareness that it supported youth in the struggle against apartheid.
On August 18, 1977, Biko was arrested. On September 6, 1977 he was interrogated by his torturers, including Gideon Niuwoudt, who died in 2005, in room 619. The beatings were such that they reduced him to death. His white jailers said he became too agitated and by an unfortunate fatality hit his head against the bars of the cell. On September 11 he was found in his cell in desperate condition. Although the doctor's recommendation was to admit Biko as a matter of urgency, instead of to the nearby local hospital he was transported to the police hospital in Pretoria more than 1,000 kilometers away on bumpy roads inside the trunk of a Land Rover, naked and handcuffed. He died during this hellish journey. The South African government claimed he had died from a prolonged hunger strike.
After Biko's death, his friend Donald Woods never stopped making accusations to the political police with the result that he ended up in jail and banned as a dangerous person. For five years he would not be allowed to stray far from home, write books or articles, be quoted in any publication, be in the same room with more than one person at a time, even keep a diary.
Despite the bans Donald Woods felt he had an obligation: to tell the world about the atrocities of apartheid and the crimes that the political police could carry out undisturbed in prisons. He hand-wrote a book telling the truth about Biko's death and inciting international powers to adopt economic sanctions against South Africa To publish it he was forced to flee South Africa, where he would not set foot again for twelve years. Disguised as a priest, to evade political police surveillance, he crossed the border into Lesotho on New Year's Day 1978 with his wife and five children and then found refuge in London.
There is an association, Steve Biko Foundation, based on the principles for which Biko fought: identity, culture and values, realities that speak to the soul of a nation.