Steve Biko
Steve Biko was a prominent South African civil rights activist, known for his leadership in the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) during the apartheid era in the 1960s and 1970s. Born on December 18, 1946, in King William's Town, Biko's activism began in his youth when he was expelled from high school for protesting against the apartheid regime. He co-founded the South African Students' Organization (SASO) and later the Black People's Convention, focusing on empowering Black South Africans and advocating for their rights and dignity.
Biko's efforts to challenge the institutionalized racial segregation of apartheid made him a target of the South African government. In 1977, he was arrested, tortured, and ultimately died in police custody, an event that provoked international outrage and condemnation of the apartheid regime. His death was later recognized as a significant moment in the struggle against apartheid, galvanizing support for the anti-apartheid movement both locally and globally. Biko's legacy endures, as he is remembered as a key figure in the fight for racial equality and justice in South Africa, with initiatives like the Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics established to honor his principles of justice and dignity.
Steve Biko
Civil rights activist
- Born: December 18, 1946
- Place of Birth: Place of birth: King William’s Town, South Africa
- Died: September 12, 1977
- Place of Death: Place of death: Pretoria, South Africa
Significance:Steve Biko was a South African civil rights activist best known for leading the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) against the institution of apartheid in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Apartheid was the South African government system of racial segregation that existed in the country for most of the latter half of the twentieth century. Because of Biko’s anti-government activities, South Africa’s white leaders severely punished him. In 1977, government-sanctioned police officers, arrested, imprisoned, and tortured Biko. The officers’ violent treatment of Biko while in their custody led to his death a month later.
Background
Stephen Bantu Biko was born on December 18, 1946, in King William’s Town in the present-day Eastern Cape in South Africa. Two years later, South Africa’s white National Party came to power in the national government and began instituting apartheid, a government system of racial segregation. Apartheid promoted the political and cultural superiority of South Africa’s white population, known as Afrikaners, over the country’s Black population. Under the government’s apartheid policies, Black South Africans were brutally repressed and enjoyed few civil rights.
Biko began high school in 1959 but was expelled in 1963 for protesting apartheid. He completed high school elsewhere and then entered the University of Natal Medical School in 1966. That year, he joined the equal-rights activist group the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). He later left the group when he found it too moderate and unassertive.
In 1968, Biko co-founded the South African Students’ Organization (SASO) as an all-Black activist group that publicly opposed apartheid while attempting to strengthen Black identity and self-confidence. Biko detested that apartheid treated Black South Africans, the racial majority in the country, as though they were a foreign minority in their own land. Through a campaign known as the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), SASO strove to restore pride, dignity, and self-respect to black South Africans.
Life’s Work
Beginning in 1970, however, Biko and his fellow SASO leaders began to worry that, by restricting membership to students only, their group would be unable to take the kind of political action required to overcome apartheid nationally. To remedy this, Biko and leaders of a number of other black-rights groups convened to form the Black People’s Convention (BPC) in 1972. The group vowed to organize all black South Africans into a political movement that would free them from the oppression of apartheid.
Biko was expelled from medical school in 1972. This allowed him to devote all his time and efforts to various anti-apartheid activities. He started working with the Black Community Programmes, which conducted various community works projects throughout South Africa to help rebuild Black neighborhoods and provide social services to Black people.
Biko made no effort to operate the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) as an underground campaign. He and his supporters appeared in schools, in theaters, and on the news, spreading their message of black freedom. This visibility quickly made the movement a target of the South African government, which started repressing various BCM leaders in March 1973. Some leaders, including Biko, were banned from leaving their hometowns. Other activists were imprisoned or killed by government forces.
Even while constrained to King William’s Town, Biko continued participating in the Black Community Programmes, helping to build a health clinic and daycare center there. He also established the Zimele Trust Fund to aid political prisoners and their families, opened home-supplies industries to create employment for black people, and founded the Ginsberg Educational Fund (GEF) to provide scholarships to college students.
Biko’s continued public advocacy for Black empowerment led the South African government to begin arresting him randomly and holding him without trial for months. Biko was arrested four times between 1975 and 1977. In 1976, another government ban forced him to abandon his position as leader of the Black Community Programmes.
In August 1977, Biko was arrested for treason in the city of Port Elizabeth. Over the next twenty-four hours, the police holding him there interrogated and severely beat him, inflicting grievous injuries, especially to his head. Biko was left in his cell until mid-September, when the police shackled him, naked, in the back of a van and drove him about 700 miles to a hospital in Pretoria. Biko died there on September 12 of a brain hemorrhage induced by his treatment while in police custody.
Impact
News of Biko’s death sparked mass outrage among many Black-rights groups in South Africa. Most people believed Biko had been murdered by the police, but the government denied any involvement in his death. Meanwhile, the international community condemned South Africa’s white leadership for the death, and the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on the country.
It would take until the mid-1990s—when apartheid ended and Nelson Mandela’s democratic African National Congress came to power—for Biko’s killers to be made publicly known and brought to justice. In 1995, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was created to correct the injustices of the apartheid era. In 1997, four police officers admitted to the commission that they had beaten Biko to death in 1977. The commission did not grant them political amnesty as they had requested.
In the twenty-first century, Biko continues to be remembered for his leadership of the BCM and as a central figure in Black South Africans’ struggle against apartheid. He is credited with transforming the existing campaign for Black equality in the 1960s and 1970s into a national mass movement that culminated with the abolition of apartheid in South Africa in 1994.
On February 8, 2007, the Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, was opened. Its purpose was to continue the spirit of Biko's work promoting the principles of justice, respect, freedom, and dignity in the way research and medical treatments are conducted and provided.
Personal Life
Biko had a child, Nkosinathi, by his wife, Ntsiki. He also fathered several children by other women.
Bibliography
Del Testa, David W.; Lemoine, Florence; and Strickland, John. "Biko, Stephen." In Government Leaders, Military Rulers and Political Activists. Westport, CT: Oryx Press, 2001, 23. Print.
"1997: Afrikaner Police Admit to Killing Stephen Biko." History. A&E Television Networks, LLC, n.d. Web. 21 June 2016.
"1977: Steve Biko Dies in Custody." BBC. British Broadcasting Corporation, n.d. Web. 21 June 2016.
Kuljian, Christopher. "Steve Biko’s Murder Exposed Deep Racism in How Medicine Was Taught and Practised in South Africa." Times LIve, 11 Sept. 2024, www.timeslive.co.za/ideas/2024-09-11-steve-bikos-murder-exposed-deep-racism-in-how-medicine-was-taught-and-practised-in-south-africa/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024
"Stephen Bantu Biko." South African History Online. South African History Online, n.d. Web. 21 June 2016.
"Steve Biko Center for Bioethics." University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, www.wits.ac.za/bioethics/about-us/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.