Melville Cooke BY SEPTEMBER 11, 1977, Stephen Bantu Biko, a black South African, was dead. He was not declared so until the following day, but a man who had been battered in the head during an 'interrogation' at South African security police headquarters four days earlier and was in a continuous semi-conscious state on Sep-tember 11 was dead, as far as functioning human beings go.
Of course, it did not help that when the police physician recommended that Steve Biko be transferred to hospital the pigs threw him naked in the back of a Land Rover and drove 1,200 kilometres yes, 745 miles from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria. But not to hospital. Alone and naked on the floor of a cell in the Pretoria Central Prison, Biko officially passed away on September 12.
(For those of you who have never driven in a Land Rover jeep, the early, tough ones, at the best of times it is not a comfortable ride. You bounce, you rattle, you shake much less comatose, naked and flung in the back like a sack of garbage to be disposed of).
It seems that he had been naked for some time. On September 7, 1977, "Biko sustained a head injury during interrogation, after which he acted strangely and was unco-operative. The doctors who examined him (naked, lying on a mat and manacled to a metal grille) initially disregarded overt signs of neurological injury." (From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa's Report).
Biko's murder climaxed a short lifetime of work against the Apartheid scum of South Africa. He was expelled from his first school, Lovedale, as well as his last, the University of Natal Medical School (Black Section), when he was elected head of the Black People's Convention, which he co-founded in 1972.
Two aspects of the Biko story are echoed a thousandfold today. He was detained and interrogated four times under South African anti-terrorism legislation between August 1975 and September 1977, and he was confined to his hometown of King William's Town in 1973, much as Palestinians are banished to Gaza by the Israelis.
There were rumblings of Jamaica today then South African Minister of Justice, James Kruger (Freddy would have been a better choice) said that Biko had died of a hunger strike and that the man's death left him cold."
An inquest revealed that Biko had died of brain damage, but no one was found responsible.
Now, why does that sound familiar?
It is also ironic that 25 years after he was murdered, the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in South Africa failed miserably to put a human face on globalisation. On the 20th anniversary of Biko's murder, Nelson Mandela quoted him: "In time, we shall be in a position to bestow on South Africa the greatest possible gift - a more human face."
"In speaking about 'a more human face,' Steve Biko was rejecting the brutality of men who behaved as if possessed in their defence of injustice," Mandela went on to say.
Steve Biko was killed before my sixth birthday; I was taught nothing of him in school, although Christopher Columbus (that "damn blasted liad," to quote The Burning Spear) loomed large in the textbooks. I do not know how his murder was reported in the newspapers or over the airwaves at the time and I seriously doubt if the events were recorded, so I feel justified in allowing my imagination a little leeway in reconstructing the events of September 7, 1977: The white policemen stood over Biko, triumphantly looking down at his naked body as the blood oozed from his left ear. One smiled as he stirred the moaning, battered, bloody pulp that was once a man with metal-tipped boot. "He doesn't look so uppity now, does he," he said, smiling and spitting on Biko. The phlegm mixed with the blood on Biko's face, diluting the redness around his mouth to pink for a moment before a fresh deluge restored the correct finish to the interrogator's handiwork.
Another policeman, his hands protected by gloves so that he would not touch nasty black blood, stooped, grabbed Biko by the hair and screamed in his face: "Who are the leaders of the terrorists?" Biko's eyes half-opened, but whatever he was seeing was not in the harshly lit, completely white 20 by 20 feet holding room at the security police headquarters in Port Elizabeth. "F-..g kafir thinks I am joking," the policeman said. "Okay, laugh at this!" he snarled, taking a baton from his waist. Still holding Biko by the hair with his left hand, he swung the baton in a short, vicious arc. There was a crunch as the oakwood slammed into flesh and bone; Biko's mangled mouth opened in a silent scream, his pupils filled his now wide-open eyes and every sinew in his neck was taut for an eternal second, then his face went blank and he sagged.
The policeman who had hit Biko grimaced in disgust, then pushed him backwards. There was a crack as the back of his head, propelled by his dead weight, hit the white tiles.
"Let's have a beer," he said, standing and stripping off his gloves. "What about him?" the third policeman asked, nodding towards Biko, who was lying on his back, the only sign of life being a spasming left leg. "He'll keep. Mongrels are tough," the officer replied.
There were no cameras present; there are nocontinuous replays, no sombre tributes, no speeches about this being our whitest hour, no smart bombs in the hands of fools. But on September 11, 2002, I remember Stephen Bantu Biko, born December 18, 1946, battered September 7, 2002, murdered September 11, 1977, declared dead September 12, 25 years ago.
The revolution will not be televised Gill Scott-Heron
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
