Word: biko
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...YEAR AGO tomorrow, a young man named Steve Biko died in a South African prison. Biko was a man of some stature in the black community, known for his intelligence and his deicated work against apartheid through the Black Consciousness Movement. Realizing his popularity and the damaging publicity that could result from his jailing, the South African police told the press that the cause of his death was suicide--the result of a hunger strike, complicated by a fall from a chair that fractured his skull...
...tragic circumstances of Biko's death underscore the brutally inhumane, coldly racist nature of John Vorster's apartheid regime. Biko has become a martyr, a symbol of the growing struggle against apartheid inside South Africa and around the world. We can only hope the outrage over his death hastens the day when the black majority in South Africa rules itself...
...with many foreign affairs, it is all too easy to dismiss Biko's murder as something distasteful, but far away. The South African tragedy, however, extends far beyond the borders of the bantustans such as Soweto; in fact, through American companies with operations there, it reaches all the way back to investors in this country, up to and including Harvard. The presence of these U.S. dollars propping up Vorster's government--directly or even indirectly--mocks the concepts of justice and equality...
...cried an editorial in the Rand Daily Mail last week, "not again!" The South African newspaper had good reason for its dismay. In the same Port Elizabeth police building where Political Activist Stephen Biko was held for four days last September before his highly suspicious death from a supposedly self-inflicted bump on the head (TIME, Sept. 26 et seq.), another black prisoner died under curious circumstances. According to police, the prisoner leaped without warning to his death through an open fifth-floor window during a security police interrogation. When announcing the incident, Minister of Justice James T. Kruger declared...
...result of the Biko case, prisoners were supposed to be closely supervised to prevent suicide attempts. Kruger had ordered that interrogations must take place either in a room with barred windows or in a first-floor room, "for their sakes as well as for the credibility of the police." But the security police had only recently taken over the fifth floor of their Port Elizabeth building from a private tenant and, against orders, Tabalaza was questioned there...