Word: biko
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Woods does not explain why Bantu Stephen Biko, a medical student who was raised in the Transkei and attended a Catholic secondary school, developed the consciousness he did. We do not learn, for instance, why Biko himself was not bound by the psychological restrictions he described, or, if he was, how he freed himself. Woods may not have known. Although he was acquainted with Biko, and counted Biko one of his most valued friends, Woods does not claim that Biko confided many personal details to the white editor of the East London Daily Dispatch...
...Biko explains clearly why Biko's ideas were accepted so easily, and why they became a major element in the recent struggles in South Africa. Long excerpts from Biko's articles and speeches, as well as anecdotes about him, show that he was both articulate and persuasive, easily able to bring his audience to understand his ideas and to sympathize with his goals. At times, Woods seems ready to canonize Biko. Yet one can hardly blame him, for Biko seems to have brought Woods and many other South Africans, both black and white, to a new awareness of the more...
...most awesome aspects of Biko's career is the extent to which he managed to spread the Black Consciousness movement, despite government efforts to silence him. They placed a banning order on him, which restricted his movements, his writing, and his public speaking. As Biko once told Woods, if the government could not catch him acting illegally, it would encircle him so that it was almost impossible for him to avoid breaking the law. But Woods reports that Biko still moved fairly freely around the country, and often held illegal meetings at his home in King Williams Town...
...SOUTH AFRICAN police arrested Biko last August for venturing outside the area to which he was legally restricted. According to Woods, Biko had often left the area, but this time the police had set up a blockade to catch him. They had given no reason for the original banning order, but now they could say they were detaining him for trespassing. In early September, after 22 hours of interrogation--90 pages of notes from the inquest describing that process are included in Biko--he had suffered severe brain damage, from which he died six days later. Woods reports that Biko...
...read, this tale of depersonalized murder. It is made somewhat more hopeful only by the inclusion of another, related story--that of Donald Woods's own transformation. Woods describes in detail his own responses to the South African situation. Born in the Transkei--not far, incidentally, from where Stephen Biko would grow up several years later--Woods did not begin to question his superiority to the blacks around him until he went to college, where he was introduced to the concepts of Western liberalism and humanism. He was persuaded to question the apartheid system with which he had been brought...