Word: biko
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Donald Woods, a white South African journalist, was responsible for much of the public outcry after Biko's death. South African officials tried to pass the death off as the result of a hunger strike; later, they attributed it to self-inflicted injuries. But Woods and other South Africans forced the government to conduct an inquest into the death--an inquest that was closely watched from abroad as well as from within South Africa. As the judge did not find anyone in South Africa guilty of mistreating Biko, or of covering up mistreatment, the rest of the world reached...
...even now, little is known of Biko's place in South African history, of the role he played in the struggle for the liberation of the African majority. Woods's Biko, written immediately after Biko's death while Woods himself was prohibited from writing, is the first widely-circulated attempt to answer these questions. More than a biography, Biko is a description of Steve Biko, of the ideas on which the Black Consciousness movement is based, and of the reasons those ideas are so important. In the end, we need wonder no longer how Biko could have inspired...
...Black Consciousness movement began in the late 1960s, based on the idea that South African blacks had to break out of the psychological chains created by a racist system before they could win the struggle for full liberation. Biko and other black students at the universities of South Africa argued that until blacks learned attitudes of self-reliance and dignity--attitudes that have been suppressed by centuries of legal white supremacy--they could not win the fight against economic exploitation. It was not enough, they said, to work with liberal white students for majority rule. Black South Africans...
...worth quoting at some length Biko's own early coments on the movement, written in the late 1960s...
...Biko's ideas may not have been entirely new; the idea that a racist society has psychological as well as sociological effects appears in Frantz Fanon, in West Africa's Negritude movement, and in the Black Power movement of the United States, among other places. But in South Africa--where courageous and outspoken black leaders have been regularly killed and jailed by the white rulers--the Black Consciousness movement meant a great deal. The Black Consciousness movement, as expressed by the all-black South African Students Organization and by the Black People's Convention, meant that South African blacks...