Word: biko
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...credit, South Africa's judicial system chose to accommodate that public concern. The case was assigned to a galleried courtroom in a former synagogue converted to judicial use several years ago. There each morning Biko's widow Ntsiki and other relatives, still dressed in deep mourning, assembled silently in the front row. Some 250 other spectators packed the remaining seats. Presiding over the inquest was Chief Pretoria Magistrate Martinus Prins. But the man who dazzled the courtroom was Kentridge, 55, a defense veteran of some of South Africa's landmark political trials over the past two decades...
From the beginning it was clear that there was a lot in the case to be curious about. The security police maintained that Biko was a dangerous revolutionary who had attacked his interrogators and had been "subdued." In the scuffle, they alleged, he had hit his head against a wall and thereafter became incoherent and comatose...
Under Kentridge's crossexamination, police witnesses revealed that Biko had been kept naked and chained in his cell for most of the 26 days he spent in detention-as well as during two full nights of interrogation. During the last 24 hours of his life, he had been driven, still unclothed but covered by a blanket, in the back of a police Land-Rover all the way to Pretoria, where he died of the head injuries 14 hours later...
There were gaping contradictions in the police testimony. Major Harold Snyman, head of the five-man interrogating team, testified that Biko, when shown several statements of "confession" written by friends, had "jumped up like a man possessed, grabbed a chair and threw it at me." Snyman then gave a vivid demonstration of how Biko had hit his head during the outburst-only to admit later that he had not seen the final incident himself. In subsequent testimony, two witnesses offered sharply varying accounts of the same interview. Furthermore, it was disclosed that the "confessions" Snyman referred to were actually dated...
Among the questions still to be answered: Why did the police at Port Elizabeth fail to tell the examining doctors that Biko had suffered a head bump? Why did the doctors fail to diagnose the brain injury, even though they all noticed that Biko was incoherent? Why was a dying man subjected to a 14½-hour road trip to Pretoria? And what ever happened to the story that he had been on a hunger strike...