Word: biko
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Africa's most able trial attorneys; the witness was Colonel Pieter Johannes Goosen, the officer in charge of security police at Port Elizabeth. Their angry exchange in Pretoria last week provided the dramatic high point of an extraordinary public inquest into the death of Black Consciousness Leader Stephen Biko...
...Biko, 30, leader of a new generation of black political activists, had been arrested on Aug. 18 near Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape district and, under the country's tough Terrorism Act, detained in Port Elizabeth without trial. On Sept. 11, he was transferred to Pretoria's Central Prison, 750 miles to the north; the next night he was found dead in his cell...
Black political prisoners often die in South African prisons; at least 21 have done so during the past 18 months. Official inquests usually attribute their deaths to suicide or implausible accidents such as slipping in a prison shower. Biko's death looked particularly suspicious: the government at first blamed it on the effects of a six-day hunger strike, but the 200-lb., 6 ft. 2 in. Biko had seemed too healthy to have succumbed to malnutrition so quickly. After an autopsy showed that Biko had suffered serious head injuries, the scheduled proceedings into his case attracted wide attention...
...like a firehouse than a bureau, with some 50 incoming calls daily. The whole country wants to talk. It is as if everyone has been put on a think-tank-a-day alert on South Africa's future." McWhirter interviewed Minister of Justice James Kruger on the Stephen Biko affair, and has met with Afrikaner students, Boer families, colored leaders and young black militants. "One disheartening thing that has happened in the past few months," he says, "is the growing suspicion in Soweto, the black ghetto outside Johannesburg, toward all whites. When I first arrived, a black friend...
...country into a police state, can control unrest. In June 1976, student-inspired riots broke out in the sprawling black suburb of Soweto, outside Johannesburg; urban black unrest has continued sporadically across the country ever since, taking more than 600 lives. Two months ago, a young black leader, Stephen Biko, 30, died mysteriously in prison. An inquest is still pending, but there is widespread suspicion that prison beating contributed to his death. The Biko case produced further disorder, and on Oct. 19 the government responded by arresting or "banning"?a unique form of near-solitary confinement which can include...