Word: biko
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Amid mounting evidence that Steven Biko, founder of South Africa's black consciousness movement, died as a result of injuries he received while in detention (TIME, Sept. 26), blacks and whites alike demanded the resignation of Justice Minister James Kruger for his callous handling of the case. At the same time, black unrest was fusing into a sustained campaign of resistance. In Johannesburg's Soweto ghetto, only 1,000 of 27,000 post-primary students and half their teachers showed up to register for the new school year; the dissidents are protesting the inferior system of "Bantu education...
...called for a total boycott of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia. The wages foreign investors pay South African blacks are so low, and the aid they give the apartheid regimes so great, that southern Africans fighting for freedom prefer to forego the small benefits of the firms' presence. Steve Biko, the South African leader who died recently in prison, called for the with-drawal of U.S. firms; the ANC, South African student organizations and independent African trade unions, as well as the Namibian and Zimbabwean liberation movements, also call for a boycott...
Minister of Justice James Kruger issued a lengthy explanation along with his announcement that Biko had died of the effects of his hunger strike. "I'm not pleased, nor am I sorry; Biko's death leaves me cold," Kruger told delegates to the Transvaal Congress of the ruling National Party in Pretoria (later he softened this statement, expressing "human sympathy" to journalists). Kruger said that Biko was given intravenous nutrients just before he died, but Kruger noted, "If a man goes on a hunger strike, you cannot force him to eat." One delegate caustically congratulated Kruger on "being...
White liberals and many blacks noted that it usually takes several weeks for a person to die from fasting, not a mere seven days. Insisted Biko's widow Ntsiki: "We just do not believe that a man like Steve would die of a hunger strike." In an attempt to answer the doubters, Kruger invited independent pathologists to join in an official autopsy, its results may not be released for several weeks...
...Biko's death, however, "is the big one, the one they can't get away with," said Donald Woods, editor of the East London Daily Dispatch and a close friend. At week's end the mood of defiance was spreading. More than 1,200 black students challenged a ban on unauthorized assemblies to attend a memorial service for Biko at the black University of Fort Hare. They were arrested en masse without incident. Other protest meetings were scheduled for this week. In the black township of Soweto, where 24,000 high school pupils have been protesting discriminatory...