Word: biko
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...cried an editorial in the Rand Daily Mail last week, "not again!" The South African newspaper had good reason for its dismay. In the same Port Elizabeth police building where Political Activist Stephen Biko was held for four days last September before his highly suspicious death from a supposedly self-inflicted bump on the head (TIME, Sept. 26 et seq.), another black prisoner died under curious circumstances. According to police, the prisoner leaped without warning to his death through an open fifth-floor window during a security police interrogation. When announcing the incident, Minister of Justice James T. Kruger declared...
...result of the Biko case, prisoners were supposed to be closely supervised to prevent suicide attempts. Kruger had ordered that interrogations must take place either in a room with barred windows or in a first-floor room, "for their sakes as well as for the credibility of the police." But the security police had only recently taken over the fifth floor of their Port Elizabeth building from a private tenant and, against orders, Tabalaza was questioned there...
...Steve Biko, Woods concludes, was killed by all who permit the system of apartheid to continue, by all who continue to profit from that system, Biko closes with a call to arms...
Help to finish the work of Steve Biko. Help to smash the remaining links of the chains he broke, and let the sound of this work echo around the world so that chains may be broken wherever they hold in bondage the bodies and minds...
International sanctions, such as corporate withdrawal from South Africa, may hurt South African blacks temporarily. But as Biko once said in response to that objection. South African blacks are used to suffering, and temporary damage would be worth it if the result was the end of apartheid. At 30, Stephen Biko became another martyr for the liberation struggle. It is hard to believe that, so long as apartheid continues to impose injustice daily on the people of South Africa, there will not be many more, dying in jail cells and on the streets, so that their children can walk tall...