Word: biko
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...most awesome aspects of Biko's career is the extent to which he managed to spread the Black Consciousness movement, despite government efforts to silence him. They placed a banning order on him, which restricted his movements, his writing, and his public speaking. As Biko once told Woods, if the government could not catch him acting illegally, it would encircle him so that it was almost impossible for him to avoid breaking the law. But Woods reports that Biko still moved fairly freely around the country, and often held illegal meetings at his home in King Williams Town...
...SOUTH AFRICAN police arrested Biko last August for venturing outside the area to which he was legally restricted. According to Woods, Biko had often left the area, but this time the police had set up a blockade to catch him. They had given no reason for the original banning order, but now they could say they were detaining him for trespassing. In early September, after 22 hours of interrogation--90 pages of notes from the inquest describing that process are included in Biko--he had suffered severe brain damage, from which he died six days later. Woods reports that Biko...
...read, this tale of depersonalized murder. It is made somewhat more hopeful only by the inclusion of another, related story--that of Donald Woods's own transformation. Woods describes in detail his own responses to the South African situation. Born in the Transkei--not far, incidentally, from where Stephen Biko would grow up several years later--Woods did not begin to question his superiority to the blacks around him until he went to college, where he was introduced to the concepts of Western liberalism and humanism. He was persuaded to question the apartheid system with which he had been brought...
When he met Biko, however, Woods was forced to reevaluate his position once again; Biko seems to have shown him what apartheid really meant to South African blacks. Even so, the shock that Woods conveys in Biko suggests that it was not until his friend died in detention that Woods was fully aware of the brutality of the South African regime. When Woods himself was placed under virtual house arrest and prohibited from writing--prohibited, that is, from earning a living in the only way he knew--the last vestige of legitimacy was stripped from the government...
South Africa has always touted its legality and its press freedom, as if a system of injustice that is conducted with due process, and that allows a press to scream at abuses within the system, is less evil. But Biko and Woods's experiences together served as final proof for Woods that South Africa's white minority would not give up its privileges without a bitter fight. If he once believed liberal white South Africans could act as a voice of reason within the country, he does so no longer. The story of Woods's escape is too well known...