Word: biko
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UNTIL HIS DEATH last September, few people outside South Africa had heard of Steve Biko. Their ignorance was understandable; the white minority government of his country had done its best to silence him, by restricting his movement and the circulation of his ideas, and by threatening him with detention. Finally, it silenced him in the most permanent way possible: he died on a jail cell floor, one more victim of a system that is as ruthless as it is racist...
Donald Woods, a white South African journalist, was responsible for much of the public outcry after Biko's death. South African officials tried to pass the death off as the result of a hunger strike; later, they attributed it to self-inflicted injuries. But Woods and other South Africans forced the government to conduct an inquest into the death--an inquest that was closely watched from abroad as well as from within South Africa. As the judge did not find anyone in South Africa guilty of mistreating Biko, or of covering up mistreatment, the rest of the world reached...
...even now, little is known of Biko's place in South African history, of the role he played in the struggle for the liberation of the African majority. Woods's Biko, written immediately after Biko's death while Woods himself was prohibited from writing, is the first widely-circulated attempt to answer these questions. More than a biography, Biko is a description of Steve Biko, of the ideas on which the Black Consciousness movement is based, and of the reasons those ideas are so important. In the end, we need wonder no longer how Biko could have inspired...
...enemies use our names best when we are dead. Steven Biko is now said to have been working for racial equality. That is not all we want. We want the land to be given back to the indigenous people," Baqwa added...
Thomson and Bok had originally offered the post to Woods for immediate residency shortly after his escape from South Africa on December 31 of last year. Thomson said, however, that Woods needed to stay in London to finish his book on Steven Biko, the leader of South Africa's black consciousness movement who died shortly after he was imprisoned last fall...