Word: biko
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WHEN DONALD WOODS, the government-banned former editor of one of South Africa's leading opposition papers and one of the country's most outspoken white liberals, fled the apartheid regime over Christmas, he did not know where he was going. Although he apparently finished his book on Steve Biko recently, he was not sure how he could continue to press for change from outside South Africa...
Thomson said he called Woods last week in London, where Woods is finishing his book on Steven Biko, the dead leader of South Africa's black consciousness movement...
...month, Woods told TIME Johannesburg Bureau Chief William McWhirter in Lesotho, the reasons for going into exile had seemed more and more compelling. The government had won a strong new mandate from the country's white electorate. The inquest into the death of imprisoned Black Consciousness Leader Stephen Biko, who had been a close friend of the Woods family and whose death Woods had criticized and questioned, ended inconclusively-although it did show, as Woods had charged, that the circumstances of Biko's death were extremely suspicious. The Woods family had also been angered and alarmed...
...some of whom were political activists like himself. One told him: "Go. You're the best one among us to talk to the [overseas] press." Woods had an additional reason for seeking exile; he was hard at work, in violation of the banning order, on a book about Biko, and was anxious to get it finished...
...lawyer did not call it murder, but he held the state at least partly responsible for Biko's death. In a five-minute verdict at week's end, the presiding magistrate, Martinus Prins, ruled out the possibility of charges against the police. Biko's death could not be attributed, he declared, to "any criminal act or omission by any person." Case dismissed...