Word: biko
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...Africa's most able trial attorneys; the witness was Colonel Pieter Johannes Goosen, the officer in charge of security police at Port Elizabeth. Their angry exchange in Pretoria last week provided the dramatic high point of an extraordinary public inquest into the death of Black Consciousness Leader Stephen Biko...
...Biko, 30, leader of a new generation of black political activists, had been arrested on Aug. 18 near Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape district and, under the country's tough Terrorism Act, detained in Port Elizabeth without trial. On Sept. 11, he was transferred to Pretoria's Central Prison, 750 miles to the north; the next night he was found dead in his cell...
Black political prisoners often die in South African prisons; at least 21 have done so during the past 18 months. Official inquests usually attribute their deaths to suicide or implausible accidents such as slipping in a prison shower. Biko's death looked particularly suspicious: the government at first blamed it on the effects of a six-day hunger strike, but the 200-lb., 6 ft. 2 in. Biko had seemed too healthy to have succumbed to malnutrition so quickly. After an autopsy showed that Biko had suffered serious head injuries, the scheduled proceedings into his case attracted wide attention...
...credit, South Africa's judicial system chose to accommodate that public concern. The case was assigned to a galleried courtroom in a former synagogue converted to judicial use several years ago. There each morning Biko's widow Ntsiki and other relatives, still dressed in deep mourning, assembled silently in the front row. Some 250 other spectators packed the remaining seats. Presiding over the inquest was Chief Pretoria Magistrate Martinus Prins. But the man who dazzled the courtroom was Kentridge, 55, a defense veteran of some of South Africa's landmark political trials over the past two decades...
From the beginning it was clear that there was a lot in the case to be curious about. The security police maintained that Biko was a dangerous revolutionary who had attacked his interrogators and had been "subdued." In the scuffle, they alleged, he had hit his head against a wall and thereafter became incoherent and comatose...