Word: biko
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...fewer than 18 black and interracial organizations were banned, among them the Black People's Convention, whose leader, Steven Biko, died while in police custody in September, igniting a fresh upsurge of protest (TIME, Sept. 26); and the Christian Institute, led by the Rev. C.F. Beyers Naude, an articulate, antiracist Afrikaner. Also banned were seven white activists and journalists associated with the black cause. One of South Africa's most outspoken white journalists -Editor Donald Woods of the East London Daily Dispatch-was told of his banning as he prepared to leave the country on a speaking tour...
World attention is now focused on the frightening array of questions surrounding the circumstances of Biko's death. The most recent reports in one of South Africa's largest daily newspapers, The Rand Daily Mail, based on interviews with six doctors who examined Biko a week before his death, suggest he showed no medical signs of being on a hunger strike-a strike that the Vorster government has claimed was the cause of Biko's death. The Mail also indicated that Biko had already suffered extensive brain damage, possibly as the result of severe beatings on the head...
...Vorster regime's only response to the Biko controversy has been a sickening mixture of callous indifference, duplicitous disclosures to the press, and continued delay in releasing Biko's autopsy report. Now in response to these latest disturbing reports, the government has issued a formal complaint against The Mail, and thus tacitly threatened a future crack-down on all newspapers critical of its increasingly unconscionable policies...
...Biko's death and the Vorster regime's response have only highlighted issues that have become sadly routine in South Africa. Biko was the 43rd black South African since 1963 and the 21st in the past 18 months to die while being held in prison under the Detention Act, which allows the government to imprison dissidents without specifying charges. The South African Institute of Race Relations, an organization that opposes apartheid, recently issued a report challenging the official police versions of nine of these last 21 deaths. The report also lists 662 political prisoners currently being detained in South African...
Largely in response to the uproar created by Biko's death, the Vorster regime has scheduled a general election for November 30, hoping to give its government the appearance of democratic legitimacy to the oustide world. However, the overwhelming victory that Vorster's Afrikaner Nationalist Party expects to score in the election can only reflect the intensifying reactionary mood within the small minority white population that controls power in South Africa, while the disenfranchised black majority will be unable to express its opposition to the Pretoria regime. Those who have beentouched and alarmed by the Biko case should be under...