Word: biko
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Amid mounting evidence that Steven Biko, founder of South Africa's black consciousness movement, died as a result of injuries he received while in detention (TIME, Sept. 26), blacks and whites alike demanded the resignation of Justice Minister James Kruger for his callous handling of the case. At the same time, black unrest was fusing into a sustained campaign of resistance. In Johannesburg's Soweto ghetto, only 1,000 of 27,000 post-primary students and half their teachers showed up to register for the new school year; the dissidents are protesting the inferior system of "Bantu education...
South Africa's blacks lost a leader, but gained a martyr. Protests over Biko's death were widespread, this time among whites as well as blacks. At a rally inside the Johannesburg city hall, 2,000 members of the opposition Progressive Federal Party called for Kruger's ouster and repeal of the internal security laws. Kowie Marais, a prominent former judge and onetime member of the National Party, declared that Biko's death had made him a "complete and unequivocal enemy of the security legislation in South Africa." Even the pro-government weekly Rapport editorialized that...
...eulogies continued throughout the country, police shot and killed a 15-year-old black youth and wounded a teen-age girl at memorial services in Soweto. On Sunday Biko was given a hero's burial at his home village of King William's Town; black and white dignitaries were present to pay final tribute...
...called for a total boycott of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia. The wages foreign investors pay South African blacks are so low, and the aid they give the apartheid regimes so great, that southern Africans fighting for freedom prefer to forego the small benefits of the firms' presence. Steve Biko, the South African leader who died recently in prison, called for the with-drawal of U.S. firms; the ANC, South African student organizations and independent African trade unions, as well as the Namibian and Zimbabwean liberation movements, also call for a boycott...
...Biko's death, however, "is the big one, the one they can't get away with," said Donald Woods, editor of the East London Daily Dispatch and a close friend. At week's end the mood of defiance was spreading. More than 1,200 black students challenged a ban on unauthorized assemblies to attend a memorial service for Biko at the black University of Fort Hare. They were arrested en masse without incident. Other protest meetings were scheduled for this week. In the black township of Soweto, where 24,000 high school pupils have been protesting discriminatory...