Word: biko
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...memories are not eroded by the years--they just burn brighter in the mind of Peter Cecil Jones, who saw Steve Biko led to his death. He remembers the summer night in August 1977 and the roadblock on the highway in the eastern Cape, 80 miles from Port Elizabeth. He hears his friend's calm reply to the police officer's question, "Who are you, big man?": "I am Steven Bantu Biko." He recalls the long, fearful hours in a holding cell, where he and Biko destroyed a secret document by eating it. He remembers the handcuffs and leg-irons...
...Jones never saw his friend again. Biko, the 31-year-old leader of the Black People's Convention--the political arm of his black-consciousness movement--was regarded by many as the Malcolm X of South Africa's liberation struggle. He died in a police cell of brain injuries, naked, 24 days after his arrest. A magistrate delivered the three-minute verdict that no one could be found criminally responsible. Jimmy Kruger, then Minister of Justice, declared that Biko's death "leaves me cold." Many others, however, were left in a blazing fury of rage. The murder...
However, lyrically, the album is a step down from the previous two. The first two tracks, "Steve Biko (Stir It Up)" (which has nothing to do with South Africa) and "Award Tour," seem to promise more of the same lyrical skill and complexity Q-Tip and Phife have shown in the past...
...White directors wouldn't have thought of putting the Rodney King footage in the movie, or of the American flag burning to the X, or even of using Nelson Mandela. Richard Attenborough did a movie called Cry Freedom that was supposed to be about Stephen Biko. But that movie is more about Donald Woods and his family trying to get out of South Africa. So if Attenborough had done this film, the main character would have been a sympathetic white reporter and nothing about Malcolm...
Peter Gabriel became one of rock's great storytellers. Almost all of Gabriel's songs were about someone, or something. "San Jacinto" was his song about Native Americans. "Biko" was his song about a murdered South African activist. "Intruder" was his song about burglars. An issue became a song, and each song told a tale...