Death of a Prisoner

And the birth of a black martyr

Two black men were arrested on Aug. 18 at a police roadblock near Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape district of South Africa. Under the country's tough Terrorism Act, one of them was detained for questioning--incommunicado--in Port Elizabeth. On Sept. 5, according to police statements, the prisoner went on a hunger strike, and six days later he was transferred to Pretoria Central Prison. One night last week a warder looked through a peephole in the prisoner's cell and saw him "lying very still." A doctor was called to certify the death.

So died a prisoner. And thus was born a martyr. The prisoner, Steven Bantu Biko. 30, was the 20th South African black known to have died in security detention during the past 18 months. More important, he was a founding member of the all-black South African Students' Organization, honorary president of the national Black People's Convention and undisputed spiritual leader of the black consciousness movement inside South Africa. His death triggered a chorus of demands, by both blacks and whites, for an investigation, and at week's end there was growing concern that memorial services and protest meetings might turn into more militant demonstrations by angry blacks.

Minister of Justice James Kruger issued a lengthy explanation along with his announcement that Biko had died of the effects of his hunger strike. "I'm not pleased, nor am I sorry; Biko's death leaves me cold," Kruger told delegates to the Transvaal Congress of the ruling National Party in Pretoria (later he softened this statement, expressing "human sympathy" to journalists). Kruger said that Biko was given intravenous nutrients just before he died, but Kruger noted, "If a man goes on a hunger strike, you cannot force him to eat." One delegate caustically congratulated Kruger on "being so democratic that those who want to starve themselves to death are allowed to do so as their democratic right."

White liberals and many blacks noted that it usually takes several weeks for a person to die from fasting, not a mere seven days. Insisted Biko's widow Ntsiki: "We just do not believe that a man like Steve would die of a hunger strike." In an attempt to answer the doubters, Kruger invited independent pathologists to join in an official autopsy, its results may not be released for several weeks.

It was doubtful that so cursory an investigation would satisfy the skeptics. After all, other black prisoners purportedly died, according to police announcements, from such unlikely causes as slipping in a prison shower and falling against a chair. Four police interrogators who were accused of culpable homicide in the death of African Nationalist Joseph Mdluli last year were acquitted even though one judge later commented that Mdluli's neck wounds were "most probably" inflicted by police.

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 education by refusing to register for the coming term, one student said of Biko's death: "The sorrow is still with us. The anger will come later."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.