Inquest into a Curious Death

For vivid moments, it took on the aura of a political trial

Lawyer: What right did you have to keep a man in chains for 48 hours? ... I am asking for the statute.

Witness: We don't work under statutes.

Lawyer: Thank you very much, Colonel. That is what we always suspected.

The lawyer was Sydney Woolf Kentridge, one of South 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.

To its 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, whose services were secured by Biko's family.

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.

Under Kentridge's crossexamination, police witnesses revealed that Biko had been kept naked and chained in his cell for most of the 26 days he spent in detention--as well as during two full nights of interrogation. During the last 24 hours of his life, he had been driven, still unclothed but covered by a blanket, in the back of a police Land-Rover all the way to Pretoria, where he died of the head injuries 14 hours later.

There were gaping contradictions in the police testimony. Major Harold Snyman, head of the five-man interrogating team, testified that Biko, when shown several statements of "confession" written by friends, had "jumped up like a man possessed, grabbed a chair and threw it at me." Snyman then gave a vivid demonstration of how Biko had hit his head during the outburst--only to admit later that he had not seen the final incident himself. In subsequent testimony, two witnesses offered sharply varying accounts of the same interview. Furthermore, it was disclosed that the "confessions" Snyman referred to were actually dated between Sept. 20 and Sept. 30--a week or more after Biko's death.

At its most gripping, the inquest took on the aura of a political trial. An excerpt from another duel between Kentridge and Goosen:

Kentridge: Would you keep a dog chained up in this way for 48 hours?

Goosen: If a dog is absolutely dangerous, I would probably do it.

Kentridge: He was so dangerous he had to lie on his mat in chains for 48 hours?

Goosen: I had to protect him.

Kentridge: You certainly succeeded, Colonel Goosen; he never got out of your hands.

Among the questions still to be answered: Why did the police at Port Elizabeth fail to tell the examining doctors that Biko had suffered a head bump? Why did the doctors fail to diagnose the brain injury, even though they all noticed that Biko was incoherent? Why was a dying man subjected to a 14 1/2-hour road trip to Pretoria? And what ever happened to the story that he had been on a hunger strike?

When the inquest continues this week, Kentridge is expected to attempt to show that Biko received his fatal head injury a full day before the alleged struggle with the police. Presumably he will also bear down on the fact that out of 28 affidavits sworn to by policemen and doctors, not one mentioned that Biko had knocked his head against a wall. Kentridge's implicit point: that the story was invented later by one or more of the participants to head off a possible murder charge.

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