48 years after Steve Biko died in police custody, South Africa to reopen probe into anti-Apartheid icon’s dying

Johannesburg — South African activist and anti-apartheid chief Steve Biko died nearly 5 many years in the past on the age of 30 in police custody. Members of the family and others who noticed his physique that day mentioned he was tortured and killed by South African police, and that he had not died from the consequences of a starvation strike, as officers claimed on the time.

Prosecutors introduced on Friday that they’d be reopening a proper inquest into Biko’s dying, precisely 48 years to the day after he died.

Biko, a liberation chief who based and led South Africa’s Black Consciousness Motion, grew to become one of the crucial globally acknowledged victims of the apartheid period following his 1977 dying in a jail cell. 

The nation’s Nationwide Prosecuting Authority, in a landmark determination, confirmed it could reopen an inquest to permit judges to rule on whether or not an offense had been dedicated. 

No person has ever been held to account for Biko’s dying, and a number of other cops requested, however didn’t obtain, amnesty for his or her alleged involvement in the course of the hearings of South Africa’s post-apartheid Fact and Reconciliation Fee (TRC).

Biko was arrested at a roadblock in what was then known as Grahamstown, now Makhanda, in August 1977. He was accused of violating a so-called “banning order,” a measure within the apartheid-era’s racial segregation legal guidelines that allowed authorities to limit the motion of people deemed a menace. 

Twenty days after his arrest he was pushed over 600 miles, bare, along with his legs in shackles at the back of a police car, to Pretoria. He died in jail the day after arriving. 

In line with stories from members of the family and others who noticed his physique quickly after he died, Biko was brutally tortured by apartheid regime police throughout his incarceration and ultimately died of a mind hemorrhage.

The one authorities inquest into Biko’s dying was carried out in 1977, many years earlier than the top of apartheid rule, and a decide got here to the conclusion that nobody was accountable.

However his dying was met by a global outcry, and requires sanctions towards the apartheid authorities and its leaders helped gas the worldwide motion towards the racist regime.

Biko’s life was immortalized in music by Peter Gabriel’s “Biko,” simply three years after his dying, after which once more by reggae dancehall artist Beenie Man’s “Steve Biko” in 1997. Denzel Washington performed the anti-apartheid icon within the 1987 Hollywood film “Cry Freedom.”

5 former cops from the South African regime’s feared Particular Department testified on the TRC that Biko had attacked certainly one of their colleagues with a chair, and that in an ensuing scuffle to restrain him, he hit his head towards the wall, inflicting his dying.

They admitted underneath cross-examination, nonetheless, that they’d colluded and submitted false affidavits in the course of the preliminary 1977 investigation.

“My dad was a really wholesome man, and we all know he died of a extreme mind hemorrhage,” Biko’s son Nkosinathi Biko mentioned in an interview this week with the broadcaster Newzroom Africa. “Through the TRC course of it was clear underneath intense cross-examination that one of many males admitted that they grabbed his head and rammed it into the wall which prompted his dying. They have been denied amnesty on the TRC due to course they lied.”

The TRC, which carried out its work between 1996 and 2001, really helpful greater than 300 instances for prosecution by the Nationwide Prosecuting Authority. To this point, nobody has been prosecuted for these alleged apartheid-era offenses, nonetheless, leaving many households, together with Biko’s, pissed off.

“It’s extremely clear that the historical past books of this nation have to be corrected,” Nkosinathi Biko mentioned within the interview. “The physique of my father is a dwelling testomony to his final minutes and the torture and violence that was visited upon him. We should always by now have handled these issues 30 years into our democracy, and it ought to have been dealt with higher.”

In April, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa ordered an inquiry into whether or not earlier governments had deliberately blocked investigations and prosecutions of apartheid-era crimes.

The Nationwide Prosecuting Authority has been underneath stress to convey formal fees for apartheid-era crimes allegedly dedicated by people who didn’t obtain amnesty by means of the TRC course of, in addition to to convey accountability and solutions to unresolved instances of gross human rights violations in the course of the apartheid regime.

Nkosinathi Biko mentioned his father’s legacy was about giving and investing in a shared society, and he mentioned setting the file straight was a significant step ahead for the nation.  

“I feel that our sense of triumph, our sense of therapeutic, rests within the prosecution, which is important within the inquests,” he mentioned. “But it surely additionally rests in making certain that we right the historical past of this nation and we intensify the worth of human life and human dignity.”