South African activist Steve Biko dies in police custody - September 12th, 1977

On this day in 1977, anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko died on the floor of a prison hospital in Pretoria, South Africa.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that pays tribute to people of the past
by telling their stories. Today, I'm Gave Luzier, and in

(00:23):
this episode we're talking about the life, work, and tragic
murder of Steve Bico, a man who made it his
mission to give the world a more human face. The
day was September twelfth, seventy seven. Anti apartheid activists Steve

(00:50):
Bico died on the floor of a prison hospital in Pretoria,
South Africa. He had been arrested for subversion in late
August and had endured several weeks of abusive interrogation at
the hands of security police and Port Elizabeth. By September eleven,
the brutal treatment had left Bico in a semi comatose state,

(01:13):
at which point he was transferred more than seven hundred
miles away to the hospital ward of Pretoria Central Prison.
A few hours later, on September twelfth, he succumbed to
his injuries and died of a massive brain hemorrhage at
the age of thirty. The political killing of Steve Bico
sparked an international outcry and made him a powerful symbol

(01:36):
of black resistance to the apartheid regime. His supporters kept
that momentum going and eventually used it to help overturn
the oppressive white minority government that had rolled over South
Africa since the late nineteen forties. Stephen Bantubico was born
on December eighteenth, nineteen forty six, in King Williamstown, South Africa.

(02:00):
His father worked as a police officer and later as
a clerk in the town's Native Affairs office, and his
mother worked as a cook at a local hospital. When
Bico was just two years old, the National Party came
to power in his country and quickly enacted a series
of racist policies that sought to segregate and control black
South African citizens. This hateful system was called Apartheide, an

(02:25):
Afrikaans word meaning separateness or the state of being a part.
The new laws not only dictated where black citizens were
allowed to live and work, but also who they could
marry and how they could vote, if at all. Steve
Bico grew up under Apartheide and experienced its injustice firsthand.

(02:46):
When he was just fifteen years old, he had been
enrolled at Lovedale College in the Eastern Cape, but when
he started speaking up for the rights of black South Africans,
he was expelled for anti establishment behavior. He had an
easier time at his next school, Saint Francis College in Natal,
and after graduating, he began studying medicine at the University

(03:08):
of Natal Medical School in the university's Black section. That is,
as he worked toward a career in medicine, Beko also
returned to the activism of his youth by becoming a
member of the National Union of South African Students. This
multi racial group shared his passion for the fight against apartheide,
but over time he realized its white liberal members weren't

(03:32):
willing to go far enough. They wanted rights to be
restored to black South Africans, but that's as much change
as they could agree on. The National Union saw the
end of apartheid as a way to restore the old
status quo, where black citizens were welcome to participate in
white South African society, but Steve Beko and many of

(03:53):
his fellow black peers believed that wouldn't be enough to
right the wrong of apartheid. They didn't want to return
to society they wanted to reform it, but this time
with the culture of the black majority at its center.
With that aim in mind, Beco resigned from the Union
in nineteen sixty nine and founded his own all black group,

(04:15):
the South African Students Organization or the Essay s O.
The group work to support and empower black communities by
providing them with legal aid, medical treatment, and job opportunities.
Around that time, BECO began promoting Black consciousness, the idea
that black identity should be self defined and not subject

(04:37):
to the definitions of others. As Ko explained quote, black
consciousness seeks to infuse the black community with a new
found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture,
their religion, and their outlook to life. What black consciousness
seeks to do is to produce real Black people who

(04:58):
do not regard themselves as a pen diges to white society.
In the early nineteen seventies, Vico helped spread the philosophy
of Black consciousness by speaking on college campuses and in
black communities throughout the country. The movement grew so large
that in nineteen seventy two, Vico helped establish an umbrella
organization called the Black People's Convention to help coordinate all

(05:22):
the various Black consciousness groups that had sprung up in
response to his message. Unfortunately, Beco's writing and speeches also
drew the attention of the apartheid government. In nineteen seventy three,
it retaliated by banning Steve Ko and many of his colleagues.
This apartheid practice, banning was essentially a kind of exile.

(05:45):
It forced the activists to return to his registered hometown
and to stay there until he was no longer deemed
a threat to the government. He was only allowed to
travel short distances and was forbidden to give public speeches
or to circulate his writing. But even with these restrictions
in place, Beco still found ways to be of service
to the movement he helped start. He started organizing small

(06:09):
community groups to spread black consciousness at a local level.
He also continued working for the Black People's Convention, although
the distance compelled him to be less hands on than
he would have liked. Beco was closely monitored and frequently
harassed during the course of his band. In fact, he
was arrested and interrogated four different times between nineteen seventy

(06:31):
five and nineteen seventy seven on suspicion of terrorism. By
that time, the Black Consciousness movement was struggling under the
weight of apartheid bands and police crackdowns. To help keep
the movement alive, Beco made the dangerous choice to defy
his band by leaving King Williamstown to meet with other
activists in Cape Town. He made it there safely thanks

(06:55):
to a convincing disguise and a bit of good luck,
but on the way back home he was stopped at
a police roadblock and the officers knew exactly who he was.
The Eastern Cape Security Police arrested Bico on the spot.
After briefly being held in a jail cell in Port Elizabeth,
he was taken to the Security Police headquarters. There he

(07:17):
was stripped naked and placed in shackles. Then, for nearly
a month straight, he was interrogated and beaten over and
over again. These assaults grew steadily more brutal until September seven, when,
during the course of a twenty two hour long interrogation,
Ico was beaten over the head to the point of

(07:38):
brain damage. According to a government report published two decades later,
quote Beco sustained a head injury during interrogation, after which
he acted strangely and was uncooperative. The doctors who examined
him naked, lying on a mat and manacled to a
metal grill, initially disregarded over its signs of neural logical injury,

(08:02):
Beco's abusers continued to ignore his pain for as long
as they could. It wasn't until September eleven, when he
slipped into a semi conscious state, that one of the
doctors finally recommended taking him to a hospital, But even
then he wasn't driven to the local civilian hospital. Instead,
they threw him in the back of an suv and

(08:23):
drove him to the closest prison with a hospital ward.
It turned out to be in the city of Pretoria,
roughly seven hundred and forty miles away. The drive there
took twelve hours. Steve Beco never got the treatment he needed. Instead,
he died shortly after arriving. He was found alone on

(08:44):
the floor of his cell, still naked, still shackled. When
the news of his death first broke, the police denied
any wrongdoing. Beco hadn't been mistreated, they said, In fact,
his death was his own fault. The sad rest halt
of a hunger strike protests that went on a little
too long. In autopsy later proved they were lying. Their

(09:07):
prisoner had died from a brain hemorrhage caused by severe
blows to the head sustained while in their custody. It
was no matter, though. The government stood by its men,
and every officer and doctor involved was eventually exonerated, but
the court of public opinion was far less lenient. Protests
broke out all over the world, and the U N

(09:29):
even imposed an arms embargo on South Africa. Beco's death
became a global concern, and somewhere between fifteen and thirty
thousand people, including several world leaders, attended his funeral, but
the roots of apartheid ran deep, and even with the
whole world watching, the pressure still wasn't enough to topple

(09:50):
the racist regime, or even to get it to admit wrongdoing.
The closest it came was in nineteen seventy nine, when
the South African government gave the Beco Emily seventy eight
thousand dollars as compensation for his death. Beco's widow referred
to the payment as quote blood money and viewed it
as an admission of the government's guilt. Officials disagreed, but

(10:13):
they considered the matter settled all the same, But they
were wrong about that. Other activists carried on what Steve
Beco started, and in the early nine nineties they finally
put an end to the apartheid era. Power was peacefully
transferred to South Africa's black majority and in a body
called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed. Its task

(10:38):
was to investigate the decades of atrocities committed under apartheid
and to hold accountable those who had abused their power.
In five former police officers appeared before the Commission and
confessed to having killed Steve Beco twenty years earlier. They
applied for amnesty, but were denied it as their crime

(11:00):
isn't politically motivated. They hadn't beaten Steve Ico to death
for his beliefs. They did it because they could. But
although they weren't granted amnesty, the officers were never prosecuted
for their crime either, due to a supposed lack of evidence.
That injustice is one of the many wounds dealt by
the apartheid era that still stings today. But the legacy

(11:23):
of Steve Bico has lived on as well, not just
in the free people of South Africa, but in those
across the globe who continue to fight for dignity and
self determination. They believe, as Steve Bico once wrote, that
it is better to die for an idea that will
live than to live for an idea that will die.

(11:46):
I'm Gabe Lucier and hopefully you now know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. If you
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and if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free
to send them my way at this day at I

(12:07):
heart media dot com. Thanks as always the Chandler Maids
for producing the show, and thanks to you for listening.
I'll see you back here again tomorrow for another day
in History class