African Revolutionary
South Africans and people all over the world remember and commemorate the death of Stephen Bantu Biko. On the 12th of September 1977 Steve Biko, a medical doctor and an anti-Apartheid activist, was captured during the apartheid regime brutally dehumanized and murdered.
Stephen Bantu Biko was one of the founders of black consciousness groups in South Africa. He took part in the uprisings of 1976. The Apartheid government banned Biko in 1973. In 1977 he was detained in his home town of the Eastern Cape, where he was kept naked and brutally interrogated. After suffering severe injuries to the head as a result of the “interrogation”, Stephen Bantu Biko died on the 12th of September 1977 in a cell of the Pretoria Central Prison.
At the age of thirty, the death of Steve Biko was not in vain, it drew attention to the atrocities of the Apartheid government and lead to the arms embargo imposed on South Africa by the United Nations Security Council. Steve Biko’s death made him a martyr and an inspiration to others fighting for the same cause.
Steve Biko had a vision to see black South Africans living as equals in a rainbow nation; unfortunately he did not live to see his dream realized. It seems the destiny of great visionaries not to see their dreams realized. His was not only a black South African dream but a dream for black people the world over and he joins other visionaries such as Martin Luther King Jr. in not yielding to oppression and inequality even unto the death. For his bravery we salute, remember and thank Stephen Bantu Biko.
For information consult the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, published by Macmillan, March 1999.
By: Tendayi Chirawu
