Miss Vuyolwethu Tsili

Biko was born to parents Mzimgayi Mathew and Alice Duman Biki in King William's Town, in the present-day Eastern Cape province of South Africa.[7] His father was a government clerk, while his mother did domestic work in surrounding white homes.[8] The third of four children, Biko grew up with his older sister Bukelwa; his older brother Kahya; and his younger sister Nobandile.[9] In 1950, at the age of four, Biko suffered the loss of his father who was studying law.[10][11] As a child, he attended Brownlee Primary School and Charles Morgan Higher Primary School.[12]
He was sent to Lovedale High School in 1964, a prestigious boarding school in Alice, Eastern Cape, where his older brother Kahya had previously been studying.[13] During the Apartheid in South Africa, with no freedom of association protection for non-Afrikaner South African's, Biko was expelled from Lovedale for his political views, and his brother arrested for his alleged association with Poqo (now known as the Azanian People's Liberation Army).[14] After being expelled, he then attended and later graduated from St. Francis College, a Roman Catholic institution in Mariannhill, Natal.[7] He studied to be a doctor at the University of Natal Medical School. Biko was a Xhosa. In addition to Xhosa, he spoke fluent English and fairly fluent Afrikaans. He was initially involved with the multiracial National Union of South African Students, but after he became convinced that Black, Indian and Coloured students needed an organization of their own, he helped found the South African Students' Organisation (SASO), whose agenda included political self-reliance and the unification of university students in a "black consciousness."[15] In 1968 Biko was elected its first president. SASO evolved into the influential Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). Biko was also involved with the World Student Christian Federation. Biko married Ntsiki Mashalaba in 1970.[16] They had two children together: Nkosinathi, born in 1971, and Samora. He also had two children with Dr Mamphela Ramphele (a prominent activist within the BCM): a daughter, Lerato, born in 1974, who died of pneumonia when she was only two months old, and a son, Hlumelo, who was born in 1978, after Biko's death.[1] Biko also had a daughter with Lorraine Tabane, named Motlatsi, born in May 1977.[citation needed] Death and aftermath
In the early 1970s Biko became a key figure in The Durban Moment.[17] In 1972 he was expelled from the University of Natal because of his political activities[15] and he became honorary president of the Black People's Convention. He was banned by the apartheid regime in February 1973,[18] meaning that he was not allowed to speak to more than one person at a time nor to speak in public, was restricted to the King William's Town magisterial district, and could not write publicly or speak with the media.[15] It was also forbidden to quote anything he said, including speeches or simple conversations. When Biko was banned, his movement within the country was restricted to the Eastern Cape, where he was born. After returning there, he formed a number of grassroots organizations based on the notion of self-reliance: Zanempilo, the Zimele Trust Fund (which helped support former political prisoners and their families), Njwaxa Leather-Works Project and the Ginsberg Education Fund. In spite of the repression of the apartheid government, Biko and the BCM played a significant role in organising the protests which culminated in the Soweto Uprising of 16 June 1976. In the aftermath of the uprising, which was crushed by heavily armed police shooting school children protesting, the authorities began to target Biko further.

On 18 August 1977, Biko was arrested at a police roadblock under the Terrorism Act No 83 of 1967 and interrogated by officers of the Port Elizabeth security police including Harold Snyman and Gideon Nieuwoudt. This interrogation took place in the Police Room 619 of the Sanlam Building in Port Elizabeth. The interrogation lasted twenty-two hours and included torture and beatings resulting in a coma.[15] He suffered a major head injury while in police custody at the Walmer Police Station, in a suburb of Port Elizabeth, and was chained to a window grille for a day. On 11 September 1977, police loaded him in the back of a Land Rover, naked and restrained in manacles, and began the 1100 km drive to Pretoria to take him to a prison with hospital facilities. He was nearly dead owing to the previous injuries.[19] He died shortly after arrival at the Pretoria prison, on 12 September. The police claimed his death was the result of an extended hunger strike, but an autopsy revealed multiple bruises and abrasions and that he ultimately succumbed to a brain hemorrhage from the massive injuries to the head,[15] which many saw as strong evidence that he had been brutally clubbed by his captors. Then Donald Woods, a journalist, editor and close friend of Biko's, along with Helen Zille, later leader of the Democratic Alliance political party, exposed the truth behind Biko's death.[20][better source needed] Because of his high profile, news of Biko's death spread quickly, opening many eyes around the world to the brutality of the apartheid regime. His funeral was attended by over 10,000 people, including numerous ambassadors and other diplomats from the United States and Western Europe. The liberal white South African journalist Donald Woods, a personal friend of Biko, photographed his injuries in the morgue. Woods was later forced to flee South Africa for England. Donald Woods later campaigned against apartheid and further publicised Biko's life and death, writing many newspaper articles and authoring the book, Biko, which was later turned into the film Cry Freedom.[21] Speaking at a National Party conference following the news of Biko's death then-minister of police, Jimmy Kruger said, "I am not glad and I am not sorry about Mr. Biko. It leaves me cold (Dit laat my koud). I can say nothing to you ... Any person who dies ... I shall also be sorry if I die." After a 15-day inquest in 1978, a magistrate judge found there was not enough evidence to charge the officers with murder because there were no eyewitnesses.[22][23] On 2 February 1978, based on the evidence given at the inquest, the attorney general of the Eastern Cape stated he would not prosecute.[24] On 28 July 1979, the attorney for Biko's family announced that the South African government would pay them $78,000 in compensation for Biko's death.[23] On 7 October 2003, the South African justice ministry announced that the five policemen accused of killing Biko would not be prosecuted because the time limit for prosecution had elapsed and because of insufficient evidence.[22] The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was created following the end of minority rule and the apartheid system, reported that five former members of the South African security forces who had admitted to killing Biko were applying for amnesty. Their application was rejected in 1999.[22] A year after his death, some of his writings were collected and released under the title I Write What I Like.
Biko Dies in Detention
Biko was detained and interrogated four times between August 1975 and September 1977 under Apartheid era anti-terrorism legislation. On 21 August 1977 Biko was detained by the Eastern Cape security police and held in Port Elizabeth. From the Walmer police cells he was taken for interrogation at the security police headquarters. On 7 September "Biko 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 grille) initially disregarded overt signs of neurological injury."
Community

In 1972, he set up the Black Community Programmes (BCP). It was a step too far. Biko was expelled from the University of Natal ostensibly for poor academic performance, although everyone knew it was because of politics. The following year, he was banned by the apartheid regime, sent back to his hometown, refused permission to move beyond the town's municipal boundaries, to talk to more than one person at a time, or to speak or write in public. It became a crime to quote any of his words, in speech or print.

It didn't stop him and he continued to talk and write, often using the pseudonym Frank Talk. His collected writings were eventually published after his death in 1978 under the title, I Write What I Like (1978, Aelred Stubbs, ed.). Only once was he officially allowed to speak out, as a witness during the BCPSASO trial. The transcript makes for fascinating reading. Meantime, within 'King', he set up a local branch of the BCP and started a whole array of grassroots community projects, Zanempilo clinic (now part of the proposed Liberation Heritage Trail), the Zimele Trust Fund (which offered support to former political prisoners and their families), Njwaxa Leather-Works Project and the Ginsberg Education Fund. He also helped, at a distance, to organise the Soweto Uprisings of 1976. In 1977, he became an honorary president of the BCP.
Education
Like so many of the other leaders of the liberation struggle, Stephen Bantu Biko was Xhosa, born in King Williamstown in what is now the Eastern Cape on December 18, 1946. He came from humble beginnings, his father; Mathew Mzingaye was a clerk, who died when he was four, his mother, Alice Nokuzola, a maid. Originally educated at Lovedale High School, he was expelled for political activities, but managed to get a scholarship to St Francis College in Natal, going on to study medicine at the multi-racial Wentworth, part of the University of Natal Medical School in Durban.

In 1970, he married student nurse, Ntsiki Mashalaba, with whom he had two children. He later went on to have three other children, one of whom died in infancy, with two other women
Involved from the first with the fairly moderate NUSAS (National Union Of South African Students), he began to question the role of apartheid on student campuses. He felt that black people were being programmed to see themselves as inferior and white people as superior and that it was essential to change Black Consciousness. It was a message that spread across South Africa and eventually, across the world.

In 1968, he set up and became first president of the all-Black South African Students' Organization (SASO), a movement he felt would help fill the vacuum left while leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe were in prison. This evolved into the Black Conscious Movement (BCM).
The Extension of University Education Act12
From the perspective of the rise and spread of Black Consciousness in South Africa, the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, more popularly known as the ‘Fort Hare’ Act, probably had a more profound influence than Sharpeville and its aftermath, impacting, as it did, directly on the way campus life was organised, along with academic programmes, and staff appointments made.
The act prohibited Africans from studying at historically white universities, except with the express permission of the government – for example if a programme was not available in any of the ethnic universities. The act then placed the University of Fort Hare, the oldest university for Africans south of the equator (established in 1916) under the control of the Department of Bantu Education and declared it a university for ethnic Xhosa groups. The act also created two new ethnic universities: the University of Zululand for Zulu, Ndebele, and Swati population groups, and the University ofthe North for ethnic Venda, Tsonga, and Sotho populations.13 The University of the Western Cape and the University of Durban-Westville were established for Africans of mixed race and those of Indian descent, respectively.
Between 1969 and 1971 these various universities were granted autonomy, thus terminating the previous arrangement, in force since 1960, under which students took the examinations administered by the University of South Africa (UNISA). Given the prejudice that eventually developed among employers in industry and the professions, cutting ties with UNISA, which also enrolled many white students, had the effect of devaluing the degrees awarded by the new universities and prevented graduates from competing favourably for jobs with white graduates. Besides, because venerated teachers of the status of Z.K. Matthews, the first African to graduate from Fort Hare in 1923, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Selby Ngcobo had resigned in protest against the 1959 act, these universities employed incompetent lecturers, mainly Afrikaners, who became little more than thought-police.14
The government hoped it had fragmented resistance from the disadvantaged and oppressed and that it had separated these downtrodden groups from their white sympathisers at the ‘open universities’. Far from becoming monuments to government machinations in pursuit of the divide-and-rule goals of separate development, however, these universities became in reality hotbeds of revolution. Africans were not hoodwinked by government talk of ‘separate but equal’. The legislative measures to create separate and inferior institutions did not go uncontested by African students, including students of mixed race and Asian descent, who could see right through government intentions to ‘ethnicise’ African politics and in the process to misinform, under-develop, ill-equip and generally prepare African students for subordinate roles in the economy.
From every segregated campus in the late 1960s calls arose for ‘Black Consciousness’. These were at first welcomed by an unsuspecting government because they appeared to accord with its own policy of complete separation of the races. The South African Student Organisation (SASO) was formally launched in July 1969 as a breakaway group from the multiracial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS).15 It was the harbinger of a new revolutionary spirit among oppressed groups, testifying to the manner in which government plans to create a new generation of more pliant African leaders than their predecessors had back-fired. Throughout the 1970s students at the segregated universities, along with students in primary and secondary schools, far from being socialised to accept apartheid and its design for them, offered what increasingly became a potent challenge to white domination in South Africa.

Schools
National Union of South African Students (NUSAS)
The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), whose membership was drawn overwhelmingly from white English-medium higher education institutions, had a track record of vocal opposition to apartheid. The organisation and its leaders came to be regarded as champions of the African cause and to be seen increasingly as important spokespersons for the cause, particularly as government-appointed authorities in the segregated African universities had prohibited their student bodies from affiliating to the organisation. Many affiliated clandestinely nonetheless, doing so in their personal capacities. Martin Legassick and Chris Saunders attribute African students’ attraction to NUSAS in the 1960s to its involvement in issues of significant import to Africans:

During the 1960s, NUSAS, alone or in cooperation with other organisations, campaigned ceaselessly against government encroachments on freedom of speech, the press, movement and association. The pass laws were condemned and in 1961 NUSAS endorsed the call for a National Convention. Protests were mounted, for example, against the 1962 Sabotage Act, the 90-day clause of the 1963 General Law Amendment Act, and the 1965 government ban on university teaching by ‘listed communists’ Eddie Roux and Jack Simons. Notwithstanding the timidity of university councils and principals, NUSAS pushed continuously for social desegregation of campuses and held non-racial sports events. It also launched the South African Committee for Higher Education, promoted adult education, organised a special prison education programme, provided scholarships for study abroad and established a student defence and aid fund. In addition, through organising seminars and workshops for activists, NUSAS saw itself as an organ for leadership training.17
NUSAS was valuable, above all else, to Africans, because of its social responsibility programmes. On the political front, however, despite its reputation as the most outspoken and radical voice of legal opposition to apartheid, NUSAS never became more than a voice of reason, within the ambit of the law – laws that bit most harshly on Africans. African radicals were excluded from the legislative process and therefore refused to accord any recognition to these laws.18 Thus NUSAS failed to satisfy the innermost cravings and deepest aspirations of the disadvantaged and oppressed. Its campaigns against restrictions to academic and press freedom or in support of multiracial intervarsity sporting competitions, for example, were peripheral issues to African demands for fundamental social, economic and political rights. Even campus

society
Resistance to apartheid in the 1950's
The majority of South Africans experienced apartheid as a negative, harsh, unjust system. The National Party government forbade resistance to its laws. Many people have used non-violence in South Africa and in other countries to demonstrate their demand for change. The life and work of M.K Gandhi, who lived in South Africa between 1893 and 1914, has inspired many non-violent movements, including the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. In the 1950s, people continued to resist without violence. Protests were met with state repression, such as banning, arrests, stricter laws and police violence. In 1955, an important document called The Freedom Charter was agreed upon at the Congress of the People in Kliptown, Soweto. The Congress of the People was a joint anti-apartheid movement including; the African National Congress, the (white) Congress of Democrats, the Coloured People's Congress, and the South African Indian Congress. In the following year many members of the Alliance were arrested and charged with treason. The policies set out in the Charter included a demand for a multi-racial, democratically elected government. Africanist members of the ANC rejected the Freedom Charter and broke away to form the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1959. Resistance in the 1960s a. The Sharpeville Massacre

By 1958, nearly one and a half million Africans were being convicted under the pass laws every year. By 1960, two of the political organisations resisting apartheid, the ANC and the PAC, organised anti-pass campaigns. The PAC organised a demonstration on 21 March 1960. On 21 March 1960, thousands of people gathered outside the police station in Sharpeville (near Vereeniging), offering themselves up for arrest for not carrying their pass books. The police opened fire on the crowd, and at the end of the day, 69 people were dead and nearly 200 wounded. Most of those killed had been shot in the back as they tried to flee. The massacre made international headlines. b. Philip Kgosana and the march to Cape Town After the Sharpeville massacre, tensions began mounting in the Cape Town African townships of Nyanga and Langa. Philip Kgosana, a leader of the PAC in Cape Town, was 23 years old when he lead a march of 30 000 people from Langa to the city centre of Cape Town on 30 March, 1960 (9 days after the Sharpeville massacre). In Cape Town, he met with the police chief on behalf of the marchers. The police chief promised to set up a meeting between Kgosana and the Minister of Justice, on condition that the marchers returned home. Philip Kgosana convinced the crowd to walk back home. When he arrived for the promised meeting with the Minister of Justice the following day, he was arrested. At the end of 1960, he was allowed out on temporary bail to visit his family in the Transvaal for Christmas. He used this opportunity to flee the country and began a life in exile. c. The banning of the ANC and PAC and the formation of Umkhonto weSizwe and Poqo The government responded to the 1960 anti-pass protests by banning the ANC and PAC. Many people began to feel it was useless for the ANC and PAC to continue using non-violence against a government that responded with violent attacks on unarmed people. The ANC established an underground armed movement known as Umkhonto weSizwe (MK) or the Spear of the Nation, which was led by Nelson Mandela. Between 1961 and 1963, MK attacked over 200 non-civilian targets throughout South Africa. The targets included government buildings and other property, like electricity pylons. People were not initially attacked. In August 1962, Nelson Mandela was captured by the police. In June 1963, other leaders of Umkhonto weSizwe, including Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba and Ahmed Kathrada were arrested in Rivonia, Johannesburg. They were charged and tried in the famous Rivonia Trial. They were sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1964. The PAC formed an armed wing called Poqo. They are less well-known today but also played an important role in SA history. Robert Sobukwe was the founding president of the Pan Africanist Congress. Some of his ideas later inspired Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement. Sobukwe was put on trial for his role in the anti-pass campaign and sentenced to three years in prison in Pretoria. After completing his three-year sentence, Sobukwe was detained by a special Act of Parliament called the 'Sobukwe Clause', and transferred to Robben Island. The 'Sobukwe Clause' was approved annually. On the Island, he was completely isolated from the other political prisoners. After Sobukwe's release from the Island, he was sent to Kimberley, a place where he had never lived before, and kept under house arrest until his death in 1978. In the 1960s, after the Rivonia Trial and Sobukwe's arrest, organised resistance to apartheid within South Africa slowed down. Many anti-apartheid leaders and supporters were in jail or had gone into exile. However, in the 1970s, a new movement called Black Consciousness or BC led to renewed resistance. The movement was led by a man called Steve Biko. BC encouraged all black South Africans to recognize their inherent dignity and self-worth. In the 1970s, the Black Consciousness Movement spread from university campuses into urban black communities throughout South Africa. Biko was banned in 1973. This meant that he was not allowed to speak to more than one person at a time, was restricted to certain areas, and could not make speeches in public. It was also forbidden to quote anything he said, including speeches or simple conversations, or to otherwise mention him. In spite of the repression of the apartheid government, Biko and the BCM played a large role in inspiring protests, which led to the Soweto Uprising on 16 June 1976.