Steve Biko

Bantu Stephen Biko was born in King William's Town, in what was then the Cape Province of the Union of South Africa, on the eighteenth of December 1946. He read medicine at the University of Natal Medical School — at the time one of only two universities in South Africa where Black students were permitted to enroll — and there, with a circle of young thinkers including Barney Pityana, he founded the South African Students' Organisation in 1968 and articulated, over the following four years, the philosophical framework that came to be known as Black Consciousness.

The argument was simple and uncompromising. Apartheid was not principally a political condition but a psychological one: it functioned by persuading the colonized to despise themselves. The work of liberation, therefore, began with the recovery of Black self-regard. "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor," he wrote, "is the mind of the oppressed." His essays, published under the pen-name *Frank Talk* in the journal of the South African Students' Organisation, were collected after his death under the title *I Write What I Like* — a work that has not lost its force in the decades since.

In March 1973 he was banned by the apartheid state — confined to the magisterial district of King William's Town, forbidden to speak to more than one person at a time, forbidden to be quoted in print. He continued nevertheless. On the eighteenth of August 1977 he was arrested at a police roadblock, taken to Port Elizabeth, beaten for twenty-two days in interrogation, and transported, naked and manacled, on the floor of a police vehicle for seven hundred miles to Pretoria. He died there on the twelfth of September 1977, aged thirty.

His funeral drew twenty thousand mourners and the news cameras of the world. The Justice Minister Jimmy Kruger remarked publicly: "His death leaves me cold." Within a generation that minister's regime had ended. Steve Biko had been thirty years old.

He is honored here as the philosopher who taught a generation that the work of freedom begins in the mind.