BIKO, STEPHEN

born Dec. 18, 1946, King William's Town, S.Afr. died Sept. 12, 1977, Pretoria in full Bantu Stephen Biko founder of South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement. His death from head injuries suffered while in police custody made him an international martyr for South African black nationalism. After being expelled from high school for political activism, Biko managed to enroll in and graduate (1966) from St. Francis College, a liberal boarding school in Natal, and then entered the University of Natal Medical School. There he became involved in the multiracial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), a moderate organization that had long espoused the rights of blacks. Growing disenchanted with NUSAS, in which he claimed that the whites doing all the talking and the blacks listening, he became in 1968 cofounder and first president of the all-black South African Students' Organization (SASO), whose aim was to raise black consciousness and black self-esteem and to overcome the psychological oppression of blacks by whites. In the 1970s the Black Consciousness Movement spread from university campuses into urban black communities throughout South Africa. Biko's black activism eventually drew official censure when he and other SASO members were served with banning orders in February 1973, tightly restricting their associations, movements, and public statements. Biko then operated covertly, establishing the Zimele Trust Fund in 1975 to help political prisoners and their families. He was arrested four times over the next two years and was held without trial for months at a time. On Aug. 18, 1977, he and a fellow activist were seized at a roadblock and jailed in Port Elizabeth. There, during the next 24 days, held naked and manacled, he evidently suffered three brain lesions that, according to the postmortem, were caused by application of force to his head. He died after being trucked in an unconscious state 740 miles (1,190 km) to Pretoria on September 11. An inquest absolved the police of any wrongdoing.