Steve Biko

It was July 1967, at Rhodes University, in South Africa.

A national students' union, NUSAS, was holding its conference. Black students there were housed apart.

A young medical student walked out of the conference, with others.

His name was Steve Biko. He was twenty years old.

He came away convinced that Black people had to organize themselves.

Steve was born on December 18, 1946, at his grandmother's house, in the Cape Province. He grew up in Ginsberg, a township near King William's Town, in a poor Xhosa family.

His father died in 1950. His mother raised the children alone. She worked as a cook at the hospital.

At Lovedale school, he was expelled because his brother was under suspicion. Nothing pointed to Steve himself. "I hated authority like hell," he said.

He continued his studies at a Catholic school, in Mariannhill. Then he entered medicine at the University of Natal, in the section reserved for non-whites.

After the 1967 conference, he founded with others an organization of Black students, SASO, officially launched in 1969. He was its first president.

His idea took a name: Black Consciousness.

Above all, it called for psychological liberation.

The word "Black" brought together Africans, Coloureds and Indians. Biko made a slogan known: black is beautiful.

To a fellow student, he explained what it meant:

He also wrote under a pen name: Frank Talk.

In 1972, he left medical school.

He threw himself into programmes for Black communities. Near King William's Town, a clinic opened in January 1975: Zanempilo. There was a crèche, literacy classes, health education, a fund for the families of political prisoners.

"We teach people by example," he said.

On March 3, 1973, the government banned Biko from leaving his district, from speaking in public, from being quoted in the newspapers.

He was arrested several times. Once, he spent 101 days in solitary confinement.

He said he hoped, if at all possible, for a revolution that would be peaceful and reconciliatory.

On August 18, 1977, police arrested him at a roadblock near Grahamstown. They held him in Port Elizabeth. In detention, he suffered severe head injuries.

On September 12, 1977, Steve Biko died in a prison hospital in Pretoria. He was thirty years old.

On September 25, about 20,000 people came to his funeral in King William's Town. Diplomats from thirteen Western countries were there.

On October 17, 1977, the government banned eighteen organizations, including SASO and the Black People's Convention. An official inquest named no one responsible. Much later, in 1998, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission refused amnesty to five police officers.

Today he is called the father of Black Consciousness.

Black Consciousness echoes Ubuntu, without being the same: a person becomes fully someone by standing tall, with their own people, and by serving everyone.

What remains of him is a sentence said to a fellow student. A sentence that asked nothing of those in power. It simply gave each person back their own face.