South Africa to reopen Steve Biko inquest
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South African prosecutors said, on Wednesday, they will reopen an inquest into the death of prominent anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. This is coming nearly 50 years after he died in police custody.
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Biko, founder of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, died in a prison cell in 1977 aged just 30. He had been beaten into a coma by police who had arrested him nearly a month earlier.
The death sparked outrage across the world and he became an international symbol of the struggle against the race-based apartheid system that denied South Africa’s black majority political and economic rights.
“The main goal of reopening the inquest is to lay before the court evidence that will enable the court to make a finding… as to whether the death was brought about by any act, or omission, which prima facie involves or amounts, to an offence on the part of any person,” the National Prosecuting Authority, NPA, said.
The case will be reopened on the 48th anniversary of Biko’s death on September 12.
A 1977 inquest accepted the police account that Biko sustained injuries when he hit his head against the wall. No one was prosecuted for the death.
But in 1997, former police officers implicated in the case admitted assaulting the activist during hearings by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, TRC, into atrocities committed during the apartheid era.
The TRC refused to grant amnesty to the officers. It ruled that they lied in their evidence and failed to prove a political motive for killing Biko.
Biko’s story inspired Peter Gabriel’s anthem “Biko”, and later the Richard Attenborough film ‘Cry Freedom’.
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