Steve Biko

Bantu Stephen Biko was born on 18 December 1946 in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and grew up in Ginsberg township, a small Black community near King William's Town, in a Xhosa family. His father died when he was young, and his mother worked as a cook and domestic worker to raise her children. Even as a teenager Biko clashed with the apartheid system — the harsh set of laws that divided South Africans by the colour of their skin — and he carried that defiance with him when he went to Durban to study medicine.

At the University of Natal's medical school, Biko noticed that even the organisations fighting apartheid were led by white students. He believed Black South Africans needed an organisation and a confidence of their own, so in 1968–69 he helped found the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) and became its first president. From it grew the Black Consciousness Movement. Drawing on the thinker Frantz Fanon, Biko argued that true liberation had to begin inside — people first had to shake off the feeling of being inferior and stand up in their own pride and dignity. Writing under the pen-name Frank Talk, he set down these ideas in essays that were gathered after his death into the classic book I Write What I Like.

Biko's ideas frightened the government, and in 1973 it banned him — confining him to King William's Town and forbidding him to write or speak in public. Yet he refused to fall silent. He led the Black Community Programmes, helping build the Zanempilo community health clinic at Zinyoka in 1975 and the Zimele Trust Fund to support the families of political prisoners — turning his philosophy into clinics, classrooms and care. In 1977, while held in police detention, Steve Biko died. He was only 30. His death was a grave injustice that shocked the world and helped turn many countries against apartheid, and his teaching of pride and dignity still echoes today.