allAfrica.com: South Africa: What Steve Biko Means for SA Today (Page 1 of 5)

allAfrica.com: South Africa: What Steve Biko Means for SA Today (Page 1 of 5) South Africa has been commemorating the 30th anniversary of the killing of black consciousness leader, Steve Biko, by apartheid security police.

Since his death Biko has become an international icon of black self-pride and of the African sense of humanity which the South Africans call, in their two main language groupings, "ubuntu" or "botho". In recent days, much has been written about Biko's intellectual heritage and what his life means to the liberated South Africa of today.

However, few South Africans can speak with the authority of the activist, lawyer, priest and academic, Nyameko Barney Pityana, now the principal and vice-chancellor of the University of South Africa. Pityana was one of the band of students who, with Biko, founded the principal institutions of the black consciousness movement in South Africa from the late 1960s. He delivered this address on September 12, the day on which, three decades earlier, Biko had died alone on the floor of a Pretoria prison cell.

Stephen Bantu Biko was an ordinary young man of his time. Nothing could have distinguished him, his family circumstances and environment from any other young man growing up in a small township in a small Eastern Cape town.

Not even his death, in some respects was extraordinary. After all, it was not unusual for political activists to die in detention. He was in fact the 42nd person to die while detained by the South African Security Police, the Special Branch.