This day in South Africa
Steve Biko dies in police custody
49 years ago
Pretoria
This moment describes violence or loss under apartheid. It is told through the people who lived it, from the sources linked below.
Steve Biko, a founder of the Black Consciousness movement, was arrested at a roadblock near Grahamstown on 18 August 1977 and interrogated in Port Elizabeth. Beaten and left with brain injuries, he was driven naked in the back of a Land Rover more than a thousand kilometres to Pretoria, where he died on the floor of a cell on 12 September. He was thirty. About 20,000 people came to his funeral in King William's Town.
This day in South Africa
