We can’t imagine the pain Steve Biko went through before he died 35 years ago. He was lying handcuffed on the floor on blankets wet with his urine when disgraced Port Elizabeth district surgeon Dr Ivor Lang finally saw him in his cell at Walmer police station.
Colonel Pieter Goosen, who was divisional commander of the security police in the Eastern Province at the time, had called Lang when he suspected Biko had suffered a stroke.
A lumbar puncture showed possible brain damage, and Biko – who had spent 25 days in detention – was almost unable to walk.
Goosen said “the deceased was apparently determined on self-destruction”, while other security policemen insisted Biko had banged his head against the wall during a “scuffle” with them.
Blood was found in his spinal fluid, indicating a brain contusion.
Biko’s words, “You are either alive and proud, or you are dead”, take on a terrible reality when we try to imagine the scene.
Lang first issued a certificate that said he had found nothing wrong and believed Biko – who had been detained on August 19, 1977 – was “pretending”.
But he later conceded that, upon first examination, the Black Consciousness leader had a cut lip, a bruised sternum, an inability to move his limbs, swollen hands and feet and slurred speech.
No attempt was made to help him. No concern was shown for his head injuries, let alone his renal failure, and he wasn’t taken to a hospital. In a prison unit, neurosurgeon RJ Keely confirmed there had been brain damage, but Lang still lied, saying he couldn’t find any pathology.
The chief district surgeon of Port Elizabeth, Dr Benjamin Tucker – who only confessed to his guilt in an affidavit 14 years later – believed Biko was fit to travel by road from Port Elizabeth to a prison hospital in Pretoria.
He thought Biko was faking his symptoms. The young prisoner was loaded, naked, without medical care and breathing unnaturally, into the back of a Landrover for the 1 200km journey to the capital.
Biko died just six hours after his arrival. Criminal assault to the head would later be given as the reason for his death.
Jimmy Kruger, then minister of justice, police and prisons, who insisted Biko had died after a hunger strike, infamously declared: “His death leaves me cold.”
The Biko family, represented by Sydney Kentridge SC, later sued the state and won an out-of-court settlement of R65 000. And it was thanks to the efforts of Professor Frances Ames of Groote Schuur Hospital that the SA Medical and Dental Council was forced to hold a proper inquiry into the conduct of those who had treated Biko in detention.
In 1983, black and white doctors joined forces to back Ames, who queried the council’s role in upholding medical ethical standards.
Still, neither the two court judgments, nor Tucker’s plaintive admission in 1991, could change the truth.
Tucker, who was eventually found guilty on 10 counts of disgraceful professional conduct, said he had “been in the wilderness, suffering deprivation, humiliation and constant abuse” after his punishment. He admitted: “I failed in my duty towards the late Mr Biko.”
But Biko, a man who died alone after refusing to collaborate in his own oppression, was gone.
It’s important to properly detail and remember these facts, and to take care to repeat them to the next generation. Without the truth, we have nothing but emotion, which remains, regardless. Disturbingly, so do many of the conditions that led to Biko's death.
He was killed because he could not tolerate inequality. Yet gross inequality remains, and such has been the inability to deal with it over 18 years, that no less than two recent blueprints – the National Development Plan and the New Growth Path – have sought a way forward.
Despite the good intentions of both documents, it is righteous to imagine Biko would have been disappointed by the oppression that continues for many of SA’s citizens today.
The growth plan has a goal of 2020 to cross a wasteland between poverty and privilege.
The development plan has set its sights on 2030. But even protagonists of government’s programmes wonder if there is the political will.
White life has not changed much since 1977 when Biko was murdered.
The only socio-economic shift has been the embrace of a new political elite. Instead of the kind of economic growth that would alleviate poverty and create employment, we have experienced significant accumulation at the top.
Biko was killed as a result of significant torture. Yet, unbelievably, it is only this month that hearings into the Prevention and Combating of Torture of Persons Bill, which is before Parliament, began.
Torture is not yet criminalised.
Even the name of the bill sounds cruelly anachronistic. Biko’s family may have won a settlement all those years ago, but the state may not yet be held accountable for torture which its own officials perpetrate.
It also cannot recompense victims. Surely that, too, would have been a disappointment for the Black Consciousness leader.
Biko was killed by police officers.
At the beginning of democracy, a new, non-sectarian force was modelled on a vision for peace. Yet these days, the police under a Jacob Zuma administration seem to routinely use violence against protesters in a manner that suggests the state approves of that kind of control, just as it did in the past.
Then, the police’s approach was designed to protect white life, which was the privileged life.
Not much has changed. At Marikana, the police were protecting the privileged, too. In that case, it was big business.
That would have been anathema to Biko. Thirty-five years have passed. Biko is long dead. It’s September again – a time for annual contemplation on whether justice has been served on the memory of a man who died in agony, alone on the stone floor of a cold prison cell. Certainly, we all know the answer.