Steve biko essay

Steve biko wife
Steve biko's family
Steve biko education

•

Steve Biko

South African anti-apartheid activist (1946–1977)

Bantu Stephen BikoOMSG (18 December 1946 – 12 September 1977) was a South African anti-apartheid activist. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he was at the forefront of a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign known as the Black Consciousness Movement during the late 1960s and 1970s. His ideas were articulated in a series of articles published under the pseudonym Frank Talk.

Raised in a poor Xhosa family, Biko grew up in Ginsberg township in the Eastern Cape. In 1966, he began studying medicine at the University of Natal, where he joined the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). Strongly opposed to the apartheid system of racial segregation and white-minority rule in South Africa, Biko was frustrated that NUSAS and other anti-apartheid groups were dominated by white liberals, rather than by the blacks who were most affected by apartheid. He believed that well-intentioned white liberals failed to comprehend the black experience and often acted in a paternalistic manner. He d

•

by Ajani Husbands
Updated 9-19-2004

Timeline of Apartheid
Nelson Mandela and other ANC Leaders
Steve Biko
After 10 Years of Democracy

Steve Biko is remembered as a founder and martyr of the South African Black Consciousness Movement. Entrenched in political activity from birth, Steve Biko gave his life for a South Africa in which Blacks could be free in their own homeland.

Stephen Bantu Biko was born in King William's Town, Cape Province, South Africa in 1946. Biko's early political activity eventually found him expelled from his first school at Lovedale for 'anti-establishment' behavior. His education eventually brought him to the medical school at the University of Natal in Durban. While here, he became involved with the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), an organization dominated by white liberals and which failed to adequately address the needs of black students. As a result, Biko founded the South African Students' Organization (SASO) in 1969. Under Biko's leadership, SASO was involved in providing

•

Stephen Bantu Biko

Introduction

Stephen (Steve) Bantu Biko was a popular voice of Black liberation in South Africa between the mid 1960s and his death in police detention in 1977. This was the period in which both the ANC and the PAC had been officially banned and the disenfranchised Black population (especially the youth) were highly receptive to the prospect of a new organisation that could carry their grievances against the Apartheid state. Thus it was that Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) came to prominence and although Biko was not its only leader, he was its most recognisable figure. It was Biko, along with others who guided the movement of student discontent into a political force unprecedented in the history of South Africa. Biko and his peers were responding to developments that emerged in the high phase of Apartheid, when the Nationalist Party (NP), in power for almost two decades, was restructuring the country to conform to its policies of separate development. The NP went about untangling what little pockets of integration and proximity there were betwee