Arguing Biko

219 Pages·2010·9.59 MB·English

Arguing Biko: Evidence of the Body in the Politics of History, 1977 to the Present

A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Jesse Walter Bucher

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Advisors
Allen F. Isaacman and Tamara Giles-Vernick

September, 2010
© Jesse Walter Bucher 2010
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Acknowledgements

Funding support for my dissertation research in South Africa was provided in 2007-
2008 by the Office of International Programs Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship at the
University of Minnesota. Funding for a research trip to the Eastern Cape in June of
2008 was provided by the Center for Humanities Research and the History Department
at the University of the Western Cape where I was a research fellow. Joint financial
support from the MacArthur program at the University of Minnesota and the Donald
Burch Fellowship in History through the University of Minnesota Department of
History in 2008-2009, and a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the University of
Minnesota Graduate School in 2009-2010 allowed me to concentrate exclusively on
completing the dissertation writing. I thank all of these institutions for their generous
support.
I first studied African history as an undergraduate at The College of New Jersey where I
had the great fortune of working with Derek Peterson. Between my junior and senior
years of college, Derek helped me formulate my first research projects in African
history while we both spent time sorting through files at the Public Records Office in
London. Derek patiently showed me how to read documents, how to join together
evidence with ideas, and how to think through the historiographical questions that
shaped the discipline. Over the last eight years Derek has remained my mentor, good
friend, and trusted critic. I thank him for starting me on a path that led to the
completion of this dissertation.
At the University of Minnesota, my advisors Allen Isaacman and Tamara Giles-Vernick
have set extraordinarily high standards for research and scholarship. Under their
compassionate guidance, I have grown as a student of African history, and appreciated
how they have made the process of researching and writing this dissertation far easier.
From the moment that I arrived at Minnesota, Allen has been a source of constant
intellectual support, and he has asked important questions that have improved this
dissertation in countless ways. Moreover, Allen has frequently opened his home and
welcomed me as a guest while he worked with me on portions of this study. My thanks
are also extended to Bobbie Isaacman for her tremendous generosity. Tamara has
closely followed every version of my research and writing over the last six years, and
patiently helped me work through a broad variety of research questions. I know that
this would be a far inferior study if she had not so consistently encouraged me to think
about this subject matter in new and challenging ways. I owe Allen and Tamara extra
thanks for calmly helping me make the transition from working on a dissertation project
in Tanzania to one in South Africa.
In many ways, I view this dissertation as an extended conversation that I began with
Premesh Lalu in 2004. Our shared interest in thinking about the meaning, location, and
practices of history has fundamentally marked this study. When I arrived in Cape Town
in 2007, Premesh helped me think about my research questions in new ways and
assisted me in sorting through materials that were often profoundly challenging. Our
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joint research trip to the Eastern Cape in June of 2008 was the highlight of my stay in
South Africa. Along with Patricia Lorcin and Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Premesh
served on my dissertation committee and as a group they immeasurably helped me work
through the revision process. Helena in particular gave this dissertation a careful read,
and pushed me to think about the subject matter in a more comparative fashion.
In Minneapolis, many friends and colleagues made graduate studies a far better
experience than I could have ever anticipated. When I first arrived at Minnesota, Joyce
Chadya and Jones Sichali helped me navigate my first semesters of graduate study. My
other colleagues from the history department Oswald Masebo, Clement Masakure,
Terence Mashingaidze, Drew Thompson, Elliot James, Joanna Evans, Julie Weiskopf,
Munya Munochiveyi, and Aaron Windel made the study of African history a thought
provoking experience. My time at Minnesota was shaped in the most important ways
by the friendships that I developed there. I count myself fortunate to have developed
lasting relationships with Stuart Davis, Nicole Abaid, Julie Wilson, Joe Tompkins,
Melissa Geppert, Rajyashree Narayanareddy, Govind Nayak, and Laurie Richmond
who all made the time spent in Minnesota a great deal of fun.
While living in Cape Town, Nathalie Rosa Bucher, Reuben Roberts, Kitty Dorje, and
Koni Benson offered lasting companionships. Many scholars, including Nicky
Rousseau, Janet Cherry, Leslie Witz, Maanda Mulaudzi, and Francis Wilson all made
significant contributions to my historical research.
Faculty at the University of Minnesota including Fernando Arenas, Helga Leitner, John
Eyler, Patricia Lorcin, Anna Clark, Mary Jo Maynes, Eric Weitz, Thomas Wolfe, and
Keletso Atkins helped me think about my work in new ways. The members of the
Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change including Sara Braun, Karen
Brown, Jim Johnson, and Kate Kulhanek, were sources of support and friendship.
This dissertation was written in New Jersey where I have enjoyed working with friends
and colleagues both old and new. Portions of this project were presented at The College
of New Jersey where I received careful feedback from Cynthia Paces, Matt Bender, and
JoAnn Gross. I presented aspects of my work to faculty and graduate students in the
Rutgers Center for African Studies and more recently at the Rutgers Center for
Historical Analysis. I profoundly benefited from feedback offered by Julie Livingston,
Indrani Chatterjee, Barbara Cooper, Temma Kaplan, Bonnie Smith, and Richard
Schroeder.
Finally, I would like to thank my family – my parents Robert and Cathy Bucher, my
sister Katie Bucher, and my wife Heather Bucher. They have been excellent critics,
constant sources of encouragement and wisdom, and above all a foundation of support
upon which I have relied. I dedicate this dissertation to them.
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Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my family – my parents Robert and Cathy, my sister
Katie, and my wife Heather.
iv
Abstract
On September 12, 1977 Steve Biko - South Africa’s most prominent anti-
apartheid activist, intellectual, and leader of student politics - died in the custody of the
apartheid government’s security police. Both the security police and the apartheid state
immediately denied any responsibility for Biko’s death, and within weeks they had
issued three different prepared accounts of how he died. A government sponsored
inquest held in November of 1977 listened to further testimony from the security police
who continued to deny that they had broken official protocol and harmed Biko. Despite
an abundance of evidence showing that Biko was tortured and severely beaten, the legal
system under apartheid never held the security police formally accountable for their
actions. Over the last thirty years, the contested details of Biko’s death have reemerged
again and again in a broad variety of political contexts and historical moments, making
Biko as famous and controversial a figure in death as he was in life.
Despite his importance, there has been little variety to the academic study of
Steve Biko, and scholarly examinations largely place any discussion of Biko within
broader political and social histories of the 1970s. In these accounts, Biko is seen as the
founding intellectual behind the Black Consciousness Movement that developed and
came to prominence in the late 1960s and 1970s, and his death has often stood as a
closing moment for this period in which Black Consciousness thrived. My dissertation
argues that it is possible to continue a study of Biko beyond the moments of his death
and to take seriously the ways in which Biko continued to provoke significant political
and social debate in the aftermath of his death. Instead of focusing on Biko’s death as a
passing moment on a timeline of events, I look at how the meaning of the event played
out across multiple time periods, and figured into broader debates about apartheid’s
systems of power and repression over the last thirty years. My dissertation explores
how differently positioned people – police officers, government employees, politicians,
journalists, biographers, medical doctors, playwrights, religious leaders, political
activists, museum curators, and many others – have revisited and detailed the event of
Biko’s death. For those commentators who took an interest in reconstructing,
interpreting, and speculating about the conditions of Biko’s death, the lack of trusted
facts provided a critical space to formulate lasting critiques of the past and to imagine a
new future – not only by shedding light on what the security police likely did to Biko,
but also in using their reconstructions to make larger political and moral arguments
about the apartheid project. The study makes two related arguments. The first
argument is that the ways in which members of the apartheid state clung to the details of
Biko’s death was fundamentally linked to a unique historical context in the late-1970s
when the apartheid state increasingly utilized detention, torture, and the concealment of
information about the fates of detainees to suppress dissent. This combination of
practices came as the apartheid state gave increased power to the security police forces
in order to respond to new forms of political dissent and resistance. The second
argument is that despite the apartheid state’s best attempts to control knowledge of
Biko’s death, critics of many sorts closely combed over the available details to compose
historical arguments that challenged the apartheid state’s claims, histories that in turn
opened up new avenues of political thought and action.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i
Dedication iii
Abstract iv
List of Figures vi
1. Introduction 1
2. Steve Biko’s Death in Context 44
3. Nakedness and the Reconstruction of Steve Biko’s Death 64
4. Diagnosing Steve Biko: The Politics of Medical Care 105
5. Biko ‘On Death’ and ‘Biko on Death’ 158
6. Conclusion 192
Bibliography 199
vi
List of Figures
Figure 1 102
Figure 2 103
Figure 3 104
1
Chapter 1 - Introduction
On September 12, 1977 Bantu Stephen Biko1 - South Africa’s most prominent
anti-apartheid activist, intellectual, and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement -
died in the custody of the apartheid government’s security police. Both the security
police and officials in the apartheid state immediately denied any responsibility for
Biko’s death, and within weeks they had issued three different prepared accounts of
how he died. A day after Biko’s death, the Minister of Justice, Police and Prisons,
Jimmy Kruger, announced that Biko had been arrested on August 18th at a police
roadblock in Grahamstown for taking part in activities related to rioting in Port
Elizabeth, and that he later died from the effects of a self-induced hunger strike.2 In
addition to Kruger’s claim about the hunger strike,3 the security police later argued that
Biko had died from brain injuries after striking his own head,4 and that Biko had
incurred his injuries after attacking the police and stumbling into a wall.5 A
government sponsored inquest held in November of 1977 listened to further testimony
from the security police who strove to offer a credible explanation for Biko’s death.
Despite an abundance of evidence showing that Biko was tortured, severely beaten, and

1 Bantu Stephen Biko is Biko’s full name, however, I will use the more commonly used name Steve Biko.
Biko was born on December 18, 1946 and died on September 12, 1977.
2 “Kruger tells of hunger strike” The Argus 14 September, 1977.
3 “Biko Died After Hunger Strike” Cape Times 14 September, 1977.
4 The story of Biko hitting his own head against a wall was developed in reaction to the revelation in
early October, 1977 that Biko had died from brain injuries. An article published in the Rand Daily Mail
on October 7 and written by Helen Zille claimed that Biko had not died from the effects of a hunger
strike, but from brain injuries.
5 “Kruger has final report on Biko” Daily Dispatch 25 October, 1977; and “Biko: Brain Injuries, Says
Kruger” Cape Times 10 November 1977.
2
denied medical care, the legal system of apartheid absolved the security police of any
responsibility.6
Over the last thirty years, the details of Steve Biko’s death have consistently
reemerged in a broad variety of political contexts and historical moments, making Biko
as famous and controversial a figure in death as he was in life. This interest was readily
apparent in June of 2008 when Bongani Diko, a playwright and director from
Grahamstown, South Africa, worked with actors on final preparations for performances
of his play Juda’s Diary.7 The play had debuted a year earlier, and based on strong
audience support, was set for a restaging during the Grahamstown National Arts
Festival, South Africa’s premier cultural event in July, 2008.8 The plot of Juda’s Diary
dealt with competing histories of the August, 1977 arrest of Steve Biko at a roadblock
in Grahamstown by the security police, an arrest that initiated a month long period of
detention and torture culminating with Biko’s death. In particular, Juda’s Diary
recreated the build-up to the 1986 murder of Mick Mphelo, a Grahamstown
businessman accused of selling out Biko to the security police.
Rather than restaging a biographical account of Biko’s life and death or focusing
exclusively on Biko’s political work, Bongani Diko offered what he called “the
Grahamstown Biko story.”9 Steve Biko’s arrest and Mick Mphelo’s murder, Diko
argued, were part of a broader constellation of violence that shaped life in the 1980s,

6 Hilda Bernstein, No.46: Steve Biko. London: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa,
1978.
7 On one of the production’s advertising posters, Juda is also spelled as Judah, a reference to the Biblical
character who sold his brother. I use the spelling Juda (Juda’s) that appears on the script. Written in the
plural without the –h, Juda’s also invokes Judas, and within the script, there is reference to both Judas and
Judah.
8 Oral Interview: Bongani Diko, June 4, 2008
9 Oral Interview: Bongani Diko, June 4, 2008