Remembrance & Memorials : South Africa to reopen Biko inquest
source: The Guardian
published: 13 September 2025
Image Credit: 9comeback: www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net
From all of our hundreds of Remembrance Calendar entries, we particularly feature certain cases that were of notable historical significance.
Steve Biko
South African prosecutors will reopen an inquest into the death of the prominent anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, nearly 50 years after he died in police custody.
Biko, the founder of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, died in a prison cell in 1977 aged just 30, after being beaten into a coma by police who had arrested him nearly a month earlier.
The death sparked outrage across the world and he became an international symbol of the struggle against the race-based apartheid system that denied South Africa’s black majority political and economic rights.
Lumumba’s Africa explores the powerful legacy of Bantu Stephen Biko, the visionary leader behind the Black Consciousness Movement. Biko’s transformative ideas reshaped resistance in apartheid South Africa and continue to inspire generations.
“The main goal of reopening the inquest is to lay before the court evidence that will enable the court to make a finding … as to whether the death was brought about by any act, or omission, which prima facie involves or amounts to an offence on the part of any person,” the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) said on Wednesday.
The case will be reopened on the 48th anniversary of Biko’s death on 12 September.
A 1977 inquest accepted the police account that Biko sustained injuries when he hit his head against the wall and no one was prosecuted for the death.
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