Who was Steve Biko?
Stephen Biko was a noted anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s and early 1970s. A student leader, he helped found the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) in 1968, and was elected its first president. SASO evolved into the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), which would empower and mobilize much of the urban black population. Black Consciousness differed sharply from other anti-apartheid movements in that it advocated the preservation and advancement of black culture from the individual level. Biko called for blacks to have their own institutions, their own achievements, and preserve their own languages and cultural heritage - not to the exclusion of whites but with a clear assertion that their culture was valid, valuable and should be allowed to thrive and grow.
In spite of the repression of the apartheid government, Biko and the BCM played a significant role in organising the protests which culminated in the Soweto Uprising of 16 June 1976. In the aftermath of the uprising, which was crushed by heavily-armed police shooting school children protesting, the authorities began to target Biko further.
On 18 August 1977, Biko was arrested at a police roadblock under the Terrorism Act No 83 of 1967. He suffered a major head injury while in police custody, and was chained to a window grille for a day. After the police denied him the medical attention doctors said he needed, he died in Pretoria on 12 September 1977.
Biko saw the struggle to restore African consciousness as having two stages, "Psychological liberation" and "Physical liberation”. While activists such as Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela fought apartheid on the political and economic front, Steve Biko fought it on the most basic psychological level. He rejected the fundamental premise that made racism and subsequent apartheid possible. The premise he rejected was "that one kind of man was superior to another kind of man". Many of his thoughts can be found in his book, ‘I Write What I Like’.
When you enter UMSU, you are entering a building named after a man who is immortalised as a figure that stood up against injustice and paid the ultimate price for doing so.
When Manchester students named our building after Steve Biko, they were sending out a clear message that this is a Union that campaigns against injustice, wherever it is in the world. UMSU has long had a reputation as one of the most active and campaigning Students' Unions in the country, and so there is every reason to follow in this fine tradition and get involved to change the University, Manchester, Britain, and the World, for the better.
The Campaigns
