Biko

Dust jacket notes: "On Tuesday, September 6, 1977, Steve Biko was taken by South African Security Police to Room 619 of the Sanlam Building in Strand Street, Port Elizabeth. He was hand-cuffed, put into leg-irons, chained to a grille and subjected to twenty-two hours of interrogation, torture and beating. He received between two and four blows to the head, fatally damaging his brain. He died six days later. No charges were pressed against his captors. A shock wave exploded across South Africa and reverberated in every corner of the globe. Newspaper editor Donald Woods, a close friend of Biko's, led the outcry against this atrocity. On October 19, 1977 he was officially banned and completely prohibited from writing. He began this book in secrecy, in defiance of his banning order and under threat of Security Police surveilance. The tragedy of Biko's death was still painfully fresh in his mind. Chapter by chapter the book was smuggled out of South Africa. Publication became possible only when Donald and Wendy Woods and their five young children made a dramatic flight to freedom - an escape which captured the imagination of the world. To tell this story the author had paid the price of exile from his country. Woods vividly recaptures the life and eath of Steve Biko, the brilliant and charismatic man who became South Africa's leading Black Conciousness spokesman. Here is a portrait of the private as well as public Biko; personal and political dialogues; details of the gruesome torture and killing of Biko; verbatim scenes from the inquest and its findings wihch shocked the world. Biko is a personal testimony to a truly remarkable man; a moving portrait of a uniquely gifted leader destroyed in his prime; a searing indictment of a monstrous system and its gestapo tactics; and the story of a deep friendship which transcended race, class and politics under a system determined to keep them separate and unequal."