Clifton 1

Tanya Clifton

Ms. Teacher

English 10

5 May 2015

History Made Personal:

A Study of Donald Wood’s Biko and Life After Apartheid

“On Tuesday, 6 September 1977, a close friend of mine named Bantu Stephen Biko was taken by South African political police to Room 619…, where he was handcuffed, put into leg irons, chained to a grille and subjected to twenty-two hours of interrogation in the course of which he was tortured and beaten, sustaining several blows to the head which damaged his brain fatally, causing him to lapse into a coma and die six days later,” writes Donald Woods in the opening of his ground-breaking memoir, Biko (13). Like so many people fighting for black equality in South Africa in his time, Biko’s murder in prison was covered up by the police commissioner, who claimed that Biko committed suicide. This type of incident happened so often because of the Nationalist government’s brutal apartheid policy under which Black South

Africans had practically no rights. This policy of forced segregation of the majority of the South

African population could only exist under a severely oppressive police state. Donald Woods, the editor of a white, liberal newspaper in Johannesburg during this time period was under a police ban because of his involvement in the anti-apartheid movement. He had to write his memoir,

Biko, in secret and under constant fear of being thrown in prison as well as constant threats to his family’s lives. His book was written for the expressed purpose of letting the world know the Clifton 2 truth about South Africa. Because of the efforts of strong black leaders and help from their white allies, apartheid was finally abolished in 1990 and Nelson Mandela became the first black president of South Africa. Apartheid destroyed the lives of so many South Africans, both black and white; although it has been over now for twenty years, racial equality has not been fully achieved. *thesis statement*

South Africa is a beautiful land, rich for farming and well known for having some of the world’s most productive diamond and gold mines. The beauty and wealth of the land, however, has been overshadowed by the evils of apartheid. Apartheid was a de jure (by law) system of segregation that was formalized after WWII but was informally practiced throughout South

African history. Under apartheid, black South Africans were forced to move to what the government called their tribal homelands, reservations consisting of the poorest quality land the government designated to their black citizens, who actually made up the majority of people living in South Africa. According to Brian King from The Geographical Review, “These territories were based on racist views of African cultural systems and organization that divided the diversity of the African population into separate groups, each with its own distinguishing characteristics” (King). Black citizens could live in segregated townships in the major cities only if they had government issued working papers. They had very few (if any) rights, and all South

Africans lived under a repressive police state for most of the twentieth century.

Racist policies in South Africa, like in many other African countries, started during the colonial period. Dutch farmers, known as the Boers, settled in the most fertile regions of South

Africa as far back as the 1650’s and were in constant battle with the black tribes in the region to establish dominance. The Boers became deeply connected to the land and soon their Dutch background evolved into a new ethnic identity known as Afrikaner and a new language, Clifton 3

Afrikaans. The British arrived in South Africa in 1815 and through a series of imperial campaigns, they settled large regions of South Africa, seeking to dominate the Afrikaners as well the native Black population, the majority of whom were the Xhosa and Zulu people. This resulted in the Boer Wars starting in 1879 and ending in 1915. It was a brutal war where the

Boers used gorilla warfare tactics, especially surprise attacks, effectively. The British retaliated by burning crops and interring the Boers in concentration camps. In 1934, the British made that area a commonwealth with limited independence as the Union of South Africa, and the country was divided into provinces. According to the Student Resources in Context, “the best land divided up amongst the British and the Afrikaaners.Neither the British nor the Afrikaaners learned a lesson from the evils of the brutality of the Boer Wars;” instead, they both participated in brutalizing the Black population long after the war -- violence begets violence (“Apartheid”).

In 1948, the Afrikaaner Nationalist Party took control of the commonwealth and made apartheid the law of the land. It was not until 1962 that full independence from England happened and the

Republic of South Africa was established. At that point, apartheid was completely entrenched in

South African culture and the Nationalist Party still had control of the government. The wealth and privilege of the white population could only be maintained through the exploitation of Black workers in the mines, farms, and cities, and the South African government was in the business of keeping the Black population in their place through brutality and injustice. Clifton 4

Works Cited

"Apartheid." Student Resources in Context. Detroit: Gale, 2010. N. pag. Student Resources in

Context. Web. 11 May 2015.

King, Brian H. "Placing KaNgwane in the new South Africa." The Geographical Review 2006:

79. Student Resources in Context. Web. 8 May 2015.

Maddox, Gregory. "Black Consiousness." New Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Vol. 1.

Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2005. N. pag. Student Resources in Context. Web. 1

May 2015.

Saunders, Christopher. "South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission." History Behind

the Headlines: The Origins of Conflicts Worldwide. Ed. Sonia Benson, Nancy Matuszak,

and Meghan Appel O'Meara. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 2001. N. pag. Student Resources in

Context. Web. 11 May 2015.

Woods, Donald. Biko. Middlesex: Penguin, 1979. Print.