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 i 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 ii 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. iii 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.