On 12 September 1977, Bantu Stephen Biko died naked and alone on the floor of a prison cell in Pretoria.He was 30 years old.
He had been arrested near Grahamstown, now Makhanda, on 18 August and detained under apartheid security legislation.
On 6 September, he was taken from Walmer police station to Room 619 of the Security Branch offices in the Sanlam Building in Port Elizabeth, now Gqeberha. He emerged with catastrophic brain injuries.
Instead of being taken to a properly equipped hospital nearby, Biko was transported approximately 1 200km to Pretoria in the back of a police vehicle, critically injured, shackled and wearing only underwear.
He died shortly after arriving.
The apartheid state initially claimed Biko had died following a hunger strike. Its security policemen later said he was injured during a scuffle. The 1977 inquest accepted the substance of their version and concluded that no offence by any person had been proved.
Nobody was prosecuted.
AZAPO has never accepted that Biko's death was an accident arising from a scuffle. Our position has always been that he was tortured and murdered by agents of the apartheid state because of his ideas, leadership and the political force of the Black Consciousness Movement.
Forensic pathologist Dr Shakeera Holland testified about Biko's numerous injuries: wounds and abrasions, bruising, evidence of burns, internal injuries and severe damage to his brain.
Some injuries were of different ages. This was not evidence of injuries accumulated over some distant period but trauma sustained at different times during the final days of his detention, culminating in the interrogation in Room 619 from which he emerged catastrophically injured.
Holland's conclusion was clear: Biko died from severe traumatic head injuries. Considerable force was required to cause damage deep within the brain. The multiple injuries could not have resulted from a single fall during a scuffle.
Forty-nine years after an apartheid inquest absolved everyone involved, Biko's body continues to testify against the official lie.
Former Security Branch officer Daniel Petrus Siebert has repeated the claim that Biko became aggressive and was injured when police tried to restrain him. Under questioning, however, Siebert was confronted with differences between his evidence in 1977, his testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997 and his version in 2026.
Was a chair offered to Biko or did he sit without permission? Was it thrown at Siebert or Major Harold Snyman? Was Biko injured on 6 or 7 September? Why did the interrogation continue after he became dizzy and disoriented?
Siebert frequently responded that he could no longer remember, invoking the passage of 49 years.
But we should not convert his claim of failing memory into established fact. It is the surviving apartheid policemen who tell us that they cannot remember. Whether their memories have genuinely faded, become selective or whether 'I cannot remember' has become a refuge from difficult questions is another matter.
Delayed justice has created the conditions in which such claims can be made. Time has not resolved the contradictions in the apartheid account. It has given them somewhere to hide.
Black Consciousness activist Monde Mditshwa testified that Security Branch policemen slapped, kicked and beat him with a green hosepipe during interrogations in Room 619 — the same space in which Biko sustained his fatal injuries.
Apartheid torture was not the conduct of a few rogue policemen. It was an instrument of the state.
This is fundamental to understanding Biko's murder. He was not killed merely because policemen in Room 619 had some personal grudge to settle with him. They were agents of a political system confronted by a liberation movement it feared. Biko represented something more dangerous to apartheid than an individual adversary: the awakening of Black people to their own power and capacity to liberate themselves. Apartheid repression was therefore about more than punishing activists. Its purpose was to crush resistance and postpone the liberation of Black people.
Those responsible for Biko's fatal injuries must answer for their individual conduct. But accountability cannot end with the foot soldiers. Behind Room 619 stood commanders, ministers, laws and an entire state machinery constructed to maintain white domination.
Apartheid itself — its political architects, principals and institutions — belongs in the dock. The policemen were instruments in a much bigger political project to keep Black people oppressed.
The missing records are politically significant. Police records, documents and post-mortem photographs could not be found, while potentially important witnesses were not interviewed. The Hawks investigator conceded that she could not understand approximately 80% of documents in her possession because they were in Afrikaans.
The 49-year delay has not been neutral. Witnesses have died, documents disappeared and surviving policemen now say they cannot remember. The Biko family did not cause this delay. It has protected those responsible.
Five former security policemen applied to the TRC for amnesty concerning Biko's death. Their applications were refused, yet no effective prosecution followed.
AZAPO anticipated this betrayal when, together with members of the Biko, Mxenge and Ribeiro families, it challenged the amnesty provisions of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act in the constitutional court.
The court upheld the negotiated amnesty arrangement. But those who failed to make full disclosure, did not apply or were refused amnesty remained liable to prosecution. The democratic government failed to fulfil that obligation.
That it took more than 30 years of democratic government to reopen the inquest into Biko's death tells us something profound about the freedom supposedly attained in 1994.
True liberation is still to be attained.
Reconciliation became an excuse for impunity. Worse, the democratic order has too often blurred the moral distinction between the violence of the apartheid state and the struggle waged by the oppressed to liberate themselves.
These were never equivalent.
The liberation struggle sought to end racial domination. Apartheid violence existed to preserve it. One arose from the legitimate struggle of an oppressed people for land, dignity and freedom; the other deployed state machinery to deny them those things.
To equate the two is to diminish the legitimacy of our righteous struggle and become an apologist for the system against which that struggle was waged.
This is why Biko must be remembered not as a harmless historical icon but as a revolutionary thinker whose ideas continue to challenge the political order.
Black Consciousness was about restoring Black people's capacity to become authors of their own liberation.
Biko understood that oppression was maintained through political force, economic domination and the destruction of the confidence of the oppressed.
Apartheid laws have been removed but the material structure of racial domination remains largely intact. Poverty, unemployment, landlessness, spatial exclusion and inadequate public services still have an overwhelmingly Black face.
The Black majority may possess the vote but it does not exercise corresponding control over the land, economy and institutions that determine its future. Political power without economic power has proved incapable of completing liberation.
What would Biko make of the Government of National Unity (GNU)?
We should not place words in the mouths of the dead but we can test the GNU against Biko's political principles. Does it transfer power and resources to Black people and transform ownership of land and the economy? Or does it accommodate political elites while leaving the Black majority fundamentally unchanged?
Unity among elites is not national liberation. Black representation in an inherited system is not necessarily Black power.
Remembering Biko requires more than memorial lectures, familiar quotations and annual visits to his grave. It requires fidelity to his demand that Black people become subjects of history rather than objects of administration.
The reopened inquest cannot return Biko to his family or recover the 49 years in which justice was deferred. But the question before South Africa is larger than who delivered the blows that killed Steve Biko.
Who created the system that made Room 619 possible? Who commanded the machinery that tortured and killed opponents of apartheid? Why were its operatives protected? And why did a democratic state wait more than three decades to return to Biko's murder?
All these years later, Biko's body is still giving evidence — against those who brutalised him, against the system that sent them into Room 619 and against a democratic order that allowed justice to wait.
Justice for Biko and liberation for Black people are not separate struggles.
They are part of the same unfinished historical task.
Nelvis Qekema is president of the Azanian People's Organisation. AZAPO is participating as amicus curiae in the reopened inquest into the death of Steve Biko.