The South African anti-apartheid leader who founded the Black Consciousness Movement, built on the insight that apartheid’s laws were only half the prison: the other half was the belief, beaten into Black South Africans, that white was superior. As a medical student he made psychological liberation the precondition for political freedom. The regime banned him in 1973 and confined him to one district. In September 1977 the police detained him without charge; weeks later he was dead in their custody. The inquest held no one responsible, but the lie collapsed over time, and his death made him a global symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle.
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor, Steve Biko wrote, is the mind of the oppressed. He was a medical student in his twenties when he put that sentence at the center of a movement. By then he had decided that the laws of apartheid were only half the prison. The other half lived inside people who had been taught to accept that white was better and Black was less. Free the mind first, he argued, and the rest would follow. The government banned him, confined him to one district, and forbade anyone to quote him. In 1977 the police stopped him at a roadblock and took him into custody. Weeks later he was dead in their custody, and the officials who held him claimed he had simply stopped eating. Almost no one believed them, and the lie made him larger than the man.