Steve Biko

Bantu Stephen Biko was born in 1946 in the Eastern Cape; his father died when he was four. He was expelled from his first secondary school after his brother was arrested for political activity, and went on to study medicine at the University of Natal's segregated Black section. There, in 1968, he led a walkout from the white-dominated National Union of South African Students and founded the South African Students' Organisation.

The movement that grew from it, Black Consciousness, held that apartheid had persuaded Black people of their own inferiority, and that the first task was to overcome that. It ran clinics, literacy classes and a community programme in his home town. Biko was expelled from medical school in 1972, and in 1973 the government banned him, confining him to King William's Town and forbidding him to speak to more than one person at a time or to be quoted. He was arrested repeatedly and continued to organise, and gave long interviews to the newspaper editor Donald Woods that carried his ideas to the outside world.

On 18 August 1977 he was arrested at a roadblock outside Grahamstown. In police custody in Port Elizabeth he was interrogated, beaten and left in chains, suffering a brain injury. Police then drove him 1,100 kilometres to Pretoria, naked in the back of a Land Rover. He died on the floor of a cell on 12 September. The minister of justice said his death "leaves me cold", and an inquest found no one responsible.

Around 20,000 people attended his funeral. In 1997 the police officers involved admitted the killing but were denied amnesty.