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handcuffed into the back of a police van, already half-dead from the brain damage and other
severe results of the beatings, Biko was taken in the van for a rough 1,200 km drive, from Port
Elizabeth to Pretoria, where he died. In spite of the incriminating testimony and the denial of
amnesty by the TRC, no one has been charged, to this day, with the torture, the denial of
medical treatment or the murder of Steve Biko. 206
Torture was illegal in South Africa (as opposed to Israel prior to 1999), and since the
South African apartheid state was very successful in covering up its own abuses in this regard,
there are next to no quantitative data available. It is known, however, that the use of statesanctioned
torture was very common, that it was often encouraged and sometimes ordered
from the highest levels of the security forces and the government, and that the amount of
deaths in police or ‘security force’ custody was very high, as well. 207
Members of the African National Congress guerrilla group, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Zulu
for ‘Spear of the Nation’, usually abbreviated as MK) also committed human rights violations.
It was not, however, responsible for any deaths until after its founder and first commander,
Nelson Mandela, himself had been jailed for life, only narrowly escaping the death sentence.
The Ethiopian army had given Mandela, a lawyer, human rights activist, intellectual and
fugitive from South African ‘Justice’, eight weeks of military training, a gun and 200 rounds
of ammunition. After 48 years of peacefully resisting intensifying white oppression, the ANC
was outlawed in 1960, following the notorious massacre by police of at least 69 protesters at
Sharpeville. The protesters were unarmed and peacefully protesting racist passbook laws.
Many of them were shot in the back as they were trying to flee, once the police, entirely
unprovoked, had started firing. Only after being offensively driven underground did the ANC
thus decide to switch to a phased strategy of armed resistance, starting with attacks on
unmanned military installations. It was during this phase that Mandela was captured. He was
later found guilty for being involved with plans for attacks which could have or would have
cost human lives. During the 1970s and ‘80s, thousands of South Africans, mainly youths, left
their country to join the MK in military camps set up in the countries north of South Africa,
recently liberated from colonial and apartheid rule. 208
One of the TRC hearings was concerned with the gross violations which the ANC
committed at a detention camp in Angola, as a result of which at least six people died during
the 1970s and ‘80s. Other such acts included bombings throughout the 1980s. The MK itself
planned and executed 13 attacks from 1980 to 1988, in which 23 people were killed and more
than 350 were injured. 209 The deadliest attack took place in Pretoria in 1983, when a single
bomb took the lives of 19 people, leaving another 217 injured. 210 It must be added, however,
that this was a very unusual attack. The ANC and other South African liberation movements
on the whole were remarkably reluctant to engage in violence, especially when compared to
the force they were up against. It has been estimated that at least one and a half million
southern Africans were killed, directly or indirectly, by the apartheid government and its
defenders and allies from 1948 until 1994, many in avoidable famines. We shall return
presently to the horrendous death toll of the apartheid wars in southern Africa.
It was widely known that South Africa possessed nuclear weapons from 1975 at the
206 Boyle: 25 Years On, S. Africa’s Slain Biko Sets a Standard, 2002; Thomasson: South Africa’s Biko Left
Chained for 24 hours - Police, 1998; Woods: Biko, 1978
207 Pigou, Piers: Monitoring Police Violence & Torture in South Africa, Paper presented at the International
Seminar on Indicators and Diagnosis on Human Rights: The Case of Torture in Mexico, convened by the
Mexican National Commission for Human Rights, April 2002; Pauw, Jacques: Into the Heart of Darkness:
Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1997
208 Mandela 1995 (1994): 274ff, 304ff; Thomas: South Africa Wrestles with Past in Apartheid Museum, 2001.
On the involvement and support by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for the apartheid regime’s
intelligence agencies in the 1962 arrest of Mandela, who had gone underground in South Africa, and which
almost led to his execution, see Blum: The Men Who Sent Mandela to Jail, 2002.
209 Schuettler: ANC Guerrilla Regret Deaths, Seek Amnesty, 1998
210 Ibid.