03 | Boycott! | Uprising

How South Africa won their freedom from the racist Apartheid regime and the Australians who helped them fight for it. A new leader emerges in South Africa, a young man with radical ideas. Steve Biko’s ‘black consciousness’ movement inspires a generation. His murder at the hands of authorities is a moment of reckoning. When the children of Soweto township are forced to study in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressor, they rebel and set the country on fire with their resistance. Hundreds of them are killed by the regime. Steve Biko’s murder in a prison cell sparks a wave of militant activism, as the government doubles down with more violent raids and arrests. And an Australian diplomat gets swept up in the conflict.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  It's 1976, South Africa, and we are only just emerging from what's called "the lost decade", a decade of silence and oppression at the hands of the apartheid government. The African National Congress, the ANC, the main black opposition to the apartheid regime, is still banned. Its leaders are all still in jail, including Nelson Mandela. But there's a slow burning flame, a renewed rumbling of dissent.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  The students had been taking part in a peaceful demonstration against the use of Afrikaans as an official language in the classroom.

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  A new generation is rising, and South Africa's about to explode.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  The bullets pierced the crown. Thousands of students scattered as police fired live ammunition. It was Soweto, June 16, 1976.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  One of the student protesters is Walanga Kozza. That's his voice you hear singing. Walanga is a young man, part of a new movement of black activism, a movement that will change the course of our history.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  But back before Walanga becomes a student leader, before he marches onto the street in protest, back when he's just a little boy, Walanga's growing up in a small village in the rural north of South Africa, shaped by poverty and loss and injustice.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  I grew up in a village called Shiluvana, and Shiluvana in Xhosa means "little flower".

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  Like so many black South African children, he's living with his grandparents because his mother is a live-in domestic worker in the home of a white family. Walanga's grandparents are farmworkers, and he's expected to do his share.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  So we used to look after cattle, goats and sheep. That was my daily life. And whenever we visited their relatives who lived far away... There was no transportation except walking. And it was great because it was always accompanied by song, you know, from my grandmother, from my grandfather, or whoever we were travelling with.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  It's a wonderful gift, the gift of song. And it's something Valanga will carry his whole life.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  When he turns six, Valanga moves back in with his mum and eight siblings in a township called Zanin so he can go to school. They live in a tiny, tiny house in a very poor, segregated area, one of the dumping grounds of black workers set up by the apartheid government.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  My mother is working very hard, but the pay doesn't really go very far, you know, paying for the rent, feeding us.

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  As he gets a bit older, Valanga really wants to help his mum with those bills. So, in the school holidays, he travels 400 kilometres to the big city, Johannesburg, to work. And while he's there, he stays with a friend of the family in Alexandra Township.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  But as a village boy, Alexandra is very scary, very, very scary. But I had it in me to act like I was a local, you know, like I watched how people walked, how they dressed and all that, you know, because I had to survive.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  The apartheid regime controls the movements of black people by forcing them to carry passes. Valanga's not even old enough to have a pass. But in Alexandra, far from home, he's constantly worried about being caught by the police.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Like about four o'clock, three o'clock in the morning, you know, they would come and kick the doors, like, you know, to check people who did not have the right to be in Alexandra, to be in Johannesburg. And so I had to hide because I didn't have that permission.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  He finds a job in a metal factory making electric tubing and bicycle frames.

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  Very noisy, sounds of metal,

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  but you know what? At the end of the school holidays, I had enough money for my school fees, school uniform, and also school textbooks, and also to help my sisters and also my mother.

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  So how old were you at the stage when you went to work in the factory in Alexandra?

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  I think I would have been around nine.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  I would have been around nine.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Valanga is too young to name this feeling he has in his gut. But there's a fire sparking deep inside, a simmering sense of injustice. For himself and for all black children raised in poverty, traveling impossible distances away from their families to work. For his people, who are tired of being harassed and beaten and silenced. Valanga's generation will harness that ember of outrage, and they will revolt. On the 16th of June, 1976, they will take to the streets and say enough. I will not sit by and watch the apartheid regime strip my people

• 5:41Speaker 01

  of the few rights they have.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  I'm Sisongem Simang, and this is Boycott, the fight to end apartheid. Episode three, Uprising.

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  To understand how South Africans ended apartheid, to know what happened to create that magical day when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison after 27 years, you need to understand the youth of 1976 and the black consciousness movement that created them. This new generation finds its inspiration in a young black man from a poor family in the eastern Cape. His name is Steve Biko.

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  Black people, they need to defeat the one main element in politics which are working against them, the psychological feeling of inferiority, which was deliberately cultivated by the system.

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  In the 1970s, no one will do more to rattle apartheid than Steve Biko.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  But back in 1966, when he's 19 years old, Steve moves from the Ginsburg township to Durban to study medicine at the University of Natal. On the first day of semester, he's wandering around campus, lost, when he bumps into a young Indian guy, Yogan Mudliyar.

• 7:11Speaker 05

  I was checking out the campus and walking down the street was a gentleman who said, "I'm Steve. Where's the director's office?" And I said, "Well, let's go." And we met Mr. Lucas, who was in charge, and he registered Steve Biko and said, "Well, given that you know each other already, you might as well share the same dormitory," which we did.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Yogan spent his whole life living in a segregated Indian community. His dad's a lawyer, and his family runs a small restaurant at a busy bus terminal. Yogan will go on to run the ICU at Sydney's biggest hospital. And Steve Biko, he will become the face of a movement.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  But back then, they're just fresh-faced young men with the whole world in front of them.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  I actually went to school, to an entirely exclusive Indian school. So we had no opportunity to meet members of the other ethnic groups in South Africa. And it was the first time that I was actually exposed to the learning environment with African students colored.

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  It's a huge achievement for both these young men to earn a place at the University of Natal. It's one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in South Africa. But there's a catch. Steve, Yogan, and the other non-white students are kept completely apart from white students. Their campus is in an awful part of town called, get this, Happy Valley.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Despite this, Yugen's stoked to be making a new friend, especially one who's as cool as Steve.

• 9:00Speaker 05

  Steve was a meticulous character, not only in dress, but in appearance, in style, in mannerism, talking. In sporting, he was good. In having fun, everybody wanted to be around him because he would generate an argument with seriousness and it would be funny in the end.

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  Yugen's pretty impressive in his own right. And together, they're a force. They both get super-involved in student politics, specifically with the National Union of South African Students, NUSAS. But there's a slight problem.

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  We found out there were only white students in this organization. And we were the only two black people there, representing 243 students. It became obvious that we've got a battle up our sleeves here. We've got liberal white students who had a good heart for us, but they were part of the system in keeping us where we were.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  What Yugen means is that the white students have no idea that they're part of the problem. And it all comes to a head when they travel to a NUSAS conference, only to find they're not allowed to stay in the same accommodation as the white students.

• 10:22Speaker 05

  We were segregated, not only physically from the rest of the students, but to find our own accommodation and also food supply. And it became obvious to us that we were secondary-class students within the main student body.

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  So Steve and Yugen start their own organization, one for black students. And they call it SASSO, the South African Students' Organization. They are more than aware that separation is their enemy. Separation under apartheid has dictated their whole lives, where they live, who they can be friends with, where they can sit, where they can eat, because apartheid literally means apartness.

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  Steve Biko and his comrades decide they're gonna do it differently. And so, the Black Consciousness Movement, capital B, capital C, is born.

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  We must change the way people viewed us. He made it quite clear that we were not anti-white, but that we had to fight for our own freedom.

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  Before Black Consciousness, resistance to apartheid was organized along racial lines: Indian, colored, and African. Biko and his comrades reject that. They say Black Consciousness is all about an inclusive definition of blackness, that anyone who isn't white is black. And he calls this idea political blackness. To call yourself black is to celebrate, it's to claim blackness rather than to try to run away from it. But it's also controversial, because it explicitly says to white people, "Back off, you have to stay in your own lane."

• 12:22Speaker 01

  The last time we heard from Baba, my dad, was back in episode one. When the African National Congress was banned and went underground, so did he. Baba joined the ANC's Revolutionary Army, M Konto Westizwe, and he escaped South Africa to study armed guerrilla warfare in Russia. But when Baba and his comrades returned to a training camp in Tanzania, all fired up, it doesn't take long for their revolutionary bubble to burst.

• 12:53Speaker 06

  We had been given to understand, we of the ANC, that within a year, we would run our way home to South Africa. And there was really excitement about that. I think it was naivety, but it proved to be quite costly, because people kept on wanting to know when they would be going to the front line. We were trained, we're going to go to South Africa and fight there, you know, and prepare the ground for the revolution.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  But the ground isn't ready for revolution. South Africa's apartheid government is killing and kidnapping revolutionaries based in neighboring countries.

• 13:33Speaker 06

  And it became clear at a certain time that our inability to go to South Africa is making people like myself and others quite restless, quite frustrating.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Still, Baba manages to carry out missions. In 1967, he's part of the leadership that sends a group of 80 men into what is then Rhodesia. It's a joint operation of liberation forces from Zimbabwe and South Africa. They fight three battles, but they are outnumbered and outpowered. They make a heroic effort, but after losing a few men, they realize they're not going to make it, and the group retreats. By the early 1970s, Baba's living in the capital city of Zambia, Lusaka, where the headquarters of the ANC in exile is based. And it's here that something very exciting happens.

• 14:29Speaker 06

  So when I met your mother, and she came from Switzerland, one of the things that happened, I mean, we're really excited to meet girls from home.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Oh, you were excited to meet girls who had the South African touch.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Of course, in the 1970s, the most crucial thing happens, which is my birth. My two sisters are born not long after, and Baba decides it's probably time to put his responsible hat on, find a career, and keep freedom fighting as his side hustle.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  He goes back to uni to study, of all things, entomology, the study of bugs. The ANC really looks after its freedom fighters. It supplies groceries, it helps them study, and every now and then Baba carries out a mission. But most of the time, he's just Baba, the most fun dad ever, taking us along with him to look for insects, carrying us on his shoulders as we walk through the markets, looking for joy in the small things. Because Baba's never lost sight of the fact that fighting for freedom means just that:

• 15:57Speaker 01

  being free to tickle your kids and kiss your wife and tease your mates. Back in South Africa, in the absence of the two older activist groups, the PAC and the ANC, this new Black Consciousness Movement, the BCM, keeps gaining steam. In 1975, it organizes a bunch of university campus rallies, celebrating the independence of neighboring Mozambique from its colonizer, Portugal. And the apartheid government does not like this, not one little bit. Police crack down hard on the students.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  There are raids, arrests, and detentions. By now, Steve Biko has spent so much time detained by police that he's been kicked out of university, so he's not arrested. But he is banned. It's kind of a bizarre term. I mean, banned? Banned from what? Banning is one of the favored tactics of the regime, and journalist Benjamin Pogrand sees plenty of it. The Minister of Justice would simply issue

• 17:11Speaker 07

  A piece of paper served on you, which would have varying degrees of severity. You couldn't write anything for publication. It was an offence for anyone to publish you. You couldn't be with more than one person at a time. You were not allowed to enter a factory, a university, a school. You had to remain within a certain geographical area. At its worst, you were house arrested 24 hours of the day. You had to report to the police once or twice a day, go and sign the book. Steve did not obey the orders.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  These banning orders only make Steve Biko more popular, and they certainly don't stop him from his activism. He becomes even more popular when the state prosecutes the organizers of the rallies on terrorism charges, and Biko appears as the defense's secret weapon, its star witness. Shaun Jacobs grew up in South Africa and is now professor of international affairs at the New School in New York City.

• 18:13Speaker 06

  And the genius thing that Steve Biko did was, over a bunch of days while he went there, he used the opportunity to basically expound on what does black consciousness mean? What is its critique of apartheid?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  It really is genius. Because as a banned person, he can't speak or publish his views. But his words in court, they can be widely reported, and they are. Like Mandela, a decade earlier, Biko uses this platform to educate. He speaks to the white judge about racism. He explains why black is beautiful, and he outlines why foreign firms should cut economic ties with South Africa. It's a masterclass.

• 18:59Speaker 06

  But to have this opportunity to just stand there in court and basically speak, make it very clear that it's a nonviolent movement, of black people having to rely on themselves to free them.

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  And that they are not merely just sort of waiting for when the white minority or members of the white minority with good intentions are trying to tell them how to conduct their struggle.

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  His eloquent rage carries across the country and young black people are electrified. Biko articulates their pain and he spells out how the lives of black people are only getting worse and worse.

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  Nowhere more so than in Soweto.

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  Soweto, the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg, the bleak dormitory town for the black workforce.

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  Soweto is the largest and oldest black settlement in South Africa, and it's described this way by whites.

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  It's almost totally lacking in amenities such as tarmac roads, public buildings, parks, and even cinemas. What it does have is row upon row of small box-like houses, most of them without baths, hot water, or electric power.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  For us, Soweto is the heart of urban black South Africa, a place of intellectual, cultural, and political sophistication. But when it comes to education, the situation is dire. Journalist Benjamin Pogrand is writing lots of stories about Soweto.

• 20:34Speaker 07

  Teaching was inadequate. Teachers were very poorly trained. Facilities were hardly existent. I'd go to schools in Soweto, a primary school, and I'd walk in and the building had an earth floor. There were no benches. There were the form benches, just open benches, which were used as desks. The kids were kneeling on the floor and using this as desks.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  In 1974, the government made a diabolical announcement. Every single thing black students will learn will be taught in Afrikaans, a language most don't understand. Shaun Jacobs. People were, of course, not happy with this because for a lot of students who spoke, like, say, KwaZulu-...

• 21:23Speaker 06

  Africans is like your third or your fourth language. How can you learn like a subject like math or science in a, in a language you don't speak at home? So the result of that was going to be, uh, more people would fail. Beyond that, it's a language of the state. It's the language in which people are given orders, in which the police give you orders. And then on top of it, there is a way in which you are saying that the languages that they speak, but that these people are speaking is not worth it. And then finally, they did not consult, they didn't consult anybody. And so in that context, what happened was this kind of blew up.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  By June 16th, 1976, it's clear that the state is going to implement this new language policy. So just a month after Steve Biko steps off the witness stand, Soweto explodes. A small group of high school students, inspired by Biko and led by a young man called Tsietse Mashanini, decides it's going to protest.

• 22:31Speaker 06

  They wanted to plan a peaceful march through the township. And then they started the march, they were singing songs, they were, the songs were very explicit about, you know, we don't want Africans. They were linking it to Bantu education. And then they encountered the police. There was like a standoff, the police fired tear gas at them, they released dogs, and at some point the police used live ammunition.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Bongim Kabela is another one of the student leaders in Soweto, and she's there that day too.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  We must have been 30 minutes or so into the march when we had the first canister of tear gas thrown at us. And for the first time, we saw army vehicles. Now, these were really terrifying contraptions. And at that point, it was just live ammunition.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  We all had to, to run and

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Hide and get into houses and families. Absolutely worst moment for me personally was when when the news came that a little boy of 13 had been killed. One of the first people shot that day is 13-year-old Hector Peterson. The defining image of the Soweto uprising is a photo of Hector in his school uniform, his lifeless body carried in the arms of a strapping 17-year-old boy called N'buyisa. A little girl runs alongside them, also in her school uniform. She's Hector's sister, Antoinette. Like Sharpville, it's a defining moment. The moment the day changes

• 24:11Speaker 01

  from a student protest and becomes a massacre.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Hector Peterson is not the only child who dies that day.

• 24:24Speaker 05

  The riots of June 1976 were the worst South Africa had seen since the Sharpville shootings 16 years before.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  It began as a protest against using Afrikaans in black schools, but it soon developed into a much wider expression of black anger. Hundreds died in the violence.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Ah, the passive voice of the media. Hundreds died in the violence. Let me just rewrite that for you. Hundreds of black students murdered by police. That's better. The official figure is 176 dead. But we all know an apartheid regime can't be trusted to count the number of people it's killed. The real number is far, far higher.

• 25:17Speaker 07

  The journalist estimation was probably at least 1,000. There were stories of bodies being carried away in trucks at night. The country became ungovernable for a while.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And it doesn't end there. It takes the government a year to contain the unrest.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  By 1976, Valanga Kozza is no longer a little boy working in a metal factory, singing his way through the streets. He's all grown up in his first year at university. And with that fire in his belly that's been stoked since childhood, he joins the protests. Valanga's feeling lucky to have survived them. But then come the raids.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Of course, the university was raided by the army and the police with dogs as well. And R1 rifles moving from room to room and beating up students. And somehow, my name was known that I had taken a stand. And the great thing, and I think you would have come across this, Sissonke, is that there's local black police people. Some followed the apartheid regime, but others were committed to their community. So one of the policemen went and warned my mother that, hey, your son, we are going to come on Saturday looking for him. Tell him not to stay here. We are coming to raid your house.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  And that's how I knew what was happening.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Valanga disappears from campus, and he hides at his friend Sis Ellen's place in Alexandra Township, half a day's drive away. And he keeps organizing. Many black students are completely boycotting school. And now, student leaders are trying to convince parents to join the protests. If they stay away from work, South Africa's economy will grind to a halt.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  And we're all talking to say, what are we going to do? How do we close off the outlets from the townships to encourage the parents not to go to work, to take a stand as well, to boycott work so that the government would get the message? And of course, Sis Ellen's house was raided. And that's when I got arrested.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  And at this time, thousands of young people across South Africa were being arrested. The streets really were quite, things were very, very tense.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would be lying if I said I wasn't terrified for my life. It was my first day arrested.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Three policemen come to arrest Valanga.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Two were white and then one was black. And for some reason, the white policeman did not want the black policeman sitting with them at the front. So they threw him in the back with us, you know.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  The absurdity of apartheid.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we tried to talk to him as well as when being driven to the police station. But he tried to ignore us, basically.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Valanga and his comrades are taken to John Foster Square, the notorious police headquarters in Johannesburg. The security branch is located on the ninth and 10th floors of that building. Activists are regularly tortured, killed, and thrown out of its windows.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  And we arrived at the police station. So the black policeman jumps out of the back of our ute. And then the two white policemen run to the office. And Sissonke, yeah, this is where I say Amalozzi, our corner. Our ancestors work in miracles. As they run towards the office and the black policeman is running to go help, they haven't shut the back of our DV van.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, the petty wagon. They have left it open.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Vele Amalozzi, we're watching you guys.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then we stepped out and walked towards the gate, which was closed.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And we walked towards the gate. There's a guard, he opens and shuts the gate. I think he'd never come across anything like this. So we are coming, well, these young people, they must have permission to walk, you know, because they're not running, they're just walking.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they're not accompanied by any police officer.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they're not running. So we walk and then he opens the gate.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  And he lets you out?

• 29:45Speaker 03

  And he lets us out.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  When we started to run, I ran so fast that I I find it hard to believe that Usain Bolt would have beaten me.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  It's a small miracle. Valanga's been lucky, but he knows the police will keep looking for him. So, like my dad 15 years earlier, he has no choice but to go underground and leave South Africa. He buys some forged documents, and with the help of Bob Marley, he escapes across the border into Swaziland.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  There was meant to be a very big festival in Swaziland. Harold Melville and the Blue Notes were coming there.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Bob Marley and the Wailas, Peter Tosh, someone knew someone who were selling very dodgy documents, but these documents worked, you know? So I managed to buy one, you know, through some connections, and I joined those people going to see Bob Marley.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  For some reason, Bob Marley never makes it to that concert, but the spirit of his music gifts Valanga an excuse to cross the border.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  So I ended up in that refugee camp. I thought I was young at the time, but Sisongke, there were young people.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Shame.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Very, very young people.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  And they had all left, they all left after June 16?

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and some of them had been arrested and tortured.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  In the months after June 16, 1976, thousands of students stream out of the country, just like Valanga. It's the second wave of black activists seeking refuge from the brutality of their home country. And this one is much, much larger.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Steve Biko stays in South Africa, continuing the struggle on the home front, still banned by the apartheid government. For the last few years, he's been in and out of detention for organizing events and protests and for writing articles the government doesn't like. But now, he doubles down. He keeps talking. He keeps going to meetings. This is the moment of mass defiance he's been pushing for for years. Biko's name has come to represent the struggle. Journalists, academics, even foreign diplomats listen to what he has to say. One man who's tuning into Biko is a young Australian diplomat, Bruce Hague.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  He arrives in South Africa just weeks after the Soweto uprising, which I cannot begin to imagine. And he works out very quickly just how volatile this situation is. Bruce is young and earnest, and I'm not going to lie, he's kind of intrepid. So he decides to find out for himself what is really going on in this country. He drives 10 hours south to King Williamstown, where Steve Biko lives. Biko's house is bugged, of course, so he can't talk freely at home.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  So we drove out into the countryside and sat out under a tree. And he asked me in detail about Australia, but about Whitlam's dismissal.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  I love this. Here's Steve Biko, banned and fighting against apartheid, and he's right across Goff Whitlam's dismissal. They have a long conversation. Bruce Hague is the first foreign diplomat to meet with Steve Biko. And over the next year, he keeps talking to Biko whenever he can, until one morning.

• 33:51Speaker 05

  I was on my way back to Pretoria and I decided to call in and see a friend of mine. And went to his house and rang the doorbell and he came and he was ashen and he looked like, well, he looked like something had happened in his own family. And I said, what's wrong? And he said, Steve Biko is dead.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  This is South African journalist Max Duprio. And a warning, what you're about to hear may be distressing.

• 34:19Speaker 05

  On the 18th of August, Biko ignored his banning orders and drove to a political meeting. He was arrested at a roadblock and taken to the Sanlam Building in Port Elizabeth. He was kept naked and in chains in room 619. Biko sustained serious head injuries during interrogation. In that state and still naked, probably to humiliate him, he was taken by a police van to Pretoria. Steve Biko died naked and on the metal grill on September 14, 1977.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  When his university roommate, Yogan Mudliar, hears the news of Biko's death, he's devastated.

• 34:59Speaker 05

  I was in the city of Durban, already working as a doctor in the major teaching hospital there. And when the news came through that he was dead, I just froze.

• 35:18Speaker 05

  My wife and I understood the context of all of this. And I remember telling her, if they can do this to this man,

• 35:32Speaker 05

  there is no point in trying to reason with this white population here. It is impossible to convince them of their utter ignorance and stupidity to kill a man of an intellect on the basis that he was a terrorist. There was not an ounce of terrorism in the man. So I told Abby, my wife, I said, I'm going to make an application to leave.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  The Minister of Police announces that Biko has died of a hunger strike. But no one believes that. A postmortem later confirmed Biko had died of extensive brain damage.

• 36:18Speaker 05

  For millions of blacks, he'd been a hero, and they saw his death as murder.

• 36:25Speaker 05

  When his death was announced as a result of being in custody, the then-forster said, "Oh, his death leaves me cold in the Afrikaans."

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Twenty thousand people attend Biko's funeral, and the casket is left open. His family wants the world to see how he really died.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  It's utterly heart-wrenching. A son, a brother, a friend, this funny, loved, beautiful man has died. And along with him, the hopes of so many black South Africans.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Throughout the 1970s, South Africans of conscience keep spilling out across the border. One of them is Biko's friend and biographer, the journalist Donald Woods.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  He was banned. He couldn't work as an editor, as a journalist. He was generally being harassed consistently by the security police. His daughter had been sent a T-shirt with acid in it, which had caused her burns. Shots had been fired into his house.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  When Biko is murdered, Woods knows he also needs to leave. He finds an unlikely ally. Bruce Hague, the junior diplomat, helps him devise an escape plan, without the knowledge or permission of the Australian Embassy. Clutching his unpublished manuscript of Steve Biko's biography, Donald Woods disguises himself as a Catholic priest and hitchhikes across the border into Lesotho.

• 38:07Speaker 05

  I picked him up at the border. He was worried about the South African police.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  Chasing whatever vehicle he was in and picking him up and so on. Because they'd done that before. So he thought in a diplomatic vehicle, it might give him some cover, some protection. I had diplomatic immunity. And, you know, in a situation like that, if you can't use it to positive effect, then you may as well pack up and go home.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Bruce's actions are a powerful reminder that if the official line doesn't recognize the truth, you should follow your own moral compass.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  While Bruce is ferrying woods across one border, Valanga is still in Swaziland, but he's also doing lots of border hopping. According to his official papers, Valanga is a refugee who's studying, but he's actually working closely with ANC freedom fighters like Baba, smuggling South African political refugees to freedom.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  I guess with my big mouth, I speak to different people and all that. So I would organize transportation to either ferry some boy to the border of Swaziland and Mozambique, or the other way, go to Oshuk.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  It's dangerous work. The apartheid police and military are everywhere.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  One day, Valanga finds himself in a car with two other comrades, an older man and a young woman called Zenzile. They're both highly skilled guerrilla fighters. So Valanga's feeling safe. Suddenly, they come under fire from the South African Defense Forces.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  And as we got ambushed, then we jumped out of the car and we're all running in different directions. And I found myself, I didn't realize that I was running towards where the fire was coming from.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Zenzile pushes Valanga away from the gunfire. But then...

• 40:07Speaker 03

  She's the one who got shot.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Basically.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  There's no time to stop. Valanga has to keep moving, or he'll be killed too.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  So he keeps going, and he makes it across the border. But he never forgets Zenzile.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  In honour of the life given to me by Zenzile, I gave, you know that in Zulu, the name Zenzile gets given to a daughter.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  That's right. A beautiful name.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, when my son was born, I said, "He's going to be Zenzile."

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Oh, that's beautiful. Wow.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  So my son is named after Zenzile.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  In the years to come, the young people of 76 continue to pour out of South Africa. And the exiled community our family is part of in Lusaka is there to welcome them. They infused the liberation movement with energy and militancy.

• 41:15Speaker 06

  Here was a bunch of young people having tackled the monster in South Africa, justified them and faced bullets and so there was no doubting their commitments to the revolution. And these are the people who gave the new umph to this struggle.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  The new exiles are younger than my parents and the others who left in the 1960s. They're mostly teenagers. They're cool and they're fun with big afros and larger-than-life stories. We start having these weekend camps and I love them, learning all the freedom songs and how to gumboot dance. The gumboot dance is an incredible story on its own. You know, mine workers wear gum boots and the dance plays with the sound. It's worth looking up. These young freedom fighters are amazing, but they're also traumatized by the violence they've survived and by the pain of leaving their friends and families.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  They imprint on my heart and they teach me that in the face of cruelty, joy itself is a revolution.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Next time on Boycott, activists around the world dig in. A young shop worker in Ireland refuses to sell a South African grapefruit with epic consequences. And once I said that I was going to continue to boycott the goods, I was told... I was suspended indefinitely. And that was the day that the strike started. And a black bishop in purple robes galvanizes a global community as he literally puts his body on the line to fight apartheid.

• 43:04Speaker 06

  The day anybody can show me that the Bible supports apartheid, that day, I will take my Bible and tear it into little strips.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  This has been a Rewind production for ABC Radio National. I'm Sisong Msimon. Catch you next time.

• 43:28Speaker 00

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