Steve Biko

7. Detentions, banishment and international engagement

118 7 Detentions, banishment and international engagement There was a crackdown in the King William’s Town area. One month after the Soweto Uprising, on 15 July 1976, Mapetla Mohapi was arrested and detained at Kei Road police station under the Terrorism Act. He died in detention three weeks later on 5 August. This was a tremendous shock. It was alleged that he hanged himself with a pair of jeans. It was clear that he hadn’t. The post-mortem was conducted by Dr R.B.R. Hawke, a pathologist, in the presence of two doctors, Dr Ramphele and Dr Msawuli, who were themselves then detained on 13 and 29 August respectively under the Internal Security Act. Biko was detained on 27 August, and Mvovo,Mpumlwana,Mbanjwa and Mtintso in the same month. Mohapi’s widow, Nohle, ran the office for four months until they were all released in December, when Mtintso was banned to Johannesburg and 119 Mvovo to Dimbaza. In March 1977 Mpumlwana, now married to Thoko Mbanjwa, was held under Section 6 of the Terrorism Act for another four months. At the beginning of April, Father Stubbs was stopped by police on his way from Port Elizabeth airport to a local church where he was to preach on Good Friday; he was body-searched and ordered to strip, an indignity Biko thoroughly disapproved of. In the same month, Ramphele was banished to the northern Transvaal. She was removed, suddenly and swiftly, from the BCP offices in Leopold Street by the police, only having time to grab her handbag, and driven over 1200 kilometres north. Within days of her arrival, having been told where she was to work in a particular hospital, she realised that the number on the warrant for her arrest and banishment did not coincide with her Reference Book. Even her name was spelt wrongly. She rang her lawyer, Raymond Tucker, who agreed this made her banning order null and void. Her young brother, Thomas, had just arrived to see her. ‘All she said was, “Good! I’m glad you’ve come. Now we’re off,” bundled him into the car and drove the 200-odd miles to Johannesburg.’ At 4 a.m. Ramphele and Father Stubbs left St Peter’s Priory in Johannesburg and drove to the Zanempilo Centre, arriving twelve hours later. Great reunions, but only for ten days, before the system, slightly embarrassed, 120 got its act together and banished her again for seven years. In those few, defiant days Hlumelo Biko was conceived, to be born after his father’s death, miles away in Lenyenye, where Ramphele, having refused to work in the place assigned to her, began to establish the remarkable clinic of Ithuseng.After the long detentions of 1976 the State continued to break up and destroy the carefully established network all over the country by consistently removing people. Staff in the office and at the clinic went down to a minimum, the column in the Dispatch ceased. The signs were ominous and the State was menacing, but there was nothing to do except carry on. Peter Jones,who was an activist in theWestern Cape region of BPC in 1975–6, was asked by Biko to come and help manage the office in King William’s Town. He had been part of a team, including Mpumlwana, Mvovo and Thandisizwe Mazibuko, who travelled widely to enlist support for the campaign to protest against the government’s move to make the Transkei an ‘independent’ country. By now it was conceded by a growing political consensus that the Black Consciousness Movement was ‘the least contentious’ of the political organisations to attempt some kind of unity of focus for all the liberation movements in spite of the fact that the planned meeting between the banned organisations had had to be postponed 121 Biko (right) accompanied by Donald Woods (left), editor of the Daily Dispatch, who gave the Black Consciousness Movement a column in his newspaper to put across its viewpoint. 122 in December 1975. ‘The relationship with anyone outside [the country] was based on the nature of the relationship we had with people inside the country,’ says Jones. By 1977 these ‘people were very close to us. There was no credibility problem. And because of Steve’s quiet position he [was] the best placed to personally promote it.’ In...