THE MAKING OF GODZILLE
How Biko exposé put steel in Helen's spine
WHY DID HE DIE?: Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness Movement
THERE are a few events in the course of any journalistic career that are of seismic significance. You never forget where you were and what you were doing when the news broke. You know that something has happened that will change the course of history, although you don’t know exactly how.
One such event occurred on September 12 1977.
The dour and ironically titled minister of justice, JT Kruger, announced that the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko, who had had such an impact on my own thinking, had died in detention “after going on a hunger strike”.
The minister implied that Biko had starved himself to death. Everyone knew that the minister was lying. So did the minister himself, but his incapacity to grasp the enormity of the situation and his palpable disdain for the life of a black man were captured in one of the most callous four-word statements ever made: “It leaves me cold.”
It is in situations like this that the quality and courage of a newspaper’s editor really matter. Allister [Sparks] was determined that we would get to the truth. Some 33 years after this episode, he gave a comprehensive account of how we did so in a speech at a faculty seminar on ethics at the University of the Witwatersrand Medical School. The purpose of the seminar was to discuss how to address ethical issues in complex professional contexts — something that medical personnel do on a daily basis.
So do journalists. Allister summarised our response to Steve Biko’s death by saying: “We knew we had to get to the truth — but how?
“It was a story crying out for investigation, but there was nowhere to start. All the facts were secreted behind prison walls and impenetrable security legislation. No one had had access to Biko since his arrest 26 days before his death. The only independent person near him was his friend and fellow activist Peter Jones, who had been arrested at a roadblock with him, but Jones was still in detention and therefore inaccessible.”
On the morning of September 29, the breakthrough came. The distinguished pathologist Dr Jonathan Gluckman called Allister, saying he needed to speak to him urgently. Allister describes Gluckman as one of the “backroom heroes of the struggle for justice in this country” who preferred to work in “the darkest corners of the apartheid state — its mortuaries” — dissecting cadavers because “that’s where the truth lies”.
And the truth was recorded in the pathologists’ report signed by both Dr Gluckman and the chief state pathologist, Professor JD Loubser. In black and white it said: “Cause of Death: Brain Damage.”
Gluckman swore Allister to secrecy, but said he felt compelled to show us the report because he feared a cover-up was being planned; the story of the hunger strike was being concocted to avoid an inquest, he believed. So he had taken a decision to force the truth into the public domain. But he told us to ensure that his role in revealing it was never known.
“It was a conundrum,” wrote Allister. “I knew the truth with absolute certainty, and it was obviously in the most profound public interest that I should publish it. But how could I do so when I was bound not to reveal the source of my information?”
This conundrum is common in journalism. “But never before in my career had the conundrum been so tightly drawn — the need to publish so imperative, yet the difficulty of doing that so great and the implications so dangerous in the prevailing authoritarian climate.
“My first decision,” Allister wrote, “was that I had to publish, come what may.
“My next decision was to call in Helen Zille. She was a young reporter but I already had a high regard for her level of accuracy, backed up by verbatim shorthand and Afrikaans snelskrif. This was before the days of portable tape-recorders and we could afford no mistakes or allegations of misquoting. We needed an accurate record of what was said. So I judged Helen to be determined and smart with a political savvy that I thought would enable her to think on her feet in what was obviously going to be a helluva tough assignment.”
This accolade is the highest I received as a journalist, and I treasure it, particularly in the context of the personal and professional trauma that followed Allister’s decision to “call me in” to cover the story.
He sent me to Port Elizabeth to interview anyone who might have had contact with Steve Biko in his final days, starting with the doctors. With some detective work, I managed to track down two district surgeons, Ivor Lang and Benjamin Tucker, as well as a specialist physician, Colin Hersch, who was also called in to examine Biko when the security police suspected he might be feigning illness.
My question to the doctors was simple: Could they confirm that Steve Biko had died of a hunger strike? If not, why did he die?
I started with Lang, because he was the first doctor who had seen Biko in his cell in the Walmer police station, naked and shackled to the grille, in a semi-conscious state.
I found out that Lang lived on a smallholding outside Port Elizabeth, and managed to find it in my small hired car (there was no GPS in those days). My heart was always in my throat for such crucial confrontations. I knew that the “interview” would probably be over within seconds, but in that time I would have to get the information I needed.
As I approached the house, I noticed that the top half of a stable-style door at the side was swinging open. I came closer and saw the profile of a tall, balding, beak-nosed man making himself a cup of tea, in the company of two enormous, eerily silent dogs. Maybe they were accustomed to people coming and going on the smallholding, but I nevertheless found it strange that they did not bark as I approached.
My mission was to confirm that this man was indeed Dr Lang, and then ask my question before — as I suspected would happen — the door was closed in my face.
“Dr Lang,” I said, as I knocked on the door. He swung round, with the dogs silent sentries alongside him. “Yes,” he said, still unaware who I was. As he approached the door, I introduced myself and asked my question in the same sentence.
His demeanour changed. “Get off my property,” he said in a low, menacing growl. “Get off my property.” The dogs became visibly agitated. “Get off my property before I let the dogs out.”
I turned and walked away. I had asked my question and I had my answer. If Biko had died of a hunger strike, Dr Ivor Lang would have had no problem in confirming the minister’s version of events. His panicked, aggressive defensiveness spoke volumes.
Next I had to track down Benjamin Tucker, the more experienced district surgeon called in after Lang, who could not determine for sure whether Biko was “shamming”, as the security police suspected. I tracked Tucker down to his office. My memory of this interaction is less clear, but it also took place at an open door. Once again, I did not make it over the threshold before the door was closed in my face, but I had landed my question and again received a response that spoke louder than words.
Then I moved on to Dr Colin Hersch, a specialist physician, who had also been called in to determine whether Biko was “shamming”. I went to his suburban home, and when I introduced myself and asked my question, he responded differently. He asked me in. We sat in his lounge and he offered me tea. I told him I needed to confirm the minister’s statement that Steve Biko had died of a hunger strike. The affable, whitehaired physician stared ahead of
It was a story crying out for investigation, but there was nowhere to start. All the facts were secreted behind prison walls and impenetrable security legislation
From Page 14 him, visibly conflicted. He told me it was a dreadful case, but that he was under instructions not to talk about it. He would not go further than to confirm to me that Biko was not emaciated when he died; slightly overweight, in fact. The minute I had that, it was as good as confirmed that Steve Biko did not die of a hunger strike. I thanked Dr Hersch and left.
I also tried to interview the police who had seen Biko in his last days. They were polite but showed me the door the moment they knew who I was.
I went back to report to Allister. No doctor had said in so many words that Biko did not die of a hunger strike, and they certainly did not say that he had died of brain damage. But especially from Dr Hersch’s account I could state categorically that he showed no signs of having died of a hunger strike, and that there was far more to the story that we would still have to unearth. It was essential to force an inquest.
We carefully crafted the story, which began: “An investigation by the Rand Daily Mail — which included interviews with doctors who examined Steve Biko in detention — has revealed that the black consciousness leader showed no signs of a hunger strike or dehydration.”
We went on to say that Biko had died of brain damage, and that the facts we had unearthed contradicted Kruger’s statement implying that Biko had died of a hunger strike. We published the report under a banner headline: No Sign of Hunger Strike — Biko Doctors.
We did not use quotation marks because the three Port Elizabeth doctors had not said this in so many words, although I had been left in no doubt that this was accurate after my discussion with Dr Hersch. Gluckman, of course, was also a “Biko doctor”, but we were committed not to reveal his identity.
We knew our story would reverberate, but even I was surprised by the earthquake that followed. When I arrived at the office the next morning, the place was in uproar.
Kruger had become apoplectic, and was threatening to ban the paper. He protested that the report was false and demanded an immediate hearing of the Press Council that very day. The Press Council was a body set up by the Newspaper Press Union, the proprietors’ organisation, to ward off Prime Minister John Vorster’s threats to pass a press control law if newspapers did not discipline themselves.
Allister refused to be rushed. “The rules of the Press Council allowed an editor seven days to prepare a response to a complaint and I didn’t want to be bullied by Kruger into abandoning that right,” he wrote.
The National Press Union piled on the pressure to force Allister to accede to Kruger’s demands, saying that if a censorship law was passed, it would be laid at our door for failing to show that the Press Council could work fast.
Allister records the incident in his lecture as follows: “It was my first direct experience of the double whammy of government pressure and unsympathetic proprietors which had driven my two predecessors from the editorial chair of the Rand Daily Mail and which was, in time, to drive me out as well, and eventually to shut down that great newspaper altogether just as its moment of vindication was at hand.”
So the Press Council hearing started that evening, before Mr Justice Oscar Galgut. Sydney FORCED AN INQUEST: Above left, one of the Rand Daily Mail’s frontpage exposés on Steve Biko’s death written by young reporter Helen Zille, above right. It contradicted the apartheid state’s claim that he had died because of a hunger strike
I could state categorically that Biko showed no signs of having died of a hunger strike, and that there was far more to the story
Kentridge, then a distinguished senior counsel in Johannesburg, argued that the minister had not contested any of the facts in our report, simply claiming that the headline didn’t accurately reflect the body of the report because we had not actually quoted a doctor as saying those exact words. Our argument, that the headline was not in quotation marks and therefore not intended to convey a direct quote, made no impact on Judge Galgut.
He rejected Kentridge’s argument BACKROOM HERO: Dr Jonathan Gluckman, the pathologist who revealed that Biko had died of brain trauma after being tortured that this was “syntactical trivia” that didn’t warrant an urgent late-night hearing and the waiving of the Press Council’s rules. It was the accuracy of the facts in the report that mattered — and Kruger had not challenged them.
Galgut found in favour of Jimmy Kruger. He found us guilty of “tendentious and misleading reporting” but also, paradoxically, that the facts disclosed in the report did not contradict the minister’s initial statement on the issue, which had been about Biko going on a hunger strike.
As with many of apartheid’s contradictions, these findings made no sense.
Judge Galgut delivered his verdict at one in the morning and ordered that we stop the presses to publish his statement in that day’s edition of the paper. We had to publish, on the front page, Judge Galgut’s finding that our exposé of the circumstances of Biko’s death the previous day was “tendentious and misleading”. mother, who sat motionless in the gallery throughout each day, dressed in black from head to toe. A regal woman of great beauty, grief etched on her face, she heard how her son had been manacled and transported, naked and unconscious, from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria in the back of a police van in urine-soaked blankets, while the police accused him of “shamming”. I sat looking at her face, wondering how she was processing these words, and how powerless she must have felt to have been unable to help her child in his hours of greatest need. That feeling still haunts me today, perhaps because I have two sons of my own.
I was still looking at her face when Magistrate Marthinus Prins concluded the inquest with these words: “The head injury was probably sustained on the morning of September 7 during a scuffle with security police in Port Elizabeth. The available evidence does not prove that death was brought about by an act or omission involving an offence by any person.”
My fury was magnified by her monumental grief.
“Not Without a Fight: The Autobiography”, published by Penguin Random House South Africa (R380)