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Tag: apartheid
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48 years after Steve Biko died in police custody, South Africa to reopen probe into anti-Apartheid icon’s death
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Johannesburg — South African activist and anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko died almost five decades ago at the age of 30 in police custody. Family members and others who saw his body that day said he was tortured and killed by South African police, and that he had not died from the effects of a hunger strike, as officers claimed at the time.
Prosecutors announced on Friday that they would be reopening a formal inquest into Biko’s death, exactly 48 years to the day after he died.
Biko, a liberation leader who founded and led South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, became one of the most globally recognized victims of the apartheid era following his 1977 death in a prison cell.
The country’s National Prosecuting Authority, in a landmark decision, confirmed it would reopen an inquest to allow judges to rule on whether an offense had been committed.
SOWETAN/THE SOWETAN/AFP/Getty
Nobody has ever been held to account for Biko’s death, and several police officers requested, but did not receive, amnesty for their alleged involvement during the hearings of South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
Biko was arrested at a roadblock in what was then called Grahamstown, now Makhanda, in August 1977. He was accused of violating a so-called “banning order,” a measure in the apartheid-era’s racial segregation laws that allowed authorities to restrict the movement of individuals deemed a threat.
Twenty days after his arrest he was driven over 600 miles, naked, with his legs in shackles in the back of a police vehicle, to Pretoria. He died in prison the day after arriving.
According to reports from family members and others who saw his body soon after he died, Biko was brutally tortured by apartheid regime police during his incarceration and eventually died of a brain hemorrhage.
The only government inquest into Biko’s death was carried out in 1977, decades before the end of apartheid rule, and a judge came to the conclusion that no one was to blame.
But his death was met by an international outcry, and calls for sanctions against the apartheid government and its leaders helped fuel the global movement against the racist regime.
Biko’s life was immortalized in music by Peter Gabriel’s “Biko,” just three years after his death, and then again by reggae dancehall artist Beenie Man’s “Steve Biko” in 1997. Denzel Washington played the anti-apartheid icon in the 1987 Hollywood movie “Cry Freedom.”
STF/AFP via Getty
Five former police officers from the South African regime’s feared Special Branch testified at the TRC that Biko had attacked one of their colleagues with a chair, and that during an ensuing scuffle to restrain him, he hit his head against the wall, causing his death.
They admitted under cross-examination, however, that they had colluded and submitted false affidavits during the initial 1977 investigation.
“My dad was a very healthy man, and we know he died of a severe brain hemorrhage,” Biko’s son Nkosinathi Biko said in an interview this week with the broadcaster Newzroom Africa. “During the TRC process it was clear under intense cross-examination that one of the men admitted that they grabbed his head and rammed it into the wall which caused his death. They were denied amnesty at the TRC because of course they lied.”
The TRC, which conducted its work between 1996 and 2001, recommended more than 300 cases for prosecution by the National Prosecuting Authority. To date, no one has been prosecuted for those alleged apartheid-era offenses, however, leaving many families, including Biko’s, frustrated.
“It’s very clear that the history books of this country need to be corrected,” Nkosinathi Biko said in the interview. “The body of my father is a living testament to his last minutes and the torture and violence that was visited upon him. We should by now have dealt with these matters 30 years into our democracy, and it should have been handled better.”
Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty
In April, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa ordered an inquiry into whether previous governments had intentionally blocked investigations and prosecutions of apartheid-era crimes.
The National Prosecuting Authority has been under pressure to bring formal charges for apartheid-era crimes allegedly committed by individuals who did not receive amnesty through the TRC process, as well as to bring accountability and answers to unresolved cases of gross human rights violations during the apartheid regime.
Nkosinathi Biko said his father’s legacy was about giving and investing in a shared society, and he said setting the record straight was a vital step forward for the nation.
“I think that our sense of triumph, our sense of healing, rests in the prosecution, which is necessary in the inquests,” he said. “But it also rests in ensuring that we correct the history of this country and we accentuate the value of human life and human dignity.”
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Google Fires 28 Workers Who Protested its Contracts With Israel
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Google says it terminated 28 employees associated with protests of the company’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contracts with the Israeli government on Wednesday. The firings follow the arrests of nine Google employees for trespassing in the company’s New York and California offices on Tuesday during an hours-long sit-in protest.
“A small number of employee protesters entered and disrupted a few of our locations,” said a Google spokesperson in an emailed statement to Gizmodo. “We have so far concluded individual investigations that resulted in the termination of employment for 28 employees, and will continue to investigate and take action as needed.”
Google claims these protests impeded other employees’ work and prevented them from accessing facilities. No Tech for Apartheid tells Gizmodo that 19 of the employees fired on Wednesday did not directly participate in the sit-in protests, but were associated with the movement.
“This flagrant act of retaliation is a clear indication that Google values its $1.2 billion contract with the genocidal Israeli government and military more than its own workers,” said a No Tech for Apartheid spokesperson in an emailed statement. “Google workers have the right to peacefully protest about terms and conditions of our labor.”
In a memo sent to all employees on Wednesday, shared by The Verge, Google’s head of global security, Chris Rackow, said “behavior like this has no place in our workplace.” The memo also claims the protestors defaced Google’s property and “made coworkers feel threatened.” Rackow concludes his message by telling employees to “think again” if they expect Google to overlook conduct that violates its policies.
A Google spokesperson tells Gizmodo the cloud computing contracts at the center of these protests, Project Nimbus, are not directed at highly sensitive military workloads related to weapons or intelligence services. However, Time reported last week that Google provides cloud computing services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The report claims the tech giant has recently negotiated a deeper partnership with Israel during the war in Gaza.
These 28 workers are not the first Google employees to be fired for protesting the company’s contracts with Israel. They join Eddie Hatfield, a Google software-engineer who was fired after disrupting an Israeli tech conference by yelling, “No tech for apartheid!” while a Google executive was speaking.
There’s some discrepancy over why these workers were fired. Google listed “bullying” and “harassment” as the reasons for the worker firings. However, No Tech for Apartheid allege their protests were peaceful, and claim the workers themselves feel bullied by Google’s response.
No Tech for Apartheid’s protest represents an increasingly loud voice within Google and Amazon opposing big tech’s cooperation with Israel. The movement’s New York protest gathered over 100 protesters on Tuesday and reportedly dozens more in Sunnyvale, California. The movement claims to have the support of “thousands of colleagues” within Google and Amazon. Organizers say they will continue protesting until the company drops Project Nimbus.
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Maxwell Zeff
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Until Everyone Is Free: My Jewish, Anti-Zionist and Antiracist Journey Toward Collective Liberation
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I grew up half Jewish and half Italian-Catholic. I made jokes about how these different identities left me mostly confused. Had Jesus risen again or not? I thought I had to choose one side rather than celebrating all the parts within myself, so I almost erased my Jewish half. I learned how to make risotto, but not matzah ball soup.
Christianity is the dominant culture in the United States and obscures the other religions. People would always say Merry Christmas to me, assuming everyone celebrated it, assuming it was the only holiday. I unconsciously accepted that and embraced my Catholic heritage more. I learned gospel hymns, but never learned the Hebrew blessings sung on Shabbat.
In addition to being stifled by Christianity’s dominant force, I also grew up internalizing sexism, striving to be like the men I deemed superior, by playing jazz and chess, composing music, reading philosophy, being stoic, and working hard.
Weighed down by sexism from without and within, I was unaware of the ways I was also part of oppressive systems. In undergraduate jazz school I was so anxious about playing equally to men that I didn’t wake up to systemic racism. I took a jazz history class, where I learned about the racism Black musicians endured, but that felt like history, miles away. I couldn’t see my white privilege because I only noticed how inferior I felt to my male classmates.
It wasn’t until I was 30 that I realized I had spent most of my life trying to prove I was as good as men, and this had distracted me from other issues. It wasn’t until I was 32, when I made a joke about Jewish people, that my Jewish friend let me know what I said was antisemitic.
“But I’m Jewish!” I said, stunned.
It turns out antisemitism is everywhere.
Even inside me.
In my thirties, when I finally uncovered the side of me that was Jewish and uprooted my internalized antisemitism, I found the joy of being Jewish: dressing up for glittery Purim events in Brooklyn; going to a feminist, antiracist synagogue; and connecting to a community of inspiring Jewish activists. The more I learned about Jewish traditions, the more I realized there was so much of Judaism already flowing through me without me even knowing: my connection to the moon, my eco-spirituality, my humor, my animated hand gestures.
As I became in touch with the Jewish part of me that was lost and erased, I also learned about the Israeli government’s erasure and deliberate killing of a large amount of Palestinian people. US media and Zionist culture declare that Israel and Palestine are in conflict, it’s complicated, and there are two sides. But 5,590 Palestinians were killed from 2008-2020 compared to 251 Israelis killed. Human Rights Watch has declared Israel to be guilty of apartheid and human rights crimes. Israel has the largest army in the Middle East, funded by the US government’s aid of 3.8 billion dollars a year. Hamas, meanwhile, has rocks and rockets that are easily intercepted by Israel’s military system. Israel is the one with the power, and their government uses it to oppress and kill the Palestinian people.
My Grandma had always talked about her love of Israel, and I absorbed that without any questions for too long. The truth of Israel’s aggression was hidden in plain sight.
Just as I first had to embrace Judaism within myself, and then awoke more to the antisemitism around me, so I learned about Zionism and Israel’s mass killings of Palestinians. The uncovering never ends, just like my battle with sexism delayed my awakening to racism. Different oppressions conceal other oppressions. Until they don’t anymore. Until we wake up from our individual struggles and realize how the system wants to keep people separated.
The veil that kept me isolated in my own struggle of sexism and antisemitism also became the path toward connection. Once we know there is a veil, we can then see through it, leading us to pursue solidarity with other causes. We can see how all the struggles overlap — that the Black Lives Matter movement is part of Palestinian liberation, part of queer and trans liberation, part of reproductive rights and feminism — that the intersection of all these injustices is where our community power lies.
When white supremacists stormed the capital on January 6th, some wore shirts that said “6MWE.” My stomach churned when I saw on Facebook what that meant: “6 Million Wasn’t Enough.”
I texted a friend: They’re talking about the Holocaust. They’re talking about me.
Some people hate me, which is sickening, and I am not going to hate or oppress anyone else. I know that it is, in the words of Jewish organization If Not Now, a “false choice between Palestinian freedom and Jewish safety.” The intergenerational trauma from the Holocaust has created an extreme militant Israeli government unable to see they are now harming others. Israel’s government is stuck in a pattern they feel is defensive but is actually violently aggressive. This round of Israeli bombing in May killed at least 256 Palestinians in Gaza, including 67 children, displaced tens of thousands, destroyed hospitals, schools, sewage systems, clean drinking water supplies, and the only COVID testing site. In contrast, thirteen Israelis were killed. That’s not Israel acting in defense — that is aggressive and violent, a series of human rights violations. When you bombard an area densely populated with civilians who are unable to escape, that’s a deliberate and horrific mass killing. That’s a war crime.
The more I dig into the rich and beautiful culture of Judaism, I learn that there is a long history of anti-Zionism within Judaism. The Judaism that I know and love wants basic human rights for all people. If Not Now states, “Palestinian liberation and dismantling antisemitism are intertwined … We will not be pitted against each other … We won’t be distracted from our fight for freedom and safety for all people.” No one is free until everyone is free, and that includes Palestinians oppressed under apartheid; Black, brown, and Indigenous people brutalized and killed by the police in the US; transgender people who are horrifically murdered; Jews experiencing hate crimes; and people in other countries fighting totalitarian and fascist governments. Our liberation is bound up in each other’s.
Still, some people try to link any opposition to Israel’s government as being antisemitic. As Palestinian-American writer and policy analyst Yousef Munayyer writes, “When people turn humanizing Palestinians into antisemitism, they not only enable the continued dehumanization of Palestinians but they also cheapen antisemitism by cynically weaponizing it.”
I, an American Jew, stand with Jews all around the world in protest of Israel’s government, because I know injustice, war crimes, human rights violations, and apartheid when I see them. I will fight for the rights of marginalized people until everyone is free.
[Feature image: Close-up of barbed wire with the golden Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem visible in the distance under a blue sky. Source: @RJA1988 for Pixabay.]
Mare Berger is a singer-songwriter, pianist, teacher, writer, improviser, gardener, and activist living in Brooklyn, NY. In April 2020 Mare released an album “The Moon is Always Full” featuring their original lyrics, songs and orchestration. You can buy Mare’s album here. Follow Mare @maremoonsong. Listen to music and read more of their writings at marielberger.com.
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Imogen Prism
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