NATE SA

The physically battered body of Bantu Stephen Biko lay in a mortuary near East London in South Africa 🇿🇦 at the time of his post-mortem, 700 miles from the place of his incarceration by the apartheid white security police, shortly after his death on 7 September 1977. As the South African government continued to propagate lies that Steve Biko had died while on hunger strike, an undercover journalist secretly took the photo of Biko's body and sent it to Britain. The photo bearing Biko's battered face confirmed to the world that the anti-apartheid student activist had been beaten to death while in prison. It later emerged that while in police custody, Biko was stripped naked, shackled to the wall, and severely beaten on the head by his interrogators. As a result, he suffered three brain lesions that resulted in a massive brain haemorrhage. According to an autopsy, an "extensive brain injury" had caused "centralisation of the blood circulation to such an extent that there had been intravasal blood coagulation, acute kidney failure, and uremia".