The NP went about untangling what little pockets of integration and proximity there were between White, Black, Coloured and Indian people by creating new residential areas, new parallel institutions such as schools, universities and administrative bodies, and indeed, new ‘countries’, the tribal homelands. Biko and his peers were responding to developments that emerged in the high phase of Apartheid, when the Nationalist Party (NP), in power for almost two decades, was restructuring the country to conform to its policies of separate development. It was Biko, along with others who guided the movement of student discontent into a political force unprecedented in the history of South Africa. Thus it was that Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) came to prominence and although Biko was not its only leader, he was its most recognisable figure. This was the period in which both the ANC and the PAC had been officially banned and the disenfranchised Black population (especially the youth) were highly receptive to the prospect of a new organisation that could carry their grievances against the Apartheid state.
Stephen (Steve) Bantu Biko was a popular voice of Black liberation in South Africa between the mid 1960s and his death in police detention in 1977.
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