In September of 1977, shortly before JM Coetzee penned his first draft of Waiting for the Barbarians, a prominent anti-apartheid activist, Stephen Biko, was tortured to death in police custody in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The case sparked global outrage not only against the South Africa’s apartheid regime, but also against the use of torture.
At the time, Biko was considered to be “perhaps the only South African leader who could claim to have the mass support of the young radical urban blacks” (Eric Abraham The Guardian Sept. 14, 1977). Since the Soweto uprising of 1976, the anti-apartheid movement had gained momentum that would build through the next decade and ultimately bring an end to South Africa’s apartheid state. As one of the most outspoken early leaders of the movement, Biko was thus a seen as a threat by South Africa’s apartheid government.
Biko was arrested at a roadblock checkpoint on August 18th 1977 and taken into police custody for breaking a travel ban. When he was reported dead, three weeks later, the Port Elizabeth police claimed that he had died of a hunger strike. His autopsy report however soon revealed that he had died of a severe brain injury. Later investigations showed that he had three lesions on his brain that led to a massive brain hemorrhage on September 6, one week before he was reported dead.
Details of his torture soon came out, including that he had been beaten against a stone wall, beaten with a hosepipe while shackled, naked, in a spread-eagle position, to a grill. As the police in his cell individually denied causing his death, the full details will never be revealed. The event of his death called attention to the use of police torture against perceived enemies of the state and anti-apartheid activists held in cells around the country under Section 6 of the 1967 Terrorism Act, which allowed indefinite detention without trial for the purposes of interrogation in solitary confinement.
The methods of torture such as suffocation, electric shock, sexual abuse, sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures, starvation, etc. were used by South African police under the Terrorism Act. While proof of these methods wouldn’t be officially verified until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 1998, knowledge of these tactics made its way into public imagination in the 1970’s; and it certainly made its way into Coetzee’s imagination, as he meditated on the dynamic of the torturer and their victim and dramatized this dynamic in his novel, published in 1980.
