Biko inquest subject of film

Press, 12 September 1987, Page 23

Biko inquest subject of film

In the dark hours of September 12, 1977, tortuously huddled on a sodden mattress in the prison hospital in Pretoria, South Africa, Steven Bantu Biko died. He was 31.

He died cruelly, crippled by every symptom of a ruptured brain. After 10 years his ghost will not depart.

It has returned again and again to haunt the South African Government and to stir the anger of liberally minded white South Africans as well as the outside world’s most bitter critics of apartheid. Biko’s death while in the hands of the infamous South African Special Branch Security Police caused a furore at the time.

Talk of clumsy coverups and outrageous professional neglect and disinterest by three doctors who dealt with the black leader’s injuries resulted in ' the South African medical profession being thrown into internal conflict.

Medical organisations around the world ostracised the South African medical bodies for their apparent mute compliance with police brutality. Eventually an inquest inquiry was held. Its findings exonerated the police interrogators and their compliant medical aides.

“The Biko Inquest,” the late-night film tonight (Saturday), at 10.15 on One, is a version of that hearing. The full transcript of the inquest found its way out of Africa. Two Lon-don-based campaigning TV men obtained it and vowed to turn it into a vehicle for public “exhibition.”

The result for Jon Blair

and Norman Fenton was their script, “The Biko Inquest,” intended by’ them to be performed live.

That script dropped on to the St James office desk of Richard Johnson who was grappling with the problem of finding a suitable launching piece for his new baby: the talents’ consortium United British Artists. “We all admired that script as soon as we had read it,” actor Albert .Finney explains. “The words needed no acting help to tell their harrowing story. It needed the finest kind of actor: one who could act at not acting... could give the illusion of spontaneity and Immediacy.

“The enormity of it all was there in the fabric of the lines. As you listen you realise they are speaking about a human creature, being reduced to a vegetable that couldn’t speak or function properly because someone had kicked his brains out. “Words like that don’t need pushing.”