12 September 2012

Biko

For their efforts, Helen Zille and Donald Woods lost their jobs. Zille left the Rand Daily Mail when it was forced to retract everything she wrote. From there she went into antiapartheid activism full time. Donald Woods was banned and eventually went to Britain. His book was made into a decent movie with Kevin Kline doing a horrible accent and Denzel Washington doing a pretty good accent.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As a former policeman in a country of law, i will say that given the obscurity of a suspect, torture does occur though few die of this.

most of the deaths while in custody, both in Canada and in Australia tend to happen to aborigines who are viewed by many policemen as semi human. royal commisions in both countries have confirmed this and then the reports are forgotten somewhere. as a bureaucrat which i also was, these reports were sometimes used to squeeze more money into a budgets or something. never as a morale touchstone. at any rate the indians and aborigines die all of the time in cells, still, usually of natural causes, i.e. heart attack. white people rarely die in cells. brown people have weak hearts and do not take well to beatings. white people have friends who also have cameras and phones etc.

I did not leave the police force because of this. I left to go to law school. I am not proud.