Steve Biko inquest: Funding granted for family’s legal team

The state has secured funding for Steve Biko’s family’s legal team, clearing the way for the reopened inquest into his death in apartheid police custody to proceed nearly 50 years later.

The inquest could not get underway in the Gqeberha High Court on Tuesday, however, after the family’s newly appointed lawyers asked for more time to prepare.

Biko’s family had been without legal representation until Monday, when justice and constitutional development minister Mmamoloko Kubayi approved funding for the legal team.

This followed Legal Aid telling the court that Biko’s widow, Nontsikelelo, had failed its means test and that it had no funds to pay for her lawyer.

The court questioned whether such a strict means test was appropriate in a case of this nature.

With the legal team appointed less than 24 hours earlier, family lawyer Ngqiqo Sakhela applied for a postponement, saying they needed time to review the record and prepare for the proceedings.

He said the family was entitled to prepare properly, and that this meant working through a large volume of material, including the record of the original inquest and the TRC hearings.

“This case is about the interest of the family,” Sakhela said.

Sakhela said parts of the record were in Afrikaans and would have to be translated at the family’s expense.

Documents from the 1977 inquest into Biko’s death and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings that followed are missing.

He said Adv Tembeka Ngcukaitobi SC had offered to represent the family for free before the inquest was postponed last year.

That offer fell away when Ngcukaitobi was appointed an acting judge of the Constitutional Court, leaving the family in what Sakhela called a “predicament”.

The lawyers who had been lined up to work with Ngcukaitobi took on other matters while the funding issue dragged on, leaving the family to find a new legal team.

Sakhela also asked the court to subpoena former Security Branch operative Craig Williamson, who was not on the original witness list but told the Cradock Four inquest that he had kept Biko under surveillance.

Two former police officers named as persons of interest are also due to testify. Both are alive and in their 80s.

State advocate Devendran Govender did not oppose the application, saying it was in the interests of justice for Williamson to be called.

Retired judge Isaac Madondo is expected to rule on the application on Wednesday.

Biko’s son Nkosinathi said the family should not have spent the opening day of the inquest arguing over money.

“It is undignified,” he said.

He said he had kept his mother away from that argument.

The NPA reopened the inquest in September 2025 to allow the court to determine whether Biko’s death was caused by an act or omission that amounted to a crime.

The matter has since been postponed repeatedly, mainly over who would pay for the legal representation of the two former officers.

Police stopped Biko and Peter Jones at a roadblock near Makhanda, formerly Grahamstown, on August 18 1977 and arrested Biko for allegedly breaching banning orders that confined him to Qonce, formerly King William’s Town.

He was taken to Walmer police station, where he was allegedly held naked, shackled in leg irons and tortured. Police only called for medical help on his 24th day in custody, after foam was seen coming from his mouth.

On September 11 1977, Biko was loaded unconscious into the back of a police vehicle, still naked and shackled, and driven 1,200km to a prison hospital in Pretoria.

He died the following day. He was 30.

The first inquest into Biko’s death, held two months after his death, heard the Special Branch’s version that Biko had injured himself by banging his head against a wall.

The presiding officer accepted that account and cleared the doctors who had treated Biko in custody.

On February 2 1978, the then Eastern Cape attorney-general decided not to prosecute anyone.

In 1997, Harold Snyman, Daniel Siebert, Jacobus Beneche, Rubin Marx and Gideon Nieuwoudt went to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission seeking amnesty.

They claimed Biko had swung a chair at one of them and hit his head as they wrestled him to the ground.

They admitted they had agreed on a version of events and submitted false affidavits during the original investigation.

The TRC rejected all five amnesty applications, finding that their accounts were inconsistent.

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