A courtroom in Gqeberha is trying to answer a question South Africa first failed to answer in 1977.
Steve Biko died on 12 September that year after suffering severe injuries in apartheid police custody. The original inquest assigned no criminal responsibility. No one was prosecuted. In 2025, the justice minister reopened the inquest so a court could consider whether any act or omission connected to his death amounted to an offence.
The hearing finally began taking evidence this week after repeated delays. Time has not preserved the case neatly. Witnesses have died. Records and parts of the original docket are missing. A family seeking truth must watch the state reconstruct what the state once had every reason to preserve.
The court has not yet made its finding. Christian reflection should not pretend to supply a verdict before the evidence is heard. But we can name what delay has already done.
Delay does not make truth unnecessary. It makes telling it more costly.
ScriptureAfter Cain tries to evade responsibility, God says that the voice of his brother’s blood is crying from the ground.
Genesis 4:10
Scripture refuses the politics of disappearance. Abel is dead, but he is not silent before God. Cain cannot turn time, concealment or power into innocence.
That matters in a country where reconciliation is sometimes confused with agreeing to stop remembering. Biblical reconciliation does not ask victims to call an unexamined record peace. The risen Christ himself carries wounds. Resurrection does not erase what violence did; it reveals that violence did not have the final word.
A reopened inquest cannot return Biko to his family. It may not recover every document or produce every consequence people hope for. Truth is not valuable only when it can repair everything.
It can correct a public lie. It can restore moral agency to those whom an earlier process treated as objects. It can warn institutions that records, testimony and accountability are duties owed to the living and the dead.
South Africans should follow the evidence without turning Biko into ammunition for today’s party battles. The question is larger than who can claim his name.
Truth arriving late cannot return the years. Refusing it now would make the delay permanent.
