Iconic autopsy: postmortem portraits of Bantu Stephen Biko.

Bantu Stephen Biko, one of South Africa's most famous sons, died at the hands of policemen on September 12, 1977. Soon after, an autopsy was conducted and photographs were taken. Images from this report were leaked to the South African press and appeared in newspapers on September 20. When journalists received the official autopsy report on October 26, South Africans, indeed much of the world, had confirmation of their speculations: Mr. Biko died of a massive brain hemorrhage due to blunt trauma on the left side of his head. Images from Biko's autopsy were periodically printed in South African news sources through the last quarter of 1977 as the state conducted an inquiry into his death. Over the next eight years, these pictures sometimes accompanied reports on efforts to censure state pathologists for their handling of Biko's medical needs prior to his death. Thus, through popular reproduction over a lengthy period, Biko's postmortem portraits reached a large and unquantifiable audience.

Like portraits made while he lived, images of Biko's corpse have become potent symbols for wider cultural notions about changing power relations, order and disorder, and conceptions of self within society. Julia Kristeva defines the corpse as the utmost of abjection. She famously wrote that it is "not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, and order. What does not respect boundaries, positions, or roles. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite" (1982:4). Since autopsies are performed when the cause of death is questioned, abjection, in all of its uncertainty, is inherent to the practice and its representation. When the pathologist's record images an important political activist who died at the hands of the State, viewers are compelled to explore personal notions of self and nation.

This article explores reproduction of Biko's autopsy portraits over a span of twenty years. During that time--1977 to 1997--South Africa underwent periods of internal censure, states of emergency, international boycott, and increased collective organization of anti-apartheid bodies, among other things. In 1994, the nation changed from widespread disenfranchisement to democracy, and a period of concerted reflection was undertaken through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Popularly reproduced and artistically appropriated throughout this time, Biko's postmortem portraits have terrifically extended their meaning beyond that of forensic inquiry. Often they can be read as both an emblem of State abuse and as forceful resistance to it. Sometimes their appropriation affirms the ongoing life of Black Consciousness, the very bedrock of Biko's identity and the philosophic principles for which he died. Works by five South African artists--Paul Stopforth, Ezrom Legae, Sam Nhlengthewa, Colin Richards, and David Koloane--are analyzed collectively here in an effort to understand how Biko's death has affected South Africans' sense of self and nation during a period of significant violence and political change.

Black Consciousness

Steve Biko helped found the South African Students Organization (SASO) and, between early 1969 and March 1973, traveled the country speaking at segregated black universities about its founding ideology, Black Consciousness. SASO officers spoke directly to the frustrations of their audience and clearly articulated a vision of self-defined aspirations and values that many had not heard before. The result was

   a level of political education and
   ideological diffusion never before
   achieved by any black political organization.
   To those in South Africa
   familiar with the course of African
   politics historically, it was evident
   that SASO in a remarkably short
   period had become the most politically
   significant black organization
   in the country (Gerhart 1978:270).

The groundwork of Black Consciousness was laid in the life experiences and political instincts of SASO's founders. They formally adopted and promoted a philosophy that recognized the personal and communal value of members and gave shape to the power they could collectively wield on economic and political fronts. As articulated by SASO's members, Black Consciousness had a wholly positive message. Personal dignity and unity among blacks were the first steps toward a society free of racial oppression, governed by Africans, "in which social, cultural, and economic priorities would be rearranged to make South Africa part of Africa once more instead of what it currently was--an extension of Europe into Africa" (Frederickson 1995:271-2).

Still actively promoted by many people, Black Consciousness is a state of mind, a mode of living. Its central aim is to renew a sense of self-worth within black South Africans in order to combat the racism that permeates their lives. It inspires pride in one's heritage, community, and self. This awareness enables people of color, all of whom are included under the "black" umbrella, to combat all forms of racism--from interactions between individuals to the once-institutionalized laws of the state--and ultimately force change in social, political, and economic spheres. Indeed, SASO resolved that "the emancipation of the black people in this country depends entirely on the role black people themselves are prepared to play" (Gerhart 1978:262; quoting "Resolutions Adopted at the 1st SASO General Students' Council," July 4-10, 1970, p. 2). Black Consciousness challenges the fundamental psychology of racism. As Biko put it, "At the heart of this kind of thinking is the realization by blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed" (1978:92).

Other ways of communicating the creed of Black Consciousness were pursued. In 1971, an important SASO grassroots offshoot was formed: Black Community Programs (BCP). The BCP reached many people through its medical clinics and self-help projects in townships and homelands. In July 1972, SASO leaders worked with representatives from some twenty-seven black organizations to form the Black People's Convention (BPC), which delivered the message of Black Consciousness to people beyond university campuses. Around the same time, SASO and the BPC established official links with the African Independent Churches Association (Gerhart 1978:294). SASO/BPC proceedings were covered extensively in mainstream and alternative newspapers and, though reporting was not always accurate, the leaders' courage to speak openly about oppression became well known. Their convictions and fearlessness were encoded in a symbol--the clenched, upraised fist--that was increasingly recognized by people beyond the university campuses where SASO began.

Fearful that Black Consciousness would fuel anti-apartheid sentiment, the South African government banned Biko in March 1973, restricting him to King Williams Town. His orders were like those received by all banned people: Among other limits, he could not converse with more than one person at a time; he could not work within the organizations he helped found; and his words and image could be neither published nor distributed. Biko subverted this last order by regularly writing an opinion column, which appeared until his death first in the SASO newsletter and then in the Daily Dispatch, under the delightful pseudonym Frank Talk. This was in keeping with other habits; it is said that he regularly broke his banning orders. (1)

The last such occasion occurred in August 1977. Returning from Cape Town, Bantu Biko and Peter Jones were stopped at a road block just outside of Port Elizabeth and taken into custody. In the en-suing three weeks their families and friends received no notice of their detention. By September 12, 1977, Bantu Stephen Biko was dead. Oddly, he was in Pretoria, some 1100km (679 miles) north of Port Elizabeth. His death while in police custody was a mystery. It prompted an international response. Pressures from home and abroad brought about the November 1977 inquest into the cause of his death.

On Autopsy Images and Their Popular Reproduction

Upon learning of Biko's death, the BPC issued a special press release that began, "Mr. Steve Biko is a picture of the violent police State that is South Africa" (Daily Dispatch 1977). This vision was widely accepted among blacks and leftward-leaning whites long before photographs of Biko's autopsy became available to the press. When the images were used as evidence at the November inquest, newspapers and journals around the world printed them.

For their original purpose, autopsy photographs are by-products of State discipline. (2) In them, the body is made object; it is forced to yield to the viewers' scrutiny, much as it did to the coroner's knife. Alienation is part of the aesthetic, even a "precondition of meaning" (Rugoff 1997:91). Despite this, autopsy photographs call for personal investiture by their evocation of mystery. We seek to understand the history that led to their making. Thus the meaning of the object imaged is inevitably contested and, in cases like Mr. Biko's, the arguments extend beyond the physical body and into the social sphere as order and disorder are questioned. The interpretative framework of the autopsy creates two bodies--the medico-legal body and the social body--both of which "define the corpse as a source of knowledge" (Hallam et al. 1999:88). Social readings of Biko's corpse are of central concern here.

In the state's archive, the image of Biko's corpse represented his utter vulnerability before the law. Symbolically, he was permanently detained. (3) This reading was reversed in popular reproductions of the autopsy photographs, wherein Biko's corpse became a symbol of strength because he was seen to have paid the ultimate sacrifice for a higher purpose. For example, DRUM magazine surveyed Biko's funeral in its November 1977 cover story (Fig. 1). The accompanying text urges viewers to uphold the principles for which Biko died, and it expresses profound anger over his death (Fig. 3). DRUM captioned each image as a "Moment" of one sort or another and called the autopsy photograph a "Moment of Reality." (4) In his text, Adam Small claimed Biko for the present:

   This is Steve Biko's measure of greatness,
   realistically, soberly: that he
   was one of the initiators in this place
   and at this time, of the black man's
   walking tall upon the streets of
   South Africa--walking tall, never
   to be bent again (1977:27; emphasis
   original).

[FIGURES 1 & 3 OMITTED]

Because sudden death is "out of time and out of place," those who grieve experience personal rupture to "their own sense of self" (Hallam et al. 1999:98). Their narratives about the deceased fulfill a personal need to reconstruct their own identities and establish a meaningful path for the future. DRUM's tribute to Biko, which prints an image of him alive alongside the autopsy photograph, relies on the living likeness to impart meaning about his death. The pair of images, which illustrate changes that might seem absolute (the living body is now dead), suggest that Biko's legacy can live on in readers, that they can live the principles of Black Consciousness for which he died. In this context, Biko is no longer the object of interrogation, but retains his personhood as subject, the model around which readers can reconstruct their sense of personal dignity and destiny.

Early Works about Biko and Black Consciousness

Paul Stopforth and Ezrom Legae created the first art works about Bantu Biko and these are still perhaps the best known. Both artists found symbolic purpose in aspects of Biko's history; both supported Black Consciousness; both were interested in boundaries, either conceptual or metaphorical; and both evoked Biko's humanist concerns in their art. Both artists' works from this period also remain clouded in the literature, which consistently emphasizes their relationship to Biko's specific history, rather than to the larger social contexts that they addressed. (5) Though both artists exorcised aspects of personal identity through their works, their responses to Biko's death advanced different objectives: Stopforth emphasized the prevalent abuse of detainees; Legae focused on spiritual renewal despite this violence. This distinction arose in large part from the artists' skin colors, with Stopforth eager to educate fellow white South Africans about violence against detainees and Legae, whose people needed no such education, expressing his response through metaphor.

Though racial ideas created very different realities for these artists (observable in their styles and the titles of their works), both worked beyond the confines of skin color to develop works that explore pain as a metaphoric index of their nation's sociopolitical condition. By emphasizing the sensation of pain, Stopforth provoked viewers to reflect upon their bodily experiences and ultimately upon their own mortality. In three separate bodies of work that express pain (only one of which is discussed here), he hoped to promote opposition to a nation that inflicted pain to control its populace. Legae, on the other hand, emphasized the transformative state of being that accompanies pain and, finally, death. His work thus projects the triumph, both personal and national, that is realized through commitment to a greater common good.

In 1979, Paul Stopforth met Shun Cherty, a lawyer who represented the Biko family at the inquest two years previously. By this time Stopforth was well known as a progenitor of protest art due to his previous work about abuse of detainees: Figures (1977) and a 1978 installation of two works, The Interrogators and Detainees. Chetty lent him autopsy photographs that were used in the inquest. The series that resulted--twelve works that are well known and have changed titles through the years--focus on the postmortem examination of Biko's corpse and emphasize the lower portions of his limbs (Figs. 2, 4-7). (6) To make these works, the artist painted translucent wax floor polish onto paper attached to boards, floated powdered graphite over the wax, engraved the details after it dried, and repeated this process ten to fifteen times in each work, thereby working the graphite into the pitted surface. (A strange metallic gleam resulted, one that does not reproduce easily.) Each work frames a small part of the body, encouraging close scrutiny of fresh scars. Because wounds are ready signs of pain, the series is essentially about pain and, in a larger sense, an appeal to white South Africans who either supported or ignored its infliction.

[FIGURES 2, 4-7 OMITTED]

The power of these works lies in their remarkable ability to communicate pain and torture, if not death. This is largely due to the close consideration of skin, a surface all viewers know well, a place where "pain, irritability, and sensation all reach their apex" (Elkins 1999:51). But the compositional arrangements and the glimmering, metal-like surfaces connote X-rays of bodily interiors. Uncertainty results: Does this work image the inside or the outside? The effect prompts us to question this boundary--skin--and with it personal subjectivity within violent systems of governance.

As the artist labored over each work, he created a "more intimate, more personal kind of space." (7) The images that result visually rise above the dark backgrounds; metaphorically, the body, fractured into parts, emerges from a murky depth that is clouded by questionable inquest testimony. Because the artist's technique achieves a visual quality that differs from its photographic source, the series effectively encourages a more thorough reading of the autopsy photograph as evidence. The works insist on an inquiry that delves beneath the surface (confined, as it can be, by the spectacular) and moves outward from the inside. The verdict is thus questioned and, with it, a society that refused to examine the violence of its infrastructure.

Unlike some protest art of this period, Stopforth's Untitled series requires our interpretation beyond what Njabulo Ndebele has called "the culture of spectacle" (1994) that dominated South African aesthetics from the mid-1970s through the 1980s. The history of this series includes a well-known episode that illustrates its political power and recalls Biko's belief that spectacularly violent events (and perhaps images that linger thereafter) can be politically useful. The following is one of Biko's most often-quoted statements, made just months before he died:

   You are either alive and proud of it
   or you are dead, and when you are
   dead you can't care anyway. And
   your method of death can be itself
   a politicizing thing (Manaka 1997,
   quoting Biko's interview with the
   British Broadcasting Corporation).

Stopforth's series was, and remains, "a politicizing thing." In 1981, two works (Figs. 6-7) were selected to travel to Chile for the Valparaiso Biennial. Stopforth renamed them Steve Biko and We Do It so that a Chilean audience would understand that South Africa was culpable for deaths in detention. These titles were too explicit for the funding body, the South African Department of Education (SADE), thus Stopforth was asked to change them. He chose Requiem for Allende I and II, thereby commemorating Chile's popularly elected president, Salvador Allende, who was murdered in the brutal coup of 1973 that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. Rather than risk offending its host, the SADE rejected these titles and withdrew Stopforth's work from inclusion in the Biennial. This event further confirmed the artist's well-known commitment to fight human rights violations and was in itself "a politicizing thing."

Stopforth created one last work from the autopsy images that Cherty loaned him. Titled Elegy (1980-81; Fig. 2), the work was made by the same scratched-wax technique, but the composition more fully articulates the sense of brutality than do previous works about abuse of detainees. The outcome here is certain: The body is a corpse. Fully figured and life-sized, it appears limp and manually arranged. Its torso is bloated with a lack of life familiar in the dead, and the handled surface beneath it can be nothing but a coroner's examination table. The title makes clear that this is a mournful composition.

A field of bright red surrounds the figure, a choice that incites different responses. Symbolically, it evokes bloodshed and, thus, violence, an obviously appropriate reading here. It commands attention, simultaneously asserting the picture plane and highlighting the contours of the central image. The latter dislocates the body from its surroundings; it appears to float. The figure seems to be lit from within, its strained flesh rendered in detail. All these compositional elements--uncertain space, hovering corpse, glowing interior beneath distorted skin--encourage the viewer to feel two forms of displacement, both of which arise from a sense of intrusion. On the one hand, we are unwitting examiners, and now accomplices, in the history elicited here. (8) On the other hand, we have stumbled upon the miraculous ascent of a martyr's body and spirit, a prominent theme of Western iconography. Such displacements were at the heart of Stopforth's pictorial decisions and allow him to powerfully disrupt detached viewing. Like the Untitled works before it, Elegy prompts viewers to contemplate their lives within what Stopforth once called "the reality of the South African situation: It was top to bottom, through and through, sickening, repulsive, and essentially evil." (9)

Ezrom Legae (1938-1999) was a superb draftsman who created two bodies of works inspired by Bantu Biko: Chicken, a series made between 1977 and 1979, with some additions in 1982; and Death of Freedom, dated 1979 to 1981. (10) The artist's choice of ambiguous titles suited the hybrid imagery he drew. The recurrence of specific motifs--fragmented parts of birds and humans, and a glowing orb--prompts metaphorical readings that ultimately become allegorical when taken as a whole. With broken bones and matted or swollen features, the chickens and humans may be regarded as tortured victims sacrificed for a greater communal good, be it religious or political. The orb motif is generally understood as either egg or sun, both symbolic of regeneration. Collectively, Legae's metaphors for torture, sacrifice, and regeneration become allegories for the strength of political commitment and its renewal in an ever-wider sphere of influence. Considered within their historical context, works in Chicken and Death of Freedom respond specifically to Biko's death, but their larger symbolic meaning asserts the renewal of Black Consciousness that followed this tragedy.

Legae's description of his metaphorical motifs is key to interpreting the works in these series as allegories to the strength of Black Consciousness:

   I used the chicken as a symbol of
   the black people of this country,
   because the chicken is a domestic
   bird. Now, one can maim a chicken
   by pulling out his feathers; one can
   crucify him and even kill him; but
   beware--There will always be
   another egg and always another
   chicken. If you remember in all
   these drawings with the symbolism
   of the domestic fowl, the spirit
   of Biko hovered and emerged even
   in the shadows, sometimes behind
   bars and sometimes free. And then
   watch out because that chicken suddenly
   became a vulture and the aggressor
   (Legae 1984:2).

As Legae described it, black South Africans are represented by "the domestic fowl," which, when caged and tortured, changes into the more aggressive vulture. These avian figures perfectly suit the "spirit of Biko," represented figurally but understood here as Black Consciousness itself, since they remain fertile despite their wounds, are peaceful until provoked, and are able to take flight toward new horizons. The three key motifs--avian, human, and orb--appear throughout Chicken and Death of Freedom, though typically in fragmentary forms that often share parts. Such fragmentation and hybridity produce ambivalence, a fundamental element of allegory, one that he says (referring to Fletcher 1964:151ff.) provides "its particular force" (Richards 1993:24).

Legae's artistic ambivalence registers quite differently from Stopforth's concretized pain. While both artists suggest that violated bodies have lost wholeness, with Legae one finds that such figures insist upon formlessness. In other words, pain cannot be represented; thus we undertake

   second seeing, [a] restless, nomadic
   way of looking that begins when
   [we] fail to find bodies or body
   parts....In the absence of bodies ...
   we embark on a search for body
   metaphors ... hoping to find one
   strong enough to rival an actual
   body in its solidity and permanence
   (Elkins 1999:6, 18).

An early work in the Chicken series includes a figure that evokes Biko's autopsy portrait (Fig. 8). The largest, and thus dominant, element occupies the lower third of the composition. An organic dark mass outlines a lighter form, within which one can barely discern swollen facial features at left: forehead, eyelids, and mouth appear to bulge outward by means of the dark lines that provide contour (Fig. 9). The lighter mass that extends right--read as a distorted body, perhaps--is too small for the head and swaddled in what could represent either a shroud or an embryonic sack. Thus the figure, representing Biko's spirit, is marked at once by the violence of his death and by the continued rebirth of his ideas. A bird's talons pierce the cloak/sack from above, and a hybrid figure, more bird than human, rises toward a barred window in the upper third of the composition. This figure is complexly rendered: It is an assemblage of bones, claws, legs, feathers, beaks, and eyes, all set at odd angles. Its complexity prompts further study, as does its proximity to the window, the bars of which match the darkened diagonal lines atop the form's head, read as such from the presence of an eye that looks directly out at the viewer (Fig. 10). It is a sorry bird. With broken bones and matted feathers, one imagines that its life is nearly over. Yet its determined gaze and amorphous shape suggest another outcome: It may slip through the window, carrying the spirit of Biko with it, onto a new existence beyond the confined and limited space of one man's cell.

[FIGURES 8-10]

Breaking the Silence: Biko's Postmortem Portrait in 1990

Sam Nhlengethwa created It Left Him Cold--The Death of Steve Biko in 1990 (Fig. 11), the same year that President F.W. de Klerk overturned many apartheid laws. The tremendous changes then under way empowered the artist to make a commemorative series honoring South Africans who suffered from state violence in the 1970s and 1980s. He considered it his "duty" to record "the truth" that had been censored under apartheid.11 Thus this well-known Biko work speaks to a moment of liberation in South Africa even though it records a time of deep repression.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

Nhlengethwa, who is well known for his collage technique, uses photographs from newspapers and popular magazines to reveal "facts" or "truths" about black life in South Africa. He believes that collage best expresses apartheid's "disorganiz[ing]" effect on blacks' self-esteem (Koloane 1994:13). The broken lines and fractured relationships epitomize the state's disruption of, and disrespect for, the lives of his subjects. In the spirit of Black Consciousness, Nhlengethwa

   [insists] on the factuality of the photographic
   image in the face of the
   fictions represented by township
   styles and contents....He [reclaims]
   ranges of experience which art of
   blacks in this country ... have not
   previously been in a position to
   access....[Nhlengethwa's work] is
   about owning and possessing reality
   and using it on its own terms in
   making art (Powell 1993:39).

It Left Him Cold--The Death of Steve Biko combines collage, pencil, and charcoal; the differences in material, mark, and perspective challenge the eye. The cell's dank interior contrasts the intense light of a hot September day as seen through a window and doorway. While the world outside seems teeming with life, the cell and its contents are eerily still. The foreground figure captures our attention in a composition that, despite its variance, does little to compel further study. We are visually arrested by what Nhlengethwa calls "Biko's portrait."

The portrait's head is a composite of six photographs taken at Biko's autopsy and reprinted in the popular press. Most interesting are the eyes and forehead. Nhlengethwa emphasizes the precise location of the fatal impact--the left side of Biko's forehead--by clipping and pasting its image twice to form a fully realized, though fractured, head. (Note the common lighting on the eyelids; they are separate prints of the same photograph.) The artist further accentuated the brutality Biko suffered by distorting the relationship of head to body and knees to shins. The boundaries of both are clearly broken. Finally, the image of Biko's body, which in no way resembles the physically strong person he was said to be, is a potent reminder of past and future vulnerabilities in South Africa.

Nhlengethwa conflated time and space by situating photographs taken in Pretoria, the site of the autopsy, within a cell in Port Elizabeth, the site where the fatal injury was sustained. Biko is thus depicted as both dying and dead. The temporal and spatial boundaries represented here are unstable and confusing, much like the changes afoot in South Africa in 1990. Thus Biko embodies the nation's past and its hopes for the future. Nhlengethwa visualizes a statement heard at commemorations in the 1980s: "Steve Biko is dead. Long live Steve Biko" (Latakgomo 1981).

It is unlikely that Nhlengethwa would have made It Left Him Cold--The Death of Steve Biko without the nation's reforms of 1990. Describing the 1970s and 1980s, he said,

   There was this fear that the system
   [could] victimize those who were
   either writing, visualizing, or [practicing]
   any act of the arts [that were]
   in any way political....[After de
   Klerk announced reforms in 1990]
   I said to myself, I need to do this
   in order to heal myself. I mean, I
   need to deal with these issues....If
   I were hesitant to do these kinds
   of pieces--like Biko, Sharpeville,
   etcetera--I would be getting this
   guilty conscience. But after I dealt
   with them I felt a bit healed. My
   spirit rested. (12)

Forensic "Truths": Relics, Recovery, and Reconciliation

Colin Richards created the installation Veils in 1996, his contribution to an exhibit called "Faultlines--Inquires into Truth and Reconciliation," staged at Cape Town's Castle of Good Hope (Fig. 12). Relics and the many desires they convey--mourning, transcendence, truth of existence--were at the heart of Richards's installation, which incorporated objects found, made, and once owned by the artist, each of which assumed the power of a relic. Repetition and its partner, ritual, were also key to the installation, enacted primarily through the re-presentation, or modified duplication, of photographic images first used in the 1977 inquest into Biko's death. That year the artist worked as a medical illustrator at the University of the Witwatersrand. In this capacity he was asked to examine autopsy photographs of Biko's corpse and label "swellings, contusions, abrasions, and cuts which were not always clearly visible" against varied fields of shifting tone, shape, and light (Richards 1999:9). Thus he readied the forensic photographs for publication and legal exhibition, among other things. By revisiting that experience in 1996, Richards achieved what he called recovery, a personal trial that involves both resurrection (rediscovery) and transcendence (covering up once again). Veils is an extremely complex work that can be broken into two parts, both of which intimately involved the artist: the Biko inquest and South Africa's military presence in Angola. Only those works that reproduce images from the 1977 inquest are discussed here.

[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]

Richards's installation situated the relic's duality--its testifying to truth and the uncertainty that accompanies its retelling--within the proceedings of the TRC, which relied heavily on objects and memory. Though many historians have reflected on the vital role of memory for the TRC (Hamber 1999; Holiday 1998), fewer have considered the commission's reliance on "factual or forensic truth"--the search for objects, which figured largely in the methodology of its Investigative Unit (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1999:110-14). Veils reflects on both aspects of the TRC's mission. Further, Richards chose to stage his installation, itself a reliquary of sorts, in the basement of the castle, a space that suits both relics and the TRC since it evokes at once death and its memorials (crypts and tombs are historically located there) as well as a sense of foundation, the historical structure of which was reconsidered by the commission.

The veil motif that Richards selected to frame the inquest images is based on the first Christian relic which, by name, purports to be true: the Veil of Veronica. Inspired by Francis de Zurbaran's c. 1635 painting The Veil of Veronica (Fig. 13) and Albrecht Durer's 1513 drypoint titled Sudarium Displayed by Two Angels, Richards painted the watercolor The True image (Veronica): Vera Iconica in 1994 (Fig. 14).(13) He later duplicated its arrangement in each of eight cloth works in Veils. Vera iconica is a Latin-Greek hybrid meaning "true image," and the Veil of Veronica, which is believed to "bear the direct imprint of Christ's face without the mediation of the human hand" (Richards 1999:6), is considered by some to be a species of photograph. Thus the Veil of Veronica is an ideal framework for an inquiry into the power of relics, the truths to which they seemingly attest, and to the popular presumption (even in our digital age) that photographs, particularly forensic photographs, likewise represent certain truths.

[FIGURE 13-14 OMITTED]

The medium through which Richards originally investigated the Veil of Veronica--watercolor--is also noteworthy in these contexts. Blending Walter Benjamin's ideas about photography's impact (1973) and Roland Barthes's notion of its implicit register of "flat death" (1981), Richards considers watercolor to be a form of "dead painting" (Richards 1999:8), one so labor-intensive as to seem almost pointless in the age of mechanical reproduction. It is, he writes, "the most fugitive of media ... [one that] requires a manual and temporal deftness which in an odd way apes--almost in slow motion--the work of the camera" (1997:82, 86). The artist's watercolors are intensely illusionistic and, as cousins to the inquest photographs, suggest that truth and memory are as labored and fleeting as the medium itself. In the 1996 installation, The True Image (Veronica): Vera Iconica was hung between two watercolors titled Sleeping Dogs Lie. The trio suggests that truths, whether embodied in relics or verbalized through testimony, must be examined lest they be left, or let, to lie. Their rhetorical purpose is therefore to counter silence, which Richards, and the TRC, further performed through repetition. The Veil of Veronica thus encapsulates the desire for truth that accompanies instantaneous replication, either miraculous or photographic. As a species of photograph heavy with the weight of human longing and, presumably, the blood, sweat, and tears of the world's most famous martyr, the Veil of Veronica perfectly frames a reconsideration of photographs first used as forensic exhibits in the 1977 inquiry into Biko's death.

Emphasis here is laid on Veil VII and Veil VIII, which reproduced photographs of Biko's body. But first a brief discussion of the other veils, all of which duplicated--via laser print on bed sheets--photographs (and one floor plan) of the cell in which Biko lay dying. These veils include the captions presented in court, which foregrounds their original purpose as evidentiary objects. Retaining their history was important to Richards; thus he included "peripheral or incidental visual information [such as] punch holes, staples, [and] misspellings in the typewritten captions" (Richards 1999:11). The captions are descriptive and do not reveal Biko as a subject, but viewers mindful of such details as dates and names will recognize the source of the images. (For instance, the caption to Veil I reads, "Possision [sic] in which deceased was found by Warders Wood and Koen on 11/9/77 at 07h05. Point C on Plan 3 refers.") The images record such things as a staged re-enactment of a position in which Biko was found the day before his death, slumped in the far left corner beside a bathtub, unable to move, and the cell's stained, dirty, chipped walls, dark corners, bars, and locks. Given the passing of time and continued public interest in Biko, such images and objects have gained a sort of reliquary status.

Veil VII (Fig. 15) and Veil VIII (Fig. 16) are quite different from the others. Most important, they image Biko's body, though it is so decontextualized that this is not evident. The image that is the basis for Veil VII is believed to be a dissection of Biko's hemorrhaged brain, and that in Veil VIII details cut skin seen so close that individual cells seem distinguishable. Richards added color to their reproduction--yellow and blue respectively--to mark the aesthetic discomfort that accompanies a shift from viewing architectural to human interiors. Installed in their own spaces rather than in sequence (Fig. 17), these veiled body images achieved a sanctity distinct from the veiled prison cell images. Finally, Veil VII and Veil VIII differed from others in that their captions are not original to their use as inquest exhibits; rather, both addressed the manifest obligations, and inconsistencies, of the TRC itself. The caption to Veil VII, an excerpt from Karl Marx's 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte (1852), reads, "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." (14) This suits the image and reflects on the great difficulty of deconstructing historical narratives, which was part of the TRC's project. The caption to Veil VIII, first spoken at the 1977 inquest by Mr. Retief van Rooyen, counsel for the police, reads, "the detainee had the appearance of a man where uh ... um ... where a veil had been dropped, and no communication was possible." This suggests that Biko had agency (he had dropped a veil, fueling the remarkable yet frequently stated belief that he was "shamming"; see Bernstein 1978) and that Biko himself "could not somehow existentially 'be' the truth" (Richards 1999:9). The caption foregrounds the presumption that objects, which inherently lack agency, testify to truths, while evidence writ on the body is always susceptible to its mutations, whether feigned or physical.

[FIGURE 15-17 OMITTED]

Holding cells, brain cells, skin cells: The composite effect of Veils, which positioned "cell" as both space and substance, encourage interpreting Biko, albeit a veiled subject, as a relic of State abuse. More than this, the images--and particularly those of Biko's corpse--brilliantly intersect with the artist's personal history (his own skin, one might say) through the use of domestic bed sheets, which once acted as membranes of a sort, enfolding and protecting the artist much as the membranous tissue of skin enfolds and protects us. The bed sheets thus act as metaphors of skin, and their folds, varied from veil to veil yet more or less the same, are in keeping with a surface that "we expect ... to be moderately complex, with a numerable set of kinds of invaginations and outfoldings" (Elkins 1999:59).

Because an image of a body's interior is considered "a powerful sign of death," historically it has been "considered too painful to represent" (Elkins 1999:109, 29). Wounds such as those imaged in Veil VII and Veil VIII reveal a lack of skin, the cure for which is "an excess of skin" (Elkins 1999:114-15). The layers of cloth that enfold Biko's autopsy images work as a curative device both in terms of excess and in their replication of an icon embedded with the hope for transcendence and humane gestures. While the inquest photographs retain a moral distance required of forensic illustration, their duplication on bed sheets, folded to reveal a human likeness, instills once more an intimate sense of personhood. This aspect, informed by the search for "a meaningful self" (Richards 1999:7), reconstructs presence in a genre--images of the dead--that is widely held to signify absence (van Alphen 2001; Elkins 1999; Barthes 1981).

Restaged in Veils, images of Biko's corpse exist as quiet relics, objects that testify to a truth and conceal it at the same time. Richards sees this duality within the TRC as well, as he does the composite desires inherent in the Veil of Veronica:

   In the TRC ... we find, through
   rough images drawn from ruined
   and ruinous recollection, unimaginable
   truths and unspeakable lies
   taking the same stand. We find, on
   the same stage, the sticky, bruising
   bile of bitterness and bad faith in
   collision with scarcely believable acts
   of human faith, mercy, and tenderness
   (1999:2).

The TRC undertook a project that aimed, in significant part, to recreate a sense of the past in order to unify a fractured nation. That Richards regards the imaging of skin, whether pictorially or metaphorically, as a partial reference to the nation was established in an earlier and unrelated project: "Mapping the skin, the surface of the country, involves more than transparent, isomorphic 'factual' description"

(Richards 1993:31). Given the complex nature of "surface" stated here, mapping beneath the skin would engender greater complexity, one delving into the deeper recesses of nation building. Perhaps there is no greater visual metaphor for the need to dissect national endeavors than the body's interior:

   It can be argued that pictures of dissections
   are the clearest examples
   of the desire to see through or into
   anything, whether it is a body or--by
   metaphorical extension--an idea.
   A picture of a dissected body can
   also be experienced as a literal version
   of a common trait of seeing,
   in that the mind's desire to analyze
   and the eye's desire to pierce and
   separate are kindred motions, and
   they are both embodied in cut flesh.
   Dissection is therefore one of the
   most apt metaphors for the experience
   of intense, directed thinking or
   seeing (Elkins 1999:126-7).

Dissecting multiple truths to arrive at a new historical record was central to the TRC's mission. The Biko case was like many others in that the conflicting testimony made for uneasy conclusions. (15) The processes of public hearings and forensic investigations opened several layers of truths, each deeply embedded with personal, or private, meaning. In its layered composition, skin--with a publicly visible epidermis and a private, interior dermis--further serves as metaphorical trope for the TRC. And just as truth remains elusive in the quest for a reconstructed historical record, so do membranes create doubt, in their bewildering multiplicity and forms, about what they essentially contain: "The more I attend to membranes, to folding and invagination, enclosure and layering, the less certain I become that there is a solid body inside the skin" (Elkins 1999:43).

Uncertainty, or a crisis of authenticity, is precisely what Richards raises through the processes of reproduction, via both laser print and illusionistic watercolor. This crisis is redressed in part by the foregrounding of skin and skin metaphors in Veils, a decision that reasserts a human presence in what was otherwise the political, albeit nonpartisan, body of the TRC. For though skin can recall public and private life through the outside/inside dichotomy of its layers, its greatest "attachment, its near identity, [is] with the inside" (Elkins 1999:43). In this way the autopsy photographs within Veils visualize the need for personal investiture with the process of recovery, dramatically staged by and realized within the TRC.

"Toward the Ancestors"

In September 1997, twenty years after the inquest, Biko's final days were publically recounted for a second time when the TRC heard testimony in Port Elizabeth. Drawn toward creating a body of works around the commission's revelations, David Koloane chose the Biko case as subject for a narrative titled The Journey (1998). In nineteen scenes rendered mostly with acrylic and oil pastel on paper, The Journey narrates Biko's capture, interrogation, detention, and death. The last of these evokes the autopsy portrait.

Koloane's narrative isolates suffering and thus visually represents a horror commonly sensed in response to Biko's death. By concentrating attention on a lone figure, bound and naked, twisting and turning in a small space, the artist records successive moments that many people have imagined. Such intimate scenes, which comprise more than half of the total narrative (eleven of nineteen works), personalize the experience of living through a slowly debilitating death. The focus on suffering rivets viewers' attention on time and offers a painful response to a question Biko once posed: Threatened by a police officer with the words "I will kill you," Biko defiantly asked, "How long is it going to take you?" (Biko 1978:152). In Koloane's episodic vision, the time from torture, inflicted in scene 4 (Fig. 18), to death, realized in scene 19 (Fig. 19), passed slowly.

[FIGURES 18-19 OMITTED]

The first three scenes recount the roadblock outside of Port Elizabeth where Biko and Peter Jones were captured on the night of August 18, 1977. These works define the palette for the series in shades of black, yellow, white, purple, blue, and red. The police vehicle shines bright yellow lights at viewers, placing them in the position of Biko and Jones. Hereafter, the color yellow regularly signifies the presence of police and surveillance. From the roadblock, Koloane next envisioned Biko's torture in a sequence of five works wherein violence is rendered just once (Fig. 18) and is otherwise obscured behind a row of plainclothes police officers gathered as witnesses or metaphorically present as an empty chair. The lone chair motif is carried through ten of the eleven scenes devoted to Biko's captivity and death. (16) Set upright, skewed in relation to the picture plane, toppled over on its side, the chair's twisting and turning parallels the figure's tortured struggle until at last, in the final frame, it lays at rest alongside Biko's corpse (Fig. 19). (17)

The final sequence of the series is devoted to Biko's suffering. His features are rendered abstractly, with emphasis on limbs and torso in motion (Fig. 20). This feature demystifies Biko's final days as his body becomes that of any human being subject to pain and neglect. Biko as Everyman is suggested from his first appearance in scene 4, where his face is entirely obscured by the fists of two police officers who batter him from either side (Fig. 18). The officers' faces are yellow to match the glaring search lights of the narrative's first sequence, and the facial features of the figure at right are clearly depicted. Such elements set the abusers apart from the abused. Depicted as Everyman, Biko's heroism extends to all viewers who regard police brutality as inhumane.

[FIGURE 20 OMITTED]

Koloane's emphasis on shared humanity meets Njabulo Ndebele's call for a concrete rendering of the body's interior; however, unlike Richards, who met this call through a hyperrealized physical interior, Koloane accesses a psychological interior through abstraction. (18) This raises familiar emotions in a viewer who, "confronted with a dramatization of process in character development, grows with the story" (Ndebele 1994:35, italics original). This enables the heroic figure to inspire beyond the limits of one life. To Ndebele:

   [I]t is humanly unrealistic to show
   a revolutionary hero ... who has no
   inner doubts .... In appreciating this
   fact, one gains an insight into the
   human reality of their heroism. A
   reader confronted with such heroism
   experiences himself as potentially
   capable of it too, if only he
   could learn to find a way of dealing
   with his fears (Ndebele 1994:35).

By assigning the largest narrative sequence to Biko's private struggle, the artist offers a version of events that is authoritative precisely because it is widely shared, and thus accepted as plausible (Maier 2000:275). But, unlike traditional plots that offer a satisfactory conclusion (van Alphen 2001:46), The Journey ends with the same disappointing lack of closure that attended TRC proceedings into the Biko case, where witnesses merely repeated their 1977 testimony and offered nothing new. The final image (Fig. 20) captures this frustrating irony: An open door at the top of the painting causes a bright yellow light to fall upon Biko--rendered as a corpse just prior to autopsy--as though someone has just discovered his lifeless body and had nothing to do with its descent into death. The narrative has already established that the color streaming into the room connotes the police and, in this scene, their version of events denies culpability. Causality, however, is widely known in the Biko case, a fact Koloane underscores by devoting just one scene to his beating; there is no need to emphasize the violent, repeated blows he suffered. Instead, the artist focuses on the hero's solitary struggle and the "utmost fear and loneliness he must have felt [despite the] strength within him." (19)

Such strength is evident in the artist as well, who is known for the many years he has promoted black artists and communities. There can be no doubt that Koloane's efforts, both artistic and administrative, have been informed by Black Consciousness. In 1977 he approached the BCP for its help in funding South Africa's first gallery devoted to black artists. (20) Koloane noted that the gallery was founded "at the height of the Black Consciousness movement" and that he and his colleagues were "primarily ... influenced by what Biko was doing....[W]e felt it was important ... to try and instill that sense of self-worth in the local artists." (21) Koloane's own career has been equally independent and self-motivated. His abstract paintings are among the best-known works from the 1980s. He painted large-scale abstractions at a time when collectors and critics expected black artists to produce small prints or watercolors of township life or political resistance. Koloane's determination to work in any style he wished, with whatever materials he needed, has made him a role model for succeeding generations of artists. Koloane notes that the effect of self-definition is most readily seen in post-apartheid art:

   Fortunately the artists are becoming
   more and more impertinent,
   and they want to do what other artists,
   and whites in particular, have
   always been able to do: say what
   they want, with all the materials
   they could want, in any size, in any
   way (Burmann c. 1992).

His thoughts here bear the imprint of Biko's:

   Not only have [whites] kicked the
   black but they have also told him
   how to react to the kick. For a long
   time the black has been listening
   with patience to the advice he has
   been receiving....With painful slowness
   he is now beginning to show
   signs that it is his right and duty to
   respond to the kick in the way he sees
   fit (Biko 1978:66; italics original).

The Journey is in many ways Koloane's personal tribute to Biko. It was long in coming, one step among many "toward the ancestors" (Kayser 1999:13). The emphasis on suffering drawn out over time (ultimately concluding in the autopsy likeness) humanizes the heroic Biko and enables viewers to connect their own sense of mortality to the martyr's. Such communal resonance is captured in the title as well, which was chosen because it resonates with black South Africans who have endured common injustice. "The journey" is thus toward righteousness. It unfolded in the face of institutionalized violence, humiliation, and depersonalization and was, as Koloane put it, "also a journey ... for me." (220 He described his pictorial narrative, almost intuitively known to black viewers, as something "like a ritual [that reveals] a passage [toward] a better humanity" (Kayser 1999:11).

Conclusion

Biko is recognized today as a political martyr for a just and free society. Through his postmortem portrait, Bantu Stephen Biko embodies contested social and political terrain in South Africa. Since his death in 1977, his image has been used to instigate social disorder, to reaffirm Black Consciousness, to symbolize acute vulnerability, to prompt hopes for the nation's future via reflections of its past, and to heal. His very private experience of dying and death has been translated into a public experience through visual representation. In this way individuals may see fragments of themselves in the larger social symbol he has become.

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2005.]

References cited

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Herreman, Frank, ed. 1999. Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa. New York: Museum for African Art.

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--. 1997. "Cross Purposes: Durant Sihlali's Art of Allegory." In Contemporary South African Art--The Gencor Collection, ed. Kendell Geers, pp. 81-97, 163. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.

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(1.) Asha Moodley, interview by author, November 9, 1999, Durban, South Africa.

(2.) Little research has been published concerning associative effects of forensic imagery, and within that field, autopsy is hardly discussed. See Hallam et al. 1999; Elkins 1999; Phillips, Haworth-Booth, and Squiers 1997; Rugoff 1997; and Tagg 1988.

(3.) Interestingly, counsel for the Biko family, which included (now Sir) Sidney Kentridge, Georges Bizos, and E. Wenzel, issued a statement contesting the usefulness of the autopsy images. They maintained that the photographs were evidence of the State's "desire to conceal the true circumstances in which injuries were received ... [because] amid the host of irrelevant photographs of places 'pointed out' to the police photographer, the one thing that was never pointed out was any place where Biko might have bumped his head in the struggle" (Kentridge et al. 1977).

(4.) James Elkins reflects on death as the ultimate reality by calling it "the state without distortion" (1999:22). Distortion, he argues, is the very essence of representation, and it is dependent upon motion. Because the dead cannot move, they somehow seem beyond the representable, and thus "without distortion." For more on this, see Elkins 1999:22-7.

(5.) An exception is Colin Richards's thought-provoking but unpublished essay rifled "Drawing a Veil: Art in the Age of Emergency" (1993). I am very grateful to Richards for sharing this essay with me. His careful analysis and extensive references make his writings valuable resources.

(6.) The engravings depict hands, feet, forearms, and lower legs. Originally they were left untitled in order to protect the artist and Chetty. In 1981, two works were retitled Steve Biko and We Do It. These renamed works are given different rifles in the literature--Biko I and Biko II--but here I use the titles that Stopforth cited in our interview (February 27, 2000, Jamaica Plains, MA). We Do It references a well-known work in Francisco Goya's series, Disasters of War (1810-20). Stopforth called all other works in this series Hands and Feet in conversation (2000).

(7.) Paul Stopforth, interview by author, February 27, 2000, Jamaica Plains, MA.

(8.) This sense of personal investment is also elicited outside of the central image, in the red field that surrounds it. Though Stopforth described his use of contrasting red and black as "basically an aesthetic decision" (February 27, 2000, Jamaica Plains, MA), the colors evoke social responses that are obvious in some cases (e.g., red signifying violence) and nuanced in others. For example, the field was created from red polish traditionally used to color the verandas of white South African homes. By using a substance familiar to white domesticity, the artist subtly personalized the space for South African viewers who may, like he, "remember [their] childhood [by] the smell of [the red polish] and the color of it" (ibid.). The effect may prompt viewers to reflect upon their role in larger social questions evoked by the brutalized image of Biko.

(9.) Paul Stopforth, interview by author, February 27, 2000, Jamaica Plains, MA.

(10.) Legae did not number the works within either series, and collectors seem to have assigned sequence arbitrarily. For example, Gencor's corporate collection lists its holdings by letters, but other collectors, such as the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the South African National Gallery, assign numbers to the drawings. Further, both museums accessioned distinctly different drawings as number 4 in the series. Finally, works listed as serial have no apparent visual order. The artist, it seems, was not interested in sequence.

(11.) In 1980, parliament began to adopt President P.W. Botha's "reform" strategy with regard to dissemination of information, a kind of heavy-handed repression from above. That same year limitations on the press were imposed, making it an offense to disclose information about detainees arrested under the Terrorism Act. Relating the conditions of detention was similarly proscribed (Tyson 1988). Press access to sites of unrest was curbed with the declaration of a state of emergency on July 21, 1985. A second emergency, declared on June 12, 1986, "specifically targeted communication" (Merrett 1994:114). Emergency regulations remained in force until February 2, 1990, when the newly inaugurated President F.W. de Klerk announced reforms that effectively led to the dismantling of apartheid.

The Publications Control Board (PCB) judged which works would be censored. Its decisions were based on whether a work ridiculed any part of the population, harmed relations among its sectors, or prejudiced the safety of the state (Publications Act of 1974:s. 47(2)(c-e)). PCB Chair Kobus Van Rooyen admitted that "strong candidates for banning" were objects that promoted "the opposition's heroes, actions and principles" or illustrated police methods of suppression "in townships and prison cells [or illuminated] black and liberation theology" (Merrett 1994:83). Prior to 1990, the government also outlawed sketches or photographs of jail cells and prisons, and photographs of security police headquarters (Goldberg 1993:7).

All quotes regarding It Left Him Cold--The Death of Steve Biko were recorded in my interview with Nhlengethwa on September 16, 1999, in Johannesburg.

(12.) Sam Nhlengethwa, interview by author, September 16, 1999, Johannesburg.

(13.) It is believed that the Veil of Veronica was created when a woman wiped sweat, tears, and blood from the face of Jesus of Nazareth as he carried the cross to Calvary. An imprint of his face was said to remain, and thus the cloth is considered by some to be the first true image not made by hand and also the first relic of Christ. The veil itself was first noted early in the twelfth century, and it was called a "sudarium" (Richards 1999:6, n. 13). Other sources of the veil motif in this installation appear in the work of Samuel Beckett. In both Endgame (1958) and Watt (1988), Beckett rhetorically recalls the Veil of Veronica.

(14.) A larger excerpt reads, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy; the second as farce.... Men make their history, but they do not make it just as they please: they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" (quoted in Richards 1999:10).

(15.) Amnesty was ultimately denied to all those who applied for it in the Biko case.

(16.) Paul Stopforth first used tins motif to signify detainees' duress in a body of sculptural work called Figures from 1977. Though benignly titled, the figures illustrate methods of torture that South Africans had undergone and which Stopforth had read about. Interestingly, an exhibition of tins work opened at the Market Theatre Gallery in Johannesburg one week after Biko's death. The two--Stopforth's Figures and Biko's death--were intertwined in the press. In some cases, Stopforth's work illustrated stories about Biko; in other cases, Biko's portrait appears alongside exhibition reviews of Stopforth's work.

(17.) When exhibited in "Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art in South Africa," this "final frame" was followed by a work that depicts the vehicle that transported Biko from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria. Koloane carefully noted that this work was not part of the series, but was added afterward as "something different. Something that was symbolic, but not as part of the series" (1999). Thus Biko's death originally constituted the final scene of the narrative. Note that the catalog Liberated Voices (Herreman 1999) reprints a different selection of works from the series than those illustrated here.

(18.) In our interview, Koloane expressed it this way: "[The police] were saying [to Biko], 'Who the hell do you think you are? You are nothing but subhuman.' ... [Biko] kept saying 'No! I demand to be treated with dignity.' ... You know, he still had his dignity. Human dignity, winch he, actually, the point at which he collapsed he still maintaIned that he was a human being like anyone else." David Koloane, interview by author, December 13, 1999, Johannesburg.

(19.) David Koloane, interview by author, December 13, 1999, Johannesburg.

(20.) Koloane cofounded The Gallery in Johannesburg in 1977. Located on Main Street in the Jeppestown area, it closed after just three exhibitions due to financial problems. Though the BCP told Koloane, "You are just the right people we are looking for ... all [funded] projects [must meet] the primary condition ... that they should be self-initiated by the people" (Koloane 1999), BCP financing was cut short when the government banned the organization in October 1977. Newly connected to BCP, The Gallery was subject to police inspection as well: "[The police] even confiscated whatever manuscripts or permissions [for financing] that we had in the bank, so we were left without any funding, and were forced to close" (David Koloane, interview by author, December 13, 1999, Johannesburg). The artist was undeterred, however, and continued to curate exhibits, teach at black art centers (most notably the Federated Union of Black Artists, or FUBA), and develop workshops for artists throughout the 1980s and 1990s. His best-known administrative accomplishments Include founding and directing the Thupelo Project (1985, with Bill Ainslie) and the Speedy Bag Factory (1991), both of which remain active.

(21.) David Koloane, interview by author, December 13, 1999, Johannesburg.

(22.) Ibid.