King William's Town

A small Eastern Cape town in what was then the apartheid Ciskei homeland: Steve Biko's birthplace and the place he was buried, having been killed in police custody in 1977 at thirty years old, still banned from public life.

King William's Town lay in the Eastern Cape, in country fought over through a century of frontier wars and later assigned to the Ciskei homeland. Biko was born there in 1946 and buried there in 1977, after being beaten in police custody in Port Elizabeth and driven some seven hundred miles in the back of a Land Rover, naked and unconscious, to a prison hospital in Pretoria. Thousands came to the funeral. He was thirty.