Cape Town, South Africa – On an August evening in 1977, 30‑year‑old Steve Biko was on his way back from an aborted secret meeting with an anti-apartheid activist in Cape Town, taking the 12‑hour drive back home to King William’s Town. But it was a journey the resistance fighter would never finish, for he was arrested and, less than a month later, was dead.

Against the backdrop of increasingly harsh racist laws in South Africa, Biko, a bold and forthright youth leader, had emerged as one of the loudest voices calling for change and Black self-determination.

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A famously charming and eloquent speaker, he was often touted as Nelson Mandela’s likely successor in the struggle for freedom after the core of the anti-apartheid leadership was jailed in the 1960s.

But his popularity also made him a prime target of the apartheid regime, which put him under banning orders that severely restricted his movement, political activities, and associations; imprisoned him for his political activism; and ultimately caused his death in detention – a case that continues to resonate decades later, largely because none of the perpetrators have ever been brought to justice.

On September 12 this year, 48 years after Biko died, South Africa’s Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi ordered a new inquest into his death. The hearing resumed at the Eastern Cape High Court on Wednesday before being postponed to January 30.

There are “two persons of interest” implicated in Biko’s death who are still alive, according to the country’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), which aims to determine whether there is enough evidence that he was murdered, and therefore grounds to prosecute his killers.

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While Biko’s family has welcomed the hearings, the long wait for justice has been frustrating, especially for his children.

“There is no such thing as joy in dealing with the case of murder,” Nkosinathi Biko, Biko’s eldest son, who was six at the time of his father’s death, told Al Jazeera. “Death is full and final, and no outcome will be restorative of the lost life.”

The Biko inquest is one of several probes into suspicious apartheid-era deaths that South Africa’s justice minister reopened this year. The inquiries are part of the government’s plan to address past atrocities and provide closure to families of the deceased, the NPA says.

But analysts note that the inquest comes amid growing public pressure on the government to bring about the justice it promised 30 years ago, as a new judicial inquiry is also probing allegations that South Africa’s democratic government intentionally blocked prosecutions of apartheid-era crimes.

Biko: ‘The spark that lit a fire’

Steve Biko was a medical student and national youth leader who, in the late 1960s, pioneered the philosophy of Black Consciousness, which encouraged Black people to reclaim their pride and unity by rejecting racial oppression and valuing their own identity and culture.

The philosophy inspired a generation of young activists to take up the struggle against apartheid, pushed forward by the belief that South Africa’s future lay in a socialist economy with a more equal distribution of wealth.

In his writings, Biko said he was inspired by the African independence struggles that emerged in the 1950s and suggested that South Africa had yet to offer its “great gift” to the world: “a more human face”.

By 1972, Biko’s student organisation had spawned a political wing to unify various Black Consciousness groups under one voice. A year later, he was officially banned by the government. Yet, he continued to covertly expand his philosophy and political organising among youth movements across the country.

In August 1977, despite the banning order still being in effect, Biko had travelled to Cape Town with a fellow activist to meet another anti-apartheid leader, though the meeting was aborted over safety concerns, and the duo left.

According to some reports, Biko heavily disguised himself for the road journey back east, but his attempts at going unnoticed were to no avail: When the car reached the outskirts of King William’s Town on August 18, police stopped them at a roadblock – and Biko was discovered.

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The two were taken into custody separately, with Biko arrested under the Terrorism Act and first held at a local police station in Port Elizabeth before being transferred to a facility in the same city where members of the police’s “special branch” – notorious for enforcing apartheid through torture and extrajudicial killings – were based. For weeks in detention, he was stripped and manacled and, as was later discovered, tortured.

On September 12, the apartheid authorities announced that Biko had died in detention in Pretoria, some 1,200km (746 miles) away from where he was arrested and held. The minister of justice and police alleged he had died following a hunger strike, a claim immediately decried as false, as Biko had previously publicly stated that if that was ever cited as a cause of his death, it would be a lie.

Weeks later, an independent autopsy conducted at the request of the Biko family found he had died of severe brain damage due to injuries inflicted during his detention. Following these revelations, authorities launched an investigation. But the inquest cleared the police of any wrongdoing.

Saths Cooper, who was a student activist alongside Biko, remembers the moment he found out about his friend’s death. Cooper was in an isolation block on Robben Island – the prison that also held Mandela – where he spent more than five years with other political prisoners who had taken part in the 1976 student revolt.

“The news stilled us into silence,” the 75-year-old told Al Jazeera, recalling Biko’s provocatively “Socratic” style of engagement and echoing Mandela’s description of Biko as an inspiration. “Living, he was the spark that lit a veld fire across South Africa,” Mandela said in 2002. “His message to the youth and students was simple and clear: Black is Beautiful! Be proud of your Blackness! And with that, he inspired our youth to shed themselves of the sense of inferiority they were born into as a result of more than 300 years of white rule.”

After initial shock at the news of Biko’s death, “then the questions flowed of what had occurred,” Cooper recalled, “to which we had no answers.”

About 20,000 people, including Black and white anti-apartheid activists and Western diplomats, attended Biko’s funeral in King Williams Town on September 25. The day included a five-hour service, powerful speeches and freedom songs. Though police disrupted the service and arrested some mourners, it marked the first large political funeral in South Africa.

His death sparked international condemnation, including expression of “concern” from Pretoria’s allies, the US and the UK. It also led to a United Nations arms embargo against South Africa in November 1977.

Three years later, the British singer Peter Gabriel released a song in his honour, and in 1987, his life was depicted in the film Cry Freedom, in which Biko was played by Denzel Washington.

Nevertheless, Biko’s stature did nothing to hasten justice.

‘The unfinished business of the TRC’

Under the apartheid regime, any further investigation into Biko’s death was effectively put to rest for decades following the official 1977 inquest.

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Then in 1996, two years after the end of apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up to investigate past rights violations, with apartheid-era perpetrators given the opportunity to disclose their crimes and apply for amnesty from prosecution.

Former security police officers Major Harold Snyman, Captain Daniel Siebert, Warrant Officer Ruben Marx, Warrant Officer Jacobus Beneke and Sergeant Gideon Nieuwoudt – the five men suspected of killing Biko – applied for amnesty.

At TRC hearings the following year, the men said that Biko had died days after what they called “a scuffle” with the police at the Sanlam Building in Port Elizabeth, while he was held in shackles and handcuffs. Up to that point, the commission heard, Biko had spent several days in a cell – naked, they claimed, in order to prevent him from taking his life.

In the decades since, it’s come to light that after being badly beaten at the Sanlam Building on September 6 and 7, Biko suffered a brain haemorrhage and was examined by apartheid government doctors, who said they found nothing wrong with him. Days later, on September 11, the police decided to transfer him to a prison hospital hours away in Pretoria. Still naked and shackled, Biko was put in the back of a van and moved. Although he was examined in Pretoria, it was too late, and Biko died on September 12 alone in his cell.

Despite admitting to beating Biko with a hose pipe and noticing his disoriented, slurred speech, the former officers claimed at the TRC that they had no indication of the severity of his injuries. Therefore, they saw nothing wrong with transporting him 1,200km away.

Eventually, the men were denied amnesty in 1999, partly for their lack of full disclosure of the events that caused Biko’s death. The suspected killers, some of whom have since died, were recommended for prosecution by the commission.

However, like most TRC cases, the prosecutions never materialised.

“The Biko case, along with others, must be viewed as the delayed activation of the unfinished business of the TRC – a matter that is a national imperative if we are to instigate a culture of accountability in South Africa,” Nkosinathi, now 54, said of the reopened inquest into his father’s death.

Though the scope of the Biko inquest has not been publicly stated, Gabriel Crouse, a political analyst and fellow with the South African Institute for Race Relations, worries that it will not examine new evidence, but that its goal will simply be to decisively determine whether Biko was murdered.

If this is the case, it would leave many questions unresolved, he says. For example, who pressured the initial forensic pathologist to declare a hunger strike as the cause of death; who ordered Biko’s killing; and what was the official chain of command?

‘The worms are among us’

Although the Biko inquest has renewed hope among his family that some of the perpetrators of his death will finally be brought to justice, analysts warn that the process may reveal uncomfortable truths about the nation’s past – including possible collusion between South Africa’s current government and the apartheid regime.

Nkosinathi now heads a foundation that promotes his father’s legacy. He points out that it is only pressure on the government that brought about this moment.

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Months before the Biko inquest reopened, President Cyril Ramaphosa ordered the establishment of a commission of inquiry into whether previous governments led by his African National Congress (ANC) party intentionally suppressed investigations and prosecutions of apartheid-era crimes.

His move in April came after 25 survivors and relatives of victims of apartheid-era crimes launched a court case against his government in January, seeking damages.

The allegations of probes being blocked go back more than a decade. In 2015, former national prosecutions chief Vusi Pikoli caused a stir when he submitted an affidavit in a court case about the death of anti-apartheid fighter Nokuthula Simelane, in which he blamed the stalled cases on senior government officials interfering in the work of the NPA.

Former President Thabo Mbeki, who was head of state during Pikoli’s tenure, has denied that any such political interference took place. But the judicial inquiry, announced in April and now under way, lists former senior officials among those it considers interested parties.

The inquiry will look at why so few of the 300 cases that the TRC referred to the NPA for prosecution, including Biko’s, have been investigated in the last two decades.

“That it has become necessary to have to look into such an allegation tells much about how the huge sacrifice that was made for our democracy has been betrayed,” Nkosinathi told Al Jazeera.

Cooper believes the delayed prosecutions are a result of a compromise made by the apartheid regime and the ANC to conceal one another’s offences, including alleged cases of freedom fighters colluding with the white minority government.

“It’s justice clearly denied,” Cooper said, adding that he once questioned TRC commissioners about why they had concealed the names of rumoured apartheid-era collaborators who went on to work in the new democratic government. “The response was, ‘Broer, it’ll open a can of worms,’” Cooper told Al Jazeera.

“I see one of the commissioners died, the other is around, and when I see him, I say, ‘There’s no more can of worms, the worms are among us.’”

Like Cooper, political analyst Crouse also believes some kind of “backdoor deal” was struck following the transition from apartheid to democracy in 1994.

Many political actors failed to apply for amnesty, he says, despite prima facie evidence of their guilt. “And so it became very apparent that white Afrikaner supremacists and Black ANC liberationists, some from both camps, had gotten together and said, ‘Let’s both keep each other’s secrets and go forward into the new South Africa on that basis,’” he said.

Pikoli’s 2015 affidavit seems to echo such analysis. In his document, Pikoli recalls a meeting in 2006, where former ministers grilled him about the prosecution of suspects implicated in the attempted murder of Mbeki’s former chief of staff, Frank Chikane. Pikoli does not specify what the ministers objected to but says it became clear they did not want the suspects prosecuted “due to their fear of opening the door to prosecutions of ANC members, including government officials.”

A plea bargain was struck with the suspects while Pikoli was on leave in July 2007, as part of which the suspects refused to reveal the masterminds behind the compilation of a hit-list targeting activists. Pikoli believes a court trial would have forced them to disclose more details.

‘A stress test’ for democratic South Africa

Mariam Jooma Carikci, an independent researcher who has written extensively about the failure of justice in the democratic era, believes the official inquiry into the hundreds of unprosecuted TRC cases, including Biko’s, is “a stress test” of democratic South Africa’s honesty.

“For three decades we treated reconciliation as an end in itself – truth commissions instead of prosecutions, memorials instead of justice,” she said.

She sees Biko’s ideas continuing to flourish in today’s student movements, for example, in the #FeesMustFall campaign that called for free university tuition and the decolonisation of education in 2015.

“You see his echo in decolonisation debates and student movements, but the truest honour is policy – land, work, education, healthcare – designed around human worth, not investor or political comfort,” Jooma Carikci said.

While the country waits to hear the outcomes of the Biko inquest and the wider TRC inquiry, Nkosinathi Biko remains haunted by constant reminders of his father.

His younger brother Samora, who recently turned 50, looks exactly like Biko, he says, but being only two at the time of his death, “he was unfortunate not to have had memories of his father because of what happened.”

Meanwhile, for the country in general, Nkosinathi sees connections between Biko’s death and the 2012 Marikana massacre, during which police shot and killed 34 striking miners – the highest death toll from police aggression in democratic South Africa.

In his mind, the image of police opening fire on unarmed protesting workers echoes the country’s dark history – a sign that the state brutality that ended his father’s life has spilled over into democratic South Africa.