Dear Steve,

It is amazing that it has been 30 years. Seems like yesterday that my eldest sister beckoned me from the playground to tell me: ‘Steve Biko is dead’; that the next day, 13 September, the Daily Dispatch carried a full colour portrait of you, and alongside it the words: ‘Sikhahlela indoda yamadoda’ (‘We salute a hero of the nation’); that it was not too long ago that an ox cart carried your coffin to the funeral.

Was it only 30 years ago that the farce that was the inquest into your death opened in Pretoria on 14 November; that the general public caught the first glimpse of such unsavoury characters as Colonel P J Goosen of the Port Elizabeth Security Police and the men who disgraced their profession by covering up for the police – Doctors Ivor Lang and Benjamin Tucker, district surgeon and chief district surgeon respectively for Port Elizabeth?

It was a time, however, when the likes of Sidney Kentridge, George Bizos and Ernest Wentzel served the legal profession with honour, representing your family.

It took a Supreme Court ruling to force the South African Medical and Dental Council to hold an inquiry into the conduct of the two doctors, in which they were found guilty of professional misconduct, in 1985. Much of the credit for that goes to Dr Wendy Orr, a very young doctor who was a subordinate of Lang's.

Your death caused ripples in our world. The world outcry was such that the apartheid government was under siege and reacted the best way it knew, by banning a number of individuals, organisations (including SASO and the BPC) and newspapers on 19 October.

With all this name dropping you would be forgiven for presuming that I knew you or that you should know me. Not so.

I was a little girl when you died and was even littler when you were making your mark on this country's political landscape. But I have made up for that by reading a lot about you.

To think that you were not yet 31 when you died. Yet you could come up with some of the insights you did, about black people, about the oppressive apartheid regime, about human nature, about the liberation movements and about the merits and demerits of capitalist and communist philosophies. Not to mention your understanding of Black Consciousness (BC).