Johannesburg - Steve Biko’s autopsy report was expected to fetch hundreds of thousands of rand at an auction, with the opening bidding price set at R100 000.
The opening bid on the post-mortem of another anti-apartheid activist, Ahmed Timol, was R25 000. Both Biko and Timol were killed by the apartheid police while in detention.
Siblings Clive and Susan Steele tried to auction the autopsies at Westgate Walding Auctioneers on Wednesday morning, stating that the documents were theirs.
The doctor who did the autopsies, Dr Jonathan Gluckman, had given the documents to the siblings’ mother, Maureen Steele, for safekeeping.
Steele was Gluckman’s private secretary at the time.
However, the Biko family obtained a court order that prevented the auction. The court also ordered the siblings and the auctioneers not to destroy, copy or sell the documents.
The news about the auction shocked not only the families of the dead men.
Advocate George Bizos SC, who acted as the Timol family lawyer at his inquest in 1972, and represented the Biko family at his inquest 37 years ago, also expressed his dismay.
Bizos and Biko’s son Nkosinathi, who was 6 years old when his father was killed, said it was clear that the siblings were motivated by money to want to sell such sensitive documents.
“They thought wrongly that they were the owners of the documents and would become rich if they sold them. The mother was not the owner of the papers, but what we call the custodian, and she could not pass them on to her children,” Bizos said.
A horrified Nkosinathi said any autopsy was the final account of a person’s life and was thus the most sensitive document that could ever be generated about an individual.
He said he could not get his head around what would make anyone want to profit from it and why the siblings felt they had the right to sell it.
“How they believe that kind of a file is something they can commodify is really beyond me. How do you get through all the political issues, the social issues and sensitivities, and make a call that says ‘I’m going to proceed’?
“It can only be if you are either a person who really has moral standards that are suspect, otherwise greed that is gigantic or perhaps a mentality of entitlement that is in the superlative.
“I just don’t see how an ordinary person would arrive at a decision that says this is the right thing to do,” he said.
Bizos said Gluckman normally appeared at inquests for families of activists who had been killed in detention.
Gluckman also knew that his office was bugged and under surveillance, hence he gave the documents to his secretary so that the security police did not seize them.
Bizos said he received a call a few days ago from an alarmed Nkosinathi, who told him about the auction.
“The families of Biko and Timol were shocked when told that the medical reports were going to be auctioned for large sums of money.
“Adams and Adams Attorneys were preparing papers, and Nkosinathi, who knew that I was involved in his father’s inquest, phoned me, very alarmed.
“He also asked the lawyers to consult me and took the initiative to inform the Timol family that their papers were also going to be up for sale.”
Bizos went to court on day for an urgent interdict, and the judge ruled in their favour. Bizos and Adams and Adams are representing the families pro bono.
Nkosinathi said the next stage was to get the papers from the Steeles. “We are objecting to someone wanting to make money out of it.”
The Star