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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...