The Eight-Week March
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6,816 words · no email, no account
No. 097 · Movements · Civil Rights
Room 619
a biography of Bantu Stephen Biko
What the book is
On the morning of 12 September 1977, a naked, manacled prisoner was driven seven hundred and forty miles in the back of a Land Rover from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria. He arrived at Room 619 of the Pretoria Central Prison hospital wing already dying. He was thirty years old. The state would call it a hunger strike. The world would call it murder.
Sandile Mokoena retraces the short, incandescent life of Stephen Bantu Biko: medical student, township organiser, and architect of Black Consciousness — the philosophy that taught a generation of South Africans to refuse the inheritance of shame. Drawing on Security Branch transcripts, inquest records, and the recollections of those who knew him in Ginsberg, Durban and King William's Town, she follows Biko from the founding of SASO through the banning orders, the clandestine meetings at Zanempilo Clinic, and the final twenty-six days of detention.
Mokoena writes with the patience of an archivist and the ear of a novelist. He is interested in the man before the martyr: the reader of Fanon and Aimé Césaire, the husband and father, the comrade with a gift for laughter and an unsettling steadiness under interrogation.
What emerges is a portrait of a thinker whose central insistence — that liberation begins in the mind — outlived the room in which he died, and continues to ask its question of us.</br>
At a glance
- Subject
- Bantu Stephen Biko
- Shelf
- Movements · Civil Rights
- Written by
- Sandile Mokoena
- Chapters
- 18 across 199 pages
- Narrated by
- Camille Rhodes
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
- Content notes
- state-sponsored murder · torture
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The Eastern CapeRead free
- 02Bantu Education3,242 words
- 03The Medical School3,647 words
- 04The Birth of SASO4,456 words
- 05Black Consciousness3,696 words
- 06I Write What I Like3,836 words
- 07Beyond the Campus3,398 words
- 08The Banning Orders3,501 words
- 09The Rising Tide3,393 words
- 10The Arrest2,018 words
- 11Room 6192,451 words
- 12The Cover-Up2,548 words
- 13The Inquest2,577 words
- 14The Funeral2,171 words
- 15The Truth and Reconciliation Commission3,277 words
- 16What Biko Built3,136 words
- 17The Afterlife of an Idea3,388 words
- 18The Measure of a Life2,750 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 199 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 199 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-047-8 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes
ISBN 979-8-90623-028-7
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is Room 619 about?
Bantu Stephen Biko. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Room 619 — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 6,816 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 199 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
06Does this book carry content warnings?
Yes: state-sponsored murder; torture. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle.
The writer
This book deals with
- state-sponsored murder
- torture
Listed before you buy, not after.
