Woods, Donald (1933-2001), a South African journalist, was a long-standing opponent of the South African government’s apartheid (racial segregation) policies. He became famous in 1977 when he spoke out against the government over the death that year in police custody of the black political leader Steve Biko.
Woods was the editor of a provincial newspaper, the East London Daily Dispatch. He believed that the South African security police had beaten Biko to death. The government of Prime Minister John Vorster reacted to Woods’s allegation by banning him from taking part in politics, from being quoted or published, and from meeting more than one person at a time. Following the banning order, the South African police ordered him not to leave his home in East London. He escaped in disguise because of the persecution of his family and hitchhiked about 310 miles (500 kilometers) to the border between South Africa and the independent kingdom of Lesotho. He entered Lesotho by swimming across the flooded Tele River. From Lesotho, Woods traveled to the United Kingdom, where his family later joined him. Woods spent nearly two decades in exile. He eventually returned to South Africa under its first nonracial democratic government, elected in 1994. Woods wrote the biography Biko in 1978. His autobiography, Asking for Trouble, was published in 1980. Woods’s friendship with Biko and his dramatic escape from South Africa in 1977 became the subject of the motion picture Cry Freedom (1987).
Donald Woods was born on Dec. 15, 1933, in Elliotdale, near Umtata, in what is now the province of Eastern Cape. He died on Aug. 19, 2001.
