You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can't care anyway.

Biko is not really talking about dying. He is talking about fear.

Under apartheid, the threat that kept people quiet was the threat of being killed. Biko's answer is to look straight at that threat and take its power away. If death ends everything, including your ability to care about anything at all, then it is not a punishment that can be held over you. It only works on someone who is still bargaining with it.

So he leaves no third option. Either you are alive and proud, or you have handed the decision to somebody else.

This was the work of the Black Consciousness Movement, which Biko led: not weapons, but teaching people to stop being afraid of what could be done to them.

Steve Biko died in police custody on 12 September 1977. He was thirty years old. He said this while he was alive and free to choose, and it was not a prediction of his death — it was a description of how he had already decided to live.