Many had been imprisoned or tortured and most had family in detention They showed me their scars, took me to Soweto. My students - full of the black-consciousness spirit of Steve Biko - were boycotting their state exams. By then I was 20, teaching black students economics as part of an anti- apartheid programme and gradually, through contact with my students, being drawn into a painful awareness of what it was like to be black in South Africa. From over the border in Lesotho, I managed to secure a copy of the banned book, Steve Biko - I Write What I Like, a collection of letters and articles he had written as president of SASO (the all-black South African Students' Organisation) and which had appeared under the pseudonym "Frank Talk".

It was time to decide whose side I was on.Steve Biko was the first anti-apartheid campaigner whose writings I read. The next morning an older friend whom I greatly respected came up to me and said with some venom: "How can you align yourself with such scum?" I protested that I had just been having fun.But as I looked into his disappointed face, the penny started to drop. I found myself, without consciously meaning to, standing with the conservative commerce and engineering students, vociferously jeering the flag burners. It was exciting and dangerous, the police arrived with their snarling dogs, students scattered and regrouped, culminating in a stand-off involving the entire student body. Campus had become intensely political and I remember the day when a group of black students, some wearing Biko T-shirts, burnt the South African flag.

We may not have known it then, but the terms of our engagement, the way white resistance politics came to be organised in the Eighties - augmenting black resistance politics but not leading it - was a direct result of the philosophy of Steve Biko.But what did Steve Biko really mean to me, an impressionable young white boy, who never met him? Biko is remembered as the father of "black consciousness", he also in the process defined "white consciousness" and spelled out the role of the white liberal.It was in the early Eighties, when I left home and went to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to study commerce that my relationship with Steve Biko and my engagement with resistance politics began. In those 20 years, many ordinary white South Africans, including myself, made a definitive moral journey from unwitting collusion with the state to active resistance of apartheid. The only difference was one of degree.Now, 20 years later, five former security policemen have stepped forward to confess to killing Biko and to apply for amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Deputies debated the proposal through yesterday evening. The violence left at least three people reported dead and about 100 injured, almost all hit by stones. I returned to the UK, the country of my birth, which my parents had left when I was two years old.But the impact of Biko and becoming politicised didn't end there.

A few in my position had opted to resist conscription and do their time in prison, but I never seriously considered the martyr position. The second State of Emergency had been declared and I had exhausted all avenues, legal and otherwise, for staying out of the army I either had to join the infantry or get out. For me, connecting my Jewish roots with my South African roots gave me, for the first time, a thrilling and meaningful sense of "white consciousness".September 1987 marked the end of my career as an activist. Bigger battles were being fought elsewhere, but we had opened another front against the state in a way in which Biko would have approved. Chelsea's Roberto Di Matteo is expected to play alongside Dino Baggio and Demetrio Albertini in the Italian midfield, while his club-mate Gianfranco Zola should link up with Lazio striker Pierluigi Casiraghi in attack. Panucci played sweeper in the first half when the probables beat the possibles 4-1 in a training match in Florence yesterday."He's one of the real possibilities but it's best not to make too many changes," Maldini said before the team left for England. He will always be the cheeky chappie but he's determined to change the other things."The Italy coach, Cesare Maldini, is considering employing the Real Madrid defender Christian Panucci as a sweeper in an attempt to shackle Shearer.

"What's more he has not been in so much trouble with referees. A fit Paul Gascoigne is obviously a major bonus when others are struggling."We have followed him closely since the last game in Georgia and his form has been good. "When his ankle was in plaster last weekend not many would have given him a chance of being available. "Inevitably there will be players who are going to be less than 100 per cent and that's when I have to look at all the elements and angles and see what's worth it for such a big game."Gascoigne's recovery was the major surprise. Hoddle pronounced himself positive and optimistic about all three with the caveat that Shearer's problem in his lower back could yet provoke a reaction."You can only go into a game risking one of two," Hoddle added. One of the dead was shot in the back and died on the operating table at the city hospital.