Janet Smith
JOHANNESBURG: Apartheid magistrate JL de Villiers told the world that young anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Timol had committed suicide upon the instruction of the Communist Party.
Presiding at the inquest into Timol’s death after he fell from the 10th floor at the old John Vorster Square police station in Johannesburg on October 27, 1971, De Villiers was clear. “Murder… is excluded,” he pronounced. “To accept anything other than that the deceased jumped out of the window and fell to the ground can only be seen as ludicrous.”
But today, as the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation hosts a commemorative event which will see the inquest documents into the teacher’s death made available to the public, De Villiers’s words are a key part of a conspiracy to murder. The event happens at the site of Timol’s death, exactly 44 years later, at what is now called the Johannesburg Central police station.
The operative of the then banned SACP would have been 74 next week had he not been one of at least 115 people who died in detention during apartheid. His nephew, Imtiaz Cajee, has been pursuing a reopening of the inquest and said yesterday that the family does not intend to end their quest until justice is seen.
Together with the Foundation for Human Rights, Cajee is building a case to take to the National Prosecuting Authority. They intend to submit papers “not to prosecute a 95-year-old Afrikaner policeman”, says Cajee, “but to reverse the findings, using empirical evidence”.
Evidence suggested that Timol was severely tortured by the apartheid police’s notorious Special Branch, and was likely to have been killed in detention. “We need to use those challenges in our history to face the challenges of today,” said Cajee. “We must use the death of my uncle as an inspiration. We need to find the truth and talk about it.”
Cajee is, meanwhile, preparing the second edition of his 2005 book, Timol – Quest for Justice, in which he hopes to find that very truth.
The apartheid government had no qualms about lying brazenly about deaths in detention. Poet Chris van Wyk provoked the state to respond on the issue in an acclaimed 1979 poem, In Detention, in which he wrote: “He fell from the ninth floor / He hanged himself / He slipped on a piece of soap while washing / He hanged himself...”
The partial set of documents being made public today was kept by a member of the Timol family’s legal team, attorney Mia Ahmed Loonat. Digitised by the Wits Historical Papers Research Archive, they were handed over to the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation.