23 Facts About Ahmed Timol

Ahmed Timol was an anti-apartheid activist in the underground South African Communist Party.

Ahmed Timol died at the age of 29 from injuries sustained when he fell from the top floor of John Vorster Square police station in Johannesburg.

Police claimed, and an official inquest confirmed, that Timol had committed suicide by jumping out the window.

The claim was widely disbelieved in anti-apartheid circles, and in the movement Ahmed Timol's death became symbolic of the broader phenomenon of deaths in police custody, as well as of the abuses and dishonesty of the apartheid state.

Ahmed Timol was born in 1941 in Breyten, Transvaal, into a large Muslim family of Gujarati descent.

Ahmed Timol was one of six children, with two sisters, Zubeida and Aysha, and three brothers, Ismail, Mohammed and Haroon.

Ahmed Timol joined a semi-clandestine Roodepoort Youth Study Group while still a student at Johannesburg Indian High School, and became friends at school with the brothers Aziz Pahad and Essop Pahad, both of whom would become prominent anti-apartheid activists.

Ahmed Timol was Vice-Chairman of the Student Representative Council from 1962 to 1963, and the SRC became an affiliate of the National Union of South African Students in 1963.

Ahmed Timol took up a teaching post at the Immigration School at Slough, which provided him with funds, became an active member of the National Union of Teachers and met Ruth Longoni, who worked for the Labour Monthly, a journal run by Rajani Palme Dutt of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Ahmed Timol was trained in Marxist-Leninist ideology, along with three fellow South Africans, one of them Thabo Mbeki, then a communist, later South African state president.

In February 1970, Ahmed Timol returned to Roodepoort and resumed teaching.

Ahmed Timol was active in the SACP and in Umkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the ANC, though both had been banned in 1960.

In October 1971, aged 29, Ahmed Timol was arrested at a roadblock.

Ahmed Timol was detained under the Terrorism Act of 1967 with Amina Desai and two others, all of whom later said that they had been severely tortured in custody.

Ahmed Timol was the first political detainee to die in Security Branch custody at John Vorster Square.

Ahmed Timol's death sparked nationwide shock, anger and demands for an inquiry.

The presiding magistrate suggested that Ahmed Timol had killed himself after disclosing sensitive information during interrogation, because he feared imprisonment, and because the SACP had instructed its members to kill themselves before betraying the party.

Ahmed Timol was himself the light in a darkening room.

Ahmed Timol was and remained, even after his death, the spectre that was haunting South Africa.

In October 2017, the second inquest found that Ahmed Timol had been pushed out the window or off the roof by members of the Security Branch.

The inquest heard evidence that Ahmed Timol had been tortured during his detention, including from Salim Essop, who had been detained and tortured alongside Ahmed Timol but whose testimony had been excluded from the original inquest.

The presiding Judge said that the officers holding Ahmed Timol in custody were collectively responsible for his death, and that there was a prima facie case of murder under dolus eventualis against the two officers who had interrogated Ahmed Timol that day, both of whom had died years earlier.

The Chris Van Wyk poem "In Detention" is a satire of the explanations given to cover up Ahmed Timol's Death Indians Can't Fly, directed by Enver Samuel and edited by Nikki Comninos, is a documentary about Ahmed Timol.