Long roads to freedom set to intersect

AYESHA Nagdee’s granny was always hassled by the police. When she stepped off the stoep of her Roodepoort house, the police would appear and ask her what she was doing.

Sometimes, officers would arrive and tell her that too many of her grandchildren were at the house and that one had to leave. Other times they just simply hassled her for no reason.

As an adult, Nagdee would lear n why her grandmother, Amina Desai, wasn’t allowed to leave her house.

The reason was that back in 1971, apartheid police fingered Desai as an accomplice to Ahmed Timol and arrested her shortly after the young activist was stopped in a roadblock.

On T h u r s d ay, Timol’s family heard in the high court in Pretoria that a 40-yearold inquest had been overtur ned and that Ahmed did not commit suicide but had died after being tortured and pushed from the 10th floor of what was then the John Vorster Square police station.

Desai’s story and her incarceration following Timol’s arrest is not as well known, but she was to gain notoriety as South Africa’s longest-serving female Indian political prisoner.

Desai would spend five years in jail and another five under house arrest for a crime for which her family said she was innocent.

She was arrested at 3am at her home on October 22, 1971. Months l ater, she would l ear n t hat police believed she was involved in a conspiracy with Timol, who sometimes would stay at her house to study.

At the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, years later, she would say that she didn’t know that Timol was an activist.

Giving evidence at that hearing, she also described enduring months of solitary confinement and sleep deprivation.

It was when she was released from prison and placed under house arrest that Nagdee got to know her grandmother.

“She used to give me porcelain dolls to play with.”

Another memory is how her grandmother hated the cold, and this was because of what she experienced in prison.

Once, when Nagdee and her siblings visited their grandmother, police arrived and told her that only four visitors were allowed at one time and that there were five. They all left.

When Desai was released from house arrest, she continued to live in her home on Harold Street in Roodepoort.

Nagdee says her grandmother was initially reluctant to head overseas because of that fear of the cold.

It was only later, with her health failing, that Desai went to England and Ireland to live with her children.

She died in 2009 aged 89 in Dublin. It was after her death that Desai was recognised for what she endured. In 2013 she was posthumously awarded the National Order of Luthuli.

Soon there might be another honour that – if given the go-ahead – will link her once again to that infamous murder 46 years ago.

There is a move to have the name of the street where she spent her time under house arrest named Amina Desai street.

This street leads into Mare Street, which could soon be renamed Ahmed Timol Street.