Spectre of justice
Decision will give hope to families of detainees who died in detention
Vorster’s ghost and the Timol inquest
Applause from the gallery in the packed courtroom at the High Court in Pretoria greeted Judge Billy Mothle’s finding on Thursday in the reopened inquest into the 1971 death of 29-yearold teacher and activist Ahmed Timol, who fell to his death from the 10th floor of what was then the John Vorster Square police station in Johannesburg.
Mothle returned dignity to Timol and gave his family closure by ruling that the activist’s death was not a suicide. In effect, the judge found, the members of the security branch who had interrogated him were guilty of murder, having pushed him either from the window of room 1026 or off the roof of the building.
This is the first such inquest in post-apartheid South Africa. Many other families of activists who died in detention are hoping that it will start a judicial process that will allow them to find out what really happened to their loved ones and, in some cases, hold those responsible to account.
Although Mothle’s judgment will hopefully help put the ghost of Ahmed Timol to rest, there is another spectre in the history of detention and torture in South Africa which still haunts the country.
No man did more to create the environment in which thousands of anti-apartheid activists were detained and tortured by the security forces than Balthazar Johannes Vorster — known as BJ or John Vorster.
A lawyer, Vorster was detained for 17 months in a camp in Koffiefontein, in the Free State, by the Smuts government for his anti-British agitation as a member of the pro-Nazi Ossewabrandwag in World War 2.
Vorster, who became the minister of justice in HF Verwoerd’s government in 1961, often cited his internment as justification for introducing increasingly draconian laws which allowed for detention without trial. The security forces were able to hold political detainees for long periods — first 90 days, then 180 days and, eventually, indefinitely — without access to the courts or their families, in police stations where men trained in torture and pumped up on anti-communist propaganda were almost completely free to do what they wished to their captives.
Detention without trial, banning, house arrests — all became powerful weapons in the state’s arsenal against opponents under Vorster’s tenure as minister of justice from 1961 to 1966 and as prime minister from 1966 to 1978.
As opposition to apartheid increased after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, Vorster’s attitude hardened. The enemy — communists, terrorists and agitators — had to be quashed, and he did so using his own experience as a detainee and with the Bible justifying his actions.
As he told his biographer John D’Oliveira in 1977: “If the security forces had to play by the rules they would be fighting an implacable and vicious enemy with one hand tied behind their backs. I saw very clearly right from the outset that because my own experiences had given me a very clear insight into the whole thing, I knew the whole thing . . . from the inside and the outside.”
It was no accident that, according to the SACP’s Joe Slovo, “the security police prior to Vorster’s appointment as minister of justice . . . were not torturers. In a sense, up to 1960-61 the underground struggle was fought on a gentlemanly basis. There was still a rule of law . . . Nobody could be held in isolation.”
After the arrests at Rivonia in 1963, the Sunday Tribune christened Vorster “The Man of the Moment”.
A picture showed the barrel-chested, bushybrowed justice minister enjoying some “well deserved” relaxation at home with his family. In the full-page article the newspaper declared that “. . . all South Africans will agree on one thing: That after last week’s smashing of the subversive Spear of the Nation movement, the man of the moment must be . . . Balthazar Johannes Vorster, the Republic’s bold and formidable Minister of Justice.”
Vorster had had a lot of help in his endeavour, not least from fellow Koffiefontein internee, “Lang” Hendrik van den Bergh, whom Vorster had appointed head of the security police and would later make the head of the nefarious Bureau for State Security, dubbed BOSS, in 1969.
When, in 1968, the police station at No 1 Commissioner Street, Johannesburg, was opened, it was no surprise that it should be named after Vorster.
As the front pages of newspapers on August 23 that year carried news of Russian tanks rolling into Prague to stifle the Velvet Revolution, Vorster, standing in the shadow of the blue-clad building — touted as the “latest word in security” — assured citizens that the “breakdown of law and order in South Africa [would] not be tolerated under any circumstances”.
By the end of the following year, 20 people had died in detention.
When Timol and his friend Salim Essop were brought to the 10th floor of John Vorster Square on October 22 1971, no one had died there yet — but its reputation as a place of brutality was well known.
Five days later, John Vorster Square claimed its first victim: Timol.
Over the next 26 years, until its name changed to the Johannesburg Central Police Station, seven more men would die there.
From the introduction of Vorster’s 90-day detention without trial law in 1963 to his death in 1983, 56 political detainees died in custody. More than 20 others would die before the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.
The blood of those who died in detention is as much on the hands of the man who created the conditions for these deaths as it is on the hands of those who actually pushed Timol to his death.
Mothle’s finding is the first of many nails that need to be knocked into Vorster’s coffin before his baleful influence can be buried.