Amina Desai might be honoured again

AYESHA’S granny was always hassled by police.

As an adult, Ayesha Nagdee would learn 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 of Ahmed Timol and arrested her shortly after the young activist was stopped at a roadblock.

On Thursday, Timol’s family heard in the Pretoria High Court that a 40-year-old inquest had been overturned 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 gained fame 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 her family said she did not commit. She was arrested at 3am at her home on October 22, 1971. Later she would learn police believed she was involved in a conspiracy with Timol.

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 she had died that Desai was recognised for what she endured. In 2013, she was posthumously awarded the National Order of Luthuli.

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.