Description
The recent inquiry into the death of the late apartheid activist Ahmed Timol has sparked life into the fight for truth and justice in South Africa. This landmark case overturned a 1972 ruling that Timol committed suicide on the 10th Floor of John Vorster Square and concluded that he had been murdered. This on-going case seeks to prosecute a Security Branch officer who, amongst others, is alleged guilty of human rights violations.
This paper takes insights from the timelines of Apartheid activists who were tortured and subsequently killed in police custody. The choreography of these deaths in detention cases are heavily dependent on space and the architecture that housed them. Police stations, such as John Vorster Square, were used as facilitators in the torture and deaths of these activists. The intention of this paper is twofold: first, to reveal the complicit nature of architecture in the highlighted death in detention cases; and second, to address the larger challenge facing the South African judicial system of dealing with eye-witness accounts that show agency in memory and architectural contexts.
