In this extract from the introduction to his book about the life of his uncle, Ahmed Timol, Imtiaz Kajee describes the roots of his journey of remembering and reclaiming.
Ahmed Timol is one of the most celebrated official murder victims of apartheid South Africa - in the grim company of Looksmart Solwandle Ngudle, Joseph Mdluli, Dr Hoosen Haffejee, Steve Biko, Neil Aggett, The Imam Haron and so many others. The technique of "defenestration" - being teasingly dangled and sometimes dropped, by accident or on purpose, from a high police window - was immortalised in his own death. So was the chilling term that the security police would use to mock his fate : "Indians can't fly", as George Bizos has grimly noted. This was, evidently, the timbre of their humour. My uncle plunged 10 storeys to the ground at Johannesburg's notorious John Vorster Square, named after apartheid's worst securocrat, the man who introduced the torture laws as justice minister in 1963 and then went on to become apartheid's prime minister, as he was when my uncle died.
The death was itself not enough for them. They turned even our collective grief into a new tool of torture. Years after, after my uncle's death had inscribed itself in the collective memory of the anti-apartheid movement, detainees at John Vorster Square were taunted with my uncle's death.
Gerald Sizani from Orlando East, Soweto, was nearly 14 years old when Ahmed Timol died. Gerald was a product of the June 1976 uprising and was detained by the Security Police in late 1976. The police were not really looking for him, but for his brother Zweli. Gerald narrates: "They took me to the 10th floor of John Vorster Square at approximately 2am. An English-speaking policeman by the name of Captain Cronwright and his bullies were interrogating me. I refused to cooperate with them. They asked me if I heard of Ahmed Timol. They told me that I was stubborn like Ahmed Timol and that they had thrown Timol out of the window."
"They then took me to the window and I was told that this was called 'Timol Heights'. I was held by my feet and dangled outside the window. I closed my eyes, sure that I was dead. They would pull me up again. This happened in broad daylight. They managed to find Zweli and I was released at approximately 1pm the next afternoon. Then Zweli was severely beaten and assaulted, which damaged him permanently. To this day he has relapses of mental disturbances."
I have called this book A Quest for justice. I wanted, if not specific retribution, at least to put right some lingering sense of a wrong committed against my uncle, my family, my country, myself. Immediately after my uncle's death the ANC correctly promised, in its official statement, to "avenge" Ahmed's murder and I am, even now, not willing to let go of that word, despite all the colourful talk of "reconciliation" that surrounds such subjects as these.
But any question of vengeance was overtaken, during the writing process, by a more pressing need. It dawned upon me that I wanted to know my uncle. I was five years old when he died and this book is my own act of reclaiming him whom I only almost had. I still have his Beethoven LPs which brought him calm and rest. The ninth symphony has the most tattered jacket; it must have been my uncle's favourite. But however much I played and re-played his music to myself in old boyish hope, Ahmed never appeared. I had no Aladdin's lamp, but I kept rubbing away.
The process of reclaiming him in fact long pre-dated the idea of a book. I began on my own many years ago, with the hoard of faint memories that I cherish... of sitting with Uncle Ahmed in Amina Desai's yellow Anglia, the very car in which he was to be arrested shortly before his murder. Uncle Ahmed often took me to Amina's house and I remember the white cat - but all its playfulness is overwhelmed, for me, by the grim recollection, after his death, of coming from Standerton to Roodepoort with my mother in the middle of the night. We were sitting huddled in the small kitchen and the family were whispering to one another. There was a ritual knock on the door. White policemen entered. Later, Uncle Ahmed's body was placed outside the flat in Roodepoort and people filed past. My granny, the dead hero's mother, was standing at the flat balcony. These glimpses are indelibly vivid in my mind.
During the years that followed I would go to the cemetery and visit Uncle Ahmed's grave with my grandfather. I would return to the flat and report back to my granny. She would inquire if I had prayed for my uncle.
These in full are the combined, precious and only personal memories with which began the journey recorded in this book, to know and reclaim my Uncle Ahmed in the fullness and roundness of his personality, going beyond the grim fixture in my mind of his martyrdom (a word I use literally: he was a martyr) and the immensity of my grief. In 1996 I began to collect documents about Ahmed's life and death as an act of remembrance and also to ensure that I could be of assistance, if necessary, as our democratic country began the process of re-visiting its past. There was, as yet, no idea of a book.
My uncle, Ahmed Timol, was a Muslim of the most profoundly humane kind. His particular brand of fundamentalism, however, was never theological and always humanist. He was no kind of zealot except in the causes of anti-racism and anti-apartheid and such values were hardly zealotry, merely common sense and elementary decency. Underneath his political ideology and religious belief Ahmed merely sought a South Africa made safe for school teachers such as himself was; a South Africa that could live up to every child's basic idea of fairness - racial fairness and economic fairness. His ambitions were as simple and as humane as that. In 1999, in Azaadville, Nelson Mandela fittingly dedicated a school to his memory and renamed it after him.
He was fundamentalist in the cause of common sense; he mingled the pious and the practical. He never left the house in the morning without reading Yaseen (a verse from the Quran), yet he never wore a "topee"(hat) for fear of upsetting his hairstyle; he wore a handkerchief instead. Ahmed always told Aysha (my mother)to keep her heart clean. He used precisely those simple, commonplace words for virtue. "Allah does not like it when the heart is dirty," he would say.
Ahmed was exceptionally well dressed on a Friday, the holy day in the Muslim calendar. In summer, he would bathe twice a day, Aysha recalls. "He was always very neat and tidy. He insisted that new shirts had to be washed before being worn, since there must not be creases on the shirt. The label on the back of the shirt had to be removed as it left a "mark" on his body. Ahmed always brought his friends home for lunch on Fridays after returning for prayers. Whenever Ahmed entered the flat he first went to the bathroom to comb his hair - never a strand out of place, that was his harmless ambition. But after the torturers had done with him, one of his eyes had rolled loose from its socket and his bush of black hair was pulled out and lay strewn on the cell floor.
Ahmed argued frequently and fervently that apartheid was a heresy against Islam. He refused to choose between Communism and Islam, thus showing that the idea of the "Godless Communist" was a figment of apartheid's own demonology. As the life of an anti-apartheid militant and Muslim, Ahmed Timol's story is of central importance now, in ways he could not have foreseen. His life underlines the profound humanism of political Islam in a divisive time when violent Christian Fundamentalism is trespassing upon Iraq (George W Bush has explicitly called his war against terrorism a "Crusade") and when vicious so-called Islamic fundamentalists are dragging the name of a great religion through the mud. Ahmed Timol's jihad was against racism and social and economic inequality.
Timol: A Quest for Justice
By Imtiaz Cajee
STE Publishers
In a book more anticipated for the responses it may elicit than for its own intellectual worth, labour-saving devices replace serious research, writes Ronald Suresh Roberts.
Shortly after Henry Morton Stanley famously found and rescued the marooned missionary David Livingstone, Livingstone's servant Ulimengo irritated the rescuer, Stanley, by failing to clean a coffee pot properly. Why was it, Ulimengo asked, that if the "big master", Livingstone himself, had no complaints, the "little master", Stanley, was complaining?
Livingstone entered the room just in time to save Ulimengo from the beating that Stanley was about to administer with a club. Livingstone, taking command, publicly rebuked Ulimengo, who repented thoroughly. After apologising, Ulimengo asked for permission to kiss Stanley's feet.
"Livingstone, doubtless not feeling that Stanley had acted entirely correctly, would not permit this," writes Stanley's biographer, Frank Lynn. "Having dismissed Ulimengo, [Livingstone] took Stanley aside and calmly got him to see the error of his ways. 'Come now, you must not mind him. He's only a half-savage and does not know any better...'" Thus the native is not only bad, but cannot appreciate the fine points of his own badness and cannot even apologise without extravagantly over-doing it. At all stages, the missionary is required for the calm administration of truth.
It is fascinating to place the public discourse around William Mervyn Gumede's book within this rich moment in the long history of colonial imagery. Rather than presenting a book for intellectual assessment and discussion, Gumede's champions seem to believe that they are presenting the native government with a test of moral sensibility. Thus, before the book was even released the chorus came: how will the natives react; what moral sensibility will be revealed in their reaction.
The quality of research and fluency of writing and all the usual standards of intellectual measurement took a strange back seat to this test of moral fitness or "maturity" of the natives. "It will be instructive to see how Mr Mbeki and his party react to William Gumede's forthright book," wrote The Economist magazine. The publication of Gumede's book "will serve as a test of the maturity of our new democracy" wrote the Books Editor of the Sunday Independent. Max Du Preez had much the same to say.
Gumede is one of four "editorial directors" of the Helen Suzman Foundation and is the only black person to occupy that esteemed status. Notwithstanding the gender of its patron, no women serve as editorial directors of the Helen Suzman Foundation, which may explain the quaint masculinity of Gumede's idiom: "in any man's book" Mbeki ran a brilliant 2004 campaign; "Desmond Tutu is "no man's fool" while Cosatu and the SACP are like "hopeless men playing the Lotto".
Oddly in a book that says it wants to lower the inhibition levels in public debate, Gumede himself as well as his bodyguards in the liberal and media elites have laboured mightily to ensure a celebratory and uncritical reception for this critical book. The Economist went so far as to play the race card, as though the fact that Gumede is black could somehow increase the value of his intellectual contribution: "Older, white critics may be dismissed (however unfairly) as relics of the apartheid past. Mr Gumede - a bright, young and black academic - cannot be brushed aside so easily."
If Gumede is to be dismissed it is not because of his race but because of the intellectual unseriousness of his work. It is not only, as others have pointed out, that he mischaracterises Mbeki's ANC as an uncritical proponent of the Blairite "Third Way" and that he vastly understates that same ANC's critique of globalisation.
What makes him easily dismissed is the laziness with which he pursues even his own case. At page 125 he writes "the modernisers increasingly talk 'left' to the ANC membership, but act 'right' as government". This is doubly lazy, first because Gumede offers no original thought but merely parrots the poorly argued thesis of Patrick Bond's book, 'Talk Left, Walk Right'. It is further lazy because Gumede gives no evidence that he has read Bond's book. His footnote cites "Interview with Patrick Bond, 7 March, 2002". That illustrates his method. He favours the quick chat over the labours of reading.
Gumede's book illustrates Mbeki's complaint that too many self-styled commentators simply do not read. It is easier to offer windy pontification: "Great democratic leaders are visionaries. They have an instinct for their nation's future, a course to steer, a port to seek." That is very eloquent, but whenever Gumede must address the intellectual commitments actually espoused by Mbeki throughout his life, he merely treats them as "fashionable" (Communist Party membership) or as slogans "used" for ulterior motives (Africanism) or as an expression of Mbeki's "arbitrary nature". All this is a labour-saving device because serious engagement with and critique of Mbeki's ideas would have required a little bit of reading, not a mere procession of adjectives underpinned by series of chats (many of those anonymous) upon which he confers the fancy title of "interviews".
It is with similar laziness that Gumede passes on his own worthless speculations as to the inner thoughts of Mbeki at various points in his narrative: "Mbeki was bitter"; "for Mbeki the decision was painful"; Mandela's "occasional admonishments drove Mbeki to distraction". Such matters are fundamentally unknowable, but Gumede is determined to kiss the feet of his liberal and elite readerships. There are already signs that, as with Ulimengo, they have adjudged him to have overdone it. The Economist concedes that he may seem to have gone too far, while the Financial Times has rejected his pessimism.
Ronald Suresh Roberts is writing a book about Thabo Mbeki and his intellectual tradition.
Thabo Mbeki and the struggle for the soul of the ANC
By William Mervyn Gumede
Zebra Press
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