Death in detention of Ahmed Timol

Ahmed Timol the first political prisonerto be killed at John Vorster Square

Ahmed Timol was born on the 3rd November 1941 in Breyten in current-day Mpumalanga. He grew up in Roodepoort and trained as a teacher. In 1964 he attended the funeral of Suliman 'Babla' Saloogee who had died in detention. This influenced him to join the liberation movement. He went for political training abroad in 1969. He was trained with Thabo Mbeki and Anne Nicholson. In February 1970 he returned to the country and went underground. He was arrested at a roadblock and 4 days later, on the 27th Oct 1971 he died at the hands of the security police at the infamous John Vorster Square.

Jennifer Davis

Jennifer was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1933. She grew up in what she described as a Jewish middle-class household where her pediatrician father was often woken in the middle of the night to make house calls. Her German-born mother was trained as a pharmacist and her maternal grandmother helped her understand the story of her family in Germany. Jennifer would later say that “never again” meant that every Jew should be an activist, resisting religious and racial oppression wherever it occurred.

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