By Rashied Omar
Cape Town – Imam Abdullah Haron’s “crime” for which he was brutally tortured to death by the apartheid police on September 29, 1969, was that he embodied the spirit and vision of the Black Lives Matter Movement more than half a century before its formation in 2013.
The Black Lives Matter movement is a global network infrastructure which supports the ongoing struggle against state-sanctioned violence and highlights the egregious ways in which black people are constantly violated and discriminated against, ultimately fighting for racial and social justice all over the world.
More than a half century ago, Imam Haron was already challenging these systemic injustices against oppressed and marginalised communities.
During the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s he worked tirelessly to break down racial barriers in Cape Town.
In order to do so, he frequently visited township areas such as Langa, Gugulethu and Nyanga. In 2020, 51 years since his killing, Cape Town remains one of the most racially segregated cities in South Africa.
One of the best ways to commemorate the exemplary legacy of Imam Haron is to emulate his moral example. Every new day Capetonians need to make a conscious effort to effect change and transcend our city’s stubborn apartheid legacy of spatial segregation.
We must be unrelenting in our challenge to dismantle anti-Blackness by confronting it in the spaces we inhabit (family, homes, masjids, work places) and the institutions in which we work.
As we commemorate the 51st anniversary of the death of al-Shahid Imam Haron in an apartheid prison cell, we once again express our disappointment at the lack of real progress by South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to find his killers and bring them to justice.
In February 2019, the Haron family, led by his widow, Galiema Sadan-Haron, requested that the NPA reopen an inquest into the real cause of death of their father in an apartheid detention cell.
After having been incarcerated in solitary confinement for 123 days under the Terrorism Act of 1967, on the 27th September 1969, the apartheid security forces claimed that Imam Abdullah Haron had died as a result of a fall from a flight of stairs at the Maitland police station.
A subsequent autopsy report found 26 bruises mostly on the legs, a haematoma (internal bleeding) near the base of the spine, the seventh rib broken and stomach empty. More than 40 000 people from all walks of life protested Imam Haron’s death at his funeral on Monday, September 29, 1969.
Imam Haron’s body had hardly been laid to rest, six feet under the earth, when an earthquake devastated Tulbagh and an earth tremor shook Cape Town.
For many of the mourners the two events were connected. In the words of one of them: “Perhaps the universe is itself a moral order … and the circumstances of death of such a man as Imam Haron was the greatest transgression of the moral order.”
The people of Cape Town have never believed the apartheid police account that Imam Haron’s death was an accident.
Sadly, his widow, Galiema Haron, passed away and was buried the same day last year on September 29, 2019, exactly 50 years to the day Imam Haron was buried.
She died without having witnessed justice for her beloved husband.
A quarter of a century after the onset of democratic rule in South Africa, it is appalling that the Haron family still have not made headway in their plea for justice. It is a huge travesty, not only for the Haron family, but for all the freedom-loving souls who were murdered while in apartheid detention, and whose families continue to cry out for justice.
* Dr Omar is the Imam of the Claremont Main Road Masjid and a Research Scholar of Islamic Studies and Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame, US.
Cape Times