In this compelling talk, Dr Robyn Gill-Leslie examines how the apartheid regime created a bureaucratic fiction to disguise political killings, using the case of Imam Abdullah Haron as a focal point. She draws on Veena Das’s concept of state magic to show how death in detention was masked as accidental and how this created a lasting space of uncertainty for families.

With reference to Berber Bevernage’s idea of allochronic time, she explains how the post-TRC state’s failure to pursue prosecutions has left survivors trapped in a painful temporal suspension. Reopened inquests offer limited redress but also reveal how truth can re-emerge through documentation, family persistence, and spectral memory, raising new questions about justice and repair in democratic South Africa.