In an in-house session that weaved scholarship, forensic inquiry, and human experience, Dr Robyn Gill-Leslie invited us to step into what she called the “liminal spaces” of South Africa’s unfinished reckoning with apartheid-era crimes. Dr Gill-Leslie, a postdoctoral fellow in the ‘Bodies of Evidence’ project at the University of Oslo, explored how the architecture of apartheid produced not only violence but a lingering sorcery that still shapes the country’s engagement with truth, memory, and justice.

Gill-Leslie’s presentation focused on the case of Imam Abdullah Haron, a Muslim cleric and anti-apartheid activist who died in police detention in 1969. The apartheid state claimed Imam Haron had died from a heart attack after slipping on stairs, a fiction Gill-Leslie deftly unpacked; “the act of falling places a body inside a liminal space… precariously balanced between two stages of stability, what came before and what will come after.” She described how these ‘falling fictions’ became a mechanism of state magic, using everyday accidents to mask systematic torture and murder. Doctors, police officers, and magistrates collectively maintained this mythology, creating a seamless and sinister form of bureaucratic deceit. The notion of the apartheid state as a ‘magical state,’ a place where fictions were weaponised as truth, animated much of Gill-Leslie’s argument. Drawing on the work of Veena Das, she showed how the state’s obfuscations were not merely lies but performances that required public complicity. “what made the apartheid state’s magic so significant is that all of its performances and audience members knew of the fiction and yet upheld the deceit.”

Gill-Leslie then traced the trajectory of accountability efforts after 1994, highlighting the limits of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). While the TRC sought disclosures in exchange for amnesty, it was not designed to compel prosecutions. Families like that of Imam Haron, who received no meaningful justice during the TRC process, remained trapped in suspended time, where neither mourning nor accountability could fully proceed. As she observed, “extended stays in liminal spaces can become formless and disorientating.”

The reopening of apartheid-era inquests, such as the one into Imam Haron’s death concluded in 2023, represents a fragile but vital attempt to disrupt these suspended realities. Gill-Leslie detailed how the 2023 judgment bluntly overturned the original findings, reclassifying Haron’s death as the result of torture, not accident. The magistrate’s previous conclusion, she recalled, “frankly and candidly reduced to the fact that Imam fell on his bum and had a heart attack,” a verdict so absurd, Gill-Leslie noted, “it deserves to be laughed out loud if it did not cause such pain and heartache.” Yet even this legal correction is bittersweet. Many perpetrators are now dead, and families have spent decades enduring the psychic costs of delayed justice. The reopened inquests, she suggested, offer “a rational and robust response to the inaction around accountability for a past crime,” but they do not guarantee closure. The haunting presence of unresolved violence persists across generations, complicating healing and memory work.

Throughout the talk and subsequent conversation, Gill-Leslie and participants grappled with the complexities of evidence, time, and justice. AVReQ MA fellow, Thabolwethu, reflected expressively on how violence, as Gill-Leslie framed it, creates a ‘futurity,’ a lingering disruption that outlives the moment of physical harm. Gill-Leslie, responding, offered the searing example of a seer from KwaZulu-Natal whose visions led to the discovery of mass graves on a sugarcane farm. Here, the absent physical bodies did not negate the reality of violence but instead challenged narrow, Western notions of forensic evidence. Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a leading scholar of trauma and memory, urged a move beyond the language of ‘ghosts,’ insisting that South Africa’s unresolved traumas represent not spectral absences but ‘living history.’ In her view, the challenge lies in reclaiming the unfinished stories as part of an ongoing project of healing and re-imagining the future. Gill-Leslie’s reflections on the labour of victims’ families brought into sharp relief the burdens that survivors carry. As she noted, it is often families, through painstaking, often solitary efforts, who pursue truth and accountability. “We still turn to the law to fix us,” she mused, even though the law itself was once a tool of apartheid oppression. This paradox sparked rich discussion about whether justice must continue to be sought through legal means or whether alternative forms of collective repair are needed.

The conversation also wrestled with the tension between the necessary pursuit of criminal accountability and a growing international abolitionist critique that questions whether legal systems, so saturated with colonial histories, can ever deliver true justice. Gill-Leslie did not offer easy answers but insisted on the value of persistence: “perhaps that’s what law’s job is — not actually the verdict, but the way in which it can conjoin multiple narratives and create that moment of affect.”

In the end, the session evoked the profound challenges of transitional justice in South Africa: the unfinished work, the stubborn magic of state fictions, and the inexhaustible determination of families and communities to insist on truth, however belatedly. As Gill-Leslie concluded, “ghosts from 50 years ago present tangible challenges to current governance,” reminding us that the line between past and present in South Africa remains porous, contested, and urgently alive.