On a rainy afternoon in Stellenbosch, members of the academic community gathered at the University Museum for a special event. Uncovering / Recovering the Past was not only a presentation of art or legal history, but a visceral act of memory and reckoning. Centred on the reopened inquest into the 1969 death in police detention of anti-apartheid cleric Imam Abdullah Haron, the event was led by artist-activist Haroon Gunn-Salie and human rights lawyer Odette Geldenhuys. Together, they invited the audience to confront the performative silences of law and the enduring power of memory.

Participants were welcomed into a carefully constructed courtroom installation, a scaled replica of the Cape High Court, and invited to don latex gloves before handling the postmortem report of Imam Haron. The gloves, Haroon later explained, were a symbolic act of reverence, much like removing one’s shoes before entering a sacred space. This immersive choice forced participants to feel the cold clinical detachment of legal documents, making tangible the institutional coldness that often veiled state violence. Odette introduced the document with careful precision, noting that it was the same one prepared on the day Haron died in Maitland police cells. She asked the audience to study it, not as passive observers but as forensic witnesses. She said, “we had to go back to 1969,” recalling the years-long legal journey that eventually reopened the inquest.

The session transitioned into a soundscape composed by Haroon: a 12-minute audio piece blending the chants of enslaved Southeast Asians, Imam Haron’s smuggled prison letters read by his daughter, and echoes of courtroom testimony. Haroon explained that “it starts in the belly of a slave ship and ends with an earthquake the night Imam Haron died.” The soundscape evoked not only personal grief, but the intergenerational and transhistorical scale of systemic violence.

“Into this emotive space, we now have to impose the law,” Odette told the audience, acknowledging the often-frictional relationship between affect and legal frameworks. She explained how post-TRC cases, like Haron’s, reveal the shortcomings of South Africa’s transitional justice mechanisms. The original 1970 inquest had absolved everyone. The reopened inquest in 2022 was only possible because new evidence came to light, and because the law permits reopening in the interest of justice, a term that remains legally ambiguous.

Haroon described his sculptural work as more than art. “It is evidence,” he asserted. Created for the courtroom, the 3D reconstruction of Haron’s body mapped the bruises, silences, and wounds that law had once refused to name. For Haroon, whose own life was shaped by imprisonment and activism, this was not just about the past. “We survived. We live to tell the story,” he said, pointing to a photograph of himself as a child on Chris Hani’s arm.

During the Q&A, Wilhelm Verwoerd noted how the phrase “nothing abnormal was found” became a refrain in the report, suggesting institutionalised denial. Anti-apartheid activist and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) member, Shirley Gunn, was also among the audience and raised the question of collusion in the pathologist’s language. Reagan, another participant, reflected on how the installation created a space where collective witnessing became possible. “We were not just looking. We were part of it,” he said during the conversation. These reflections underscored the power of language, both legal and artistic, in shaping public memory.

Uncovering / Recovering the Past was more than an event; it was a communal act of remembering and rehumanising. It held space for Imam Haron’s story, but also for the many others whose names remain lost in the official archives. By inviting audiences to feel the cold of gloves, to sit in a courtroom reimagined, and to hear the voice of a man long silenced, Haroon and Odette have opened a new path for justice, one rooted not only in evidence, but in empathy.