Ahmed Timol, a teacher from Roodepoort, was a student activist and later became a member of the South African Communist Party. He went to London in 1967, where he took up a teaching post, supporting his family in South Africa. He also met with former comrades and friends from the Communist Party and the ANC who selected Ahmed Timol to attend the International Lenin School in Moscow from February to October 1969. Back in London, and before leaving to go back to South Africa, he received training in underground political work. He returned to South Africa in February 1970, resuming his teaching post in Roodepoort.
Ahmed Timol was arrested at a roadblock in October 1971, together with Salim Essop, and subsequently taken to the John Vorster Square police station. He was severly tortured by the security police and died in police custody on the 27 October 1971, by falling from the 10th floor to his death.
An Inquest was opened on 1 December 1971 at the Johannesburg Magistrate by J.J.L. de Villiers, with D.W. Rothwell and A.L.T. Beukes as Public Prosecutors, and Advocate I.A. Maisels QC and Advocate G. Bizos, and instructing attorneys M.S.H. Cachalia and M.A. Loonat presenting the Timol family. The hearing had to be adjourned due to Advocate Maisels request to access documents in the case. After lengthy interventions hearings were resumed in April 1972. The post mortem was carried out by the pathologist Dr Nicolaas Schepers, assisted by Dr J. Gluckman at the request of the Timol family.
The Magistrate announced his findings on the 22 June 1972, saying that Ahmed Timol had committed suicide whilst in police custody, and that nobody was to be blamed for his death.

The PTL collection is a small collection (0.5 linear metres). It has been arranged to reflect its main activities. This collection also reflects the increasing militancy of teacher organisations, and the impact the education crisis of the 1980s had on teachers.

Sections A - H deals with the PTL itself and its membership. As the PTL was formed under the state of emergency and operated under repressive conditions, there are no minutes of its executive meetings available as these were not kept. This phenomenon holds true for many organisations during this period who were opposed to the apartheid regime.

Section I - K deals with the whole teacher unity process at the National and the Southern Transvaal regional and NECC level at which the members of PTL were involved. This process culminated in the formation of the South African Democratic Teachers' Union (SADTU). Copies of minutes as well as hand-written notes of some of these meetings provide interesting insight to the whole process of the formation of a national teacher organisation

Section L has files kept by the PTL on the various teachers organisations in the country. It was not uncommon for PTL executive members to also be members of some of these organisations, more notably TASA. Section M are miscellaneous documents relating to education that the PTL had collected in the course of its activities.

The collection is very small, 0.3 linear metres. SAHA received it as part of the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) collection, but it is clear that it constitutes an archive in its own and was added to the NIC collection by mistake.

This collection is not a large collection, comprising of 10 archival boxes. It is also not the official NIC collection but was donated to SAHA by the Centre for Community and Labour Studies (CCLS) in Durban. Some of the material given to us by CCLS has been separated from this collection as it was clear that it constituted a separate archive, that of the South African Tin Workers' Union.

The collection includes a memoir and a tribute.

The collection includes minutes, reports, conference papers and audio recordings, photographs and other organisational material. Of particular interest are documents on the organisation of white activists in the Democratic Movement.

These documents received by SAHA from SAYCO Head Office are not the complete archives of SAYCO. It is doubtful if records of the period before 1990 were kept or even exist at all given the repressive conditions of the period. Thus, this collection has documents mainly from 1990. This is a small collection, comprising of 3 archival boxes.

Doc(s) - document(s)

Misc - miscellaneous

Incl - includes / including

Ts(s) - Typescript(s)

Ms(s) - Manuscript(s) i.e. anything hand-written

Corresp - correspondence

pcopy - photocopy

incomp - incomplete

n.d. - no date, i.e. undated

n.a. - no author

n.t. - no title

p - page (or pages)

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Almost all the items in this collection are copies of posters utilised in the book "Images of Defiance". The majority of slides in this collection correspond to actual posters included in the SAHA Poster Collection (AL2446).