On October 28, 1971, South Africa’s apartheid police confirmed the death of Ahmed Timol. He was a 29-year-old teacher and anti-apartheid activist, and he had died in their custody at Johannesburg’s John Vorster Square, days after his arrest. The officers’ account was that he had jumped from the tenth floor. His family and his comrades never believed it. The official story said a man in police custody had taken his own life; the people who knew him, and knew the police, heard something else in it — a death the regime was explaining away.

Nearly half a century later, the record caught up with that disbelief. A 2017 inquest ruled that Timol had been murdered by the security police, who had staged the fall to cover it up. What had been presented in 1971 as a jump from a tenth-floor window was, the inquest found, a killing dressed up as one. The confirmation that came on this day had told the country that Timol was dead; it took another forty-six years for the law to say plainly how he died, and at whose hands.

That is why October 28 still matters. It is the day the death apartheid tried to hide behind an official story entered the public record — and the day whose truth, long denied, history finally refused to let go.