The power that made John Vorster Square terrifying was the power to make a person vanish legally. Under apartheid's security legislation, police could hold political detainees with no contact, no lawyer, no family, no court. A detention might last hours or months, entirely at the discretion of the officers running the interrogation. The people brought here were trade unionists, students, activists, members of banned organisations, ordinary South Africans the state had decided to silence. Cut off from the world on the upper floors of a building most of the city walked past every day, they were utterly at the mercy of their captors. The architecture itself, those high windows looking out over downtown, would become part of the official story of how some of them died.

On 22 October 1971, the police arrested a 29-year-old teacher named Ahmed Timol. Five days later, on 27 October, he was dead, having fallen from the tenth floor. The police said he had jumped, and in 1972 an inquest accepted it, suggesting he had killed himself rather than betray his comrades. His family never believed it. For decades they pressed, and in 2017 a reopened inquest finally overturned the lie: the court found that Timol had been tortured, that he had not jumped but had been pushed, and that his death amounted to murder. It took forty-six years for the law to say what his loved ones had always known. The original magistrate's verdict had not just failed Timol; it had helped his killers walk free.

Timol was not alone. Of the seventy-three known deaths of political detainees in South African police custody between 1963 and 1990, eight occurred at John Vorster Square. In December 1976, Wellington Tshazibane was found hanging in his cell four days after his arrest; his family said he had scrawled a warning on the lining of his trousers, telling his mother and brothers the police meant to throw him from the tenth floor. In February 1982, Neil Aggett, a young doctor and union organiser, was found hanging after seventy days in detention and a marathon interrogation; he was the first white South African to die in detention since 1963, and a later inquest concluded he too had been killed. In 1988, the activist Stanza Bopape disappeared after his arrest, the police claiming he had escaped while they changed a tyre. Each death was ruled a suicide or an accident. Each ruling was a second violence laid on top of the first.

In September 1997, three years into democracy, John Vorster Square was renamed the Johannesburg Central Police Station, and the bust of Vorster was taken down. But the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had already heard the testimony, from officers and survivors alike, of what torture had been routine inside these walls. The Commission reached a careful, damning conclusion about the so-called suicides: given the extensive evidence of physical and psychological torture, a death by one's own hand under such conditions should be treated as an induced suicide, for which the security forces and the former government were accountable. The poet Chris van Wyk caught the absurdity of the official excuses in his bitter verse 'In Detention.' The building still functions as a working police station today. To stand before it is to stand at an address where the state once turned a high window into a weapon, and to remember the people who deserved to grow old.