Luke Tamborinyoka
Today, I re-publish that piece in rememberance of my time in the belly of the beast. .
My Zimbabwean Prison Experience!
Inscribed on the door of cell C6 at Harare Remand Prison is a simple message in the local Shona language: Zvichapera boyz dzangu, which means: “This suffering will come to an end”.
I walked out of the prison gates at 7.30pm on June 7, 2007, after three months as an inmate. I asked my wife Susan to drive away quickly, so that I would never again to look at the place where I had seen my friends succumb to disease and malnutrition.
The D-class section, reserved for “dangerous” suspects, was my home for 71 dark days. It was a place where one had to adjust to tough conditions such as leg irons, bad food, the company of hardened criminals and scowling prison officers.
Harare Remand Prison was an odd place for innocent prisoners like me whose persecution arose from a relationship to Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The prison was a potpourri of the genuinely guilty and those whom Robert Mugabe wanted to intimidate. It was a waiting room of extreme fortunes where two cell-mates could part to go to contrasting destinations: one for home and the other for the guillotine.
My ordeal started on March 28, 2007. On that day over 500 armed policemen descended on Harvest House, the national headquarters of the MDC. For over three hours an assortment of visibly drunk policemen wrenched open doors and seized party equipment, from documents to computers.
They took mobile phones, prised open cabinet drawers and stuffed money, passports and other valuables into their pockets. Everyone was ordered to lie down while some of them battered our backs with batons.
Mugabe’s men had come ostensibly to recover “weapons of war” that were supposedly hidden at the MDC headquarters.
They combed drawers, ceilings and any other crevices within reach; they sniffed toilet cisterns and air vents in search of the elusive MDC “weapons”.
Their desperation was understandable under the circumstances.
On the following day Mugabe was due to leave for Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to explain why he had been cracking down on the opposition. His police officers had recently shot dead an MDC activist, Gift Tandare.
Mugabe’s police force had also beaten MDC president Morgan Tsvangirai and some other senior opposition party officials. Several MDC members had been abducted, beaten and dumped in far-away places. Mugabe may have needed a plausible explanation for these events at the summit of the South African Development Community in Dar es Salaam. The story of an arms cache at Harvest House might have helped to justify a violent crackdown on the opposition.
The police were obviously disappointed when they failed to find even a box of matches at Harvest House.
They ordered everyone in the building – including tenants and their clients – to get into the police vehicles. About 100 people were taken to the infamous Room 93 of the Law and Order section at Harare Central Police Station, where a series of assaults began.
One by one we were called into an office where wild allegations were made against us: we were part of the MDC thugs that had “petrol-bombed police stations”; we worked for a puppet opposition party; we wanted to hand the country back to the white colonialists.
On the following day the number of suspects was trimmed down to 23 and eventually to seven. No charge had yet been levelled against us. For three nights we were tortured with a baseball bat and batons. We were denied access to food, legal and medical assistance. For three days the guards continued to ask us about something they called the “MDC’s democratic resistance campaign”.
On March 31 we were told that we could go home because the police had detained us for more than 48 hours without charging us. It was then that an official whom I suspect to be a member of the state security Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) called me to a private room. He accused me of being responsible for the “Roll of Shame”, a column in a local newspaper, in which government personalities were exposed for committing human rights abuses.
He referred to what he called “anti-government speeches” that I made five years ago when I was secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, and accused me of co-ordinating former Daily News reporters so that they wrote for anti-government publications.
For my alleged crimes, the officer said, I was going to be imprisoned. I and some others were being charged with carrying out a spate of petrol-bombings in Harare and other cities. We were being accused of “resisting the government and seeking to remove the government through acts of sabotage, banditry and terrorism”.
We were taken to court under heavy security. This drama, of course, was meant for the media.media
The state-controlled Herald newspaper gleefully reported the arrest of the MDC terror-bombers, including that of the “journalist-cum-activist” Luke Tamborinyoka.
There was no magistrate when we arrived. We were almost collapsing from hunger and the injuries sustained after three days of torture.
Someone must have summoned ambulances to the magistrates court, but the police ordered that we should not receive medical attention. When one of my colleagues, Shame Wakatama, collapsed the police allowed the ambulance crew to drive us to a clinic.
The court later convened at the clinic, where the magistrate remanded us under prison guard until the following Monday. We were put on intravenous tubes by hospital staff.
At around midnight, however, a group of gun-toting agents of the CIO – backed by prison officers – burst into the clinic, violently plucked out our intravenous tubes and frog-marched us to a nearby van via the emergency exit. The sight of assault rifles in the van was frightening, but driving in the early morning hours with armed CIO agents to an unknown destination was terrifying. The eight of us were dumped at Harare Remand Prison.
Those of my colleagues who had come out worst during the torture were taken to the ill-equipped prison hospital to await the attention of a government doctor. The doctor was to arrive at the prison two months later and interview 30 of us in about 20 minutes.
Life in prison was an ordeal on its own.
Remand prison is supposed to be temporary but some inmates had been there for years, seemingly abandoned, both by the state and by relatives who no longer came to visit.
Food was acquired at a premium. It was a one meal per day affair served from an aluminum bin, and was only obtained after a stampede.
Adventurous inmates like Reason, one of the most notorious prisoners in D-class, were among the few who could afford the taste of meat. He was notorious for what became known as the “rat barbecue”. For the rest of us it was one meal of sadza and cabbage a day, eaten an hour before we were ordered to bed at around 3pm.
The cells were overcrowded, with between 45 and 70 prisoners sharing a single cell and spending the night fighting the cold and the lice.
The leader of the MDC, Morgan Tsvangirai, left his own mark on the prison. On the day he came to visit us both inmates and prison officers began shouting “President!” as they crowded to catch a glimpse of Mugabe’s direct opponent. Afterwards, Tsvangirai was banned from visiting the prison again. The chants of “president” directed at him in a government complex must have made a lot of people uncomfortable.
By mid-April there were 30 MDC activists in prison, some shot and abducted from their homes while others were arrested in the streets of Harare to face the same charges I did: terrorism.
The state’s case against us began to crumble after it emerged that fictitious witnesses had been called in to incriminate us.
On June 7 the government conceded that it had no evidence and we were eventually removed from remand.
But as I walked out of the prison complex another reality struck. I realised that the whole of Zimbabwe is just another big prison.
Harare Remand was a microcosm of what the country had become. There is no food on the shelves, and people can no longer afford to visit each other because of prohibitive transport costs.
I feel that my unwarranted arrest has shown the panic of the ruling regime.
And Mugabe has every reason to panic. When he came to power as Prime Minister after the crucial election of 1980, he was 56 years old.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai will be 56 in March next year – when elections are scheduled to be held. It’s a trivial coincidence, but maybe one that can still scare an old tyrant.
