By Luke Tamborinyoka
Inscribed on the door of cell C6 of the D-class section at Harare Remand Prison is a simple message in the local vernacular Shona language: “Zvichapera boyz dzangu”, a telling reminder that the ordeal of incarceration always eventually comes to an end.
Memory is a site of the struggle and today marks exactly 18 years to the day since my arrest and brutal torture with other party colleagues on 28 March 2007 on trumped-up charges of banditry and terrorism.
I walked out of the prison gates at exactly 1933hrs on Thursday, 7 June 2007 after an unforgettable three months-stint as a guest of the State inside cell C6 in the D-class section of Harare Remand prison near Newlands shopping centre in Harare.
But as I walked out of jail, even the euphoria of my new-found freedom did not erase in me the memory of Zvichapera Boyz Dzangu—that indelible but simple inscription obviously scribbled by an optimistic, home-sick inmate.
After what I had gone through, it remained a pleasant surprise that I was finally out of the belly of the beast after 71 days. The tortuous ordeal, as implied in the words inscribed on the door of Cell C6, had indeed come to an end.
At least that is what I thought then. I had presumed that this was my farewell to this dingy prison. But I was to return to the same D-class “residential area” for another whole month the following year in April 2008.
The D-class section, reserved for “dangerous” suspects, was my home for 71 dark days way back in 2007. But my cumulative tenancy in the same D-class section becomes 102 days if I add my 31 day stint the following year when I was arrested again on the 15th of April 2008 on yet another trumped-up charge of public violence.
The strange allegation in April 2008 was that I and three others— Kudakwashe Matibiri, Fortune Gwaze and a journalist colleague Frank Chikowore—had burnt a bus during a demonstration by Zimbabweans demanding the release of the historic March 29, 2008, election results.
Tomorrow, we commemorate the late Morgan Tsvangirai’s famous and historic shellacking of Robert Mugabe in that landmark 2008 plebiscite.
But in my naive innocence on the evening of Thursday, 7 June 2007 as I left prison after my initial three months in D-class imprisonment, I thought I was leaving the place for good.
In the glaring moonlight, I turned my back to the dilapidated two-storey building that constitutes the D-class section of this cursed and unimaginative piece of architecture.
I painstakingly walked the final 10 metres to the prison fence and immediately jumped into the crushing embrace of my loving wife, Susan.
I ordered my wife to quickly drive away, never again to look back to the dingy prison buildings where I had seen over 10 people succumb to pellagra, a medieval disease related to malnutrition.
D-class prison was a place where one had to adjust to tough conditions such as leg irons, dirty khaki shirts and shorts, sub-standard food, tight security, the company of hardened criminals and scowling prison officers.
For me, Harare Remand prison represented the dark rictus of death. It was an odd place for hardened criminals and innocent prisoners like me whose persecution arose simply because of our relationship with Zimbabwe’s then main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party.
Harare Remand Prison was a potpourri of the genuinely guilty and those whom the regime simply wanted to torment and intimidate.
The D-class section of Harare Remand will forever remain etched in my mind as one of tyranny’s prized institutions plucked straight from the heart of Hades.
It was a waiting room of extreme fortunes where two cellmates could part to go to two contrasting destinations—one for home and the other for the guillotine.
My ordeal started on a sunny Wednesday afternoon on 28 March, 2007. On that day, over 500 armed policemen descended on Harvest House, the national headquarters of the MDC.
From about 1215hrs to 1530hrs, an assortment of visibly drunk policemen wrenched open doors and seized party equipment, from documents to computers and laptops.
They stole people’s mobile phones, prised open cabinet drawers and stuffed money, passports and other valuables into their pockets. Everyone was ordered to lie down while the sadists among them indiscriminately battered our backs with batons.
My friend, Kudakwashe Matibiri and I were forced to lie down for close to three hours while adventure-seeking policemen hit us with booted feet and gun-butts.
The sorry sight resembled a scary scene from an Alfred Hitchcock whodunit.
Mugabe’s merchants of death had come to Harvest House ostensibly to recover “weapons of war” which they said were hidden at the MDC headquarters They combed cabinet drawers, ceilings and any other crevices within reach. They poked every nook and cranny.
Like determined bloodhounds, they sniffed all sorts of odd places such as toilet cisterns and air vents in search of the elusive MDC “weapons”.
Their desperation was understandable in the circumstances. The following day on Thursday, 29 June 2007, Mugabe was due to leave for Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to explain the crackdown on the opposition: his police officers had just recently shot dead an MDC activist, Gift Tandare.
May his soul rest in peace.
Earlier that month on 11 March 2007, Mugabe’s clearly partisan police force had beaten to pulp and savagely attacked then MDC president Morgan Tsvangirai and other senior opposition party officials and civic leaders right inside Machipisa police station in Highfield, Harare.
In the succeeding weeks, MDC executives and party members had been abducted, severely beaten up and dumped in far-away places.
Therefore, Mugabe had to have a plausible explanation for the SADC leaders in Dar es Salaam the following day and the prospect of an arms cache at Harvest House would give him a credible story to justify his violent crackdown on a legitimate opposition.
They were obviously disappointed when they failed to find even a box of matches at Harvest House. The regime’s grand plot had fallen apart at the seams.
Harvest House is a six-storey building in which the MDC occupied the two upper floors, with the rest then occupied by an assortment of tenants.
The police 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 the series of the nights of terror and torture immediately commenced.
The number of suspects was trimmed down to 23 and eventually to seven.
No charge had yet been preferred against us.
That night of 28 March 2007, we were severely assaulted. One by one we were called into another separate office where all sorts of wild allegations were made against us. We were part of the MDC thugs that had several “petrol-bombed” police stations across the country, the police alleged.
We worked for a puppet opposition party. We wanted to hand the country back to the white colonialists and any such drivel associated with a regime fast accelerating a nation towards an inevitable implosion.
For three nights, we were tortured and brutally assaulted with a baseball bat, clenched fists and batons.
For three days and nights, the beatings and assaults continued.
For three days and nights, we were denied access to food, legal and medical assistance.
For three days and nights, the sadists continued to call us one by one, asking all sorts of questions.
For three days and nights, our condition deteriorated due to the incessant torture.
They wanted to know more about the MDC’s ‘democratic resistance campaign’ which they said was a programme to attack and burn down police stations.
Then on Saturday, 31 March 2007, after three days of continuous brutal torture, we were finally told that a court order had been obtained that we should go home because the police had detained us for more than 48 hours without preferring any charge against us.
It was then that an official whom I suspect to have been a member of the dreaded state security Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) called me to a private room.
He said I was responsible for the “Roll of Shame”, a column in a local weekly where the department where I was the Director named and shamed all government and Zanu PF personalities who were committing human rights abuses.
The CIO official also referred to what he called “anti-government speeches” that I had made five years before when I was still secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists.
He also accused me of writing for “anti-government” on-line publications. He claimed I had retained my news editor’s position at the banned Daily News and I was responsible for co-ordinating the pool of former reporters of the then banned Daily News to write for anti-government online publications.
For my alleged “crimes”, the officer said I was going to rot in prison.
Faced with the prospect of releasing us on the basis of the court order that had just been granted in our favour, a grim-faced officer then called the seven of us into a room and read out the charges against us.
We were being charged with carrying out a spate of petrol-bombings in Harare and other cities. We were charged under section 24 of the Criminal Law (Reform) Codification Act and were specifically being accused of “resisting the government and seeking to remove the government through acts of sabotage, banditry and terrorism.” I was shocked. Me, a terrorist bomber?
In any case, the real terrorism was the one that had just been meted out on us for three consecutive days and nights at the Law-and-Order section offices where these strange charges had been concocted and were now being read out to us!
The law-and-order unit is one of the most misnamed offices in the country—a place where neither law nor order prevails.
We were then taken to court under heavy security. This drama, of course, was meant for the state media.
The State-controlled Herald newspaper went on to gleefully report the arrest of the “MDC terror-bombers”, including the “journalist-cum-activist” Luke Tamborinyoka.
It is telling that when the State case eventually collapsed like a deck of cards three months later, the same State media thought it was not a story worth reporting. So much for professional journalism.
There was no magistrate when we arrived. We were almost collapsing due to hunger and the injuries sustained after three days of brutal assault and torture.
Someone must have summoned ambulances to the Magistrates Court but the police ordered that we not be allowed access to medical attention.
One of my colleagues, Shame Wakatama, collapsed and we all thought he had died. It was then that the police panicked and allowed the ambulance crew to drive the rest of us to Harare’s Avenues clinic.
The court later convened at the clinic and magistrate Gloria Takundwa remanded us in hospital under prison guard until the following Monday, 2 May 2007.
We were put on intravenous tubes by hospital staff eager to nourish and boost our wasted bodies.
But the worst was yet to come!
I am not ordinarily given to fear. But when about 10 gun-toting agents of the dreaded Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) burst into the clinic at around midnight and demanded to take “our people”, I became jelly-kneed.
They scared the hell out of an adamant sister-in-charge, violently plucked out our intravenous tubes and frog-marched us via the emergency exit to a nearby van.
The sight of AK rifles in the van was frightening but the thought of driving in the deathly quiet early morning hours with armed CIO agents to an unknown destination was enough to almost paralyze one with fear.
The seven of us were later dumped at Harare Remand prison at around 01:30 hrs, in the process breaking the prison’s own record of “check-in” time.
One is supposed to go to prison by dint of a verdict of the court, but we were simply smuggled into jail by the State’s dreaded soy agency, in brazen violation of the law and outside any court process.
We had been remanded in hospital by a competent court of law, but the CIO had kidnapped us from hospital to dump us in prison as if they wielded any legal power to interfere with judiciary processes.
But then this is Zimbabwe.
My colleagues, Zebediah Juaba and Brighton Matimba who had received serious injuries during the torture sessions inside a police station were immediately taken to the ill-equipped prison hospital to await the attention of a government doctor.
The “doctor” was to pitch up at the prison complex after two months. He just orally and off-handedly interviewed the 30 of us in less than 20 minutes!
The oral interview took place long after my two colleagues had been discharged from hospital to the cells, even though they were still in critical condition.
Matibiri and I were allocated cell C6, where I carved out a place for myself near the corner.
That corner was later to be referred to as the “MDC Information Corner” after it emerged it was in the same corner that the late MDC spokesperson Learnmore Judah Jongwe had met his mysterious death in 2002.
Later, more MDC activists were to join the seven of us in Remand Prison and more were to be detained at the prison hospital.
Among this lot of late arrivistes were Morgan Komichi, Phillip Katsande and Dennis Murira.
Life in prison was an ordeal on its own. Remand prison is supposed to be temporary accommodation while awaiting trial and sentence. But some inmates had stayed at the prison for years, seemingly abandoned by the State which brought them to the jailhouse and by relatives who no longer came to visit either because they had long died or they had simply grown tired of the routine trips to the prison.
More than 95 percent of the inmates in D-class prison had no relatives who brought them food and they depended on the prison meal of a morsel of sadza and cabbage leaves boiled in salted water.
Rations of soap and toilet paper were last seen in the 1980s, we were told. A colleague, Arthur Mhizha, learnt the hard lesson that in a Zimbabwean prison, you bathe with one hand while with the other, you hang on to your prized piece of soap!
The ‘MDC team’, as we were known, became famous for donating some of its food from home to other inmates. The recipients of our benevolence included Fungai Murisa, a ZANU PF activist who was facing a murder charge after he had murdered an MDC member in Makoni East in Manicaland province.
Food is acquired at a premium in prison. It is a one-meal per day affair served from an aluminum bin. Yes! A bin! And it is only acquired after a stampede that would leave rugby players green with envy.
Only adventurous inmates such as Reason, then one of the most notorious prisoners in D-class, could afford the rare taste of meat. Reason was well known for what became known as the “rat barbecue.”
He would kill the stray rats that patronized the dirty, un-flushed toilet chamber in cell C6 and roast them on the overhead globe during the night when prison officers were snoring the night away.
For the less adventurous, it was one meal of sadza and cabbage, taken every day at around 2pm before everyone was ordered to retire to bed for the “night” at around 3pm.
The cells are another overcrowded affair, with an average of between 45 and 70 prisoners sharing a single small cell and battling the night away in the usual pastime of fighting away the cold and killing lice.
One also learnt to meet with suspects with fascinating and sometimes just unbelievable stories of how they ended up in jail.
One such character was one Takawira Mwanza, a former army officer who was arrested and served four years for stealing Mugabe’s prized bull from his Norton farm.
The bull, Karigamombe, which was bought and airlifted from China, turned out to be at Mwanza’s rural home in Sanyati.
At that time, Mwanza’s gripe was that even though he had served his sentence for stock theft at Chikurubi Maximum Prison, Mugabe was not happy that he be left to go home.
Takawira was languishing at Harare Remand prison, waiting for the day when Mugabe would wake up in a good mood and order the prison officers to allow him to go home and meet his family.
So much for an independent judiciary.
In the meantime, he had to contend with his two tattered blankets in his beloved corner in cell C6 at Harare remand prison.
The then MDC president, Morgan Tsvangirai also left his own mark at Remand prison. On Monday, 14 May 2007, he came to visit us and when he proceeded to see Morgan Komichi in the prison hospital, there was chaos from other sections when both inmates and prison officers went into frenzy, shouting “President” as they stampeded to catch a glimpse of the man who had given Robert Mugabe a political nightmare.
The then officer-in-charge of Harare Remand Prison, a commissioner Musonza, was transferred to Prison Headquarters after the incident.
Tsvangirai was also “banned” from visiting Remand prison lest the officers and the inmates got into yet another frenzy!
The chants of “President” directed at Tsvangirai by an excited crowd of prison officers and inmates inside a government complex 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 had been snatched from the streets of Harare to face the same charges of terrorism.
What kept us going during those tenuous three months in D-class prison was the inspiring presence of Ian Makone, the simplicity of Zebediah Juaba, the comforting singing from Paul Madzore and Shame Wakatama and the gospel teachings of Kenneth Nhemachena.
In June 2007, the case against us began to crumble after it emerged that the State had created fictitious witnesses to incriminate us on a trumped-up charge of terrorism. One such fictitious witness who turned out to be a creation of the State was one Peter Chindodhana.
It later turned out this Chindodhana did not even exist!
For our charge, the State consented on 7 June 2007 that it had no evidence, and we were eventually removed from remand.
Almost 20 years later, the regime is still detaining innocent people with impunity.
Three weeks ago on a Sunday, a day before he handed himself to the police only to be detained for a long period, I called and I had a hearty 10-minute conversation with Blessed Mhlanga, a journalist colleague and brother.
I told him to brace himself for a longer detention when he turned himself to the police the following day. It turned out I was right.
We are back again to the tyranny of the Robert Mugabe days, if not worse.
It appears the more things change, the more they remain the same.
NehandaRadio
