by Simon Mann
I still don’t know who they were.
The next morning I’m taken to the police station itself, where they put me back in handcuffs and leg-irons, then sit me on the floor. They keep me like that for something like an hour. I don’t know why, because then they take me back to the tank.
As we walk back I notice that the man who asked if he could join my group – to fight against Mugabe – is chatting to two plainclothes police officers. They are surprised to see me clock them. After that he doesn’t come back into the tank, so I am sure that he had been sent in as an agent provocateur – a poor agent.
It will not be the last time that the Zimbabwe security services prove themselves a waste of rations. More than once I will feel shame at being the prisoner of such cack-handed gaolers. Sometimes I am embarrassed by them.
This day is a long one. There’s no interrogation. All the time I think there will be. The tank has emptied such that there are only half a dozen of us. The fat white man, now very quiet, is one.
My feet are still bare, and by now very dirty. I pace up and down. Every tenth time I do a length, I climb up onto the wall that retains the one, overflowing lavatory. That allows me to stretch, then pull myself up to look out of the high opening in the wall. From there I can see the 50 yards between the tank and the police station. I can see where cars drive in and out of the station’s leafy car park.
A new BMW arrives. South African and with diplomatic plates. Right, I think, NI are busy. My two-timing friends. They will be hard at it. Hand-washing. Proving their innocence. Tut-tutting.
I pace up, then down. Little do I know what a world-girdling trek of paces lie ahead of me. From the wall opening and the door’s peep-hole, I can work out direction and time, using the sun as compass and watch.
Luckily, I know how to do it. I laugh at myself. Such a Boy Scout. So how come I’m now in such an almighty fuck-up?
The day drags. I want to escape, but can see no way. Even at that early stage, the key thought about any escape has already struck me: how far can a ragged and shoeless white man go when everyone else is black?
Already I am frantically bored, yet I’ve only been a prisoner for five days. How am I going to cope with months? Years? My spirit sinks, withering and sickening inside me. Inshallah… Then maybe they’ll kill me.
I can see a short row of huts. They are neat and homely, belonging to the police officers of that station. Each one is only one room, but the doors and windows, as well as their surrounding patch of earth, are well kept. A child crawls out of the hut I can see best, then starts to play in the sand. His mother fusses around, making ready a meal while also taking care of him.
I watch them. I might as well be a million miles away, watching through a telescope, so remote am I from any such life, such loveliness. I am a living dead.
Once it is early evening, the tank slowly fills up. We all dread the crowd sure to be thrown in with us: another night in that unlit stinking hole, unable to lie out, pressed in on all sides by tight bodies. The fat white man isn’t the only one to feel the panic of claustrophobia, even if he is the one to show it.
Each time we see an officer, we beg that he run the water into the tank’s lavatory cistern so that we can flush. Sometimes he does, although the relief only lasts until the next time somebody has a shit.
Of course, there’s no paper. I long ago used my underpants, then chucked them. My hands are my only way, then cleaning them on whatever I can find: floor, wall, a piece of old cardboard.
We fear the worst for that night. We are right. The dread calls that I get all night long – ‘Mann, Mann – wake up – outside – Handei! – come on – outside…’ – are in fact a help: they give me a good reason to hang onto my spot of concrete by the door. Everyone knows that I will be out and in all night. It’s them I’ll be treading on.
The morning comes. One of my friends of the day before is taken off to the police station. He chanted and sang in the night. When I said how good the singing was the street boy next to me – my friend, Rent Boy – said: not singing, Simon, he’s praying.
Half an hour later I too am taken to the station. It seems quiet, sleepy. It’s sunny outside but not hot. We could be in England. I remember that it is Saturday. Then what Saturday meant: fishing with Freddy. I never would again.
At the front desk sits one of the CIO officers. Before him is stacked paper, some sheets of carbon paper and a large old-fashioned typewriter. There’s something so quaint about it all that I smile, despite it being unquestionably aimed at my downfall.
I sit across from him, while he plonks away with two fingers, sometimes three. The quiet – and the comfort of a hard wooden seat – make me drowsy.
The fat white man is brought in from the tank. He’s made to sit on the bench behind me. My CIO man casts one eye over him, makes no change to his face, then carries on with his hen-peck typing.
As I sit watching the old typewriter work, I can feel the fat white man over my right shoulder. I feel his rage coming up to the boil; with us, in the tank, it has been somehow kept on simmer.
‘Excuse me, sir…’ bubbles over the heavy South African accent, the ‘sir’ ridiculous, ‘I need to see my Minister – the Right Honourable Mkube Mazazongo – Minister of Baboon Shit, or whatever – he will order my release – he…’
‘Shut up.’
‘No – you people…! You people, you don’t understand – the Minister and I are par…’
‘I said, “Shut up.” So shut up … Sit on the floor!’ says my man, with one long, cold stare.
The fat white man sits down on the floor, his bolt shot.
The typewriter clacks slowly along.
The white is taken away by two uniformed police. (I didn’t see or hear of him again, so I guess he was made to trek back again … to Voortrekkerhoogte, maybe. He was lucky.)
The CIO man looks up – then he pushes a newspaper my way, turning it so that I can now see the front page. There’s my Boeing 727-100, N4610, parked at Manyame Air Base, on the south side of Harare International.
‘MERCENARIES TO BE HANGED,’ says the banner headline. I glance at the semi-informed text, then look up at the CIO man. He is coolly watching my face.
‘Don’t worry – we’re not going to kill you. We’ll find you somewhere in the rural areas and keep you there … maybe for a very long time … maybe we’ll find you a farm – yes – maybe a Section Six farm.’
He laughs. I try to smile. My throat is dry and scratchy. I can feel a coarse hemp rope around my neck.
(Then, I don’t know it, but that feeling – ‘maybe this all ends with a rope around my neck, and a long long drop’ – coming with a nasty cold slither in my gut – is not to leave me for four long years: not until after my trial and sentencing in Equatorial Guinea, in 2008.)
After 40 or so minutes, all is ready. The CIO man gives me the papers that he has been so carefully typing. They come as no shock to me, just as what is to happen next comes as no shock. He has typed up my handwritten account of events, so now he will ask me to sign it. Then it will be a confession.
I read it through. The typing at least is accurate.
‘Is that OK?’ he asks.
‘It’s a copy of what I wrote … but you know that I cannot sign this without a lawyer present.’
He looks at me, unworried. Then he stands and goes to a side office, from where he comes back with a decrepit old man, tall and stooping. He wears a tweed jacket, a V-neck pullover, a shirt and tie, and grey flannel trousers with turn-ups. His shoes are scuffed black lace-ups. Were he not black-skinned, he would have been a caricature: of an English public school Latin beak.
‘Come with me,’ orders the CIO man.
He leads the way down a corridor and I follow, while the Latin beak files along behind me. We go into a small room. There’s a table in the middle with three chairs. I am pointed into a chair next to a double-door steel locker, painted grey, that fills the far-right corner, almost blocking the waist-high wi
ndow.
‘Sit there,’ the beak is told, with a wave to the side opposite me. The CIO man is going to sit between us, and therefore at the head of the almost square table.
‘You will sign, Mann,’ he said. ‘This is the Commissioner for Oaths – the Honourable Terence Mapfumo – and you will sign, in front of him.’
He walks out of the room, opening the door opposite that leads to another room, similar to ours, yet empty of both furniture and people. He turns right, out of my sight. I hear his footsteps, then a shout, a howl, another shout. A rush of feet come close, then into view. My singer friend of the night before flies into the room opposite, half thrown, half carried by two bruisers.
They hurl him to the ground, yelling at him. The noise is sudden and terrific. They kick him into place, all the time yelling. He goes down, then onto his back, arms by his sides, palms downward to the floor. His bare feet stick out of his frayed trouser bottoms, while he holds his legs straight and up at an angle of 30 degrees.
I watch. Horror.
My mind is stupid: why does he lie like that? So vulnerable. Over the coming years, I will see men take up that position many times. Like the singer did, on that sunny Greendale morning. I will learn that they hope, in that way, to make their beating less harsh. They hope to be just beaten. They hope to be thrashed that way.
Not killed.
My CIO man stands in the corridor, just to one side, watching me. The beak, beak-like, studies a sheet of typed paper on the table before him, as if the only nastiness is its poor syntax or grammar.
The two bruisers head for me, breathing hard. The first goes behind me, rattling open the doors of the steel locker, then smashing one door back into my chair. The second grabs my chair and forces it round halfway, then he grabs both sides of my head so that I am facing the steel locker.
They smell of sweat. Stale and fresh. Their breath carries their last night’s alcohol. The locker is empty, except for a heap of half a dozen two- and three-foot strips of lorry fan belt, the same as I had seen used the first night.
Goon One takes a handful of the strips, while Goon Two holds my head. Goon One keeps them in his left hand, putting one into his right. I think how cheap leather jackets are de rigueur for Zimbabwe Bruisers, that Southern Hemisphere autumn fashion: these two have them, like every other goon thus far.
Next Goon Two holds my face, his stinking mouth close to my ear, talking shit about white men not being tough, while Goon One put his bruiser’s face into mine, talking more shit, rubbing my neck and cheeks with the harsh V-shaped fan belt strip.
‘You will sign, Mann,’ the CIO man says. Then he orders the bruisers: ‘Show our Englishman why he will sign!’
They let me go, then spin my chair round to face out of the door. As the bruisers move from me to the singer, his feet still offered upward, his eyes meet mine. Pain fills them. I don’t need the message.
The beating starts, one bruiser for each of my singer’s feet. He shouts and screams in his pain. I wish I could say that I try to grapple my handcuffed hands onto those of the torturing bastards, but I do not. A lesser pain fills me too, and shame.
‘Are you going to sign, Mann?’
‘Will you stop that if I do?’
‘…but you must sign.’
I nod, then sign. The Latin beak looks pained, then rubber-stamps, witnesses, then stamps again. Months later, I am to learn that the beak is dead, of a cancer that he has fought and lost to. He died a few weeks after my signing ceremony.
At the time, I think his pained look is due to what is happening.
They take me back to the tank, calling out two prisoners as they push me in. There are about four left in the tank. I pace up and down, climbing and looking out across the 50 yards to the station at each length.
Soon I see two policemen walking either side of the two prisoners, while they carry the singer between them as though in a chair. They each have one arm under his armpits, their other hands under his legs, holding his knees up and keeping his scoured foot soles off the hot, harsh, red African grit.
They bring him into the tank. The singer’s eyes accuse me. The two policemen look at me: ‘This is your fault,’ say all of their eyes. The two prisoners lay him down gently on the filthy floor. The singer shuts his eyes.
Rent Boy, who had just carried back the singer, turns to me. ‘It isn’t you, Bwana. What could you have done? We are all suffering now. It isn’t you.’
I’m pretty sure the street kid is a rent boy – in the tank for hawking himself – but I don’t know that. I don’t ask. Why should I care? My whole world has reversed polarity.
So many things that mattered once don’t any more.
Not long after that, I pace again. The singer looks asleep. I hope so. The street kid is also pacing. We have just shared a smuggled cigarette. There is not meant to be any smoking in the tank so, whenever they do smoke, which is often, they take off their shirts and whirl them around as fans. That way, if an officer comes in, there will be no lingering smoke.
Of course, this is just a matter of form. The contraband cigarette and lighter is smuggled in by the officer anyway, in return for one for himself.
I must learn.
‘Look! Support Unit – they have come to take you, Simon. They will take you to Chikurubi now.’
I climb up beside him and look. I can see a dozen police, armed like soldiers, and three open pick-ups.
‘How do you know they are Support Unit?’
‘Brown boots … there is nobody else here for them, but you.’ He answers my first question and my next. I ask anyway.
‘Then … how do you know they will take me to Chikurubi – not somewhere else…?’
He laughs at my dark view. By now I understand that the police and Chikurubi, terrible though they may be, are safety. The Zimbabwe legal system is bad, but not as bad as their Gestapo.
‘Because the Support Unit can only be here for you. They can only be taking you to Chikurubi…’
An hour later I am taken out of the tank, careful not to say any farewells in front of the officers. I am learning. My goodbyes are already said, except to the hurt singer. Still asleep.
The Support Unit men have the look and manner of crack troops. They will do whatever their masters order, but they bear me no grudge. When I ask, they tell me straight: Chikurubi.
Relief.
I am moving on to something else. It will be better. The nights in the tanks have been hell. The fear – that I am a CIO non-person – has been terrible. I was never sure that they were not going to pull out my fingernails, or put electrodes to my balls, or shoot me. Feed me to the crocs.
As we drive into the Chikurubi Max farm and complex, and then into the prison itself, I try to scan everything into my head for future use.
For my escape.
Going home – somehow, anyhow – by now feels like the wildest of dreams…
But – somehow – I’ve got to get there. Home. Escape.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHIK MAX
Checking in to Chikurubi is surreal. Chik Max is the Harare Hilton. Our doors are open to all. The hardest and most secure prison in Africa. So they say.
I feel safer now. I’m out of the hands of the CIO and the police. I’m in the hands of the Zimbabwe Prison Service, the khaki-uniformed ZPS.
Chikurubi has an outside-of-Africa feel about it. The machine has discipline. There is a white man’s machine-age brutality. Sparta. Echoes of efficiency. Checked in by Reception. Forms are filled. Property signed for.
Two freshly washed and ironed uniforms (khaki drill shirt and shorts – white is for convicted men), four clean blankets, a plastic plate and cup, a bar of soap and a roll of loo paper. Issued. Signed for.
A doctor gives me a quick medical.
I’m back in the army.
In leg-irons and handcuffs they escort me for the first of too many times up the two sets of stairs to ‘A’ Hall.
I pass the mess and stink of all the pi
geon shit. They nest and coo in the roof. I pass by where the wild bees will hive. Then I go through a locked door and walk six paces: across the ‘A’ Hall exercise yard, under a steel-wire net in the sky; through another locked steel door; along three paces of passageway; past a steel-grille officers’ cage; through another locked steel-grille door; then into a passage.
All around me there are faces. Super-black against their white drill shirts. All eyes stare at me…
Then duck away when I look back.
Cell Six. The door is unlocked, opens… I walk in. My crowd of escorts have halted outside, craning to see my resting place.
The heavy hardwood door slams behind me.
The escorting officer rattles the handle. Another rattles it again. To check. Silence … near silence … my ears adjust.
Stunning.
I’m entirely – absolutely – alone.
I have to communicate with Amanda. I must … or with someone on my side. Anyone.
But: no mobile phone, no room phone, no screen and keyboard, no pen or paper, no nothing. No room service.
What’s happening? What are other people doing?
My Brothers-In-Arms, partners in crime, friends; they have money, they have contacts, they know Africa, they know the Zimbabwe top brass, they know Colonel Dube, Head of ZDI. They know how to operate in a zoo like this. Yes. They know how to operate in a zoo like this.
My cell is five feet wide and seven normal paces long. It’s high, maybe 12 feet.
A single bare bulb lights the space. All day. All night. No light switch.
At the other end to the great door, well made in some African hardwood, there is a small air vent, six inches in height, a foot in length, covered in a fine mesh at both its cell and outer ends.
At that same end wall, starting at about seven feet above the floor, a gallery juts out a couple of feet proud of the wall. The gallery is wood and glass, to allow daylight into the cell.
To one side of the cell, against that far end, is a built-in concrete box with a steel lavatory bowl let into it. At above head height, there is a short rope attached to a cistern flushing arm. The cistern itself is built into a solid and painted hardboard box. I pull. A mighty flush of water falls down. Luxury.