by Simon Mann
Charlie is here on a daring mission to help me. Amanda and my family know nothing of it. He’s with Colonel Miala, the CIO man in charge of my case, and Señor José Olo Obono, the Attorney General of Equatorial Guinea, with his interpreter. The latter had been heavy-handed with his scent.
A deal had been put to the Croc, and through him to ‘London’. If I give all the information that I could give – and hand over the documents that Equatorial Guinea think we have – the contract between Severo Moto and me – and the bank statements – then they will make no extradition request against me.
When my time is up in Zimbabwe, then I will go free.
This Sunday-afternoon meeting is happening in late 2005. I’ve been in custody now for 21 months. By now my Earliest Date of Release (EDR), with good behaviour and so on, is 11 May 2007.
They tell me again that the offer has already been put to the Croc and ‘London’. ‘London’ and the Croc do not know it is being put to me now, directly.
By this time, it is almost two years since our arrest. My Brothers-In-Arms have failed to send me so much as a postcard. They have made no effort to help the men, or their families. No share of legal fees. No postcard to Amanda.
I am ready to put the boot in.
The deal is placed on the table once more.
‘You bet.’
I ask Charlie to take that message home. Then, a few days later, when I see the Croc – who is amazed by the news of my Sunday visitors – I send the same message through him. No one gets back to me.
I am losing everything. Keeping me inside, and trying to get me out, is costing a fortune. Amanda and the children also have to eat, live, go to school. Inchmery – our home – has to be kept standing. Worst of all is the ruinous civil action being brought against me in the UK by President Obiang. It’s costing millions – but if it is lost, then all will be lost.
Nobody asks me if we should start this UK case, or do a runner. I would have run. Hidden the assets. Never, ever, would I have got into such a lawyers’ jamboree. The bill for that case alone is to be over £3 million. Still not won. Until I sort it.
A month or so later, I write to my sister, Sarah, and Amanda: the ‘Sitting Duck’ letter. I have it in front of me now. If you let me sit here until May ’07 – my estimated earliest release date – without a deal having been done, says the letter, then I will be a sitting duck.
No answer.
Why should I worry?
Mainly I walk now.
I can walk home. If I walk from here – Chik Max – to Cape Town, then I will free myself. I work out the distance, from the differences in latitude. Cape Town is 33 degrees south, Harare is 17. Sixteen degrees’ difference at 60 nautical miles per degree equals 960 nautical miles. Give or take.
Then I time my speeds: up and down the ‘A’ Hall yard. Up and down my cell. I log my time walking. I log my miles for each day.
Then I walk to Cape Town. But I’m still in Chik.
So I walk back.
I’m still here. Still walking. Up down. Up down. Except for food, showers, shits, writing and sleep.
Walking and barring thoughts of Amanda and the children are how I push time. My friends inside, Lucky and Zeb, have told me how: ‘You think too much, Shumba. Don’t think too much – you won’t make it…’
‘How can thinking ever be bad?’ I ask.
‘Not that thinking … You know what we mean! Thinking about outside … pamwe … you must make the inside of the prison – and all of us prisoners – your life, your home. That’s it.’
It is true.
It’s hard, but that’s how you do push time. After about two years, I get the hang of it.
Shumba is my name now. In Shona it means ‘lion’. It is an honour to be called that – the lion is king – and it is fun: the powers that be hate my having that prison name. By the powers that be, I mean the real powers – the CIO – the top. The officer in charge (OIC) also calls me Shumba, but then he doesn’t like the real powers that be either.
When officers walk past my cell, they sometimes shout out to Shumba, so I squeak back, ‘Meeeow.’
I bond with the inmates too.
Poor Zeb. He’s been in here five years without a trial. He’s a ‘Notorious’ – an armed carjacker – so that makes prison without trial OK.
Then his wife is killed in a car crash. We all feel bad for him. We say so.
Then we hear that the car was his. Then we hear that his best friend was driving the car … then that the friend was drunk … then that the friend had been fucking his wife. We don’t know what to say.
Zeb and I run these days. We’re all in section FB 1 together (FBI, we joke). I was moved out of ‘A’ Hall because FB 1 is the most secure. It’s the old Death Row. We run laps round the yard for 30 minutes a day, slowly building it up. The yard is only 25 metres square, so we run ten laps one way, then ten t’other.
We’re fanatics. We run as soon as we’re unlocked. We don’t care if there’s no food or water or electricity. It’s a way of stamping ourselves on the shitty set-up we’re in. It’s fun. It’s two fingers up at Mugabe and Co., and his troops, who come in to see me twice a day.
More guards than the Queen, I laugh at them.
Running hasn’t stopped my walking. Just more miles per day.
The troops are there because the Zim Army think that they own me too. They don’t trust the CIO or the ZPS. All these stakeholders in me only care because they think there is some money to be made out of me.
I never fail to tell the ZPS that the Army don’t trust them.
Lucky and I run what we call the ‘travel agency’. This is our name for the process of softening up, then bribing, chosen prison officers. Then they are hooked onto the payroll. Then they will help our trafficking. Our smuggling. Maybe an escape…
The ‘travel agency’ is part of the Shumba Group. This group pride themselves on being the very worst of everything. It started when we noticed that the phosphor heads of Lion-brand matches, an export of Zambia, either didn’t strike or flew off the stick if they did. ‘Lion’ is shumba – and so the Shumba brand. If someone sings in their cell badly enough – annoyingly enough – we ask them to sign up to the Shumba label. If a cooker – a prison cook – is useless enough, then he may be asked for his recipe, for the Shumba-brand foodstuffs division.
One time, a new batch of Pakistani matches, Khyber Pass brand, came in. They were so bad that the executives of Shumba quickly negotiated a corporate merger.
When someone’s clothes fall apart, then they are from the Shumba autumn collection. It happens more and more because Zimbabwe is running out of everything.
You get the idea.
Security try to kill the Shumba brand.
One day we are making tea leaves by opening old tea bags and spreading the used leaves in the blasting tropical sun. By this means, I was making sure that everyone in the section had a mug of tea every night. It was vile, Shumba-brand tea, but a little better than nothing.
My guard, the army guard, were handing over. They swapped monthly. There must have been 20 in the yard. The old and the new palace guards. Changing the guard at Shumba’s palace.
‘What are you doing?’ they ask. Friendly. We tell them. Lots of Shumba-brand jokes.
Next morning Security are in my cell.
‘Where’s the tea?’
I show my bags. Not that tea. The other tea. Something about brandy. They take everything.
Days later, we find out. ‘Shumba brand’ had become ‘Shumba brandy’. Mann was concocting brandy – hooch – out of old tea leaves. Clever Boy Scout.
My mind is playing tricks on me. I see moments that I guess were once real, although maybe not. For example: I have just put fuel in my motorbike, at a motorway service station, on my way up the M3 from home to London. I have paid, and I am walking back towards the bike. The sun is out, but rain has just stopped.
I look at the bike and can see it, bright and shiny but in exaggerated detai
l. The image super-clear. The resolution high. I look at the ground, then my boots. I feel sick. Something is wrong.
I can see every drop of water on the black stones of the tarmac, grains of sand between the stones, the stitches on my boot. I look up – in my mind’s eye – to escape the detail. I look at the trees – bright green – a hundred yards from the service station – but I can see each leaf waving in the English breeze… At home are Amanda and the children. I’ll see them this evening…
‘But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by Heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.’
It’s evening now in Chikurubi. We’re locked up. I think of Conrad’s words as I write this book. Heart of Darkness lies beside me.
I start to walk up and down my cell. Seven paces.
Why should I worry?
*Military slang for clothes washing.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHRISTMAS DAY 2005
Christmas Days in prison are worse than any other day. They mark the passage of another whole year of my life … going … gone. Christmas Day is even worse than Amanda’s birthday, or the children’s. According to my lawyer, I should be sitting at home. And have been there this past week. I look round my cell. It is my home, but that isn’t what he meant.
‘London’ have screwed up at least two other deals that I know of. I don’t understand why. Or how. I never will.
So sure have I been that I am homeward bound for this Christmas that I’ve given up smoking. There is no way I can go home to Amanda a smoker.
When I know I’m not going home, I want to smoke. But the effort has been huge. I look at my chart. Each day marked with the fags smoked. Somehow, I harden up. I don’t smoke again. I’m a mountaineer, not a smoker. In my mind, at least. I have to be.
I still need loads of fodya to pay the staff – my butler, Agrippa. I share him with Wicknell, who insists on calling him our butler.
Agrippa is a wonder. Young and built like a tank. He is a ball of energy. He has gone homosexual, but that bothers Wicknell more than it does me. That is why he is in our section. To keep him away from boys.
Our butler is serving 94 years for armed robbery. He had owned up to one so that the police would stop beating him. He had no lawyer, so the cops dumped all of their other outstanding armed robbery cases onto him.
I try to tell him that I do not need my shirts and shorts washed, starched and pressed every day. But I am his only hope of escape. That’s how desperate Agrippa is.
If I am your best hope of escape, then you are truly in the shit, I tell him.
He grins. ‘No, Shumba, you will be free soon.’
In Chikurubi, not only is no food ever too rotten to eat: optimism is something on another plane to that of those who are pamwe, outside.
Chik Max gets odder and odder. They have sent three boys into our section so that they might be less often sodomised. They found out that the boys are too young to be here in Chik anyway. They should be in a young offenders’ prison.
That there is a guy just come into our section for homosexuality – in fact with these same three boys – bothers nobody. Then the OIC, Makoro – meaning ‘dug-out canoe’ – comes to see us. He’s CIO and a prat but he’s OK. He is in our section to talk to these boys. He talks to them in Shona, at length.
Reon, or Rocky as he’s known, listens and shakes his head. As soon as Makoro has gone, I ask Reon, what’s the joke?
‘He was telling the boys how they will go to a young offenders’ prison as soon as possible – three to four weeks. Meanwhile, they are safe in this section. In their futures they must not again commit the sin of sodomy. Then he gave them a lecture about the immorality, as well as the risk of HIV AIDS. So then – get this – he tells them that, if they have any more trouble of that sort then – if all else fails – they should talk to us – the white men! We’ll sort it out! They can trust the white men!’
Amazing.
Why should I worry? What are they doing out there?
Soon after that, we get a new OIC, Mudzamiri. He is a sport. Although not so much a sport as would allow me to escape.
One man in the section isn’t pleased. The reason he’s still in prison is that, having been told to clean an officer’s car, he drove off in it. This was in a normal security prison. The officer who owned the car was Mudzamiri.
He has a thing about clean cars. Just after he takes over at Chikurubi, a bag of dagga – weed – is stolen from his new car’s glove box. This theft must be the work of the car-cleaning detail. To catch the thief, Mudzamiri puts some more dagga in the same place the next time the same detail are put to work.
Success. On their guard, this time, the escorting officers collar the thief. They beat him half to death at the time. Then they beat the other half that Sunday, when Mudzamiri has one of his mass public beatings of homosexuals out in the centre court.
We can’t miss it there. If we did miss it, we can hear them screaming from anywhere in the prison. But beatings are not the big worry for us right now.
Water. We don’t have any. Other than thirst, the knock-ons are dire. We are told that Chikurubi – with its 3,000 prisoners – can be smelled four kilometres downwind.
I’m all right because – as with anything – money talks. I’m Shumba. In this case, cigarettes talk. Our hot water for tea and coffee keeps coming. Cost: one packet of 20 Madison every two weeks, or something like that. They’d taught me: don’t pay the same sum. Don’t pay when due. Make the povos sweat. Stay on top.
I offer, and have offered many times, both directly and through my lawyer, and through my family, to drill a new borehole. Fix the water problem. Dig a well.
My offer is unconditional and without payback. The ZPS would love to accept, but the ZANU PF Commissars go crazy: Mann cannot be seen to be helping because it makes it look as if the authorities can’t cope.
The authorities can’t cope.
Many days, 20 men die in Chikurubi. The count of the day’s dead is never less than five. As soon as the weather grows cold, or there’s no water, or there’s diarrhoea, or we have a maize crisis … the count goes up.
It isn’t simple. About one in three men here is HIV-positive. There’s a TB epidemic – that’s fed by the overcrowding and the endless passing around of the little mudzanga, or roll-ups, smoked by the povos.
Then there’s the diet.
Then they die.
Of course the poor bastards die. Nobody gives a shit. The whole country is dying. We are at the very bottom of a very nasty shit heap. It’s a bad feeling. Any day the infrastructure may seize up for good. Then we all die. Or there’ll be a prison riot because we’re starving and dying. Then they will come, shooting.
To the officers I say: ‘The day you decide not to come in any more, remember to unlock us, please?’
They laugh: ‘Ah, Shumba.’
I ask why they don’t do something about Mugabe and Co. They shrug: ZANU PF won the war. They freed the country from the whites. From colonialism. To the victor the spoils. They must be allowed to serve out their time as heroes. One day, they’ll all be gone. Then we can run what’s left of our country better.
This is from a prison officer whose monthly take-home pay will buy him a litre of cooking oil.
I recall the time an EO white South African told a yard duty sergeant how pathetic Zimbabwe is, because they can’t keep the lights on.
‘How long has been South Africa run by blacks?’ the sergeant asked.
‘Ten years…’
‘Twenty years, here in Zimbabwe. You wait another ten years of your black rule down south. Your lights will be going out.’
Light or no light, I’ve been burning the midnight oil. I’ve written a paper called ‘Hurricane’. It is a true account of the coup plot. Wicknell and I plan to place it in a Zim newspaper, by way of pro-Mann propaganda. Everyone tells me how the media has painted me as some kind of blood-sucking, war-starting monster.
One guy �
� Henry – had his whole family in shock because I had given him my wool sweater. He was sick and freezing. They had refused to believe that a monster – who sucks the blood of African babies, and who goes around starting wars, and whose teeth are all filed to points – would do such a thing. But despite all this, their real shock was that he had worn it.
Henry never did give it back. Maybe he thought it was a gift. He’s in prison for being a member of the political opposition party, MDC. Nothing more.
I have told Wicknell that Operation Hurricane must not go ahead without the nod from my sister Sarah back in London. Always, my wish is to be loyal to the chain of command. But I cannot risk a short circuit of whatever it is that they are doing. I have to believe in them. I have to believe what they’re telling me.
That’s why they make me so fucking angry.
Hurricane does not go ahead for that reason. My sister vetoes. God knows why… Why should I worry? What are they doing out there? My spirit is dying inside me, day by long day.
Wicknell begs me. He tells me how Zimbabwe works. He asks: ‘Does your sister understand? In Africa the unsolicited gift is massively powerful. If one of us gives $20,000 to Mugabe for a birthday present, then it is a big deal. That person will be asked to lunch or something. He will be expected to make a request. He has earned that right … do you see, Shumba? … I mean – he may not get what he has asked for, but …’
Meanwhile, this book, Straw Hat, is slowly, painstakingly, getting written. The pages number hundreds. As a challenge, I am trying to write a good book.
Then it is stolen by Security. They destroy it.
So I start again. I’ve plenty of time. All I want is to have something written for Amanda and all the children. It may be the only thing that makes it home to England.
It may be the only way that I will ever again put bread on the table. They’ve done me a favour stealing it from me. It’s all in my head anyway. Rewritten, it will be written better.