Cry Havoc

by Simon Mann

  We have a saying here, a Chik Max maxim: ‘Just when you think things can’t possibly get worse … they get worse.’

  The other one is as good: ‘Hope for the best … expect the worst.’

  JULY. MIDWINTER.

  Sure enough, I hadn’t thought things could get worse. Then, sure enough, they did.

  But I am sick. At night, 5,000 feet ASL, it is freezing. Prison rules have changed. There are no more food parcels. I’m eating prison rations. Sadza. Bota.

  I have diarrhoea. To me, like to most people, a runny stomach had meant a couple of days of holiday discomfort. Taking or not taking Imodium.

  This is different. Weakened by the poor diet, the diarrhoea floors me. I’ve no strength. I feel as though I’m dying, and I don’t mind much.

  One evening, they come – when I’m at my lowest – and move me again: ‘A’ Hall back to FB 1. These are the two max-max security sections, FB 1 the more so. Both are single-cell. Both have steel grids above them to foil attempted escape by helicopter.

  I complain. I’m an old prisoner now. I hate change. I’d read about that (in Waugh’s Decline and Fall). Now that is me. Like an old cat having to move house. Poor old Shumba.

  In FB 1, next morning after we are unlocked, Hassan Banda takes one look at me.

  ‘Shumba, Shumba – this is not you! Come – you are sick… We must make you better.’

  So he does make me better. He knows. He nearly died in the last diarrhoea outbreak. It’s easy to die here.

  Hassan is a musician, in his fifties, and a soldier. He’s South African, a Zulu and a Muslim – although he doesn’t believe or practise. He is lucky not to have hanged. He knifed a man to death for fucking him over on a stolen-car deal. Luckily, there had been enough doubt to float an argument of self-defence.

  His partner, Johnny, told me how he was a traditional musician. He needed backing. He told me that the steel jew’s harp he played was best made from the steel rods used in reinforced concrete.

  ‘What did they use then?’ I asked.

  Johnny looked blank.

  ‘I mean, if this is traditional music, how did they make jew’s harps? Before such steel came along?’

  There must be an answer, I thought. Maybe soaked ironwood, which becomes incredibly hard.

  Johnny understood now, frowning. ‘Ah, Shumba … that I don’t know.’

  As a boy, Hassan Banda had joined Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation, the fighting part of the ANC. They shipped him off to Angola for training and war. That meant that we could swap Angolan war stories, even though our wars had been at different times – his in the 1980s, mine in the early 1990s. Same war. Just a long one.

  As I grow stronger, and the weather kinder, Lucky and I begin running in earnest. Our target is a half marathon inside the yard. Hassan is timekeeper and lap counter. Sometimes the others sing and clap in their beautiful African way. Keeping us running.

  One day, we go for it. We’ve worked it out. To run a half marathon, we must complete 850 laps. The yard sergeant tries to stop us. He is sure we are going to kill ourselves. He would be in the shit. We did it. The yard sergeant wasn’t far off. Maybe we are obsessive, but we have nothing on our fellow inmates next door.

  Next door – meaning over the 20-foot wall – through the steel-grid anti-helicopter top cover – is the next section, FA. They’re religious, with competing churches in the same yard. The sound of badly sung hymns plagues us. All day, every day.

  The mad-keen Christianity that is the norm in Africa angers me. I loathed religion before I came to prison. Everything about it in here strengthens that feeling.

  ‘You really don’t like it – when they’re churching – do you, Shumba?’

  ‘No, Lucky, I do not.’

  ‘You know that they are the homosexuals, don’t you?’

  ‘All? How can that be?’

  ‘Not all, Shumba – but most… And the worst – the most religious – they are the ones who organise the homosexuality, make it happen… You know what I am talking about, don’t you?’

  I do know. There is a whole racket to force young boys into sodomy. The religious make sure that the boys are pushed to the back of the food line. Then – once they are truly hungry – if they do as they are told, they get shunted higher up in the queue.

  Then they get better food. Shunted some more.

  It is a poor choice: die of starvation – or die of AIDS.

  The prison officers connive in this food queue homosexual racket. In return, they get paid: a new blanket (in the days when there were new blankets) or a pair of trainers, or some fodya.

  An ordinary guy off the street – if he has no money, and no pull – will be dead within five years of going inside Chikurubi. Since the sentences are long – and many men are here on framed charges – seeing and coping with tragedy is now my everyday life.

  We are a black hole of misery.

  Shumba has pastoral duties too.

  I’m often asked what I think about things. Sometimes I am asked to be judge. I don’t know which is worse: the Christian questions or the black magic ones. The latter, however, are more fun.

  Our yards sergeant (a little Saturday afternoon drunk) tells me he doesn’t believe in magic … mermaids in the river, stealing clothes drying on the rocks and so on.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And the bad things mean human blood, human sacrifice.’

  ‘What? What bad things?’

  ‘Surely you must know, Shumba? Things like flying baskets. These are true. They are woven from grass, you can fly around in them … but they are bad because of the need for the blood of people.’

  ‘How do you know they are true?’

  ‘Ah, Shumba, everyone knows that. There was a woman who fled her home. She flew from one end of Zimababwe to the other. Then she was found … alive … but – NO BABY! The baby was found in the middle of Zimbabwe, fallen out of the flying basket … so you see …’

  Then Wicknell, well read and educated. He asks me about goldfish. After a while we come to the heart of the story. You can catch these goldfish in South Africa. They are worth about £25,000. About what a good VW minibus taxi costs. But you need a live boy as bait.

  This is known to be true because a couple went to Jo’burg not long ago, with a boy, and came back with a VW minibus. No boy. There is a man in the section for murdering his son in the course of witchcraft. He claims that it was an accident, while chopping down a tree. I assume that this cannot be true: for the obvious reason, and because there are so many inside Chikurubi wrongly.

  ‘No, Shumba, it is true.’

  We talk about trees, and the forest in which sit the Chikurubi prison farm and the prisons.

  ‘We will never chop down all the trees in the forest,’ says the sergeant. A debate follows. In the end you will.

  A young officer sits by the sergeant, on his upturned broken bucket. He looks at me. Then he speaks up. ‘We Africans only chop down trees. Look at the whites! The first thing they do on a new farm is they start to plant trees.’

  Zimbabwe is dying. That is true. But it is ZANU and Mug’s fault, not the common man. It is not a fault inside the Africans’ blood. I try to speak out, but the conversation is too political for the sergeant. He shuts us all up. Many times, I have to tell them that there is nothing wrong with the Africans. That they are as good and as bad as anyone else. They fear that they are a lesser sub-species.

  ‘Where are our Beethovens, our Einsteins?’ they ask.

  Then the black magic becomes personal. A young owl is trapped beneath the helicopter grid one morning. As soon as we are unlocked, they kill it. I try to stop them but fail. The owl is haunted. It is bad.

  Then I hear that I am a ‘water soldier’. I ask what that means. It is powerful. It makes me dangerous. The story comes from that land of endless bloodshed and horror, the Congo. From the heart of darkness, therefore.

  A water soldier is one who, as when a round is fired into water, is not harmed
by the passage of a bullet. He cannot be shot.

  FA – next door – do have their uses. Their Chik footballs fly onto our helicopter grid. We ask a passing watch-tower officer to go out on the grid and chuck them down. Simpler than making our own.

  A Chik football is as good as any beachball. It is layered. Inside are three or four inflated rubber surgery gloves. These are held by having been placed inside a plastic shopping bag. The outer layer, which gives the ball its roundness, is a hand-made string net. The string is rolled from the stuff of mealie sacks. The sacks are carefully picked apart, then the threads are rolled into string.

  Lucky and I hide the balls in the section’s broom cupboard. It drives us crazy that, every time one of my guards – the army guards – sees a football, he has to start kicking it around the yard. Showing off.

  A good football is prized by officers with sons. We traffic.

  This broom cupboard is also Lucky’s dead-letter box. This is where officers drop off and pick up contraband. Before they were banned from coming into the section, that is.

  Early in my education – and the setting up of the ‘travel agency’ – Lucky had sized me up. Then he said, ‘Tell me, Shumba – are you a good liar?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think so. Don’t worry, though. We’ll lie for you.’

  My education is an ongoing project for my friends. Just as, in return, I educate them with my books and our book club talk-ins. One guy at this time – in on a framed rape – wins his English O Level, thanks to my informal classes. I’m happy.

  A month before his exam, he is moved out of our section for being too friendly with me. In fact, I think he is moved because I’d given him a pocket dictionary as a present. One of the officers whom I am also helping – illegally, and in a much bigger way – has grown jealous.

  At this time I meet a man – black – who is in Chikurubi for an unusual offence. Even unusual by the standards of Zimbabwe, where the law defines good witchcraft (OK) and bad (against the law – go to prison).

  This wretch had taken the name of his country and used it in vain: ZIMBABWE – ‘Zero Intelligence Mainly Because All the Bloody Whites Emigrated’.

  Colin, Norman and Lucky are my instructors in car theft – stealing and hi-jacking. I learn how to pop a car-door lock with a carefully cut-open tennis ball. I learn why – when I buy a new or second-hand car – the most important thing to do is be sure that I have all existing sets of keys.

  They tell me of the car hire-purchase scam that they ran down in Jo’burg. Bribing the salesman and the insurance man are the key elements.

  One day, Norman comes to me and asks to be taught about computers. This will be good, because the last guy I started teaching how to program bottled out. He was tipped off that Security were going to have a go at him, for being too close to the notorious Shumba.

  He was an ex-general, and in deep shit with the CIO, for treason.

  Norman and I start. After a few days – when it has become clear that computers are not Norman’s cup of tea – Lucky drifts over to help out. We kick the thing around a bit. Then Lucky cuts to the grist: ‘But, Norman, why do you want to know about computers?’

  Norman looks round, then nods to the empty corner of the yard – the one where the sun is hottest at this hour and time of year. We quietly and separately go there – to do otherwise would attract others – then get to the truth.

  Norman has a plan. Norman is another armed robber. Famous outside and in. He is even more of a ‘Notorious’ than Zeb and Lucky. Norman’s nickname is ‘the Refrigerator’. This is not because of his build – which is slight – but because he once stole an enormous refrigerated lorry, full of sides of beef. He drove the truck up to Lusaka, Zambia, and sold the beef. Then the truck.

  Norman wants to know about computers because he wants to hack into the Police Vehicle Database. He wants to be able to flag a car on the electronic file as ‘not stolen’ when the police have flagged it ‘stolen’.

  Around this time the great suspicion that I am under leads to a backfire of the Shumba brand. I start making marks and calculations in the yard so that we can work out our Longitude and Latitude. I want to show the others how this works.

  I already have makeshift sundials, using only the shadow of the helicopter grid. We can tell the time with such accuracy that officers and my guards often bring their friends into the section to show off Shumba, the talking clock.

  Security assumes that I am up to something. Signals to London maybe. They make me stop. When I write about my barefoot astronomy to my poor boy – to Freddy – they bin the letter. Except they don’t tell me they’ve binned it. I find out only because he will never get that letter.

  One day, with the Croc in Security, I row with the Security lieutenant about another letter. This one had again been pulled without my knowledge, but I have found out.

  I’m very angry.

  The lieutenant says, ‘Look, Mann – my orders are clear. I have to censor anything that I don’t understand…’

  ‘That should give you plenty of scope…’

  All is well. Until the Croc gets the joke and starts laughing. The lieutenant’s penny drops. The lieutenant does not enjoy my joke.

  Security and my guards will not even allow me an electronic calculator. Plenty in here have one. All who are doing their Maths O Level. I tell them there is nothing that I can do on a calculator that I cannot do manually.

  ‘What do you want to calculate, Mann?’ they ask.

  ‘Calculations,’ I reply. Deadpan.

  Luckily, I have made an old-fashioned slide rule from paper. I cut it out from an article in Scientific American, my favourite mag, along with Vogue and Tatler. For some reason Security allow those three. Although they keep on snipping out photos of girls that they think are too sexy.

  A few times, after they have done that, I accuse them of encouraging homosexuality. What do they want us to do? Ogle the pictures of men? I say this is something they shouldn’t be doing, when there is such a serious problem in this prison.

  ‘Is there a homosexuality problem, Mann? How do you know?’

  ‘Well, maybe we’re just imagining it then – the officer in charge and me…’

  But these guys are so Chinese/ZANU PF-brainwashed that, if the party line says there is no such problem, then no such problem there is.

  Even if it is falling in on their heads.

  At that time, a US supporter, the tenacious and wonderfully named Street Brewer, sends out Vanity Fair to me. It reports how Tim Spicer and his company have just achieved the incredible feat of winning the USA contract to manage all the Iraq PMCs on Uncle Sam’s ticket.

  Of course, Security get their scissors out and obliterate the piece. Not least because I have an honorary mention. Equally, of course, Security fail to cut out the contents trailer for the article, so I can read what’s happened anyway.

  I cheer for Tim about this. For me, it is a moment of escape. It’s my side scoring … somehow. I’m happy for him, and glad that, when I was asked, I sent my postal thumbs-up for Tim’s election to White’s. God knows if that made it through Chik Security. God knows if that made it through White’s sceptics. Either way, he’s a member now.

  How strange it is. My exercise routine is everything to me. It allows me to hold my head up … to myself, if that can make sense. Sometimes it becomes really odd. One year – sure that I am going to be out in time for skiing the following February – I religiously start my best pre-ski exercise. The one where you sit against the wall as if there is a chair, but there isn’t one. Very good for the upper thigh. The downhill racer muscles, as I had once raced. Of course, I’m not free that February, nor for many more. I don’t ski. But it doesn’t matter. I’m still strengthening those muscles. Something is happening.

  Back in the real world, I love the men in my section. And they love me. We have to love one another because that is the way we do what has to be done.

  Escape death. Survive. Get o
ut.

  Of course, like anything positive in this shithole, love is doomed.

  ‘In Chik, just when you think things can’t get any worse…’

  Slowly but surely there is trouble brewing in FB 1. There is my lot. There are the neutrals. And then there is Valentine. The trouble is jealousy. Valentine thinks that if he can engineer the departure of my gang, then he would be top dog.

  My best friend. Therefore, kept. Fodya. Food. Coffee. Money. Freedom.

  The other problem is Security. I am the most exciting toy they have ever had.

  We don’t help ourselves either. A chance eavesdrop tells us that a particularly stupid yard sergeant thinks that I am about to be rescued by helicopter. Valentine ‘helps’ by telling Security that there might be truth in the rumour.

  We play a prank. We start a ruse. Helicopters. We start to build one, a small toy. Then we talk about it, as if it’s a real helicopter. We do so covertly – but loudly enough to ensure we are overheard.

  A wind-up helicopter…

  The joke works. It backfires. Our section comes under scrutiny. Security has a hard-on for us. At the same time, Valentine catches us making an electric kettle out of some wires and a razor blade. All contraband.

  Next – unknown to us – he works out that men in the section are washing the clothes of officers. The ‘travel agency’ in action. They’re not just washing the uniforms. There is a tailor’s shop at work. Security’s nightmare. Prisoners in prison officers’ uniforms.

  Valentine shops everyone.

  As Reon/Rocky had so prophetically warned me: ‘We all love one another in the section… We love the guards too … but that’s because we have to… You see, in Chikurubi, all those who aren’t spies want to be spies… They’ll love you, and you’ll love them – but that won’t stop their betrayal… It won’t be the spy’s true story that fucks you, it will be his lie.’

  We try to beat off the shit storm that follows. Then we try to keep small the harm done. But Lucky and Co. are arrogant. Valentine wins.