Shepherds and Butchers

by Chris Marnewick

  The heavy door swung open and a whiff of teargas wafted down, partly masked by the smell of disinfectant. It brought back unpleasant memories, of a day when the prison had been filled with shouts and curses and teargas and everyone inside it had been gagging and wheezing, with tears streaming from their eyes. The door slammed shut behind them, locking the column into the narrow stairwell.

  The prisoners had never been to this part of the prison. When they looked up, all they could see was the staircase, the grey wall on their left, the steel grille on the right, and the handrails on either side. The handrails were not for them; their hands were firmly cuffed behind their backs. Not that such a precaution could ever match the desperate ingenuity of a man about to be hanged. The stairwell was narrow and windowless at the lower reaches. At the top sunlight filtered through a solitary window.

  In the crush of the stairwell the procession made steady progress to the first landing, but when the prisoners in front saw yet another landing ahead they baulked and reared back, bumping into the prisoners and escorts behind them. One man turned and started making his way down when his escort was caught in the stampede of retreating prisoners. The escorts further down the stairs stood firm, blocking the way, but it is always easier fighting one’s way down the stairs than up, and for a moment it looked as if the retreating prisoner would get all the way down, but his escort caught up with him and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and dragged him back to his place higher up in the column.

  The escorts held onto their prisoners with a firm grip of the shirt collar and another hand on the handcuffs, lifting the prisoners’ arms high behind their backs. This was not going to be an easy hanging, they knew from experience. With kicks and smacks they settled the column down and made their way up, grunting and cursing, with more kicks and smacks as the need arose. The prisoners put up a token resistance, their spirit broken after a year or more of unremitting conditioning and abuse and by the futility of the uneven contest. The procession came to a halt a number of times when a prisoner’s legs gave in or a manacled hand would not let go of the handrail. Prisoner and escort alike had to fight gravity and fear at every step, on unwilling legs. The escorts’ shouts and exhortations filled the stairwell but could not be heard outside. The smell of teargas was stronger the higher they went. A prisoner wet his trousers. An escort gagged and struggled to hold his breakfast. The column coiled its way upwards, to the light.

  When the procession arrived at the top of the stairs most of the men in the column were breathing hard, their uniforms untidy, their eyes wild in their flushed faces. The pungent smell of urine blended with the smell of unwashed men. They entered a large ante-room with some cell doors on the left.

  The Sheriff stood waiting with folded arms at the far side of the room with the Warrant Officer. The escorts once again prodded the prisoners into line and turned them to face the Warrant Officer and the Sheriff. The prisoners complied mechanically and stood in a bedraggled line, heads down.

  The Warrant Officer held his clipboard in his left hand, with seven white hoods draped over his arm. He studied the prisoners and escorts briefly and then raised his arm to look at his watch. It was five to seven; they were a minute ahead of schedule. He liked things to go exactly according to plan, so he took his time.

  ‘Staan vorentoe!’

  The escorts pushed their men a yard to the front and held them there.

  The Warrant Officer walked slowly down the line of prisoners. They kept their eyes on his shoes.

  ‘Ek wil niks kak van julle hê nie.’

  The prisoners stood mute; the escorts peered over their shoulders.

  The Sheriff came over to join the Warrant Officer in front of the first prisoner in the line. Standing face to face with the prisoner, the Warrant Officer made a show of comparing the prisoner’s features with those in the first photograph on his clipboard. It was the photograph taken on the prisoner’s admission more than a year earlier. The Warrant Officer did not speak; this was not his show but the Sheriff’s. He took a step to the side as the Sheriff stepped up to the first prisoner.

  The Sheriff addressed the prisoner by his name, exactly as it was written on the death warrant.

  ‘Mnuxa Jerome Gcaba, do you have anything to say before the sentence of the Court is carried out?’ he asked. He struggled with the pronunciation of the Zulu names.

  The prisoner mumbled something incoherent. He wanted to speak but did not know what to say. Before he could change his mind, the Sheriff stepped back and made a tick on his own clipboard. The Warrant Officer reached behind the prisoner and handed one of the white hoods to the escort. The custom-made hood was an elasticised headcloth with an additional flap, also elasticised, which would in due course be hooked under the prisoner’s chin and cover his face completely. The escort adjusted the hood on the prisoner’s head and pushed the flap back over the prisoner’s head. When he was satisfied that the hood was properly in place, the Warrant Officer handed the escort the prisoner’s name tag. The escort pocketed the tag and held his prisoner in position in the line. The first prisoner was ready.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the Sheriff with exaggerated politeness as he went up to the next prisoner to repeat the formality.

  ‘Joseph Gcabashe, do you have anything to say before the sentence of the Court is carried out?’

  From here on things would happen fast. In less than five minutes these prisoners would be hanging from their ropes, destroyed by order of the law.

  Yet every second would feel like an eternity for those in the gallows chamber.

  Immediately after the last white hood had been put in place, the escorts pulled their prisoners by their shirtsleeves into the next room, following the Warrant Officer’s unspoken command. The prisoners looked around curiously. They had heard the rumour that the condemned were not really hanged, that they were to be taken to secret dungeons below the prison to work as slaves in the Mint, to produce banknotes and coins. But there were no machines in the room and it was devoid of furniture. There was only a row of windows high up on the one side and a second door obliquely ahead.

  Ahead of them the Warrant Officer stopped at the door and stood next to it. The Warrant Officer waited with his hand on the door handle. Behind him the Sheriff stood at the front of the column, followed by the prisoners and escorts in pairs.

  Here in this last stop before the gallows, the prisoners had a moment to reflect. They tried desperately not to look at the door, tried not to think of what lay behind it. But their thoughts took them to another world of horror and pain and death as an array of events slipped into focus, as in a dream, flickering without colour or sound. Disjointed incidents reared up from their past, a past that was distant yet real, a past that could not be ignored in this final act before the fall of the curtain.

  Picture a slightly built, elderly man, walking with a stick, carrying his Bible in the early evening of a Cape Town autumn, being robbed of his meagre possessions, even his dentures. He cries pitifully for help, but to no avail, as he is stabbed repeatedly by his three young assailants. Some women rush to the scene, but the killers ignore their pleas to leave the old man alone. The killers run from the scene only when the police arrive unexpectedly.

  Move to a farmhouse attached to a small hotel in Natal. A gang of four lies in wait for the lights to be turned off in the bedroom of the elderly couple they have been stalking. The gang is impatient; it is taking too long. One of them enters the house on a reconnaissance but creeps out again on finding the couple still awake. They decide to wait. At last the lights go out and the gang steal into the house. They grab the sickly old man from his bed and wrest his pistol from him. They stab him in the lung and ransack the house even as his distressed wife shields him from further injury. They rush off into the night. On the way to the hospital the old man drowns in his own blood, in his wife’s arms, while his killers sit down to argue over the fairest way to divide the spoils.

  Imagine a middle-aged man in the Transvaal, pleading
pitifully for his life with his three youthful attackers. But they taunt him, ‘Do you know what the date is tomorrow? It is the sixteenth of June. You know what that means!’ They rob him of a few meaningless possessions. They discuss ways of killing him before they strike him repeatedly on the head with a hammer. When he does not die quickly enough they pull at opposite ends of a rope around his neck to strangle him. It takes him a long time to die. They drive around with the body in the boot of the dead man’s car before they finally return to the scene to build a pyre of wood and abandoned car tyres and dispose of the body by reducing it to ashes. Even as the body burns the three killers go for another ride in the car. They stop to pick up their girlfriends and have a party during which they distribute the loot.

  Then picture Cape Town, where two young men surprise a kindly seventy-three-year-old woman in poor health and living alone, in her kitchen. The one stabs her in the shoulder and takes her to the bathroom where he allows her to wash off the blood. He rapes her in her bedroom. He stops from time to time to shout instructions to his companion about which items to collect from the rest of the house. He smashes the pleading victim’s skull with an ornamental stone she uses as a doorstop. The killers pack the day’s takings and go drinking.

  But there was little time for reflection.

  The Warrant Officer looked at his watch again. It was one minute to seven.

  Then he turned and opened the door without another word. The column followed the Sheriff through the door where they passed the Hangman without seeing him, their eyes fixed on the scene ahead. They were in the gallows chamber.

  Immediately in front of the column was the gallows machine with its seven ropes ending in the nooses hanging at eye level, coiled and ready. The ropes so dominated the scene that the prisoners did not notice the officials waiting against the wall. In a row under the window and well clear of the gallows machine stood the Head of Pretoria Central Prison, the Head of Maximum Security Prison, the Prison Medical Officer and the four standby warders. The two officers were dressed in their most formal uniforms: prison-green trousers, shirts and ties and fully buttoned tunics. The doctor wore a businesslike white safari suit. The Hangman was in shirtsleeves, the warders in their fatigues. Like the Hangman they were not spectators, they had work to do.

  The escorts did not break their stride as they walked the seven prisoners onto the trapdoors, still holding their charges by their shirtsleeves. The prisoners went onto the trapdoors between the two handrails while the escorts took a line on the outer side of the right handrail. Under the combined weight of the prisoners the trapdoors gave way ever so slightly and the prisoners instinctively looked for a handhold, but their arms were cuffed behind their backs. The escorts quickly manoeuvred them precisely into position, a prisoner on each of the seven pairs of painted feet on the trapdoors and a noose hanging from the beam exactly above each hooded head. The prisoners stood with heads down, their eyes averted from the ropes. But for the prisoner in front, who faced a blank wall, the entire view of each prisoner was filled with the spectre of the shivering prisoner in front of him.

  The ropes smelled of the blood of recent hangings. The hemp in the noose was stained.

  Overwhelmed, a prisoner in the middle of the line stumbled and his legs started to buckle. One of the standby warders sprang forward to the rail on the left and grabbed the prisoner by the arm as he fell away from his escort. Together the two warders raised the prisoner and held him upright in position. The prisoner swayed in their grip, oblivious to the further proceedings. The white hood had slipped to the side of his head. The standby warder held him steady as the escort quickly readjusted the hood.

  The moment the last prisoner was in position, the Hangman moved up to the back of the line and, starting with the last prisoner, slipped the noose over the hood and around the prisoner’s neck. Then he expertly adjusted the noose to ensure a tight fit. The steel ring on the noose sat in exactly the desired position, flush against the jaw immediately below the prisoner’s left ear. The aim was for the combined effect of the rope slamming the head over to the right and the rest of the body continuing its fall to shatter the cervical vertebrae of the prisoner’s neck and to crush the spinal cord. This would happen at the point where the cord exited the skull, between the two vertebrae known as the atlas and axis. As soon as the fit of the noose was exactly to the Hangman’s liking, he turned the flap of the white hood down and hooked its elastic seam under the prisoner’s chin so that it covered his face completely.

  The Hangman took but a few seconds with each prisoner. Slip the noose over the head. Slide the steel ring over to the rubber grommet. Pull tight to ensure a good fit. Drop the flap of the white hood over the face. Next prisoner.

  Slip noose. Slide ring. Pull tight. Drop flap.

  Seven times the Hangman completed the sequence. Slip. Slide. Pull. Drop.

  When he had completed the process with the prisoner at the front of the line, the Hangman was right next to the lever.

  When the clock in the Dutch Reformed Church in front of Maximum Security Prison began to strike the hour of seven, the condemned men were on their marks on the trapdoors, the ropes around their necks and their escorts by their side.

  For a second, time stood still. The moment so long awaited had arrived.

  The prisoners stood still on the trapdoors for that eternal moment. They were about to pay the price for their greed, for their rapacity, for their callous, murderous hearts, for the opportunities they had missed to do good things, for the opportunities they had denied their victims, for the pain they had caused to so many others. Their hearts were beating in their ears. Their lungs were drawing quick, shallow breaths. They hyperventilated and the white hoods billowed out in front of their faces with every exhalation, only to be sucked in by the next desperate gasp for air. In this last moment before death every synapse, every sinew was alive with the most acute sense of the present, the here and the now.

  Time stood still also for the escorts. They stood on their side of the rail, each next to his allotted prisoner. They were in empathic distress, their pulses racing and their chests heaving with strained breathing. For them too the here and the now was overwhelming, the stench of fear and the smell of the ropes in their nostrils. What fate ordained who should go on the right and who should go on the left of the rail? The escorts knew what was in store for them. Doesn’t everyone who kills die a little with each killing?

  That long second ended as the Hangman, in a smooth and practised movement, disengaged the clutch and pushed the lever forward. The escorts, acting as if on an unspoken command, simultaneously let go of their charges and took a step away from the rail. The Hangman looked backwards and down over his right shoulder as the metal cam-rod device supporting the cross-supports under the trapdoors slid forward and allowed gravity to take over. The officials and standby warders on the far side of the room stiffened.

  The trapdoors opened with a mechanical thud.

  Kellunck!

  The prisoners’ bare feet desperately sought purchase on the receding trapdoors and a rush of air escaped upwards between the doors.

  Shooosh!

  The prisoners fell straight into the dimly lit room below, some in silence, some with a desperate groan, one barely conscious. They experienced the instant dread of all mammals: uncontrolled free fall. Their bowels and bladders voided compulsively, the muscles controlling their internal organs responding to some primordial command to prepare for flight or battle. Their abdominal muscles involuntarily contracted and they gasped vainly for breath. As they plunged towards the end of their fall, the crimes that had brought them to this cruel end flashed through their individual minds, not as a logical sequence of events with discernible causes and consequences, but as a dark hole into which every memory was sucked with irresistible force.

  A moment later the trapdoors slammed against their stopper bags with a double blow that reverberated throughout the building and could be felt by everyone in it as a faint tremor. />
  Whabam!

  The singing in all sections of the prison below immediately rose an octave.

  Someone’s dying, Lord

  Kumbaya

  The ropes snapped tight as the prisoners reached the end of their prescribed drops. The steel rings on the nooses smashed into the muscles and blood vessels on the left side of the prisoners’ necks and slammed their heads over to the right. Their bodies continued to fall for a short distance, stretching their necks to an obscene length, until the downward momentum was stopped by the neck muscles and tendons.

  Simultaneously a round of loud cracks echoed in the gallows room upstairs as the prisoners’ spinal cords broke. The bruised flesh and the tortured neck muscles held the bodies up and pulled them back a short distance. Signals from the tormented brains took their usual route down the spinal columns, but found their path largely terminated in torn nerve endings. The prisoners’ tongues were squeezed upwards and out of their gaping mouths. Their eyes gorged on the blood and tissue being forced into their eye sockets by the constrictive force of the ropes around their necks. Blood and mucus spurted into the white hoods, mainly from their mouths and noses. In two or three cases necks were torn open on the side of the steel ring on the noose. In another an ear was partly torn off. Bodily fluids immediately stained the white hoods. Excrement, urine and blood started dripping into the pit in the floor of the room below.

  The bell in the spire of the Dutch Reformed Church still resonated in the background, slowly sounding to the final strike of the gong.

  But the prisoners were not dead yet. While their brains may have had no means to send signals to their vital organs or muscles, there was still sufficient oxygen to allow conscious brain activity for about five minutes. Electrochemical discharges continued to send impulses to the prisoners’ extremities through what nerve conduits remained intact, causing their limbs to twitch in a fine flutter. Their hearts lost their rhythm and in the absence of any coherent signals from their brains were soon to stop beating altogether. Their lungs collapsed and their internal organs slowed in their usual functioning.