Title: What I learned as a student activist: Don't go to prison
Author: Shaun Matsheza
Category: Zimbabwe
Date: 11/12/2014
Source: Waza
Source Website: https://wazaonline.com/
African Charter Article# 13: Every citizen shall have the right to participate freely in the government of their country and to equal access of public services
Summary & Comment: Prisons in Africa are best avoided, but if you need grooming on how best not to treat ordinary people when one day you are in public leadership, it's the right place to go. After a taste of incarceration in Zimbabwe, a student leader reflects on the institution of prisons in Africa; how human rights are blatantly broken. MM
https://wazaonline.com/en/power-people/what-i-learned-as-student-activist-dont-go-to-prison
'If you want to know what a man is like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.' I believe this statement applies as much to the state and society as it does to individuals. How we treat the worst of us as a society says a lot about who we are as a people.
Most times, when we talk about the lowest rung of society, we mean the less-privileged, that tenacious group of people that subsists on less than a dollar a day, and keeps messing up our economic and human development figures. Very seldom does the discussion move to those who occupy no rung at all; prisoners.
One memory remains strong from my days as a student activist in Zimbabwe. On 7 July, 2007, I was arrested, together with seven other colleagues, on charges of leading a demonstration by students against an unjustified unilateral decision by the University of Zimbabwe to raise tuition and living fees halfway through the semester. My experience over the next week gave a small glimpse into what life in a Zimbabwean prison could be like.
Read more about tensions between youths and governments
We were arrested on a weekend, which meant that the holding cells filled to overflowing until the Monday when court appearances would resume. After being taken around a few police stations, we ended up at Harare Central police station. The situation there was terrible, to put it mildly. There were lice, fleas, and mice in the dark cells, so we spent the night in the corridors, where the light from the naked light bulb made some of critters scatter away.
We also wanted to escape the smell of the filthy toilets in the cells, so we crowded the corridor like sardines, lying in alternating sides so that you always had someone's feet in your face whichever way you turned. The decision to change sides was a collective one due to the lack of space. I myself could only sleep on one side as I had been thoroughly beaten on my left buttock for 'being the ring leader'. They left me the right cheek to sleep on- and all this was before we made our first appearance in court.
The worst part was that the place was 'cleaned' every time we were taken outside for roll-call. The filthy water from cleaning the toilets would be swept along the corridor, and when we returned, we had to wait until the floor dried before those of us who had sleeping mats or blankets could put them back and we resumed our lying down position. It was the longest week of my life, and I was glad when we finally got bail and were remanded out of custody.
The plight of prisoners in Goma, DRC
https://wazaonline.com/en/freedom-of-expression/meet-mr-human-rights
Across the continent, incarcerated people face years of confinement in often cramped and filthy quarters, with paltry food allocations, inadequate hygiene, and little or no clothing or other amenities. Like many other aspects of African bureaucracy today, the prison is the inheritance of colonial times, a 'European import designed to isolate and punish political opponents, exercise racial superiority, and administer capital and corporal punishment,' according to Jeremy Sarkin, special rapporteur and member of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. He adds that local justice systems were less centered on the perpetrator, with compensation of the victim being the end goal. This reminds me of a Facebook post by a friend of mine, Davison Mudzingwa, where he asks,
'What would the jailing of an offender help me with? I would rather have him work in my plot/farm for a couple of years and pay me a couple of beasts. That's productive, Afrikan jurisprudence not this imported justice system that let the offended sustain the offender in prison with their taxes.'
The question of African jurisprudence is one for another day, or another blogger more enlightened than I in matters of the law. Now, granted, being a prisoner means that you forfeit some of your rights, but my colleagues and I were awaiting our first appearance in court and should have been presumed innocent. That was not the case. I wondered what it was like in 'real prison' until I saw the SABC special assignment report on Zimbabwe's prisons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTODPwFAuZA: the sight of hopeless skeletal men shuffling about like the walking dead is enough to make the strongest of us cry.
I don't argue that prisoners should be handled with kid gloves, lord knows many of them deserve to be where they are. Many, however, are victims of the selective application of the law by callous governments that protect their own political interests over others. I believe that we have to pursue a certain level of what Avishai Margalit, a philosopher of ethics, calls 'decency'. Margalit says that the pursuit of decency, understood primarily in terms of the absence of humiliation, takes precedence over the pursuit of the ideal of justice. There is no satisfaction in a form of justice that dehumanizes the jailer as much as it does the prisoner.
I believe that as African societies, we have to seriously reflect on our relationship with the institution of prison, and what our society gains from them. If we do decide to keep it, we have to make our prisons places of rehabilitation, and not gulags where any sentence is a death sentence by default. Many of our current methods go totally against the elements of basic human dignity, and that is a shame.
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