UNLIKE the prisons that held African political offenders convicted of political crimes in Rhodesian courts of law and sentenced them to serve time in jail, detention centres held those Africans not charged with any crime or tried in a court of law.
In the wake of increasing African political activism in Rhodesia, newly amended and legislated laws in the 1960s allowed Rhodesian authorities to impose detention orders on any persons who, in their opinion, posed a threat to the maintenance of law and order.
Africans actively involved in nationalist political organisations or those suspected of actively supporting the struggle for liberation, but did not commit any prosecutable crime, risked being detained as ‘saboteurs’, ‘agitators’, or ‘provocateurs’.
In essence, therefore, African detainees were not ‘criminals’, but were detained nonetheless for holding political opinions that were contrary to the Rhodesian regime.
Detention was thus an especially repressive form of confinement that Rhodesian authorities deployed to confine their political opponents whom they could not prosecute in courts of law.
After 1965, some African detainees were confined in prisons after the closure of some detention centres.
Detainees in prison were technically not prisoners since they had not been sentenced to prison terms in a court of law, but that distinction was to all intents and purposes just technical.
In many instances, convicted political prisoners also became detainees at the end of their prison term, after Rhodesian authorities imposed detention orders on them.
Indeed, Rhodesian authorities used both detention and imprisonment to remove political activists from their communities and to suppress African political opposition to Rhodesian white minority rule.
However, whereas some political prisoners could hope to serve out their imprisonment terms and re-gain their freedom, the majority of political offenders served with ‘Detention Orders’ and sent to detention under Rhodesia’s repressive Law and Order Maintenance Act’s (LOMA) faced indefinite confinement in remote detention centres across Rhodesia.
From the Rhodesian authorities’ perspective, the intended purpose of detention went beyond merely removing political activists from their communities.
Detention was also meant to isolate these political activists to remote and inaccessible parts of the country and thereby render political activists and supporters of the struggle for liberation politically, intellectually, and socially dead.
Cut off from the outside political world by lack of basic means of information such as radios and newspapers, and lack of communication and limited visitations, Rhodesian authorities hoped that detention would short-circuit the circulation of anti-colonial politics and ideas.
Out of sight, African political activists and their active supporters would no longer foment anti-colonial activities that had led to urban political unrest and rural peasant opposition.
As Joshua Nkomo—one of Rhodesia’s long-time detainees—noted, “The objective (of detention) was to cut us off from the world, to make it forget us and us forget it.”
Despite Rhodesian authorities’ concerted attempts to physically isolate African political activists to remote spaces of detention, detention centres were spaces in which detainees actively negotiated their incarceration and challenged rules of detention.
Through re-organising the detention spaces themselves and through practices designed to take control of these spaces, detainees creatively negotiated significant say over the routines of their daily lives.
For example, instead of conforming to the dreary and disempowering monotony of detention life, African detainees took advantage of their captivity to empower themselves through academic and political education, political debate, and also developed powerful critiques of colonial rule through writings that were smuggled out of detention.
Second, contrary to contemporary opinion about the nature of detainees’ experiences, Rhodesian detainees were neither defenseless nor weak victims of Rhodesian authorities.
The Law and Order Maintenance Act’s Sections 50 and 51 empowered the Rhodesian Minister of Law and Order to define areas of detention or restriction where individuals who “presented a threat to the maintenance of law and order in the country” were to be held.
The length of such detention or restriction was determined according to the minister’s own discretion.
In some contemporary detailed reports about life in Rhodesian detention centres written by local and international human rights defenders, political detainees appear as victims of state-sanctioned depravation, physical and psychological abuse, and inhumane treatment.
Despite the significance of such reports, particularly considering their legal standpoint, their language nevertheless depicted the detainees as objects of pity and of detainees who were innocent — not only innocent of criminal guilt, but ingeniously simple and, like children, incapable of responsible action.
Resistance, was key to the survival of these detainees and also accounts for the fact that detention failed to strip activists of their political commitments to the struggle for liberation.
First, and most basically, resistance in detention meant securing basic conditions of mental and physical survival.
If, for example, detention threatened life or sanity, detainees tried to prevent these dangers.
To do so, mental adaptation and resistance were key to detainees’ endurance.
Such things as defiance and various forms of protest against detention regulations constituted this type of resistance.
Acts employed by detainees to ensure physical and mental survival developed into a second type of resistance, that which responded to the negative and psychological effects of detention.
For example, in order to resist the state’s attempts to render detainees intellectually, politically, and socially dead, detainees in Rhodesian detention centres developed an academic and political life within detention.
Third, detainees struggled to maintain their political identity and activism in detention in order to shape politics inside and beyond the detention centres.
Obtaining contraband news through smuggled radios or newspapers, for example, was a refusal to submit to the authorities and was a positive step towards challenging the ‘inside-outside’ divide that detention (and confinement in general) created.
Other detainees, particularly influential political leaders, were able to smuggle out political critiques of the colonial regime and even directed outside anti-colonial activities.
In Kenya, Caroline Elkins described the British detention sites of Mau Mau political activists, the ‘world behind the wire’, as she called it, as spaces of ‘social death’.
However, far from being spaces of social, political, or intellectual death, Rhodesian detainees creatively constructed positive political lives that challenged the isolative intent behind political detention.
As Derek Peterson noted in a revisionist essay on Mau Mau detainees, colonial political prisoners were capable of challenging their incarceration in ways that defied colonial authorities’ attempts to render them intellectually, socially, and politically dead.
Furthermore, in contrast to the dominant literature of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle that only emphasises the guerrilla war and experiences of guerrillas as the most important story of the struggle for freedom in Zimbabwe, political detention was also a crucial experience in the struggle for liberation.
Detainees were self-aware of their roles as symbols and vanguards of the struggle for liberation.
Many former detainee informants characterised their detention as one way of fighting for Zimbabwe’s liberation from colonial rule.
Part Two will look at the terrain of Rhodesia’s detention centres.