HEROES Day celebrations are just a week away!
And so this week we are looking at the use of police cells, jails and detention camps by the evil Rhodesian colonial regime to punish blacks who fought for their rights to be free.
It didn’t matter how minor the offence was.
As long as the offence was considered to be political, and the Rhodies thought it threatened their continued hold onto power, the poor small offender more often than not found himself or herself either incarcerated in a police cell, jailed or detained in a restriction or detention camp, as our first story shows.
This writer, while attending school at a Roman Catholic mission secondary school called Gokomere outside Masvingo town in the mid 1970s, was once put in jail for a very minor offence as far as I was concerned.
Here is the story of what happened.
I was doing Form Five at Gokomere while a friend of mine, one Ernest Marambe, was doing Lower Sixth at Goromonzi Government School in Mashonaland East Province.
In those days, there were no cellphones, email or whatsapp.
And so letter-writing was the order of the day.
Marambe and I were prolific letter writers, sending each other a letter every week, telling one another what was going on at our respective schools.
One day, students at Ernest’s School, Goromonzi, staged a demonstration against the school authorities.
Since the leadership of the school was in white hands at the time, the school authorities in turn declared the demonstration a political one and so they called their special branch (police) and some members of their Rhodesian CIO to investigate the reasons behind the demonstration.
Those members of the security agents went on to search the hostels, suitcases, desks and drawers of students who were considered ‘ring leaders’.
Unfortunately my friend Ernest was considered a ‘ring leader’ and so his belongings were thoroughly searched.
As fate would have it, in one of the letters I had written to Ernest were some political remarks that caught the interest of the special branch big time.
Below is what I had written in that letter.
“My friend, it is time that we students in Zimbabwe (I did not say Rhodesia, the official name at the time) decide what we want to do.
Do we want to be beaten up everyday by the mangende (racist white) police for simply demanding our right to be free or we go and join the liberation war, get trained as freedom fighters after which we come back home and confront the mangende full and square.
Students from St Albert’s Mission, who left their classrooms to go and join the liberation war have shown all of us the right thing to do.
Why don’t we follow their example.”
The above letter to my friend Marambe sent the special branch (police) based in Masvingo town near our school to come running at breakneck speed to arrest me and take me into police cells at a station called Chikato in the city centre.
That letter of mine qualified me to be charged with what were called ‘subversive activities’ and so the police were authorised to detain me in the cells for over 40 days.
I was shocked.
To be detained in a terrible cell for merely writing a schoolboy letter to a friend!
I stayed in the terrible cells of Chikato for two weeks.
After that I was handed over to the Rhodesian CIO who beat me up and ordered me to write something denouncing the liberation struggle.
However, instead of that detention in the police cells at Chikato deterring me from going to join the war, it spurred me to eventually become a freedom fighter.
But I will never forget the horrible smelly cell I stayed in at Chikato Police Station in Masvingo town for two weeks.
My two weeks in Chikato police cells are nothing compared to the suffering that most nationalists endured in Zimbabwe jails and detention camps during the Rhodesian days.
Ngwabi Bhebhe tells us a bit of the arrest and detention of heroes like the late Vice-President Simon Muzenda in jails and restriction camps during the Rhodesian colonial period:
“Simon Muzenda was first detained at Gweru Prison when PCC and ZANU were banned in August 1964.
He was then transferred to Wha Wha Detention Camp and finally dumped at the remote detention camp of Sikhombela. At Wha Wha, he was with other ZANU officials who included Morton Malianga, Eddison Sithole and Edgar Tekere.
They were then transferred to Harare Central Prison.
Here, they were quite a group, including Robert Mugabe, Leopold Takawira, Rev Ndabaningi Sithole, Enos Chikowore, Enos Nkala, Edson Zvobgo and Maurice Nyagumbo.”
The conditions in which the heroes were detained were shocking.
For instance at Sikhombela, ‘the dormitories were made of iron sheets, set on cement floors’.
What this meant was that during hot months, the dormitories became real ‘ovens’ while in winter they became ‘fridges’.
In some cases, the arrested nationalists were simply dumped in the open where there were no houses — nothing.
And so they ended up building their own shacks with the few materials and tools they laid their hands on.
Now and again they were taken from restriction camps to prisons which were even worse.
“Life changed dramatically and became far tougher and more stressful when they were transferred to Harare Remand Prison.
For example, the big frustration for prisoners came from lack of first hand knowledge of how their families were getting on outside.
Physical contact between prisoners and their families was totally excluded at prisons.
Prisoners were only allowed to communicate with their wives and children through a window separated by glass, talking through a phone device.
The whole thing exercised the psychology of both prisoners and their families.
As the years dragged on, emotional stress and other psychological problems began to show up.
Mental anguish caused by not knowing how long one was to remain in prison tortured prisoners and erupted in strange behaviour, including violence,” says Bhebhe.
What about the food the prisoners ate?
“The next issue that tested the morale of the prisoners was bad meals.
For days on end, prisoners complained about bad food but to no avail.”
The Rhodesians did not care to give the prisoners a balanced diet that, for instance, instead of giving the late Leopold Takawira, ZANU’s Vice-President at that time, who was diabetic (and who) required a diabetic’s diet, they fed him on sadza after sadza, which was as good as giving him poison. The outcome was disastrous.
Death.
“Just before he died, Takawira developed an unquenchable thirst for water (a system of acute diabetes).
His fingernails had turned white.
One morning Takawira tried to use his chamber and collapsed. The prison warders left him there for the whole day only to take him to hospital at 4pm.
He died that night.”
Now when you take into account the fact that many nationalists were kept in jails and detention for 10 or more years , you now know how much sacrifice the heroes who were jailed by the Rhodesian racists made to get our country free.
Police cells, jails and detention camps caused a lot of suffering to our heroes.