A toothbrush, a cellphone and a protest gone horribly wrong
It ended with naked, wet men being repeatedly shocked, and with blood on the floor. But it started with the intentional misapplication of a toothbrush as a form of protest.
As Xolani Zulu, who is serving a life sentence, tells it, unjust punishment for a previous infraction was about to see him and 30 cellmates lose their privileges to make phone calls, watch TV and exercise for long stretches at a time.
Fed up with “abusive and haphazard management practices” in the Leeuwkop prison, he used the tried-and-tested method of inserting a toothbrush into the cell’s lock, preventing it from opening, and demanded to appeal to the area commissioner, a higher power.
The story of what happened next is based almost entirely on the accounts of convicted criminals, and has not been tested in a court. The department of correctional services did not respond to questions from the Mail & Guardian, but an official not authorised to speak to the media said there would be no response while the matter was before the courts.
But some evidence corroborating the accounts of the prisoners can be found in court papers.
Subsequent independent medical examinations record physical damage consistent with a beating. More damning, a letter from the Judicial Inspectorate for Correctional Services records an investigation deeming it “clear” that at least three of the group of five “did not display violence and did not threaten the security of the prison” by merely being in the cell with Zulu when he wielded his toothbrush.
According to the inmates, the blocked door was met with a call to an emergency security team trained to deal with violence. They were puzzled to see no violence in pro- gress, but pitched in with an offer of teargas to resolve the standoff. The inmates relented. That is when the beating started. “I was bleeding a lot,” Zulu later wrote. “One of the officials responded that I ‘should just die’.”
The beating went on long enough for some of the officials involved to require a break, but that was by way of preliminaries for the five men whose names appeared on a list of those suspected to be concealing a contraband cellphone.
They were taken to a shower area, where the guards really got to work.
At one point, an inmate says, “the pain was unbearable. In an attempt to get the assault to stop, I told them I’d given the phone to Abel Phasha.”
That earned Phasha another beating, and a choking to boot.
Once things settled down, each prisoner was offered two paracetamol tablets. Medical staff, they say, seemed strangely reluctant to examine them or complete comprehensive reports before they were placed in “segregation”, the formal description of the method used to isolate troublesome prisoners, for more than two weeks.
No cellphone, it seems, was ever found. —