Brutal torture left deep mental scars
JACKSON MAPONYA
JACKSON Maponya* was arrested in May for a kidnapping that turned out to be bogus.
His interrogator covered his face with a latex glove while an accomplice pinned down his hands.
“You think we playing? We don’t have time to play,” his torturer told him. “Today you’re gonna tell us the truth. We’ll make you tell us the truth.”
Maponya, 25, lives with his parents in Soweto. He was forced to abandon his studies at the University of Limpopo when he could not afford the fees and now does voluntary work coaching soccer in primary schools.
He had never had any run-ins with the police before his arrest in May.
He was taken to the holding cells. “There’s a room with like a sink. There’s a chair in the middle of that room.”
One detective fetched a pair of latex gloves. Then they started playing good cop, bad cop. One kept saying: “Just tell the truth, I don’t want this man to hurt you.”
Maponya says he told them he knew nothing.
Then the glove came out. “He put it over my head. It covered my face,” he says. The other detective held his hands down. Every time his torturer removed the glove, he asked: “Are you ready to talk?” Then he pulled it over his face again. Water from the basin was poured over his head.
This continued “for quite a long time. I felt dizzy. I couldn’t stand up any more,” says Maponya.
Eventually the glove broke. His torturer threatened to use two gloves and give him electric shocks.
“This was just a warm-up for him. He said if I thought police brutality was over I should think again. I could die in the cell and he would still have his job but that would be the end of me.”
When Maponya was released his neck was bruised and he suffered chest pains.
“I couldn’t sleep at night. My dad had to sleep with me in my room because I kept having nightmares. I kept seeing this police’s face,” he says.
We don’t have time to play. Today you’re gonna tell us the truth
“All those things that he was saying to me. I didn’t matter to him. I was just nothing. He could kill me and get away with it. Whenever I close my eyes, I see his picture.”
Maponya tried to lay a charge against his torturers at the same police station but the case went nowhere. Other officers tried to dissuade him. “They said: ‘Just go home.’ ” Now he lives in fear. “This might happen again. They know where I live. They know my face.”
The experience traumatised him. Maponya has become withdrawn and often snaps at his partner. “Most of the time I just like to be alone. I just close myself up.” * Not his real name
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