The Star/Asia News Network
Monday, Nov 19, 2012
ZIMBABWE - When the door shut behind him, Reon Schutte found himself in a 8m x 6m cell, a space shared with 50 cellmates. During his time at Chikurubi maximum security prison, he was left naked most of the time, had to sleep on the ground and had no running water.
Given the economic situation in Zimbabwe, the food ration comprised pap (a bland porridge, usually made of maize), rice and cabbage. Each inmate was given a blanket, and even through winter, all they had was summer clothes.
Sanitation was almost unheard of with various contagious diseases including skin disease, chicken pox, tuberculosis and AIDS related ailments proliferating in conditions brought about by a lack of nutritious food. It was not uncommon to see bodies being moved out of the 55 cells on a daily basis. The prison's capacity is 17,000, but Chikurubi frequently holds twice that number of inmates.
If disease and poor sanitation wasn't enough to kill, inmates had to endure almost daily beatings. Schutte had all his teeth knocked out by the prison guards.
According to him, the threat of having a baton hitting you in the face was enough to make any cellmate back down.
"It just takes one strike right on the forehead... blood would squirt out of the nose and mouth. And these guys who are hit don't die immediately. It can take days and weeks as their condition worsens day after day," Schutte says of the place in which he was incarcerated for 12 years, making it sound for all intents and purposes like hell on Earth.
