Life Behind Bars: Oral Histories of Life inside Rhodesian Prisons, 1965–1980

Abstract

Political imprisonment in Rhodesia constituted a second form of confinement for African political offenders. However, unlike life in detention centers, where for a while Rhodesian authorities left political detainees to their own devices in remote regions of the country, prison life for African political offenders was more restrictive and regimented. Despite their differences in governance and forms of regimentation, all Rhodesian prisons were fortified enclosures, architecturally equipped with communal and solitary confinement cells. These institutions were not ad hoc spaces of confinement like the detention centers that were set up in the 1960s. Rhodesian prisons were already established institutions, some constructed as long back as the 1890s, which were meant to discipline criminals of all sorts. In the politically charged environment of the 1960s and 1970s, those Africans who, in pursuit of political and social rights, stepped outside the Rhodesian authorities’ conception of the rule of law, found themselves locked up in these prisons. Rhodesian authorities did not confer these political offenders with the statuses of political prisoners, or prisoners of war, in the case of captured guerrilla combatants; to Rhodesian authorities, convicted African political offenders were “terrorists,” “thugs,” “saboteurs,” and “dangerous criminals,” and were all lumped together as “communists.”¹

That prison was hell… but we survived.

Interview with Lucas Jonasi, Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe, July 28, 2007