Photo courtesy of whyjoberg
I sense I’m standing on hallowed ground. A place searing with warnings, some heeded, many forgotten. Here the weight of history lays heavy on me, the solemn, searching, haunted visitor.
I’ve never before felt this way in a toilet.
It’s a dark, dank, claustrophobic space. Disused and broken, it emanates no smell. There was a time however when over 200 starved, broken, unclean, people used it for their daily bodily motions. A literal cesspit of ghastly stink, filth and disease.
I move a few feet away to where the people slept. I cannot imagine what that must have been like. I check myself. This is still, today, a reality for so many in prisons and labour camps around the world.
Through a corridor and into an open courtyard. Sunlight! I’d forgotten that it is a beautiful day. My eyes adjust as I follow a sunbeam settling on a stone. The light is transient, as is my presence here. Transience is in itself a life lesson. I’m feeling philosophical.
A semi-open structure almost akin to a summer house. Here the prisoners received meals rationed with cruel exaction. Race pervades all, including what you’re allowed to eat and how much. The aim is to sustain you just enough to keep you alive and working. Just enough is apparently different if you are white, coloured or black. The dining tables are right below more toilets and washrooms, down a slope that coaxes the latrine waste over the diners’ legs and feet.
I’m silently taking this all in when I hear a rustling, sorrowful whisper. “The wind”, I tell myself.
I enter a room where medieval punishments were meted by omnipotent guards upon whomever they pleased. Machines designed to string people up and stretch them, primed for whipping the skin off their sore, scarred, broken backs. The room feels darker and smaller than it actually is. Torture has its own aura, a stubborn murky hue that lingers on. I’m not sure what counts as a suitably respectful amount of time to spend in this space. I want to honour those who were treated so dishonourably but the room is difficult to be in.
Head bowed, I slide around a corner and down some stairs. On the left is a row of tiny rooms; each looks like a small outdoor toilet. The doors are scratched and carved by fingernails. Squiggles and lines form crooked letters and stick figures. Some, although undecipherable, convey a depth of anguish that words cannot. I go into a room and close the door. I hear the whisper again, a mix of sorrow and judgement, in a language I don’t yet understand. I don’t last longer than a few minutes in the solitary confinement cells where people were shut away for months until insanity took over.
Prisons are undignified places, designed to exert control, power and deprivation. Walking through a prison is unsettling. Intrusive and voyeuristic, demeaning visitor and prisoner alike.
My first prison visit was as a young law student. The notorious Welikada Prison in Colombo, inhabited by people who were there because lawyers had done their job, had failed to do it well or despite their best efforts in the face of a deeply corrupt and flawed system. I was overcome by sadness and frustration when confronted with this direct consequence of society treating its “problems” in such a callous and unkind way. I felt shame and complicity that the profession I was studying to enter was a pivotal part of the problem. I was most struck by the dehumanisation of the prisoners; how the guards accompanying us would speak of and to them, caged animals in this human zoo.
I’ve grown more accustomed to prisons and detention facilities since; my job as a human rights lawyer ensured I would. But I still feel unsettled, not quite myself when I enter one. It’s always discomforting to be so viscerally confronted with the deep structural violence of our societies that most of us are privileged enough to be ignorant of. This unease is heightened when prisons, as they all do, serve to reinforce structures of supremacy and oppression be they colonial or ethno-nationalist, racist or xenophobic, when they serve as torture sites, inflicting a particularly sadistic cruelty aimed at breaking people.
Prisons rank right up there among the worst human inventions.
Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, South Africa, is a deeply moving and, dare I say, inspiring place. A fort turned prison turned Constitutional Court, museum and event venue. I’m there on a guided tour with colleagues and friends from around the world. We’re in South Africa to strategise and plan the next steps of the Global Movement Against Statelessness. As people committed to human rights and social justice issues from countries such as Malaysia, Pakistan, Palestine and Kenya most of us are not strangers to the violence of colonisation; the banal evil of oppressive, racist and supremacist structures; and the debilitating and dehumanising effects of maliciously inflicted suffering.
The prison perfectly represents the architecture of inhumanity; its spaces designed to maximise claustrophobia, isolation, violence and insanity while depriving privacy, denigrating dignity and reinforcing racial supremacy.
Prison doctors practice the medicine of oppression. Theirs is not a Hippocratic oath but a hypocritic one, keeping prisoners barely alive for the purpose of hard labour, resuscitating torture victims so they could be tortured again, determining extrajudicial killings to be suicides or deaths by natural causes and innovating untraceable ways to kill those who are too stubborn to die.
The barbarism of colonialism is on full display. Guards forcing prisoners to do monkey dances to make cavity checks more entertaining for them and prisoners having to eat gruel even as the faeces of fellow prisoners comes washing down on them – the many tools of torture imagined into reality and brutally used by sick and perverse minds.
We cannot escape the significance of the place we’re in. We cannot but feel the presence of its past inmates, the ghosts of Constitution Hill who endured there more than anyone ever should. I feel their whispers again; raw, pained, trying to tell me something. My ear is not yet attuned to their mournful, raspy cadence.
We feel duty bound to bear witness, more than forty years after the prison’s closure, to the atrocity it had been. We relate it to our own experiences, atrocities more recent, closer to home, ongoing. My Palestinian friend is shaken after stepping into the isolation cells; her own mother had been a political prisoner held incommunicado by colonial Israeli forces. My Kenyan friend breaks down under the unbearable the weight of history on his hue. His mother too was a former political prisoner. A South African friend is reduced to shaking his head in disbelief. This is his history which he knows so well but the ghosts seem to be asking him why he never visited them before. I think of my own Sri Lanka. My dear friends’ father who was tortured, my school friend who was arbitrarily detained, the many people I knew who were disappeared, imprisoned, tortured and extrajudicially killed.
The prison represents something uniquely South African and enduringly universal. Man’s insatiable cruelty towards humanity rooted in ideologies of supremacy. It’s a reminder if ever we needed one that our struggles are all intertwined, that freedom is meaningless until it is enjoyed by all.
The prison museum spotlights its most famous occupants, pride of place given to a certain Gandhi and a Mandela. But the most endearing, haunting presence I feel is of the unnamed, non-biographised masses of black and coloured prisoners who lived there were demeaned, tortured, starved, mutilated and even killed by the racist apartheid machinery and its sadistic agents. The ghosts of Constitution Hill who do not live on in photographs or history books but in the fading memories of those they left behind, the intimate stories passed onto their children and the slowly deteriorating attention of a country determined to cast its gaze into the future, a future they feel is better embodied by the beautiful and inspiring Constitutional Courthouse, the bastion of democracy and rights, that stands next to the prison and is built with its bricks. In South Africa as elsewhere past, present and future are in constant negotiation with each other.
As I leave the prison to enter the court, I feel the ghosts are still trying to tell me something. But the harder I try to listen, the less I’m able to hear.
Apartheid South Africa was one of the defining global moral tests of my parent’s generation. Colonised and occupied Palestine was another, a test they profoundly failed, which has since grown into the defining test of today. In the prison of Constitution Hill I see so many of the practices that still characterise Israel’s debasement of Palestinians. Food rationing that is starvation by another name. Torture enabled by the same doctors who cover up extrajudicial killings. The law weaponised to control, humiliate and exploit people and steal their land. Lies, gaslighting and the extermination of truthtellers. Architectural violence that exerts power and dehumanises.
The Palestinian struggle is also defined by genocide. World powers who once reluctantly responded to mass protests and boycotts against apartheid South Africa have shown no inclination to rein in Israel’s egregious excesses. Israel has, without consequences of any significance, gone on the rampage, relentlessly bombing, burning, torturing, raping, starving and killing the children, men and women of Palestine. The genocide is well into its second year at a cost that perhaps none of us will ever be able to fully understand.
I’m scrolling through my social media. I pause on a photograph of Dr Hossam Abu Safiyya walking towards Israeli tanks amidst apocalyptic surroundings. The head doctor of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, who for several days called on the world to intervene, had failed in his mission to protect his patients, colleagues and hospital.
In the photograph I see a giant among humans walking towards Lilliputians. They’re armed with the endless weapons, blessings and protection of their patrons, unshackled by any semblance of morality or conscience and driven by hatred and depravity. He is a symbol of love, care, righteous anger, sacrifice and courage. I dare not think of his fate in their cruel hands. Instead, I think of another moral giant who stood with the oppressed – Jesus Christ, who just under 2,000 years ago not too far from Gaza, was crucified.
Far away, in a quiet, dark cell, the ghosts of Constitution Hill let out a heavy sigh. I think I finally understand as I barely make out the words, “Have you learnt nothing?”.