llows
30° South Publishers (Pty) Ltd
KEVIN WOODS was sentenced to death in Zimbabwe and jailed for 20 years by Robert Mugabe’s government. For more than five years of his detention he was held in the shadow of Mugabe’s gallows, cut off from the world, naked and in solitary confinement.
He had been a senior member of Mugabe’s dreaded Central Intelligence Organization, the CIO, and was jailed for committing politically motivated offences against the ANC in Zimbabwe on behalf of the then-apartheid government of South Africa.
“This is not a pretty story. This is a book, archetypal somewhat, of Africa north of the Limpopo River. It is a story during which I lived, and nearly died, sometimes in defence of the country of my birth, and sometimes in defence of a racial system in South Africa that I never really believed in but chose, nonetheless, to aid in its time of need against its perceived Communist-inspired enemy.
“However wrong society may view extremist action, people often do these things from the best possible personal conviction, belief or motives, but I always knew that my actions would have consequences far down the line, as they did, and still do have.”
From Mugabe’s confidant to condemned prisoner, he recounts his life on the edge as a double agent.
“I have spoken of many scenes and cases I attended and witnessed, and maybe it’s because of the repetition that they have stuck in my mind. I’ve related some of these horrors to CIO colleagues, to my South African handlers and to other colleagues, maybe in the pub or wherever, or remember them after lying sleepless in my bed at home. Subsequently, after years of solitary contemplation on the cold concrete floor of my cell in Chikurubi, I have visions of bloodshed and murder engraved on my memory.
“I suppose some of the cases remain with me because of their exceptional brutality, or their excessive overkill, or other more poignant mental triggers, such as a small child standing outside the flaming wreck of her grass-thatched rural hut which had just been torched by 5th Brigade soldiers, with her whole family locked inside.”
“I was in Lupane in February 1983 during the curfew when reports of a large massacre reached the CIO office there. I went and had a look, together with my Lupane team, and just to the north of Lupane and among the gutted and smoking ruins of the thatched huts of a large village, like something out of Apocalypse Now or Dante’s Inferno, lay scores of dead and wounded people who had just been shot by 5th Brigade. Most of us have seen this in Vietnam films, for instance, but this was very real, and not a movie.”
“In my report I told the plain truth, that the 5th Brigade was responsible, while at the same time, and referring to the same incident, Mugabe’s ministers were denying it and blaming the dissidents, but at the same time refusing any independent observers into the curfew area to establish just what had happened. By refusing such an investigation, the government proved it had something to hide.”
Woods explains the desolation of being abandoned by the South African government when he was compromised, and in his book he details his lone fight to maintain his humanity, dignity and sanity in a prison system that belongs to the Middle Ages.
In prison, Woods at times sank into the depths of despair and utter hopelessness while coping under the most desperate conditions imaginable.
“People on death row pray a lot. I did. When you’ve nothing, absolutely nothing to hang on to, God makes it so easy for you to lean on him. You don’t feel God’s help – but you have to lean somewhere, and why not a God? Hope is a wonderful thing. Hopelessness will destroy you. Often I would manufacture hope, just to get me through each agonizingly long day, when there was actually nothing to hope for.”
“Many were the times I was swathed in blankets and kneeling on the floor of my cell, utterly devoid of hope and the willingness to carry on and all I had was a five-word prayer: “God, please give me hope!” It must have worked, as time after time, wearing my knees bald from kneeling on the rough concrete, I uttered the same short prayer, and I got through.”
“I sat there on death row a few times and heard other inmates being removed in the dead of night, to be taken to the death chamber that adjoins the prison hospital. I heard their chains dragging on the floor, I heard their spine-chilling wails and tears, and I heard the deep ‘ka-lunk’ of the trapdoor as they were killed. I remember so well the horror and dread in me.”
Post published in: Arts