TRC Final Report

Volume 4

Chapter 7

Subsection 6

Women in prison

35 One of the most startling features of the hearing was the devastating description by women of their experiences as political prisoners. A number of witnesses told of their time as detainees and prisoners. Their conditions were different to those of men and were very severe. Ms Deborah Marakalala was pregnant when she was detained. She described what happened:

Whilst interrogating me, they changed from one policeman to the other, and I would have to answer questions standing. I was not allowed to sit down. At that time I was pregnant. As they could not get anything out of me during the interrogation, they said they would make me tell the truth, and they told me to take off my jacket. I did as I was told.

At that time they started assaulting me. I became lame from the waist downwards, as if I had pins and needles in my body, and I lost my balance and fell and messed myself.

36 She was then taken to prison where, after a few days, she asked to see a doctor, as she was “confused, sick and swollen”. No doctor came.

Then one day I felt weak. I lost strength and late that afternoon I started vomiting. I still asked to see a doctor, but I was told the doctor would not come. On the third day I collapsed. That was the time I was actually having a miscarriage, and I was taken to Johannesburg Hospital where they found that I did have a miscarriage.

37 Not only did she have a miscarriage but, for a year, she was not allowed to see her children.

38 Women were deliberately ‘diminished’; subjected not only to physical discomfort and torture but also to extreme mental torment. The most effective method was to use family matters as a means of applying pressure on women where they were most emotionally vulnerable. Ms Zahrah Narkedien described how, although physical torture could not break her, she could resist no longer when she was told that her nephew would be killed:

They tortured me for seven days, and the only thing that really made me break in the end was when they threatened to go back to my house where my sister was staying with me and kidnap my four-year-old nephew, Christopher, bring him to the thirteenth floor and drop him out of the window.

At that point I really felt at my weakest, because I felt I could risk my life and I could let my body just be handed over to these men to do what they liked, but I couldn’t hand over someone else’s body, so at that point I fully co-operated.

39 Narkedien’s testimony confirmed that of Ms Nobuhle Mohapi, at the first human rights violations hearing in East London. Mohapi said that, when she was detained, she was told that her child had died and that she would be allowed to attend his funeral only if she signed a statement that had been prepared for her. She refused to sign and was later released to discover that her child was not dead.

40 Although she tended to downplay the effects of her physical torture, Narkedien’s description of how she was treated by the security police gave the Commission important insight into the special treatment received by women.

They started to realise that I was enduring [their] abuse, so they took a plastic bag … One person held both my hands down, and the other one put it on my head and then they sealed it so that I wouldn’t be able to breath and kept it on for at least two minutes, by which time the plastic was clinging to my eyelids, my nostrils, my mouth and my whole body was going into spasms because I really couldn’t breathe. They’d do it to me for about three times, but I still wasn’t prepared to surrender to them. I was willing to suffer it out.

And then they decided I had to do physical exercises. They always had a woman present when they were torturing me, and they asked her if she would like to leave because they were going to intensify the treatment.

All these days I was wearing the same clothing, just a dress, and I was also menstruating at that time, which I told them so I couldn’t stand so long and I was bleeding a lot. They made me lie on the floor and do all kinds of physical exercises, lifting my body with my hands – what they call press-ups – then reducing the fingers until I had to pick myself up with just two fingers. While I was down they would kick me and tramp on me.

All this time it didn’t really matter, but it was beginning to hurt physically. They did this for hours on end. Even Inspector de Beer, who was the investigating officer, even he came in and started hitting me with a clothes brush. Any physical pain didn’t matter, because I just sort of transported myself out of there.

After a while, he kept intensifying the physical treatment, and he would use both his hands to strangle me and lift me right off the ground and then drop me, grab me by the hair and throw me down and pick me up.

After a good few hours — I think that’s when they realised, after the seventh day, that they would have to use psychological treatment, because I was like a person who was physically there but spiritually and mentally I wasn’t there. After he threatened me with my nephew, I said I would do anything he wanted.

41 Narkedien also gave a chilling account of the physical conditions of the cells in which she was kept.

What really bothered me were the rats. I know there’s this chauvinist thing where men would say women are just afraid of mice and rats, but these were not little mice. These were huge rats, the size of cats, that were in the cells, in the passages all the time. I would sit and eat my food, and three of these rats would just sit and look at me. I’d be in the yard praying. The rats would just be around me, and I’d get up and chase them, but they’d come back in. I had to use my towels and clothes to block the access where they were coming in under the door, and the rats just used to rip all that and eventually come in.

One particular evening, one was crawling on me, and I didn’t quite mind until it got to my neck [when] I screamed the whole prison down. The guards came running as they didn’t know where this problem started. When they eventually came, they found me in the corner, and I was actually eating my T-shirt. That’s how berserk I went.