Coming cold into a civil war

Maseru.– It happens, essentially, because I have been away from Lesotho for too long, on a year’s sabbatical abroad where reports of the civil war were flimsy, discounting its intensity.

After dinner with my local correspondent on the first evening, I return to the Lancer’s Inn hotel to find a crowd around the parking area. An off-duty waiter is assaulting a woman, holding her by the hair and hitting her with his fist. I intervene. The waiter falls down. Somebody calls the police.

They arrive in a Land Rover. With no questions asked, I am handcuffed and tossed into the back. A constable sits opposite me. On the drive to the police station, he beats methodically on the short chain between the metal cuffs. There is no apparent malice. His attitude suggests this is just something he does with prisoners.

At the charge office, I am allowed no phone calls but summarily pushed into a cell with eleven others. Then the overhead light is put out again.

There are no beds but duckboards on the floor. The cement beneath them is damp and cold enough this winter evening to set me shivering. The man next to me offers a portion of his traditional blanket.

Foolishly I ask him, “What are you in for?”

“I killed my wife yesterday,” he says.

Why? It was over another man.

Sleep, which was always going to be problematic, thus becomes impossible. I lower the blanket and sit up. Most of the others in this small cell, perhaps three metres square, are awake too. They are not surprised to hear the story of my arrest.

“This country knows only violence now,” says a voice from the corner, “and the police are the worst. They are completely out of control.”

Another voice chimes in: “Maseru is bad but Butha Buthe and Leribe are worse. In the parts where the (opposition) Congress Party is strong, Jonathan’s thugs are acting like butchers. Killing and maiming. Killing and maiming. You must see what they did to Tsepo here.”

The darkness does not allow such inspection, so the man explains, “They clubbed him with rifles, then they took him to police headquarters in Leribe. They put barbed wire around his testicles.

“Tsepo is not even a Congress member but, after that, he was forced to say he was.”

“Surely the police must charge Tsepo with some crime or else release him?”

“Do you think,” says the first speaker, “we are here because we have committed crimes? We have done nothing. We are only trying to speak out about what the government is doing. Lesotho is supposed to be a democracy.”

“And Leabua (Jonathan) is behaving like this,” a new voice adds, “because he knew all the time he was losing the election, and shouldn’t be in power.”

So what will happen to them?

“Oh, they will hold us for some more days or until others are picked up and they need the space in this cell. Then they will beat us badly and let us go.”

But, they add, it is worse for others.

“Even just down the road,” says one. “Maseribane (the deputy premier, Chief Sekhonyane Maseribane) has a big tent in his garden where people are tortured every day. Some die from the torture and the bodies are taken out at night.

“It is common knowledge. Those are the people the government thinks are its real opponents, not small fish like us.”

In the course of that night, I hear other stories of the revolution. Of mass executions in the mountains, earlier in the year. Of how King Moshoeshoe the Second was captured at the traditional shrine of Thabo Bosiu while trying to raise a force of rebel horsemen.

The king was found – the men tell me with some derision – hiding in a ruined hut, weeping like a child.

As the sun rises, I begin to see them: young men, mostly, barely out of their teens. The self-confessed killer, who was prepared to share his blanket, is not much older.

I am shown Tsepo’s wounds, open sores around an area grown elephantine. I feel his forehead. It is burning hot.

At first light, too, I am called to the cell window. Outside is my friend and correspondent, Joe Molefi. He has spoken to the waiter, who is with him and is prepared to tell the senior police officer at the station that it was all his fault: that he was striking a woman and I stepped in to try to protect her.

My release, however, does not happen quite like that.

The senior policeman, a colonel, has me brought to his office. He tells me I may go after I have paid ten Loti admission of guilt.

Admitting what guilt?

Assault, the colonel says.

But the waiter is outside, waiting to confess that he was to blame.

“I don’t know of any waiter,” says the colonel.

“Well, let me go outside and find him.”

“No,” says the colonel. “You are here because you were fighting in a public place. If you want to be released, you must pay the fine.”

I think of the dank cell, the other men who have endured several nights already and could be there for several nights more. I wonder what will happen if I turn down this opportunity to get out and write about it.

So, eventually, I pay the ten Loti. But before I do, I show the colonel the bruises on my wrist from the constable’s truncheon. I tell him I wish to lay my own charge of assault.

“How do we know,” he says, “that you were not resisting arrest?”

The colonel is writing out a receipt for my fine. I tell him also that there is a man in the cell who has a high fever from a septic wound and needs a doctor urgently.

The man’s name, I say, is Tsepo Mohale. He has the wound because barbed wire was applied to his genitals.

The colonel finishes writing and hands me the receipt. Pointedly, he puts his pen away.

Then, with a slight motion of his head, he indicates the door.

From One Man’s Africa