Special Hearings — Prison Hearings — 1997-07-22

HAROLD STRACHAN: He was the guy who told me all about Central and what to expect and including other things which former witnesses got dead right, you know, lashes and I have seen lashes myself being given by peeping out of a window.  The guy got it dead right, you know, but we will come to that later.
 Any way, so that was PE, you see.  Central, I spoke about is general brutality, you know, absolute harshness.  I mean, you can't believe it.  You know where purposeful cruelty and vengeance left off, neglect would take over.  Nobody really cared you know.
 Sort of follow the regulations as minimally as possible or ignore them if they get in your way or make you uncomfortable and you know, he is just a "bandiet" it doesn't matter, you know.  That is when they are not consciously punishing you, you know.
 Look, I am not falling into the trap of seeing criminals as romantic figures, they aren't.  Most of them are a dead ball and every one of them is treacherous, you know, but they have certain virtues which would be regarded as just great and fine and manly in certain other communities, like in a military community.
 I mean, talk about the bravery of soldiers.  Those guys are brave man.  The first thing you learn going into prison is to accept injustice, you know.  The first thing and they handle it with such calm.  I mean the most terrible things would happen to this fellow.  I mean total deprivation of everything he has been building up for five years on some petty charge, you know physical assault, everything.
 And you would come away and you are saying never mind, and he say "make a skuif man", that was the answer to all of the world's problems, you know.  Just get some tobacco and make something to smoke.
 So I wrote about Pretoria Central and then I tried to divide this articles up into three, roughly speaking, you know, three important things with sort of background stuff in support of it, you know.  As I say like the dirty dishes at Port Elizabeth and so forth.
 Then there was the other thing at Pretoria Local.  Before we leave Central, I will give you an example of what I mean by callous brutality.  Not particularly purposeful punishment, this, but it amounts to punishment by deprivation of everything gentle in your life.
 There is no reason why in a place housing people, you shouldn't get some dentistry equipment and one of those surgery lights to work by and a dentist's chair and things like that.  To get a dentist to work on these guys' teeth, you know.  Then I got excruciating toothache at one stage and I said, I stood out as they say, with my prison card and said, I want to get my teeth looked at, they are sore, so I am taken off the next morning to the District Surgeon.
 I stand in this great queue in the hospital yard, long queue, all these blokes waiting for the dentist.  It is the only queue I have ever been in where you can jump position towards the front any time you like, because everybody wants to be at the back.  Because they know what is going to happen.
 And as we got closer and closer, I met there a guy called Tokkie Waters, who was with me in this cell in Port Elizabeth and as we got close to the District Surgeon, we could hear the sound of plonk, plonk, and we didn't know what it was and when Tokkie looked around and there he could see, the District Surgeon in along white apron, plastic apron, covered in blood and he is a rugby player, Lock van Druten, and he's got this guy's head in a sort of one man scrum and he is pulling his teeth out and chucking them into a bucket, held by a "bandiet" there with his corduroy jacket.
 He is looking into this blokes mouth to see all these teeth coming out, they don't fill teeth in prison, that is what they do.  And Tokkie said okay, I said Tokkie just do it and shoved him in.  And it was my turn next and the guy pulled out 12 teeth in a quarter of an hour and I passed out on tooth 6.
 He picked up my head again, got it in the scrum again and pulled out the other six.  Five years later, bits of bone were coming out in my gums you know.  That is what I mean by a general callousness you see.  That is what I mean by a District Surgeon too.
 I mention that because we got stuck into the District Surgeons in the next article that came out in the RDM.  At Pretoria Local now, they moved Turok and me there towards the end of our stretch.  We had about six months to go, or more, I forget.  
 But by putting my little bankie on top of my table and peeping out of the window, which is very unlawful, you know, I could just see little bits of the yard.  And little bits of the premises.  Incidentally just along the end of the reception yard, you could see a place in the wall where old pink bricks had been replaced with red bricks and that was where Jopie Fourie had been shot.
 Sat on the chair, tied on, shot against this wall.  This is how much history has passed under the bridge, you know, in the century in South Africa, but down there I could see in the morning, the new intakes of prisoners.  There would be 50, 60, 70 of them and they would stand there for an hour, and hour and a half, two hours waiting for the District Surgeon to come, who eventually would, you know, because he had his other duties to do in the prison I supposed, or whatever.
 And he would arrive there and he would sort of go down the row and look at - these blokes stood stark naked and this is June, July in Pretoria, and it is cold, there is frost all over - but standing there stark naked, sort of hiding their genitalia, a little bit embarrassed you know.
 And sort of stamping their feet, waiting an hour and a half, two hours for the District Surgeon, he would arrive and then go down the line and then sort of glance at everybody and sign a piece of paper and I think, you know, and then you know, we wrote about that - the behaviour of the hospital staff down there, which was appalling.
 I mean the way they would haul one of their patients out with his sort of blue night gown on.  I am talking about a specific case now, grab this fellow, rip off this night gown.  Somebody had told them that he had been smoking dagga or something.  They got this sick man, I take this as a particular case, but it was general, illustrating the general by that particular, this happened often, they would haul this guy out, get him to kneel and put his shoulders on the ground, so that his backside is sticking up, and pour what looked like a pint or so soapy water which they mixed up beforehand, sort of blue soap and water and poured this in this funnel into his bowels and then he was not allowed to squirt it all again, he had to hold his buttocks closed with his hands and dance foot to foot, you know, to shake all the soap inside of him and then he was made to sit and defecate in a pot.
 I mean never mind the lack of dignity, there is blood running down this guy's thighs too by the time they got the soap out, the blood came out.  This head warder, Kruger, sort of digging around in this pot, looking for the dagga and then, what was really a very perverted piece of behaviour, I mean, not even with a rubber glove, I mean getting his middle finger into this guy's backside, you know.  And very brutally doing things to him.  
 This is actually, I am sorry to be disgusting, but prison is a disgusting place, you know it.  And this sort of behaviour, you can expect to see fairly often.   That was the sort of thing I wrote about.

MR LEWIN: I was going to ask what was the reaction from the Prison Department after the articles came out if you can tell us that.