From there, lively dialogue erupts. Students take turns at the mike but Santos is clearly the leader, and very much in his element. I marvel at the way he’s abruptly transformed from shy and gawky to buoyant and garrulous—a teacher and a leader.
“Should the nation be run by a woman?” Santos asks.
“Never!” calls one prisoner. “Our prison used to be run by a woman. Now it is run by a man and it is far better.”
“Women are too subject to moods to run a country,” calls another prisoner.
Howls of disagreement erupt from all sides.
“This is entirely a lie. Women and men are both subject to moods,” a prisoner to my left says, finger in the air. Everyone is animated, ardent, and at home. I am happy to sit where I belong, on the sidelines. The students and prisoners break off into groups to debate the issue further.
“Where is your gun?” I ask Rolfe, the corrections officer.
“We do not carry guns,” comes the reply. There is almost no violence here. Order is maintained via a prisoner-run government, led by a capita general and an array of capitas under him, who govern individual blocks. Rolfe laughs as he tells me that one prison has a “Block Texas,” so named because it’s occupied by wealthier prisoners. The capita in charge of security is called the commissaire, and there’s little need for the corrections officers to even enter the prison. Elections are held regularly. Most capitas are genocidaires and highly educated. Most genocidaires, after all, were highly educated.
I cannot lie. I do look at the men in prison uniforms and think, skulls. Almost a million of them. Corpses. Rape. Machetes. Murder. These men did all of that. And yet here they are, looking like—human beings. Being warm and gregarious with the survivors of their atrocities, who are in turn kind and gracious beyond measure. Is such a thing really possible? My mind reels, and so does my heart.
“American prisons are harsh, isn’t it?” Rolfe asks. I nod. “And I hear that they have no Internet connection, yes? How can that be?”
I don’t know how it can be, Rolfe, but indeed it is. Rolfe gapes at this. He explains that there’s a prison economy in which services like laundry and goods are for sale. Most prisoners have jobs on the outside and keep 10 percent of their pay.
“They’re permitted to go on work leave?” I ask, surprised.
“Of course.” Rolfe gives me a “silly mzungu” stare.
“Here, we play football with them. There is no difference between these prisoners and us. The only difference is—how do you say?” He fingers his uniform. “The cloth.”
“But,” I cannot resist asking, “aren’t some corrections officers, aren’t they survivors? Isn’t it hard for them to be here, you know, to play football with the genocidaires?”
A second stare. “No,” says Rolfe firmly. “There is a word called—how do you say?—forgiveness.”
Silly mzungu me.
Do not take me for naive. The cynical New Yorker in me looked hard for the flaws in this Rwandan facade, searched for greedy, self-interested motives lurking beneath the peace agenda. I struggled to find them. There is a word called forgiveness. Indeed. Even if there were cracks in the facade, even if there did exist persistent social divisions, ways in which the gacaca system had failed, excessive government censorship, the ease with which this mantra, forgiveness, rolls off every Rwandan’s tongue, the way it has firmly ensconced itself as the crown jewel of this country’s national narrative—this was striking. Lip service has value. Say “forgiveness” often enough and eventually behavioral psychology kicks in and divine actions follow; preach punishment and watch bloody hell break loose.
The prisoners and students reconvene to present their group’s findings. There is more speechifying, handshaking, and laughter. We are out of time before I know it.
“We have much to learn from you,” Rolfe declares as we say goodbye, muttering something about high-tech security measures and official prison procedures. “But I hope you also have something to learn from us.” It’s a grand understatement.
As we file out of the prison, through throngs of men in uniform who pass us unperturbed, one student hugs me and slings her arm through mine. She is giddy; the visit has gone better than expected and she cannot wait for the next one. She wishes there was more time with the imprisoned men, who were so bright and interesting, with many good ideas.
“The visit was, like, amazing,” another student, beaming, says during the ride back. “When we meet those guys they were very, very happy. As we were discussing in groups their ideas were really amazing. They are bright. I am very excited to meet those guys. They show us that they have new things to teach us.” Adds Santos, when we reach the office, “We have to make a better world. This is a part of peace-building—making sure that those guys who are in prison, they are human beings like others. They will come home and we all live in peace.”
Santos is real. All of these students are real. They are survivors of genocide. They have just returned from a dynamic visit to a prison housing the kinds of people who slaughtered their parents—maybe even the very people who slaughtered their parents. And they return dizzy with joy, awed by the discovery that “they” is actually “we,” that the men inside have committed monstrosities yet are not monsters, that, as Rolfe put it, it’s the cloth that divides.
How can I say such a thing? How can I equate the skulls in those pits with the people whose unfathomable cruelty created them? Alas, the twentieth century alone, in which more than 50 million people were murdered by “civilized” government decrees—during Nazi Germany, the Armenian genocide, the Soviet regime, and so on—has proved how easy it is for good people to turn mass murderers. This is the era of Abu Ghraib, where naked prisoners were stacked high in a pyramid so that American soldiers could photograph each other grinning over their human pile. And more naked prisoners were put on dog leashes and made to perform oral sex acts while these same soldiers gave each other high fives.
This reality—the human capacity, our capacity, for evil—should not distance us from those who commit atrocities. Quite the contrary, it should remind us of a fine line: if not for some grace, there go we.
I say goodbye to the students, knowing that the Prison Visiting Project is in good hands. The visits will continue now that the structure is in place, official permission has been granted, and a sponsor has been found. Santos tells me that future visits, to prisons across the country, will be longer and will include movies, sports, and culture. The program will flourish and grow, he’s sure.
———
Inside Bourbon Coffee at Kigali International Airport, awaiting a delayed flight, I take out my book, Desmond Tutu’s No Future Without Forgiveness. “Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done,” Tutu writes. “It means taking what happened seriously and not minimizing it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence. It involves trying to understand the perpetrators and so have empathy, to try to stand in their shoes and appreciate the sort of pressures and influences that might have conditioned them.”
I have, in Rwanda, seen Tutu’s words take life, along with those of all the academics and thinkers I’d consulted on the road to this trip. I’ve seen empathy, restitution, and reconciliation in unfathomable doses. Now I have the right to bear witness, to say, Don’t take my word for it—take their word for it.
In the end I spent just one day in prison in Rwanda. But really I was in prison the whole time I was here. Most of the country is a liquidated prison; those who did not pass through the opened gates into freedom were victims of the ones who did. Rwanda is a grand courtroom putting justice to the test and shattering the very foundation of the concept we call prison. Most imagine that after harm must come punishment. But here lives a radically different paradigm that involves healing, restitution, and that pinnacle of humanity called forgiveness. Rwanda has been a trial. I bore witness to some of the worst atrocities imaginable, and left maintaining my belief that in a world without prisons,
the pain of victims and survivors can be treated in radically reimagined ways.
Rwanda has also allowed me to launch my journey the way any reassessment of justice should begin, spending most of my time with survivors and victims—those who ought to be our focus when we think about crime. Now it’s time to make an entrance into the world of so-called offenders: Pollsmoor Prison, South Africa.
2.
Sorry | South Africa
When a man sins against another, the injured party should not hate the offender and keep silent. It is his duty to inform the offender and say to him, “Why did you do this to me? Why did you sin against me in this matter?” And thus it is said, “You shall surely rebuke your neighbor.” If the offender repents and pleads for forgiveness, he should be forgiven. The forgiver should not be obdurate. —Maimonides
I land in the pages of a Jane Austen novel. At least it feels that way, especially coming from Rwanda. I see an eighteenth-century manor and a backdrop of cloud-cloaked mountains, with guinea fowl poised picturesquely on the lawn. My room at the Steenberg Hotel feels like a royal carriage house, with creaking mahogany and a four-poster bed. The air is al dente; the setting sun casts crimson light over the exquisite mesas that ring Cape Town, South Africa, like beatific fortresses.
Helping to fund my stay here is the travel piece I’ll write about Constantia, a posh Cape Town suburb and winemaking region that happens to be just a stone’s throw from Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, among the largest prisons in Africa, home to some 7,500 men, women, and children—including, from 1982 to 1988, Nelson Mandela.
In other words, when I’m not in prison, I’ll be immersed in luxury. It’s an ironically uncomfortable, yet also apt, way to experience one of the world’s most unequal societies, not simply in the glaring contrasts of black and white wealth, but also in the skewed balance between the masses and a rising entrepreneurial super-class. My South African experience will take me from one end of the racial, social, and economic spectrum to the other, and will, I anticipate, be pertinently discomfiting.
These extremes are colonialism’s and apartheid’s legacy; centuries of grand inequity left a sea of poverty and crime in its wake. The statistics are staggering. South Africa’s rate of violent death for men—in 2012, some 16,000 cases of homicide were reported—is eight times the global average, while the female homicide rate is six times it. Over 40 percent of men report having been physically violent to a partner and more than one in four report having perpetrated rape, three-quarters of them before age twenty. In 2012, 64,000 rape cases were reported to the police; even the country’s president, Jacob Zuma, a man with four wives and at least twenty children by a host of women, once faced that charge. More people are reputedly knifed to death in Cape Town’s townships than in any other metropolitan area.
But as in Rwanda, I’ve come to engage in forward-thinking work, this time to further explore restorative justice. It’s an alternative paradigm for thinking about crime, not as an offense against the state that demands punishment but as an injury done to another that calls for healing and restoration. If Rwanda was about forgiveness and reconciliation on a grand scale, South Africa, where I’ll spend a week observing a long-standing restorative justice program inside Pollsmoor, offers a glimpse of these things on a person-to-person basis—individual “sorry”s, not collective ones. Here I hope to examine, with a close and critical lens, the entity at the heart of almost all of my interactions in Rwanda, that strange and powerful force known as forgiveness.
———
My plan had been to walk to Pollsmoor in the morning. It’s only yards from my hotel’s driveway, sitting on land once owned by wealthy Afrikaner farmers, then sold to the Cape Command for use as a World War II military base, before finally becoming a prison. But the concierge insists I be chauffeured in a Mercedes limousine bearing the hotel logo.
“I bet I’m the first guest you’ve carried to Pollsmoor,” I say to Wilbert, the hotel driver, who has yet to emerge for even a split second from the yoke of high-end formality.
“Yes, ma’am, you are the first,” he replies, unflustered.
Welcome To Pollsmoor Correctional Facility: A Place Of New Beginnings, reads the sign. We pull up to the gate, where the officers toss an indifferent glance my way and wave us inside. I’m early, so none of the others I’m meant to meet have arrived.
“Are you certain you’ll be fine, ma’am?” Wilbert asks with a worried look. Pollsmoor has an outsized reputation for vicious violence, mostly due to its highly ritualized gangs, known as the Numbers. It’s said that the 26s are responsible for gambling, smuggling, and accruing wealth; the 28s are organized around the keeping of sexual partners, or “wyfies,” and fighting on behalf of all three groups; and the 27s are the peacekeepers and guardians of gang law. I’ve been told that stabbings at Pollsmoor are practically a daily occurrence; in 2011 there were forty-seven suicides and murders behind South African bars, and the corrections department owed billions in damages to prisoners and former prisoners, mostly for assault and rape. The government has no policy on the prevention of sexual violence in prisons, and infecting a prisoner with HIV is said to be a form of gang punishment. The tuberculosis transmission risk is 90 percent a, and 32 percent of prisons lack a doctor or nurse.
Assuring Wilbert that I will be fine, I take a seat on a plastic bench beside the main security booth. I survey the area. Built for 4,500 people but home to nearly double that, Pollsmoor still resembles a massive military compound, a compendium of bastions and barbed wire. There’s even a renowned on-site restaurant, staffed by prisoners, where curious civilians can order chicken cordon bleu and beef schnitzel. The backdrop of exquisite mountain ranges is staggering: the whole prison is reminiscent of refuse discarded in the middle of Eden.
Another American volunteer arrives. He’s from California and he wields a Bible. “God called me here,” he explains, as if saying “I caught the red-eye.” The two of us take a ten-minute walk along the rims of the barbed wire toward Medium B, our home base for the week. The door is at the end of a narrow, fenced alleyway. There is no metal detector or dress code for us volunteers, and no one confiscates my cell phone. We enter a mess hall–like room, where my nose reacts to the fusty air, thick and mildly rotten. A banner reads, “Restorative Justice: Working Toward Reconciliation And Reintegration.”
I lay eyes on something depressingly familiar from American prisons: a sea of black and brown faces above uniforms—less than 10 percent of South Africa’s prison population is white. The uniforms are tangerine orange, stamped with CORRECTIONS in a circular design. Many uniforms have been styled out, tailored into funky vests and blazers, with zippers and buttons; one man has sewn on a Nike swoosh. Most men are blanketed in tattoos and many are missing their front teeth, a style favored by Numbers gang members. They rush forward to shake our hands vigorously. This, too, is familiar. It’s prisoner–volunteer fraternizing, friendliness fused with boundless optimism over something to be gained from the encounter. There is camaraderie with the wardens, smiles, jokes, teasing. I suspect that it all belies the angst at the core of this place.
Seven tables are swathed in floral tablecloths and labeled with names spelled out in three tongues—English, Afrikaans, and Xhosa, the language of a Southern African Bantu ethnic group. On one side I spy Accountability, Confession, Responsibility, and Repentance; on the other side, Restructuring, Forgiveness, and Integrity.
A rail-thin, sixty-something prisoner with a shaggy salt-and-pepper mustache greets me warmly. Decades ago he served time on Robben Island, he tells me, because he was a freedom fighter. Postapartheid, he returned to his township and found that little had changed; there were no jobs but plenty of drugs. So he resorted to crime and eventually earned a fifteen-year sentence.
Pastor Jonathan Clayton takes center stage, and the rest of us, our seats. Mine is in the back of the room, at a table for nonparticipant observers.
“We apologize for the delay!” comes Jonathan’s welcome, in
thunderous tones.
“There was an escape yesterday, so security for the prisoners is heavy today. But”—he runs a hand through slicked-back hair, jet-black and faintly dotted with gray—“we are here now, and we are glad to be here!”
In crisp blue Hugo Boss shirt, ivory tie, and handsome slacks, Jonathan cuts a sharp figure. Americans might dub him “Indian,” but in Cape Town he is known simply as “colored,” a term that rankles my American mind. As the catchall category for anyone who belies the easy black or white, it includes mixed-race individuals as well as those with roots in India, Malaysia, Madagascar, and elsewhere.
Welcome is repeated in sonorous Afrikaans.
“We speak three languages in this room,” Jonathan explains. “I will speak English and Afrikaans. Peter”—he points to a white man with a Santa-style beard seated at the Accountability table, surrounded by black men—“will translate to Xhosa for those of you who need Xhosa. You will understand this process. You will understand it in your own language, yes? And we have other ground rules. Is everyone here voluntarily?” Pause.
“We cannot allow you to participate in this restorative justice week if you have been forced to be here.” No one protests, so Jonathan continues.
“This program is based on Christian principles but we accept any religion. If you are Muslim, very good. If you are not any religion—that is just fine, eh?
“You have full and total confidentiality in this room. You may be free to speak your mind and your truths at all times, yes? Total confidentiality. But if you confess a murder, and in this confession you tell us things, details, such as the location of the body, we will have to pursue what you have told us. We must do this to help you and the victims be healed, due to the evil things that happened to them and their loved ones. Yes?” Jonathan delivers an Afrikaans translation of this, then goes on.
Incarceration Nations Page 6
