'The rats tried to eat us'
2009-11-22 08:04
Johannesburg - Niek du Toit's wrists still bear the scars of the handcuffs that were so tightly fastened they cut to the bone.
Arrested on March 8 2004 for plotting to overthrow the Equatorial Guinea's dictator, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, he was left to rot in his own filth in the permanent darkness of a one-and-a-half by two metre “death cell”.
At night the president's security chief, brandishing a loaded pistol, would drunkenly threaten to shoot him.
Some of his co-conspirators were given electric shocks, beaten with rifle butts and burnt with cigarettes. One of them suffered a heart attack as a result and died, his body unceremoniously dumped on the prison's concrete floor.
For five-a-half years, Du Toit and the other coup plotters would be shackled hand-and-foot day-and-night. Most of that time was in solitary confinement.
First six weeks
“The first six weeks were the worst,” Du Toit said in an exclusive interview with Rapport.
“Our hands were cuffed so tightly behind our backs that about half-an-hour after my arrest my hands were so swollen the cuffs couldn't be taken off. They cut into the flesh so deeply, the bone was showing.
“The wounds became septic and as a result of the sepsis and pus on the cuffs they rusted shut. The first time the guards tried to remove them was two weeks after the arrest. They had to use a hammer and chisel to get them loose.
“After they threw me into a cell, they used handcuffs to lock my feet together. The handcuffs were too small for my ankles so they took the cuffs, put them half way around and hit them with a hammer until they locked closed.
“Now and again they would ask one of the other prisoners to wash us. On the fourth day when they took me out to be washed my eyes were so swollen with sepsis and filth from the cell that I was blind. The guy who washed me struggled to get the sepsis out of my eyes.
“We were never taken out to the toilets. That which happens, happens in the cell.”
Couldn't drink the water
The prisoners were given water bottles to drink from but with their hands behind their backs they had no way of holding them.
“I had to pick up the water bottle with my mouth, try and unscrew the cap and then toss my head back with the bottle between my teeth to get a drop,” Du Toit explained.
On the day of their arrest two other coup plotters, Marius “Bone” Boonzaier and ex-32 Battalion soldier Sergio Cardoso, were strung up from a pole with their wrists cuffed and arms pulled up behind their backs. They were given electric shocks.
A German prisoner, Gerhard Merz, died under torture.
“They burnt him with cigarettes and beat him,” Du Toit said. “He was an old man and he chain-smoked so I don't think the torture alone caused his death but it did certainly contribute to it. His body just couldn't take it anymore.
Psychological torture
“The other prisoners told us he was beaten, kicked and burnt with cigarette stompies. He had a heart attack but they (the guards) did nothing. They just left him. At one stage they carried him out and then came back, threw down the corpse and said: 'Oh well, the guy is dead.'”
The Equatorial Guinea government claimed at the time he had died of malaria.
Du Toit was singled out for the attentions of the president's security adviser “who wanted to try and show me what a 'heavy' he is and that I should be terribly afraid of him”.
“At night he would arrive there drunk out of his skull, drag me out of my cell, pull out his pistol, hold it against my head and say: 'Now I'm going to shoot you'. It was psychological torture. It could easily have happened that he pulled the trigger. He was drunk, so drunk that he was sometimes unable to stand on his own feet. Then two guards would have to accompany him and hold him upright.
“What can you do? You’re shackled, you can't even move or stand. You just sit there and watch and hope and pray that his finger doesn't touch the trigger. That went on for about three weeks.”
Broken rib
Another of the coup plotters, George Alerson, was also regularly terrorised by the official.
“Sometimes we were relatively afraid because the pistol was in his hands the whole time as he talked and waved it about”, Du Toit said.
When they were taken to the police station to be interrogated, the guards who transported them would also beat them with rifles and smash the butts down on their feet.
Alerson suffered a broken rib that “never healed properly”.
The guards would buy cheap hamburgers at nearby shops and bring them for the prisoners to eat but they refused to take off their handcuffs.
Treated like a dog
“You were treated like a dog,” Du Toit said. “One of the guards would come and feed you and push the whole burger into your mouth and then you had to swallow.”
They lived mostly on rice, dry bread and the occasional bit of fish, chicken wings or pig's tail.
The bread would be delivered at night and rats would urinate on it, sparking outbreaks of typhoid.
Du Toit's weight dropped by 37kg. He now weighs only 63kg.
The cells in which Du Toit and Alerson were initially kept made up Black Beach prison's death row.
No light
A small hole in the ceiling allowed air in, but the roof above kept the light out. They only time light entered the cell was when a guard opened the door to bring them food.
“You could physically not see what you were eating. If you didn't see where they put the plate down then you didn't know where the food was. The cell was so small you could do nothing. Later they gave us mattresses. With the handcuffs on our feet, we couldn't stand.
“As people slept at night, the rats would try and feed on them.
“You just lie in the darkness and think about what happened and, as is probably the case with 100% of prisoners, you find God. That is all you have, nothing else.”
There were small kindnesses that made life a little more bearable. The prison warders openly ran a shebeen in the prison.
Conditions improved
“We didn't have money to go and drink there but some of the local guys, political prisoners mostly, began to look after us and once a week or so they would buy us a beer or a cold-drink.”
Six weeks after their arrest, conditions gradually began improving. Foot shackles replaced the handcuffs around their ankles.
Their hands were cuffed in front of them. They left the death cells and eventually, as a result of growing international pressure over the conditions in Black Beach prison, a new prison wing was built.
Du Toit and the others were housed on the second floor in the maximum security section where they had toilets, showers and basins in which to wash.
Despite these improvements, medical care remained “non-existent” for much of his stay.
Bouts of malaria
Du Toit got malaria six times. The last bout, earlier this year, nearly killed him.
“Their treatment of malaria is to give you ten headache pills. Luckily we got a batch of malaria pills from the embassy and we could then treat people ourselves when they got sick. Everyone got malaria.
“The last time I got cerebral malaria. They found me in my cell when they brought me food and I wouldn't wake up. They put me on a drip and gave me a few pills. Five days are missing from my memory. If my constitution wasn't so strong, I would have been dead.”
Du Toit feels, to some degree, that he was lucky. “They treated us relatively well all things considered. There are other places where it would possibly have been much worse.”