Secret film exposes South African jails
Warders trade in sex, drugs and weapons, inquiry told
Source: The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,764092,00.html)
Authors: Chris McGreal
Dated: 2002-07-27
The South African prisons department has been forced to reinstate a governor who was sacked for resisting official pressure to destroy a secretly made video showing warders selling convicts weapons, drugs and juveniles for sex.
Tatalo Setlai, the governor of Grootvlei prison, was sacked a fortnight ago, after the presentation of the video to a judicial inquiry laid the ground for weeks of astonishing and at times horrific evidence about the scale of the corruption and abuse in jails.
More than 20 warders are now under investigation. One is accused of rape, another of making £600 a month smuggling brandy to inmates.
The video was made by four prisoners at the jail in Bloemfontein over a five-month period. Using miniature cameras, the four - two murderers, an armed robber and a cattle rustler - filmed in their cell, the prison kitchen, and parts of the jail where warders sold drugs and alcohol to convicts.
Two particularly disturbing scenes stunned the inquiry, and, after the video was shown on television, the public. One showed a warder selling a pistol and a bullet to a double murderer for about £400, for use in an escape attempt. The other caught a guard bringing a juvenile inmate into the cell for sex with another prisoner.
The video opened the floodgates for evidence by youths who told how they were regularly auctioned by warders to older inmates for sex. Several accused a senior warder, Sam Mohanoe, of having raped juvenile prisoners since 1985.
One, Wilson Mohodi, said on Monday that Mr Mohanoe ran a "soccer club" for young inmates who were all forced to have sex with him. He said the guard rewarded the young men with marijuana, toiletries and petroleum jelly.
"When [Mohanoe] needed a young man, he gave me dagga [marijuana], and I gave him a young man," Mohodi told the commission. "Sometimes, after he had finished with a young man, he would call me and I would also have intercourse in his office."
The commission also heard this week that one juvenile, unable to afford the £36 bail while awaiting trial for theft, was raped 11 times and twice tried to commit suicide. "I don't accept myself as a human being anymore," the youth told the commission.
A prisoner the youth identified as one of his rapist, Japhta Moeng, admitted that there was a trade in young inmates for sex.
"Juveniles are sold there. If he was sold, what can I do?" Moeng said.
Turning to his victim, he added: "If I did sodomise you, I did it because you were sold by somebody else to me."
Other prisoners have told the commission of lesser abuses: one was forced to give a senior prison official a pedicure and cut his corns.
A female prisons commissioner said she was forced by armed warders to kneel, and was spat on and called a bitch, because, they said, it was against tradition for a woman to stand in front of men.
One man complained to the commission that a fellow convict, jailed for impersonating a doctor, was treating prisoners in the jail hospital.
Gayton McKenzie, the prisoner who organised the videotaping, said he was responding to President Thabo Mbeki's declaration of 2002 as the "year of the volunteer".
The convicts handed the video to the prison governor, Mr Satlei, who told the inquiry that he regarded it as an important step in eradicating abuse and corruption by his staff. Officials in the prisons department had different ideas, however.
Mr Setlai said that the provincial correctional services commissioner, Willem Damons, asked him to destroy the tape. "He said it would damage the image of the department, the government and the country as a whole, and drive investors away."
The minister of justice, Penuell Maduna, came to the governor's defence after a prisons commissioner, Linda Mti, said he should be suspended, but he was removed from his post and appointed to the parole board.
Mr Setlai was reinstated at Grootvlei on Tuesday after he had threatened legal action and the chief counsel at the judicial inquiry had accused Mr Damons of constructing a "tissue of lies" about him.
The commission heard that Mr Damons blocked the arrest of the accused warders, who are still employed by the prison service.
The four prisoners who recorded the video said they were stripped of their privileges and locked in their cells for 23 hours a day as punishment.
Another, a member of one of the notoriously violent prison gangs, told the inquiry that a "death sentence" had been passed on the four at the behest of some warders.
One of the four, Samuel Grobbelaar, said two attempts had already been made to kill him.
He was knocked unconscious with a steel rod and had his food poisoned while he was recovering in hospital.
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