Maximum Security Prison

26

I watched from the passenger seat as Wierda drove us to Maximum.

Maximum Security Prison was part of Pretoria Central Prison. We entered the complex from Potgieter Street. A high fence surrounded the whole complex. The road ended abruptly in a jacaranda-lined parking lot in front of a gate in a concrete wall. In front of us were two heavy steel gates on rollers. The entrance consisted of a small building with the usual security apparatus: a metal detector through which visitors had to pass and an x-ray machine for their belongings. I stood at the gate looking at the aerial photograph Wierda had obtained from the municipal offices. Wierda offered me a sketch plan he had prepared from it, with some of the detail filled in during his sessions with our client.

‘We might be able to hand this in as an exhibit,’ he suggested. I could not see the Judge agreeing to that, but took it from him nevertheless.

Wierda’s sketch was line perfect. He must have used drawing instruments – yet another expression of the architect’s genes in his blood line. My instincts told me that it might be an offence to make or publish a sketch of the prison and I quickly hid Wierda’s effort in among the sheets of my writing pad.

It took a while for us to be signed in at the front guardhouse. A warder told us to stay together and ushered us towards an officer in a drab olive-green uniform waiting for us. A grey concrete wall, easily six metres high, came into view. The buildings were well away from the wall. I turned to take a good look at the surroundings.

Above the checkpoint was a guard tower. I counted five of them altogether, each consisting of an eight-metre-high red-brick structure, about four metres square at the base, with a sheltered guardhouse on top. The guards on the towers had their rifles pointed at us. I realised that their job was to prevent escape, not an invasion. They were all facing inwards. There were security lights on thirty-metre steel posts near each tower. I remembered from Wierda’s sketch that the complex was laid out in a pentagon of uneven angles and sides.

The warder introduced us to the Major. The Major would not let the women in and the Judge’s registrar and Sanet Niemand left in one of the cars. Niemand was fuming, but she left without looking back after James Murray had whispered something to her behind his hand.

‘This is the most secure prison in South Africa,’ the Major began after the women had left. ‘We intend to keep it so. So we will not allow any photographs to be taken, and you will not be allowed to speak to any of the prisoners or staff once we are inside. Is that clearly understood?’

We stood squinting at the Major in the blazing sun. I wondered how Judge van Zyl felt taking orders from the Major, but the Judge stood in anonymity amongst us. In his suit he looked like any other lawyer.

The Major insisted on an audible answer. ‘Is that clearly understood?’ he asked a second time, in a firmer tone.

‘Yes,’ some muttered.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Wierda. He stopped just short of saluting.

‘May we take notes, sir?’ Wierda asked with some cheek.

‘Yes, but you are not allowed to make any drawings of the prison. That would compromise our security arrangements and it is a crime in any event.’

Wierda stole a glance at me and I glared at him. What would happen if we were searched on the way out? I could claim professional privilege, but it would be embarrassing if the Judge did not agree.

‘Stay in this group, with these warders,’ said the Major. ‘If you stray off on your own the men on the towers will shoot you. Be careful.’

Half a dozen warders had quietly joined our little mission.

The Major spoke about the prison and its history but I quickly lost concentration. I heard the rustle of running water and birdsong behind us. There was a park-like garden between the wall and the first buildings and I turned to look at it. I don’t know why I was afraid of the Major.

The garden consisted of rocky ponds surrounded by indigenous trees, shrubs and plants. There were some goldfish in the ponds. Birds fluttered in the branches overhead. I saw a number of different species of birds. I recognised at least five, a lilac-breasted roller, marico sunbirds, blue waxbills, a pair of red-eyed ring-necked doves and some red-faced mousebirds. On the ground I saw a tortoise, a steenbok, a pair of rabbits and some common ground lizards. A blue-headed tree agama scratched its way up the rough bark of a tree. I gazed in amazement. In this place of death there was also an abundance of butterflies, dragonflies and wasps. I knew that steenbok were nocturnal animals. This one stood in the shade, as if in a daze, looking at us with large unseeing eyes. Even this lush artificial paradise without predators was a prison, trapping this daintiest of all the antelope and buck of the bush in a foreign time zone.

I felt uneasy, and when I looked up, I saw a rifle pointed at me from the tower above the main gate. I realised that I had been left behind. The others were already near the steps leading up to wooden doors at the main entrance to the buildings and I rushed to join them at the door. From what I could remember of Wierda’s sketch we were now at the main door. I resisted the impulse to check the sketch as I went up the steps; I would have to confirm the details later when we got back to Wierda’s chambers.

At the top of the steps was a heavy wooden door with steel reinforcing and a peephole at eye level. The Major knocked, prompting a warder to look at us through the peephole. Even the Major had to be checked in, it seemed. They let us in one by one, subjecting each of us to a cold silent scrutiny that raised the level of my unease sharply.

The warder slammed the door shut and locked it behind us when we were all inside. We were in a foyer of sorts now and were quickly taken through to the next section, which I remembered from Wierda’s useful sketch. There were no windows and it was difficult to maintain my orientation. Straight ahead were three steel grille gates leading from the foyer to A, B and C sections respectively, the Major said. The gate to A Section was on the right. We were to visit that section first.

The place smelled just like Leeuwkop as I remembered it, only worse, with the unmistakable odour of fear added to the mix of tobacco, unwashed bodies, steel and concrete.

The prison had been placed in lock-down mode for our visit. The mood was sombre and heavy. The place was very quiet; our footsteps and the clanging of keys in locks were the only sounds. The Major spoke softly, as if we were in a hospital for the terminally ill, the parade-ground voice he had used outside at the gate subdued inside. The place did, in a way, feel like a hospital with its muted colours and uniform fittings and furniture. Instead of general wards, single rooms and beds, the prison had sections, cells and bunks. I thought, grimly, that I knew the operating theatre was elsewhere on Wierda’s sketch.

Without prior orientation from the sketch I would have been quickly lost in the maze of passages and doors. The outside world had ceased to exist; there was no natural light and the colours were all shades of grey under harsh electric lights. There was a humming noise that I imagined was the outside world held at bay, but it could have been the prison’s generator. We never heard a prisoner speak and, apart from the Major, none of the prison staff uttered a word. It struck me that no one even coughed; it was as if the whole place was holding its breath.

In all my life I had never felt so completely lost.

Wierda tried to take notes, but the Major reminded him gruffly that he was not to make any sketches. Wierda elbowed me in the ribs and whispered that he would do so afterwards. And indeed, he and I were subsequently able to reconstruct precisely where we had been and what we had seen simply by using his updated sketch.

We were taken from the foyer into a passage separating A and B sections from each other. The passage ran north-south, and was perhaps thirty-five to forty paces long. Three steel grille doors on the right opened into A1, A2 and A3 sections respectively. Some doors on the left side of the passage led into administration offices in B Section. Our attention was drawn to a small table in the passage.

‘This is where the prisoners’ fingerprints are taken on the morning of an execution,’ the Major said.

The table was more or less opposite the Warrant Officer’s office.

We had heard a good deal about the Warrant Officer from Labuschagne. I looked into the office but its occupant was absent. From what Labuschagne had told us this man held a special position, namely that of Warrant Officer in Charge of Security. This was a misnomer, according to Labuschagne. The Warrant Officer was really the man in charge of executions.

The Major continued with his tour. We would only be shown A1, he said, because A2 and A3 were virtually the same.

Inside A1 there was a long central passage ahead of us, at least sixty paces long, with steel doors on either side of the passage and a catwalk above it. The first room on the left was arranged and furnished as a chapel. Directly opposite the chapel was an office. There was a steel door to the bathroom. The rest of the section consisted of cells.

There were communal cells, an isolation cell and ordinary single cells. The single cells were about two metres wide by three metres long. The Major asked the warder with the keys to unlock the cell. He showed us that the isolation cell had been equipped with sound-muting materials and a window of soundproof glass. The cell had claustrophobia written all over every feature.

On leaving the section through a steel door at the end of the passage we found ourselves in a small exercise yard, about ten metres by twenty, enclosed by its own wall.

I breathed easier outside, relishing the smell of a solitary orange tree in the exercise yard mixed with the smell of dust; relief, such as it was, from the nauseating smell we’d left behind. The outer concrete walls of the complex were too high for me to see anything beyond their grey confines but I was able to work out where we were by reference to the sun and the guard towers which, according to Wierda’s sketch, were at the south-western and north-western corners. I looked up to see if the hillside from which Wierda and I had looked down on the prison months earlier was visible but the walls were too high. Even outside the cell-blocks the free world was obliterated. I remembered the vagrant who had scared me senseless and wondered if he was back on the hill, looking down at the complex but unable to see anything inside. What would he think of the place if he knew what the function of these buildings was? How much would he appreciate his miserable existence, his freedom, if he knew? Was he the one who had left tracks around the bodies and left without touching them?

Back inside I felt eyes on me and when I looked up there was a warder in shorts on the catwalk. He was barefoot and without a shirt. His chest glistened with sweat. He held a rifle in his hands, at the ready, pointing it straight at me. I followed the Major to the end of the passage without looking back. There was an itch between my shoulder blades, but I resisted the impulse to scratch.

We trooped past the chapel; it was cold and formal like the rest of the prison. Behind the Major we climbed up the steps to the gallows chamber. I could smell the hemp of the ropes hanging on hooks attached to the wall of the gallows chamber, but they were not hanging ropes. Everyone was suddenly in a hurry. Wierda stepped onto the trapdoors and placed his feet in the painted footmarks. The Major gave him a hard stare, but Wierda was oblivious to that. He inspected the mechanism of the lever and its clutch in the greatest detail. I noticed Judge van Zyl taking his time to do the same. He held a whispered conversation with Wierda, who nodded from time to time. I stood to one side, watching. The two Assessors stood side by side, their hands clasped in front of them like funeral directors.

The pit room below was stark and smelled damp. It looked as if it had recently been rinsed with water and detergent. From underneath the mechanism of the trapdoors could be seen more clearly. Wierda again inspected every component, prodding the stopper bags with his fist. Here, I noticed, was the only colour other than grey or brown in the building. The steel parts of the gallows machine had been painted a bright blue. Wierda pointed at the sliding mechanism that would release the trapdoors, Judge van Zyl taking in every detail, as thick as thieves with Wierda in this pursuit. The artificial lighting in the windowless room made us all look sick, a yellowish hue on every face and on every surface.

I found myself next to James Murray. I knew that he disapproved of my tactics, but he knew as well as I did what we had to do. It was dirty work but we were both trapped in it by our respective duties, his even more onerous than mine. My conduct was defined by my duty to the Court and to my client. The prosecutor’s duty was to ensure that justice was done. We stood side by side, looking into the drain in the pit. I walked with him to the next room.

There we found autopsy tables and refrigerators. There was a stack of coffins in the corner waiting for the next batch of executions. Everything was spick and span, as spotless as military barracks, but with the smell of the operating theatre of a hospital.

‘We don’t use the autopsy room any more,’ said the Major. ‘There is no need to determine the cause of death because we know it in advance and there is a doctor present when death occurs.’

He must have noticed the sceptical look on my face; everything was just too organised for the room and its equipment not to be in use. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘from time to time we have one of the professors from the medical school to conduct an autopsy and then we allow a class of their students to witness it.’ He looked uneasy as he spoke, apologetic perhaps. ‘And sometimes, when we have a suicide, the District Surgeon may do the autopsy here too.’

The warders had laid on tea and biscuits for us in their common room and we could not refuse. We sipped guiltily at the sweet brew while we made polite small talk. One of the Assessors mentioned the rugby and speculated on the outcome of the Currie Cup final. The biscuits were dry in my mouth. We left the main section of the prison with the clanging of the doors and the rattle of heavy keys still ringing in our ears. A troop of warders accompanied us to the main gate. We stayed close to them.

We were made to sign out again at the front guardhouse. The warder on duty smelled like the prison – of sweat, fear and cheap tobacco.

It was good to be out in the open air again. The air smelled sweet with the perfume of the jacaranda flowers. I heard a faint tune and African voices behind us as I walked with Wierda to his car.

Kumbaya, my Lord
Kumbaya

Judge van Zyl walked away with the rest of us. ‘I’ll see you back in court tomorrow at ten,’ he said.