The Mirror at Midnight by Adam Hochschild

Author:Adam Hochschild [Hochschild, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub

…

Late afternoon. Two weeks before Christmas. Downtown Johannesburg is decorated with long strings of winking colored lights. There are Christmas trees in shop windows and merchants have hired small brass bands to play carols, on sidewalks crowded with holiday shoppers. The sound of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem” drifts up through the window of the small, bare office where Gladys Shezi is talking. She, too, insists that I use her real name.

“They came around one in the morning. They kicked the doors. After that they started searching the house, putting everything upside down. They slapped everybody in the house in their faces and they threatened that they’re going to shoot them if they don’t tell what my activities are. I told them: ‘Don’t threaten my family. Just take me. I am the one who is active in the house.’

“They took me to Alexandra police station. They kicked me, slapped me, even hit me with the back of their guns. When I was bleeding through the nose they let me stay for about thirty minutes. They said they are taking a rest, they are coming back. After that, they said I must come and look at what they are doing to my colleagues, who were detained that day with me. They started kicking them, and hitting them with a plank with four nails in the head. When the blood comes out they started laughing. Then they blindfolded me. Then they started electric-shocking. There are marks. They are all over. The marks of the electric shocks, see?”

With a trembling hand, she points at small, round dark spots on her arms, the inside of her thigh, and points through her dress at her breasts and stomach.

“They laugh and they electric-shock me. I become unconscious. And when I wake up I find myself bleeding through the mouth and in the nose. My dress was torn.”

After this, Shezi was held in solitary. “The cell I was staying in was in a block of single cells. I was the only person in that block. There were no people around me. I asked permission to see my kids. They said I’m not allowed. I’m not even allowed to see a lawyer, even to read a book. No visitors, no nothing. My visitors were my interrogators, those white men who come to interrogate me. They were my only visitors. [They threatened] to kill my kids. They threatened to kill my father.”

Every time she pauses, we can hear the carols outside. “Silent Night, Holy Night,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Good King Wenceslas.”

“I just wanted to kill myself,” Shezi goes on. “I tried to tie a rope off the roof of my cell. I was too short to reach, I couldn’t make it. I tried for almost three days. On the fourth day they find me out and said I must not do that. Then they put me in a cell which is having nothing on top, not even a shower, a cell which is empty, with a bed only.

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