This year is shaping up as the year of prison reform in Swaziland, and Aids is the catalyst.
”It would be wrong to suggest that prisons are inhumane in Swaziland, but there is much room for improvement to make them safe from HIV infection, inmate abuse and other ills that are more or less endemic to African prisons,” said an officer with the Correctional Services, which administers the kingdom’s prison system. This person spoke on condition of anonymity.
However, the head of Correctional Services — Commissioner Mguni Simelane — talked openly about the change in attitudes which is taking place within his department.
”We have come a long way in acknowledging the impact of Aids within prisons,” he said. Legal observers in Swaziland say this has resulted in an end to the denialism which previously characterised the debate about HIV in jails.
Two years ago, a Mozambican national was held for three months at Zakhele Remand Centre in the central town of Manzini, where awaiting trial prisoners count the days before their court appearances. So appalled was the 24 year-old inmate by the prison conditions, that he told his story to the press after being released.
The man claimed that young boys were put in the same cells as older prisoners, and often forced to have sex. Immediately, the Correctional Services paraded out a dozen inmates to refute these claims.
”There is no sodomy in Swaziland’s prisons,” insisted several inmates at a press conference.
The denials were widely ridiculed, and the Mozambican national stuck to his story which was later published in a book about abuses, compiled by a humanitarian organisation. The book also contained testimony from a prison guard who tried to protect young prisoners as best he could from abusive situations.
That particular Correctional Services warder testified anonymously, but by the time his account was published officials had acknowledged that rape and same-sex relationships in prison were prompting the spread of HIV.
The International Red Cross was one of the organisations instrumental in forcing this change.
”Prison officials told us privately what they would not tell us publicly, because they said they faced a dilemma,” says Iris Dlamini, a Red Cross nurse.
She adds, ”They could not allow Aids mitigation groups to distribute condoms in prisons, even though they knew there was men-on-men sex, and HIV was on the rise. ‘If we allow condoms, we will be encouraging immoral behaviour,’ they told us.”
But, nightmarish Aids statistics are alarming all Swazis.
Late last year, the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAids) published a report that for the first time listed Swaziland alongside Botswana as having the world’s highest incidence of HIV amongst adults. About 40% of the adult population is said to be infected.
The number of prison deaths from Aids-related illnesses ‒ and the toll which the disease was taking on prison warders ‒ also prompted action on the part of Correctional Services officials.
”We have allowed the Red Cross to have access to all the prisoners, at the Zakhele Remand Centre, at the Matsapha Maximum Security Prison (outside Manzini), and other facilities. They lecture men and women prisoners about Aids, and they promote safe sexual practices,” Commissioner Simelane said.
Health care within the prisons remains a challenge, with facilities overwhelmed by Aids patients.
Dlamini echoes the voices of other aid workers when she says that an effort to curb the spread of HIV in prisons will pay dividends for society as whole in the future.
”Prisoners are in the high risk category, which means that upon release they pose a danger to larger society if behaviour while incarcerated led to Aids,” she notes.
”Obviously, for society to protect itself we must stop Aids at its source. In Swaziland, that means cutting back on multiple partners, curbing pre-marital sex, and going after commercial sex workers, itinerate workers and prisoners with Aids awareness messages.”