The Dungeon

For many prisoners, the only crime they have encountered is that of their imprisonment, and torture at the hands of the police.

In the centre of the vast African continent, there is a constellation of misery. Fetid, isolated, and often illegal, Burundi’s single-cell “cachot” prisons are off the radar of even many of the country’s human rights organisations. Children as young as ten crouch in the reeking dark of these dungeons, sometimes for years, often with no evidence against them, and rarely having seen the inside of a court room. The Burundian constitution states fourteen days as the maximum imprisonment; the reality is a violent miscarriage of any sense of justice.
For many prisoners, the only crime they have encountered is that of their imprisonment, and torture at the hands of the police. Arrested for infractions as myriad as sorcery and murder – or in the case of 10 year old Eli-Davide in Cibitoke, for just watching a stranger stealing DVDs – the unlucky pass from the violent hands of the police to the abuses of life under prisoner chiefs: “If someone new can’t pay the cachot tax, he can spend a week without sitting down, without eating – he must live in the corner where we shit in the night.” Without documentation or representation, these losers of the seemingly random justice game are truly lost.

Text by Laura Gabrielle Dix