Despite being within the Zanzibar city centre prison, it was a facility for the mentally ill. It had about sixteen units. Each of these units accommodated about four patients. Adjacent to it, was a wing for female inmates. Upon completion of a new and arguably better facility that was being constructed at Kidongo Chekundu, Mjini Magharibi, the patients were moved from the former facility to the latter. This happened all before Zanzibar gained independence from Britain on December 10, 1963, as a constitutional monarchy under Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah.
But that independence quickly turned bloody when a month later, on January 12, 1963, a leftist revolt ousted the coalition government of Prime Minister Sheikh Muhammad Shamte Hamadi. 17,000 people were reportedly killed during the revolt (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-14115176). It seems that immediate security considerations coupled with global cold war politics compelled the ''comrades'', as the revolutionaries became known, to consider entering a political union with neighbouring Tanganyika which had been granted independence on December 9, 1961, by the British mandate authorities.
Consequently, on April 26, 1964, Zanzibar and Tanganyika became united. On October 29, 1964, the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, the name originally adopted by both parties to the union, was changed to the United Republic of Tanzania with a single seat at the United Nations (Zanzibar had its own seat following its admission on December 16, 1963, as the 112th member of the United Nations). Julius Kambarage Nyerere, who now ruled Tanganyika, became the first president of the United Republic of Tanzania with Abeid Amani Karume as the first vice president.
In 1965, the Tanzanian constitution was amended to establish what Nyerere relished calling ''mono-party democracy''. But his critics could not fathom why Nyerere would want to proscribe legal opposition when his party, TANU, that was already dominant on the mainland whilst in Zanzibar Karume's Afro-Shirazi party was also the sole party there. Unsurprisingly, in 1977 the two parties merged on the basis that Tanzania was constitutionally a single-party state following the abrogation of the constitution in 1965. Some observers thought the above-mentioned changes were designed in part to absorbing Zanzibar, which is semi autonomous, into a Tanzanian state. Of equal concern was the fact that Nyerere had earlier granted himself absolute powers in a republican constitution he enacted in 1962. This effectively removed any form of checks on Nyerere's presidential powers much as it created an unequal power relationship between the state and its citizens. Indeed, it was at this point that the Tanzanian law no longer contained legal safeguards against arbitrary arrest.
As Nyerere uncharacteristically proceeded to curtail divergent political views and opinions, Usalama wa Taifa, Nyerere's dreaded political police outfit, but which, throughout Nyerere's tenure as president, had no legal status, was given free rein to operate its own secret detention camps where real or imaginary opponents of Nyerere's regime endured all forms of torture and humiliation. In Zanzibar where the revolution had since commenced to devour its own children, Usalama wa Taifa, which translates to Safety of the Nation, was allocated the facility at the Zanzibar city centre prison which previously housed the psychiatric patients who were moved to the Kidongo Chekundu facility.
Hassan Rehani Mandera, who, during colonial rule, was a police officer with the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), but who had since been inducted into the Usalama wa Taifa, was appointed its head. Assisting him was a group of carefully selected Usalama wa Taifa agents, who mostly hailed from the northern part of the main island of Zanzibar (Unguja). These included, amongst others, Salum Mohamed also known as Mluguru (or Kenedi), Juma Mussa, Haji Kafupi, Mussa Makwega and another agent who went by the pseudo name Jaffari.
It was a notorious torture chamber by any standard! In no time though, that notoriety earned it the Kwa Bamkwe name. Ironically, the name derived from Hassan Mandera's own pathetic attempt at humour: ''Nitakuoza mwanangu, au nitakuolea mwanao'', i.e. I will marry you my daughter, or you will marry me yours, he would be heard to say on few occasions when he would be in good mood. In swahili, an in-law is ''mkwe'' and ''kwa'' means to/at. So Mandera's overused expression evolved to Kwa Bamkwe, i.e. at the in-laws with ''Ba'' as a plural. It was not clear why Mandera, now deceased, was so obsessed with this expression. But then again, this was a black chapter in the country's political history when women of mixed ancestry were being forcibly married to ''indigenous'' officials of the revolutionary government. It must be emphasised that the revolutionaries claimed to have executed the revolution in the supposed name of native Africans, hence use of the term ''indigenous''. But it was questionable whether the people who planned and executed the revolution were more ''indigenous'' than the descendants of people who founded Zanzibar many centuries ago.
Whatever the case may be, critics thought Nyerere, who had legal and constitutional powers over Zanzibar, should have done everything in his power to ensure that the policy which violated women was not adopted in the first place; the policy of which its critics regarded as a crime against collective public conscious. Unsurprisingly, to this day the Tanzanian authorities have never formally apologised for this unconscionable crime, let alone bringing those who were involved in its commission to justice. Instead, the government has perpetuated the notion that the policy was intended to promote ''racial integration'' in Zanzibar. The message this notion conveyed to the young generation of Tanzanians is left for the reader's contemplation. And whether Zanzibar was not ''racially integrated'' prior to the bloody revolution that gave pretext to the new rulers to appropriate properties belonging to those they deposed, is a matter for future academic debate.
In the meantime, however, that debate extends to the other names by which Kwa Bamkwe was known. These included Kwa Mandera, i.e. at [Hassan] Mandera's place; Machinjioni, i.e. slaughter house (a place where people are slaughtered, i.e. tortured to death), and Mlango wa Nyuma, i.e. back door (because detainees were conveyed to Kwa Bamkwe through the back entrance as the torture chamber was behind the Zanzibar city centre prison).
All told, the horrors of Kwa Bamkwe worsened following the shooting to death of Zanzibar's post-revolution tyrant, Abeid Karume, on April 7, 1972. Apparently, his assassin, a junior army officer in the Tanzania People's Defence Force (TPDF), sought to avenge the death of his father whom Karume had ordered executed.
And despite the Karume killing being motivated by sheer personal vendetta, hundreds of people were rounded up throughout the islands and taken to Kwa Bamkwe for interrogation where they endured severe physical torture. But many of those rounded up were ordinary rural people who did not even know that Karume had been assassinated until after arriving at Kwa Bamkwe. There, they found a team of men from the three security agencies namely, the police, the army and Usalama wa Taifa which, as usual, was running the show.
Apparently, the team was presided over by Mussa Maisara, a former nurse, who had been appointed chairman of the committee that had been hastily assembled to probe Karume's killing. Also present was Juma Ameir Juma (insert bottom right) an agent of Usalama wa Taifa who has since been positively identified by many survivors as having physically tortured detainees to death (see separate article: Yes, ''Black Lives Matter'': But Will Tanzania's Juma Ameir Juma Ever be Brought to Justice?). Juma Ameir was assisted by fellow torture experts who included, amongst others, Ali Mzee (later appointed cabinet minister), Hassan Kheri, Mohammed Mpita and another agent who went by the nickname Kibanzi. All these men, including the team mentioned earlier that worked with Hassan Mandera, took active role in the horrific torture of detainees which often resulted in death. Members of the committee from the police and the army respectively took a comparatively minor role during torture sessions as opposed to Usalama wa Taifa agents whose brief emanated from the president's office. More tellingly, the victims were not tortured because they had done anything wrong, but because they could not implicate innocent people as opponent of the government. So, the supposed probe of the Karume killing had suddenly morphed into a nationwide witch-hunt of government critics whose identities the Usalama wa Taifa men were now seeking to establish from the people they had indiscriminately detained. Source: https://www.facebook.com/Ludovick.S.Mwijage/
 | www.bbc.com Provides an overview and key facts for the semi-autonomous, island territory that lies off Africa | |
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