'I Served 10 Years for Murder in Brutal Prisons'

In 2003, I was arrested and convicted of having killed a man I'd had a disagreement with three years previously. When I heard the verdict, my shock was inexpressible. I was a successful, self-made businessman who ran a safari outfitting company, and I was widely respected in the community. I also maintain that I am innocent.

My mind was in turmoil. I couldn't see it clearly at that stage, but from that moment on my life would never be the same again. I was sent to four different prisons in Harare, Zimbabwe for 10 years, where I lived in harrowing and inhumane conditions.

Life in prison

In prison, I shared a small cell with dozens of other inmates, divided by chalk lines marked on the wall that gave us just inches of personal space each. Lying down on our sides, we were packed like sardines, with the legs of two rows of men overlapping in the middle of the cell. We lay so close together that what one man exhaled, his neighbour could smell his breath.

To cushion ourselves against the cold, bare concrete floor, we folded two paper-thin, lice-infested blankets several times to fit our space. We would wrap our clothes around our toothbrush and toothpaste and use that as a pillow to stop them from being stolen.

For my first eight years in prison, we rarely, if ever, received a change of clothes. We often slept naked, wrapped in a blanket, and only used our clothes as a pillow when they were not being washed. About every four days, we would wash our clothes in the cell toilets at night, then hang them on the walls, using smuggled book staples, in the hope that they might dry by the following morning.

In 2007, Zimbabwe went through a period of hyperinflation. Zimbabwe's capital city, Harare, ran out of water. For three years, while I was in one prison, each prisoner received only one plastic cup of water per day—one cup of dirty, orange city run-off water from a nearby dam. That one cup of water each day was to drink, clean our teeth, wash our faces, bathe; everything.

We did, however, manage to salvage rainwater from the broken gutters into 20-litre containers when it rained, during our four hours out of the cells.

Death and disease in prison

During my long years in prison, I learned that the most important things in life cannot be bought, including health. During my first six years in prison, I witnessed over 2,200 prisoners die—I know this because other inmates and I kept a tally. Most of the prisoners died from malnutrition. When the Zimbabwean currency crashed, there was little or no food outside prisons, let alone inside them.

We received one meal a day, a plate of cooked maize meal—sadza, pap, grits—and either boiled cabbage or beans. The same meal every day for eight years. No dairy, no fruit, no vegetables; we had a thumb-size piece of meat once a week for the first year, then nothing. In June 2006, because the death rate was so high, the prison started allowing relatives to deliver one cooked meal a day to their loved ones. My sister sold her business and gave up her career just to feed me for four years.

When you have no food, there is no water and people are dying around you every day, you feel grateful that you are still alive, that you are still breathing. Each day becomes a blessing.

During a cholera outbreak over eight months in 2008 and 2009, in Harare Central Prison—a medium-security prison to which I'd been moved—I watched as over a third of the prisoners died.

Many of my friends died in prison. One day my friend and I were playing cards on the floor of the crowded exercise yard and the guy sitting next to us rolled over dead. Nobody around us moved. We were in shock. But there was nowhere else to sit, so we just turned a little so we couldn't see him, and carried on playing until prison hospital staff collected him.

There were people dying everywhere and you could smell dead people continuously, day and night. However, that particular incident has always left me wondering: Why did so many others lose their lives while I had the privilege of living? I'll never really know the answer, but this experience taught me to be humble. When you could be the one dying tomorrow, and you don't, you learn to be grateful for every little thing about your life.

Lessons I learned

I arrived in prison with my self-esteem and confidence intact, but imprisonment breaks you. When pressed so low, you have to dig very deep to find solutions to help you survive. But you grow; you learn lessons that others never have to.

The biggest lesson I learned in prison was the nature of true forgiveness. The humiliation of being labelled a murderer and the terrible living conditions were extremely hard to deal with. As was the pain of my bitterness, anger and hatred for those who had put me in prison. I would lie there for hours, wishing every terrible thing on each of the people who were involved in my conviction.

Then one day, I was struck by the realization that they'd all forgotten about me long ago. Here I was, consumed by the unfairness of it all, while they were blissfully unaware of the evil I wished on them every day. In the end, I was only hurting myself. I was carrying all that in my head for nothing.

After about a year, I'd had enough of all the anger, hatred, and bitterness. It was draining me daily. I believe it's only when you forgive and let go of the past that you can be fully free to move forward with your full potential.

I learned to live in the moment. The past was too painful to contemplate, and my future taunted me, so I took each day as it came. I learned to have faith because worrying did nothing to change what I was experiencing.

My release from prison

I was released from prison in April 2013, after serving my 10-year sentence. The Zimbabwean courts have never acquitted me of the crime I was convicted of.

My time in prison changed my perspective on life. Before prison, I was a big fish in the little city of Bulawayo, going nowhere, like a hamster on a wheel going round and round. And it was all about me, money, my empire, and achieving more and more. Never knowing when enough is enough.

Now, I focus on helping others and making a difference in other people's lives. I'm a motivational speaker and I share my testimony and the lessons I learned from my ordeal with corporates, churches, schools and prisons. I have a purpose in my life, and the satisfaction I get from helping others far outweighs the money I was making before.

Sitting by a campfire now with my beautiful wife, whom I married three years ago, I take in the beauty of the sunset, the dancing flames, the bright stars and the moon, none of which I saw for 10 long, lonely years. I now appreciate the smallest things in everyday life: a hot bath, a soft bed, a delicious meal or a spontaneous cuddle with a loved one. It is the simple things that you miss most when everything is taken away from you.

Rusty Labuschagne is the author of Beating Chains. He is also a motivational speaker.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.