I could have died at any moment
Kenworthy
News Media, 21 May 2015
“One police officer came with a plastic bag
and put it over my mouth and nose, and pressed very hard so that I couldn’t
breathe. I could have died at any moment”, Bheki Dlamini says looking at the
camera, close to tears, writes Kenworthy News Media.
The scene is from a new
documentary, “Swaziland – Africa’s last absolute monarchy”, made by
award-winning Danish investigative journalist Tom Heinemann.
The film describes the
fight for democracy and socio-economic justice in the tiny sub-Saharan country
through the eyes of Bheki Dlamini, a young activist and leading member of
Swaziland’s largest banned political party, the People’s United Democratic
Movement (PUDEMO).
Never misbehaved
Bheki never misbehaved as a child, his father says. He always did his chores at
home. He got up at five in the morning and walked the 10 kilometres to school
from his home in the rural town of Mpofu in northern Swaziland, and studied
hard to fulfil his academic promise.
In fact it was at
university, while studying Sociology and Public Administration, that Bheki
really started questioning the doctrines and cultural codes of Swazi society.
“University changed my
perception and how I looked on society through the different and diverse views
from other students and lecturers who have been out in the world”, he says.
Wearing a t-shirt is terrorism
Bheki chose to act on his new-found beliefs by amongst other things helping
organize civic education for poor and illiterate people in Swaziland’s rural
areas.
But Swaziland’s absolute
monarch, King Mswati III, not only demands total loyalty from his citizens,
most of who survive on less than a dollar a day from handouts from the UN. He
also makes sure that meetings that are deemed “political” are disrupted by
police, who harass and beat up activists like Bheki, many of whom are
subsequently tried with terrorism for trivial “offences” such as shouting “viva
PUDEMO” or wearing a PUDEMO t-shirt.
After having had his home
ransacked and been detained on several occasions, Bheki was arrested in 2010,
tortured, and charged with terrorism for allegedly having committed arson
against an MP and a police officer, crimes that he and his colleagues said he
could not have committed.
Into the bigger prison
Bheki was in prison for nearly four years. He was kept in a filthy cell, no
larger than five by twelve metres, 24 hours a day with up to 40 other inmates.
When the trial finally
began, all charges against Bheki were quickly dropped and he was released. But
as Bheki told the large crowd that had gathered outside the courthouse to great
him upon his release, “I am moving out of the small prison into the bigger
prison”.
A few months later he was
forced to flee Swaziland, when the police tried to arrest him after he had
given a speech on Mayday.
Make or break
“In life we face challenge”, Bheki’s father says in the film. “But it is how we
respond to these challenges that will either make us or break us”.
And Bheki has chosen and
stood by his response, even though it means he has had to flee Swaziland to
live at a secret location in exile, away from his family. Or that he will
almost certainly be arrested, tortured and charged with treason if he returns
home.
“No matter what they do
to me the fight continues” he says, unflinching and looking straight into the
camera. “The state is afraid, so if we can push much harder it is going to
succumb to our pressure”.
“Swaziland – Africa’s last absolute monarchy” premièred on May 20 in
Copenhagen. The documentary will be screened on Danish national television
channel DR2 on the 2nd of August. It has been submitted to several film
festivals, including the Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival and
Movies That Matter.
Bheki Dlamini
is the President of the Swaziland Youth Congress, the youth wing of PUDEMO. He
currently lives in exile at a secret location in South Africa. The Swazi
police’s torture of him by way of “severe beatings and suffocation torture” was
mentioned in Amnesty International’s 2011 Annual Report.
Tom Heinemann
has won the Danish Outstanding Investigative Journalist of the year award
twice, and has been runner up for Journalist of the year in Denmark three
times. In 2007 he won the Prix Italia in the current affairs selection.
