Bagamoyo: Police Violence

In our last two posts we’ve tried to describe the heady atmosphere of Bagamoyo, a small windswept town on the Indian Ocean that is home to many of Tanzania’s most talented artists. Sadly, all is not as calm, creative and carefree as it seems.

When we were last there we met a young man with several gaping wounds on his shins.
Shocked that no one else seemed alarmed by the bright red holes in his legs, we asked him what had happened.

Apparently he was in a minor car accident on one of Bagamoyo’s sandy roads. According to him, it was clearly the other driver’s fault, but he quickly realized that the offender was paying the cops to get off without a penalty. When he pleaded with the cops not to let the offender go, tempers flared and a fight broke out. The young man was subdued, arrested, and taken to the police station, while the other man drove away.

At the station he was taken into a room and beaten by several policemen with heavy clubs. Six weeks later, when we took this picture, his wounds still had not closed. Apologies if the picture is too intense, but we feel we should report on what we experience and let you, our readers, do the interpreting. Although we’re trying to focus on the positives about Africa on this blog, we don’t want to do so at the expense of reality.

After the attack he was released, whereupon he went to the hospital. The hospital couldn’t do anything for him – every time they bandaged the wounds, the gauze came off within hours due to a combination of the heavy bleeding and the hot weather. So one of his friends, an old Italian man who runs a hostel near the beach, treated him with an antiseptic cream that turned his wounds a cough medicine red.

I grew up in a world sheltered from violence of this kind. At the sight of his wounds I became nauseas. I tried to imagine how I would have felt, what I would have done, had it been me curled up in that jail cell trying to escape the blows of the notched ebony clubs.

I’m tempted to say that this violent episode isn’t even that “severe” compared to the rape epidemic in the DRC or the murder of half a million Iraqis, but who can quantify the psychological effects of physical violence? The fact is that this young man’s psyche has been permanently altered and he no longer feels safe in his own town.

Yes, violence and oppression are facts of life in communities all over the world, and police violence certainly occurs with more frequency than is reported. The young man in this story had actually witnessed a police beating in Sweden prior to becoming a victim himself. He usually splits time between Canada and Bagamoyo, living in each place for half a year, but he now says he won’t come back to Tanzania for a long time. He’s currently looking for a human rights lawyer who will take on his case, but even if he finds one, it’ll be his word against the machine.