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The Herald, 4 January 1990

A RETIRED hangman described in gruesome detail on a British television programme on Tuesday night how condemned prisoners on Pretoria’s death row are executed and secretly buried.

“It didn’t worry me,” was how a former prison warder, Mr Chris Barnard, summed up in an interview by the First, Tuesday programme, which introduced him as the “chief executioner from 1962 to 1986, credited with over 1 500 hangings during his career”.

The documentary, including secretly and illegally shot footage of Pretoria central prison, was entitled South Africa’s Death Factory. 

It informed viewers that 1 200 prisoners had been hanged in the 1980s equivalent to one every three days, and that there were currently 300 — including Upington 14 — awaiting the noose on death row.

Mr John Didcott, said to have tried over 500 murder cases, but never to have imposed the death sentence, was quoted as expressing his wish for the abolition of the death penalty.

He recalled how he and other prison warders would “talk, play darts or read the paper”, while waiting for the final signal to pull the lever. “It didn’t worry me.”

He described up to seven prisoners being executed simultaneously in separate numbered chambers. 

“If there was one or all of them, they all went at the same time.”

White caps were placed over the prisoner’s heads, with a flap over the face, followed by the noose, which was pulled tight. Most of the people he had executed did not resist, but he remembered one occasion when nine Xhosa men from the Cape had to be overpowered.

Mr Barnard also described how he used a fan to blow away the “bad smell” of trapped air and gases escaping from the bodies when the ropes were loosened.

LESSONS FOR TODAY 

 South Africa’s democratic government abolished the death penalty on June 6, 1995. Despite the violent crimes committed by some rogue elements, calls to restore the death penalty have been resisted.

 As of 2020, 53 countries, including Zimbabwe and the United States of America still had capital punishment. The United States under President Trump executed a number of prisoners on death row before he left office.

 Amnesty International which opposes capital punishment says, “the death penalty violates the most fundamental right — the right to life. It is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.”

 President Mnangagwa in 2018, “commuted to life imprisonment, the death sentences of prisoners who had been on death row for more than 10 years.”

 Zimbabwe has gone for 15 years without executing prisoners on death row. The last prisoner was hung on July 22, 2005.

 In January 2019, President Mnangagwa, who is opposed to the death penalty said he “wholeheartedly”, agreed that capital punishment “constituted an affront to human dignity.” 

 MDC-T leader Senator Douglas Mwonzora gives compelling arguments on why Section 48 of the Constitution should be amended, in an article: “Why Zimbabwe should amend the Constitution to abolish the death penalty”, published by Constitutionnet on August 7, 2019. Section 48 provides for the right to life, but section 48(2) states: “a law may permit the death penalty to be imposed only on a person convicted of murder committed in aggravating circumstances.”