On the night of 1st to 2 September 2024, hundreds of inmates at Makala Central Prison (MCP) left their detention wings, destroyed the administrative offices and committed mass rapes on nearly 320 female inmates. The prisoners’ rush to the administrative block during the night was interpreted by the prison authorities as an escape attempt. It led to a military-police crackdown, the provisional toll of which, presented on 2 September 2024 by Interior Minister Jacquemain Shabani, was 129 dead and 59 injured. This nocturnal event was not the first notable incident to affect the MCP at late hours. The night of 16 to 17 May 2017 is still vivid in the memories of many city dwellers in Kinshasa. More than 4,000 inmates set fire to the administrative offices and killed 2 warders before fleeing the MCP.
In the DRC, such events are treated above all as cases of force majeure, forcing members of the government to justify the State’s militaristic policy. By describing them as escapes or attempted escapes, the Congolese political authorities have not only labelled the phenomenon or used it as a means of government communication. They have also activated a public action aimed at establishing who are the incident perpetrators, in order to punish them. The Minister of the Interior, for example, indicated that a crisis unit had been set up under his leadership to shed light on the events.
Justice Minister Constant Mutamba spoke of an act of sabotage aimed at calling into question his policy of decongesting prisons (reducing overcrowding). The Kinshasa Military Court has already begun the trial at the MCP, with the aim of sentencing the alleged perpetrators of what is now being called ’the attempted escape of 2 September 2024. The detainees summoned to these trials are accused of rape, acts of terrorism, arson and malicious destruction of public property, among other charges. A profusion of criticism has emerged from NGOs, opposition parties and the international press, describing the event of 2 September as carnage and demanding that the State be held civilly responsible for failing to protect the women incarcerated in ward 9 of the MCP.
The prisoner is also a victim
Although the multiplicity of declarations by state and non-state actors is justified, given the seriousness of the incident, public action geared towards identifying those responsible and punishing the culprits provides very few keys to analyzing the underlying factors, daily routines, and structural and infrastructural problems that trigger incidents at the MCP. Analytically, several authors have already highlighted the issue of overcrowding (in January 2024, the MCP had 14,500 inmates for a capacity of 1,500), caused in part by the long waiting period for trial. An additional explanatory factor is undoubtedly the night-time context in which a tragedy such as that of 2 September occurred. Such an event can be highlighted in terms of the organizational routines of those who live and work in prison, and their operating modes, which vary between day and night, whereas the MCP is supposed to function at all hours. This will be the focus of our attention in the section below.
In part, the grey areas surrounding ’the escape attempt of 2 September 2024’ stem from the anonymous, mysterious, obscure, unplanned and sometimes ominous nature of nocturnal activities. It is difficult for any actor, including the one securing the prison with a gun in his hand, to know what is going on around him. What’s more, videos of the prison night are seldom, and sometimes impossible to make, especially when the electricity is cut off. Faced with such a lack of information on the empirical fact of the night, post facto comments appear biased and severely limited. These comments, which are sometimes contradictory, make the narrative of events complex. The prisoner who ransacks the offices, after cutting through the gates of the pavilions, is also the victim of the military response. The prison guard becomes the assailant of the prisoners, and the prisoner who attacks the guards with the aim of fleeing, looting and raping the women subsequently becomes a victim of military-police violence, whereas he was a potential executioner at the outset of his action. All these contradictions, both factual and heuristic, make nocturnal temporality a worrying subject that needs to be identified in its many manifestations.
One of the first points to make is that any nocturnal events that take place in the MCP’s detention wards cannot be observed or experienced directly by the prison administration. The daytime public governance that allows civilian prison officers, members of NGOs, magistrates, lawyers and religious actors to come to work around 8am and return home around 4 or 5pm, disappears completely during the night. As the movement of prison officers and all external actors within the wards is at a standstill, it is difficult for those who are not detainees to know exactly what goes on at night in the places of detention.
Sleeping in the foul-smelling toilets
Outside the wards of detention, all the civilian administrative staff in the three prison registry offices, the kitchen, the detention service, the prison secretariat and the visitor registration services are no longer operational. Their various offices are generally closed. Some prison officers are supposed to be on duty in ward 9, which is reserved for women, and in the dispensary, which is supposed to receive patients at all hours. However, many of them are absent during the night, as they live in fear of the atrocities suffered by their colleagues who died on the night of 17 May 2017, during the mass escape. The only prison officers who can therefore be on duty and present at their posts during the night are military and police personnel. They are not present in the wards, but they make sure that no inmate leaves the wards to end up in the administrative blocks, or in another corner of the prison, access to which is prohibited at late hours.
The heavy-handed intervention of the police and army during the night is generally not necessary when minor incidents are resolved by the inmates’ self-governance. This nocturnal self-governance is a form of joint governance, implemented between the prison administration and the inmates. In joint governance, the inmates act as informers, commission agents, organizers of hygiene work, and controllers of the movement of their fellow inmates from one ward to another. They are also the ones who carry out the disciplinary punishments imposed by prison officers on recalcitrant inmates. Their Commander-in-Chief is the ’ General Governor’ of the prisoners, who is the one who distributes the roles.
One of the most active services in this joint governance of prisoners at night is the ’military police’ service. Members of this service intervene in the event of fights and quarrels. One of the bones of contention at night is the question of sleeping space. Because the prison is so overcrowded, it is often difficult for some inmates to accept standing up and sleeping in the foul-smelling toilets, while others manage to find tiny sleeping places in a room. The inmates involved in ’military police’ are supposed to put an end to this type of conflict1, but does not always succeed.
The limits of self-governance
Together with the military and the police, the ’military police’ of joint governance contribute to the implementation of a double security action during the night in prison. The action of the military and police officers, which is potentially lethal, is only likely to be triggered if the first control action carried out by the “military police” fails. As long as the inmates remain inside the wards, the second security action can be considered a dependent variable of the first. When the inmates leave their detention areas and the military interpret their massive rushes towards the administrative offices and the women’s wards as security threats or attempted escapes, repression may be inevitable, as was the case on 2 September 2024.
The incidents that occur during the night provide evidence of the capacity deficit of prisoners involved in joint governance, especially in terms of mediation or prison conflict management. The absence of any notable night-time incidents since May 2017 is also not proof of effective self-governance by inmates during the night. The occurrence of the tragedy of 2 September 2017 shows that such an absence does not mean that there were no premises, predispositions or prison conflicts likely to transform the MCP into a space for military-police violence.
The work of the joint governance inmates is severely restricted at night. Although they are allowed to have telephones, to alert the official administration in the event of deaths, general brawls and serious illnesses, they are not always certainty that their grievances will be resolved following a phone call. In the event of a collective prisoner revolt, those in joint governance are sometimes the first to be stabbed and beaten by their peers.
Even if it is not always possible to maintain the same facilities in a prison during the day and at night, certain political and economic measures can be taken to make prison life at night a less incident-prone time for administrative work.
Training modules in non-violent communication
One of the first levers that could be activated is the payment of salaries and bonuses to all prison officers who are supposed to work day and night at the MCP. While waiting for the current justice reforms to lead to such payment, many of these officers are still justifying their absences from work by the lack of pay and payment of risk bonuses. Remuneration is undoubtedly not a panacea. Since these officers still feel vulnerable to nocturnal violence from inmates, and also fear possible arrest and incarceration within the MCP, in the event of error or professional misconduct. A policy of professional protection for warders could play a key role in motivating them to be devoted to their work in the prison.
In addition to warders, it would be appropriate, in view of their responsibilities, to equip the inmates involved in joint governance with skills likely to curb prison uprisings. They could therefore receive specific training from technical and financial partners such as the UNDP, the ‘Red Cross’, ‘Lawyers Without Borders’ and ‘RCN Justice and Democracy’, who work on a daily basis within the MCP. Training modules in non-violent communication, intercultural mediation and democratic crowd management could be crucial in equipping these inmates with practical skills in prevention of prison uprisings.
Furthermore, the decision by the Minister of Justice to release sick prisoners could not be more commendable, because these vulnerable individuals are very often collateral victims of prison violence. Extending these same release procedures to the incarcerated women who were the targets of the 2 September gang rapes could alleviate but not obliterate the burden of the atrocity inflicted on them. It is worth noting that some women are imprisoned with their children and should be protected.
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1Liwérant et Nionzi, in Conjonctures de l’Afrique centrale 2023, L’Harmattan