before we arrived and had been sent to the morgue. There were ill detainees in the hospital, including a man who had been shot and left paralysed, who had been deported in this condition. In the paediatric ward, there were orphaned children. One 4 year old boy had been left orphaned when his mother was deported very ill and died. A brother and sister aged 7 and 3 years old had been orphaned, also after their mother was deported ill and died. The hospital did not know how to contact relatives of these children. The mothers had been given paupers’ funerals. Deaths A tragic case was brought to our attention towards the end of 2003. A deportee was reported to have died of starvation while trying to walk the 300 km through virtual desert to get to Bulawayo. On investigation, it was established that this young man had indeed died in the vicinity of a rural school about 40 km out of Beitbridge. Teachers at the school reported finding him lying by the side of a small stream, moaning that he was hungry. They put him on a donkey cart, but by the time they got him to hospital, he had died. It was established by the authors that he had his ID on him, but the hospital morgue would not delay his burial to allow for efforts to locate his family. The hospital has facilities to store 6 bodies at a time, and on this day there were over 20 unclaimed bodies, more than a dozen of which were deportees who had died in the hospital. Most of them were without any form of identity. In the morgue on this same day, there was a severed human head, still complete with skin and features, but no lower jaw. This remains of a crocodile’s dinner had been picked up on the shores of the Limpopo and delivered to the morgue by the police. The identity of the person was unknown. This human head, together with the dead deportees, was buried in a paupers’ grave in Beitbridge the same day. The police were asked about these cases, of the person picked up in the school grounds and the human head: they confirmed that it is not unusual to find human remains in the greater vicinity of Beitbridge, both on the banks of the Limpopo and in the bush. The police report this happens every few weeks, and they assume these are deportees or border jumpers, who have no relatives in the area to notice they are missing. Such remains may lie for unknown periods in the open until they are discovered, scavenged and dessicated. They end up in paupers’ graves. People in the vicinity of the hospital burial ground complained to us that the paupers’ graves are not deep enough. They told us that 39 people had been buried the week before, and that the smell from the corpses was still noticeable. Political exiles: risks on deportation We have several cases on file of individuals who, on deportation, decided to go home instead of ducking straight back under the fence to South Africa, and who were then picked up again and re-brutalised by police. We have other cases on file of people who had been wanted by the police for their political activism, and who decided of their own accord that it was possibly safe enough to go home; they were picked up and tortured. Gabriel Shumba, whose affidavit is in Appendix One, is one good example. He had at one stage fled to South Africa, after 11 arrests and several assaults, and was persuaded by friends and 77