Thought-crime and punishment: the story of Abdullah Merhi

Only Abdullah Merhi will ever know what he was thinking when, at 19 years old, he had a ten-minute conversation that would two years later incriminate him. Shackled and imprisoned in isolation for more than a year, he’s had a lot of time to think about it. The newly-married apprentice electrician had time to ponder it two Christmases ago, when he sat alone in his cell while his 18-year-old wife Violet gave birth, 60 kilometres away, to their first child. He’s now allowed to hold the little boy once a month, for an hour, which makes him “feel like only an uncle”. Sometimes it’s too painful to touch the tiny, soft person who doesn’t recognise him and cries when handed to his father. Merhi had time to ponder it on his twenty-first birthday. Not at the momentous celebration of hundreds planned by his family, but alone in a daylight-free cell. He’s had time to discuss it through thick glass with Violet, whom he’s not permitted to touch. She, a former South African estranged from her family for converting to Islam, finds it hard to take the hour-long trip to see her husband, shackled, in a steel-enforced room, where their conversation is watched and recorded. [Introduction]