I sit in the Memorial Garden at Port Arthur, Tanzania, where a coffee shop once stood. Port Arthur is a historical site and tourist destination. Originally, it was a prison colony.
Established in 1830 and based on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon designs, it was described as “a mill for grinding rogues honest, and idle men industrious.” Instead, this bucolic corner of the earth became a brutal hell for decades, disguised as a paradise, but one that grinded men, women, and children as young as thirteen.
Before walking the grounds of the former penal colony, I went straight to where the Broad Arrow Café once stood. There, on April 26, 1996, at 1:10 pm, a different type of horror occurred, one with which those in the U.S. are too familiar, a grinding of men, women, and children that is becoming normalized.
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