The Black Hole

Thomas Macaulay and a host of lesser chroniclers have left one terrible night in India indelibly stamped upon the world's memory. It was that night in June 1756, when 123 prisoners, many of them British soldiers, died of suffocation in "the black hole of Calcutta," a lockup in Fort William, 18 ft. long by 15ft. wide--an outrage for which the Nawab Sirajud-daula was later put to death by Clive of India.

Last week the horror of the Black Hole was re-enacted in the newly independent Sudan when some 300 rioting Sudanese farmers on strike at a cotton project on the White Nile were rounded up by police and locked in a room at the new army barracks at Kosti only 65 ft. long and 23 ft. wide. "There were more than 300 of us in that prison room," said one who escaped at last. "We were all tired from the police chase and sick from standing too long under the sun. The room we were put in had only two small windows and both were closed. Sweating and choking, we tried to open the windows, but they were stuck fast. Some of us cried. Others panicked. We knocked at the doors, but there was no answer. In despair we began preparing ourselves for death. One of the prisoners started to chant the Shahada ("There is no God but God and Mohammed is His Prophet. . ."), and the rest of us followed in faint voices. One after another died. Death was getting us so quickly, so horribly . . ."

Next morning one of the prisoners managed to open a window and climb out. When the guards soon afterwards opened the door to the hell hole, 194 were dead inside.

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