Solitary Confinement Tips from Simon Mann

COVID lockdown giving you the blues? Don’t tell it to a former British SAS officer turned mercenary who spent almost six years in African prisons.

When it comes to how to deal with solitary confinement, not many people have a leg up on Captain Simon Mann. A household name in the UK, Mann was born into a long, proud line of British Army officers. Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, he served in the prestigious Scots Guards and then in the elite SAS before famously becoming a soldier of fortune in southern Africa.

In late 2003, long retired from the gun-for-hire game, Simon was approached by a group of shadowy Anglo-European players (including Margaret Thatcher’s ne’er-do-well son Mark) to organize a coup to overthrow Teodoro Obiang, the brutal dictator of the tiny but oil-rich West African nation of Equatorial Guinea. The operation proved to be a setup. Even as Simon and his men were in the air, his backers doublecrossed him and used the threat of a coup to extract oil contracts from a suddenly compliant Obiang. Mann was arrested on the tarmac of the airport in Harare, Zimbabwe, where he and his men had stopped to refuel, and thrown in prison under the heel of Obiang’s rival, the equally godawful Robert Mugabe.

Mann spent the next five years and eight months in African prisons — four in Zimbabwe and then another twenty months…