They come every day. Sometimes they plead for help - food, money, assistance in escaping. Sometimes they narrate the latest horrors to befall them. Others just want reassurance that there is another, more sane world beyond Zimbabwe's borders.

Collectively these text messages from my former cellmates in the central prison of Bulawayo, the country's second city, chronicle the inexorable descent into hell of Zimbabwe.

The first to text me was Ryan, a former traffic policeman, who taught me how to sleep on a stone floor. “The sitn here is just so bad, worse than ever, people killing each other like flies. Pliz do something, pliz help us my friend,” he wrote. In recent weeks the text messages have moved from a steady flow to a torrent.

“SOS. We cannot stay in this country any longer, it is mad place now. Pliz my friend you are our only hope. Do anything to help us get out and away from here,” said one that was received yesterday. “I am begging you Mr Jonathan pliz help us, I am frightened I will be killed if I stay here, last time they beat me but now they are crazy,” another read.

As I learnt when I was arrested after an attempt to sneak into the country to cover the elections in April, prisons in Zimbabwe are overflowing. Many of my cellmates have now been released on bail to make room for newcomers. Others have served their sentences. They have all emerged into a country even worse than the one they left.

Most of the time I have been able to do little except offer inadequate words of comfort. Sometimes through an intermediary I have sent a tiny bit of money to my closest friends.

“Clayton, Sir, I am pinning my hopes of a new life on you. May God bless you and shame on all the wrong doers here,” said a text received last week from the recipient of £10 - a fortune in Zimbabwe.

These messages are a daily reminder of our conversations inside Grey's Prison, built for 250 inmates but now home to almost 900. In the middle of the night, when the stench from the hole in the corner used as a lavatory was overwhelming, we would gather in front of the tiny window of the cell. It was the rainy season. Heavy thunder clouds hung low in a threatening grey sky. When the downpour began great drops of rain would splash on to the exercise yard outside and push blasts of fresh, clean air through the bars. We would inhale it deeply as if it were some elixir of the gods.

My cellmates all had a naive belief that the outside world would not stand by and watch President Mugabe cheat his way back to power. They desperately sought reassurance. I never said what I truly believed - that once again Mr Mugabe would get away with murder.

My interlocutors were big, virtually naked and looked fearsome. Many were soldiers or policemen who had deserted or committed crimes after non-payment of salaries. However, they were gentle, frightened and usually very young. In hushed tones so as not to disturb the other cellmates (there were 22 in total) they told me stories of broken lives.

Alfred became my first friend. He was 24 and had been conscripted into the Army at the age of 18 - a few weeks after he had received his A-level results. “I took two As and a C,” he told me proudly. “That's very good you know - enough for university.” He came from a large family of peasant farmers outside the capital, Harare, and his ambition had been to become a lawyer. Instead, he found himself defending Robert Mugabe's “revolution”.

Last year he could bear it no longer and ran away to enrol at university. He told the authorities that he had finally been demobbed. The Army found him two months later. When we met he had already been in the cell for three months awaiting a court martial. Branded an enemy of the state for deserting the Army, he knew worse was almost certain to come. He told me: “It is too late now, I will never study again ... what do you think, do you think there is any hope for us here? Will this man [Mugabe] ever go?”

The ambitions of David were more modest. He loved motors. “Particularly diesel, I know everything about diesels,” he told me with a smile. He was studying to become a mechanic when he was taken to serve in the Army. He ran away almost immediately.

His biggest worry was Precious, his girlfriend. “I love her very much, I want to marry her, but she is young. Young girls here do not wait, you know,” he confided to me. As he wept I tried to reassure him that she would.

The presidential run-off did not boost the morale of my old cellmates. “They say God will fix it, but he is taking his time,” one of the fortunate ones, who got out of jail, wrote at the weekend. “By the time things are well we will be old, our lives will be over and we will die poor, I fear.”

Voices from Cell 5

“Hello my friend. This is xxxxxx [name deliberately withheld] from Cell 5. Things so bad now, have been tortured and beaten. I fear next time they will kill me. Pliz help, whatever you can”

“Sitn is very bad. We are targeted becoz we not war veterans. Our age is being used against us”

“I am begging you Mr Jonathan pliz help us, I am frightened I will be killed if I stay here, last time they beat me but now they are crazy”

“Pliz Clayton, I want give you my story to write out, but not here whilst I am in Zim. I will be killed and dnt publish my name. Thks for your caring”

“No one voted, in my area nine people out of a possible 4,000 voted.

Don't believe those rallies you see on television. People are forced to go to them”

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