Artist Arthur Judah Angel, who spent 16 years in a Nigerian prison, holds up one of his works as he speaks with a reporter in October in his gallery in Lagos, Nigeria. While in prison, Angel witnessed more than 450 inmates hang. He committed their names to memory, and many of their images to paper.

Lagos, Nigeria ? The doomed man’s eyes stare blankly ahead as he shuffles down a dark corridor, spreading a hush through the death-row cells. The hangman pushes a black hood over the convict’s head and tightens a noose around his neck. The trapdoor opens beneath his feet with a clang that reverberates around the stone walls. A gurgle, one last rattle of chains, then silence.

Through the iron bars of his cell near the gallows of this Nigerian prison, Arthur Judah Angel watched the hangman do his morbid work for almost a decade, witnessing the hangings of more than 450 of his fellow convicts. He committed their names to memory and many of their images to paper.

Now, 51 drawings that survived Angel’s incarceration are attracting the attention of human rights activists and art lovers alike, allowing the artist to turn his years of horror into activism against the death penalty.

“I had to document our ugly world,” said Angel, 46, who spent a total of 16 years in prison for a murder he says he didn’t commit before being freed in 2000. “It was drawing that kept me going in there. It gave me a purpose.”

Life behind bars

Angel was beaten and thrown behind bars in January 1984 when he went to visit a friend who had been taken into custody at a neighborhood police station. He was 21 then and planned to begin university that year.

Five days later he was charged with murdering a policeman. Police asked for a bribe to free him, but his mother was too poor to pay, he says. So Angel was held for two years until his case went to court. After a six-day trial in which police were both the complainants and only witnesses, he was sentenced to hang.

On death row, he lived in a seven-foot-square cell with up to 13 other condemned criminals. A bucket in the corner was the toilet. At night the cellmates had to lie down side-by-side to sleep. If one wanted to turn in the night, he would have to stand and then squeeze himself back in.

The cell was one of 18 which housed over 200 condemned men in Enugu prison — one of Nigeria’s largest.

A detailed pencil drawing by Angel on rough pink cardboard shows the semi-naked prisoners hunched in awkward positions. Scrawled across the grimy walls are the names of previous occupants and the dates of their execution. Angel named the drawing “Sleeping in Limbo.”

“That existence is one between life and death. You don’t belong to either world,” Angel explains.

Secret drawings

Condemned criminals were not allowed to keep pens or paper so Angel’s first prison drawing was done on a cell wall with charcoal smuggled from the kitchen. It was a cartoon cowboy designed to cheer up his cellmates, but it also caught the eye of the wardens.

“They started coming to me and asking me to do drawings for them,” he recalled. “I would draw cards or portraits for them and in return they would allow me a pencil and a spare piece of paper.”

By night, Angel turned his artistic focus from the images he was commissioned to do to the macabre sights around him.

The cell’s concrete roof had a small hole in the center that provided a circle of light when the moon shone. Angel would jostle for position beneath the hole and squat with a sheet of paper on his knees to do his secret drawings.

Some of his pictures are scrawled on book pages, others on faded cardboard. Many are rough at the edges, slightly torn or damaged by damp. Most of these dark artworks did not survive.

The 51 that endured were smuggled out by his parents when they visited. These now provide a unique insight into daily life on death row: from the shuffling, chained and hooded figures driven by the guards’ clubs toward the gallows, to the stooped heads and empty expressions of the other inmates, a captive audience at the execution.

“You don’t know if next time it will be your time to go,” Angel says. “From Monday to Friday you expect executions in the morning. When the gallows are prepared, we all got nervous. You hear the chains clanking, and the trap door banging. You see the hangman walk past the cells. Most inmates don’t have the strength to eat before midday.”

Angel was prepared for execution once — fed his last meal with his legs chained — but at the end of the day his name was removed from the list.

“I once saw 58 executed in one day,” he says. “But I wasn’t meant to die in there.”

Seeking death penalty moratorium

In October, Amnesty International asked the Nigerian government to declare a moratorium on executions, saying the country’s criminal justice system was “riddled with corruption, negligence and a nearly criminal lack of resources.”

The London-based rights group said over half of the 736 inmates facing death were convicted on the basis of written confessions that many said were extracted under torture.

In addition, at least 80 death row inmates were sentenced with no right to appeal, Amnesty said, and others faced decades of delays on appeals because of missing case files or a lack of lawyers to represent them. The group used Angel’s images to illustrate its reports and organized exhibitions of his work to further its campaign against the death penalty.

In what amounts to an acknowledgment of flaws in its criminal justice system, the government has appointed two commissions of inquiry, both of which also recommended a moratorium on death sentences.

No such action has been taken, but on Nov. 14, President Umaru Yar’Adua pardoned a man who had been on death row for 22 years and ordered the justice minister and attorney-general to review prison inmates’ records and bring other “deserving cases” to his attention. It was not clear what prompted the pardon or what constituted “deserving cases.”

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation, with 140 million people according to government census figures. Despite being Africa’s biggest oil producer, poverty, violent crime and corruption are widespread.