The transcript for the BBC documentary Killers Don’t Cry was found on http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/
programmes/correspondent/transcripts/1298829.txt. It appears in White Paper White Ink in a marginally edited format.
The descriptions of the traditional music orchestrated by Don owe much to Laurie Levine’s The Drum Café’s Traditional Music of South Africa, an extraordinary book (with CD) that is now, sadly, out of print.
For the detailed descriptions of the Numbers gangs’ rituals, language and myths, it is with huge gratitude that I acknowledge a remarkable but perhaps little-recognised book, God’s Gangsters, by Heather Parker-Lewis. In this book, Parker-Lewis, working as a social worker in a Cape Town prison, earns the trust of the Numbers gansters, who reveal to her their hitherto closely guarded rituals and litanies. Without the in-depth and nuanced research of Parker-Lewis, this book would not have been possible. The description of the initiation ceremonies draws heavily on the research of Parker-Lewis as they appear in God’s Gangsters.
The poem, ‘The Broken String’, comes from Neil Bennun’s book with the same title. The poem about the San prisoners rolling stones to reclaim the land on which Cape Town’s Victoria & Alfred Waterfront now stands appears in Pippa Skotnes’ book, Heaven’s Things – A story of the /Xam.
The gang histories and tattoo narratives draw heavily on the work of Jonny Steinberg in his ground-breaking book The Number. The influence of this particular work on my own cannot be overemphasised. In many ways, The Number was the inspiration for White Paper White Ink, which was an attempt to extend Steinberg’s excellent but more academic work on the Numbers to wider audiences via a more popular format, namely the prison thriller. The conversation at the end of the book between Pieter and Dog involving the riddle of the umbrellas, as well as the conversation involving prisoners willing to die for each other, were also gleaned from Steinberg’s book.
The illustrations of the prisoner tattoos are based on tattoos photographed by myself (Jonathan Morgan), as well as from an exceptional collection photographed by Araminta de Clermont and available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2008/sep/05/photography.
When Pieter, in a conversation with Sipho, explains how the 28s are holding a mirror up to the warders, his words derive from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Numbers_Gang.
The conversation between various prisoners concerning their first kills was based on the research of Don Pinnock in his book The Brotherhoods: Street Gangs and State Control in Cape Town.
The song about Nonqawuse and Don’s fifth lecture about the Xhosa cattle killings, as pointed out by Don himself, derive from JB Peires’ excellent work entitled The Dead Will Arise.
Similarly, when Numisani Mathebula – the real-life Nongoloza – goes on trial, the facts derive from Jonny Steinberg’s The Number as well as from Steinberg’s own source, The Small Matter of a Horse by Charles van Onselen.