Okay, so this writing group is about to happen. I have tried to recruit a few of the most obvious suspects, the ones who seem really interesting to me. And the ones who won’t shaddup and keep telling me stories of varying believablity. Is that a word, ‘believablity’? Plus one or two who seem to have an interest in writing. Add to that some of the Numbers I have got close to. I definitely think some of the Numbers’ stories will spice up this book.

Tuesday, 7 pm, my cell. The first meeting. The line-up… okay, it’s a bit of an exaggeration to call it a line-up, only five guys but, hey, five is better than nothing, right? In the writing project with Jonathan we were eleven. A full team with a goalkeeper/coach (Jonathan), a goal (to write a bestseller), strikers (Valentine, me before I got arrested, and Virginia) and defence (David, Pinkie, Gert, Patrick, Fresew, Steven and Robert). We were all trying to get a grip on who we were. There was Valentine, from Cameroon, whose grandfather taught him to catch mermaids. Pinky, who was eight years old in the middle of the 1976 Soweto student uprising. Gert, the horse thief who never attended a session and who Jonathan met in a park. Patrick, the cartoonist who was forced to eat live birds. Fresew, the Ethiopian chemist. Steven, the ex-boxer who could change the colour of a stolen cow so the owners wouldn’t recognise their own livestock. And Robert, who knows how to remove prison tattoos using condensed milk. I wonder if my prison group will be able to produce the kind of powerful writing like those ouens in Jonathan’s group.

Okay, so here’s the current line up here in prison… From the Numbers gangs there is only Wesley, the Cape Flats coloured gangbuster who only has a Standard 6 but who is sharp as a razor and likes to sing. It took him no time at all to join the 27s and get branded with tattoos. Then there’s Sanza, your typical Xhosa homeboy who fell into crime at the drop of a hat. So far he has not joined any prison gang. Then Major, the tailor/artist. He sounds interesting, right? Major told me if he’s going to join any gang it will be the Airforce because they plan and execute escapes. And Oom Buks. With a name like that you expect him to be different. And before I forget, my latest recruit, Don the librarian. Don is definitely on his own mission. He is much more political and philosophical than the rest of us, more like a political prisoner from a different era. But there’s also something mysterious there. Like that tattoo on his forearm he does his best to cover up.

But don’t get the wrong idea, hey – like I have all the time in the world to run creative writing groups like that larney Jonathan. If I am going to do the writing project, I need time to write. So why I became a farmer, as I like to call it, is because even though I would have more time without this day job, there’s no place or privacy to write. I signed up as a farmer just to get out of here a little bit and then to earn some free time when the prison is not too crowded.

As a farm we get to work both on the prison farm as well as other boers’ farms for which the prison gets paid.

Outside we have to wear these bright orange overalls in case we make a run for it, in which case we will be instantly recognisable, especially from a helicopter. But who knows, I might even be able to run away.

When I decided to become a farmer, I got the option to be transferred to Section C, but chose to stay in my cell with Buks, Sanza, Wes and Major, and with Don nearby. Section C is empty during the day because most of its residents are out at the farms. The farm workers wake at 4 am and wash. That’s an hour earlier than the others. At 5 am there’s the head and body count, then we eat and wait in the courtyard until they call us. Then we’re marched out of the prison gates by six armed guards to the prison’s farm area where they grow sweet potatoes, potatoes, mealies, sorghum, beans and peas. We’re not handcuffed because much of the time our job is to pull out weeds. One warder stands on either side of the row watching us. If we are not weeding, we’re sowing seedlings from the nursery. At the end of the field is a big mountain, which signals the horizon. Both are under a big, blue sky. To anyone flying over in an aeroplane we must look like ants or at least dwarves. There is a hosepipe on a big frame that looks like a giant insect, always spraying water with pesticides and fertiliser in it. A road passes the field but few cars use it. We wear prison hats, green floppy ones, which go nice with the orange uniforms. We return at 2 pm and this is the rub about my new job: at 2 pm we return to the prison to eat and then can watch soccer on TV for the rest of the day or do whatever we want, which, in my case, equals write…

 

On Monday we did a ‘tools-down’ because of the water situation. No provision was made for us to drink and the water pump is far away. If we want to drink we have to walk to the pump at lunchtime. When we did the tools-down they threatened us with the isolation block but in the end we won and they had to supply us with water.

When I told Don about this he was really pleased and wrote some of what I told him down in his notebook. I asked him why he was doing that and he said he wasn’t sure himself, but he felt it was important.

Don has his own cell, 2.5 metres by 1.5 metres, with its own toilet, basin, double bunk and a small bookshelf. He has no things, only a small stone, which is more like a piece of rubble. And a few books.

“What’s the stone?” I ask.

“It’s part of my museum,” he tells me.

“And the rest of your museum?”

“In my mind,” he continues tapping his forehead. I want to ask him how come he’s got his own cell, but I get the sense it’s a question he won’t like.

One evening, I eventually get all five writing group members into my cell just before lock-up. And I manage to put the beds together and the blankets up to screen us off. Major took some persuading to join, but I showed him my drawings and asked if I could see his. I was really blown away by them too. This guy is good – he not only draws faces and bodies like me, but scenes with backgrounds and all, which look like comic strips. Tonight we only have 20 minutes and I had to bribe another prisoner with my bread ration for a week to organise that all of us could be here together. Okay, where was I? Right, all five of the writing group guys in my cell. They all look at me and I have their attention and gotta talk fast.

“I was part of a writing group once before,” I begin. “Anyway, every week we would come together, giving, like, our life stories. Each piece of writing is like doors or windows into our lives, which somebody can open and peep in and say, ‘Oh, Oom Buks is like this and that, and he did this and that with his life, and this and that happened to him.’

“This white guy I used to work with called it narrative therapy, so not just writing for the sake of writing but finding a new story to live by, in which all those bad voices in your head are not the author and director of your life. You find a new voice and a new way of seeing things. Not as a victim, not standing in your own shadow, you check, but standing in a new light with some wind in your sail.”

I don’t even say it as well as that. Heads nod.

“This may be interesting,” says Don. “I’m also into capturing history. Tell you what, I’ll do a deal with all of you. Ever since I got here I have been preparing to run this little lecture course, twice a week, say, every Tuesday and Thursday evening from 6 to 8 pm, on the history of South Africa. My plan has been to discuss books that we have here in our prison library. In the words of Bob Marley, I plan to call the course, ‘Free Yourself from Mental Slavery’. The problem is, not too many are interested in my course. If you all agree to come, I’ll join your group.”

“No way,” snarls Oom Buks. “I don’t give a fuck if you come or not, dunno for sure that I even want to join Michael’s writing group. I just came today to hear what he has to say.”

Don looks hurt by Buks’ rough words, but more is to come.

“Sorry, but 6 to 8 is my favourite soapie, Days of Our Lives,” says Wesley.

“Ja, for me too,” chips in Sanza.

“And me too,” says Major.

I’m keen to have Don join our group, even though I don’t trust him one hundred per cent but I bet he has some interesting stuff to tell, so I agree to attend his lectures. But I am the only one.

“Back to this group,” I say. “I’m not even telling you it will become successful. Not even that what we write will be published, but how about we give it a chance…? Maybe it’ll help us to get through this time.”

Sanza and Wesley are, like, “Okay, what we gotta lose?” and “No problem, Michael, lesgoforit.”

And then Oom Buks grunts, “Okay, why the fok not. There’s not that much to do here anyways.”

My heart does a triple bypass. They’ve all agreed to meet a second time! But just before they go, remembering how Jonathan started us off, I say, “Once we get into it, you’ll all write six chapters about your lives, like I said. We call them windows. Begin with your distant ancestors, then your grandparents, then your parents, then your childhood, then how you got to prison, and then how you see your future. But before we get into that, the reader needs to know how you look like and how you sound. Okay, so this is your homework: you must find a partner from someone here in the group, and you must visit each other’s bunks or cells and find the ou sitting on his bed or doing something in the cell, or it can be at a mealtime or whatever, and pretend you are an artist and are painting a picture of that person. Only you must paint in words and not with paint. It has to be no less than a page long and must describe how the ou looks and what his mannerisms are, how he sounds when he talks, and also what his immediate surroundings look like, and why he is in prison.

“One page is the minimum,” I say. “If you want to write more about your own life and your family history, go for it – but start with this, about someone else, because this is the foundation. And you gotta bring your writing with you next time we meet, which is on Wednesday, same time, same place.”

Wednesday morning I wake up at 4 am and we are taken to work on some boer’s potato farm. Not our own fields. Today I am earning money, but not for myself – the prison gets money for what we will do today. The van turns off the tar road onto a dirt one and then finally comes to a stop. The door is unlocked and swung open and we get out. Eleven of us are at the edge of a field of sand. It is a huge circle, maybe 300 metres wide.

From the centre of the field to where we stand stretches a huge steel machine that feeds the potatoes water and chemicals. The potato plants have died and now they are just stalks lying on top of sandy mounds. When the plant begins to go yellow and dies, this is the time to dig out the spuds. Our job is to dig with our hands – we cannot use forks, so as not to damage the potatoes or the warders. The potatoes are huge and perfect. ‘Genetically modified’, so I’m told, to fry into perfect chips for the larnies who can afford takeaways.

We dig them up all morning and in the afternoon we load the potatoes into trailers. But my mind is not on potatoes, and I keep thinking about the goup. Will they pitch up? They won’t. Will, won’t, will, won’t. But then along comes the only thing that can distract a man in my situtation. After leaving the field, the tractors drive into a big shed lined with steel benches along which women stand cleaning and packing the potatos. Women! I just said ‘women’! You hear me? Women. Now the bad news. We are not allowed to talk to them. But, as they say, there’s no law against looking, which is what we do.

I get back to the prison at 7 pm. I am late for eating but manage to get a serving of pumpkin and pap. The meat is all gone. Then I rush off for a shower and make it to my cell by 7.30. No one is there.

And then, lo and behold, within a few minutes Sanza, Wesley, Oom Buks, Major and Don arrive, all holding paper. “Hola!” I greet each one with a smile and a firm hand grip as they enter my cell. Major helps me. We shift one bed a little so it is more like a room or an office.

“Hola, ouens,” I open proceedings out of breath, not sure what to say.

“Hola, Bushy!” trumpets Welsey from the bed on the other side, where he sits at its edge, closer to me.

This hola comes from Jo’burg; its not used in the Cape, but these ous are learning it from me, and even Oom Buks says hola at times. I can hardly hold my excitement. We settle down on the beds in the enclosed space and I say, “Okay, who wants to go first? Remember, this is not about you writing about yourself, it’s about you visiting another ou and reading to us what you saw, heard, smelled and found out.”

“Okay, I’ll get it over with,” volunteers Sanza. He stands up and begins to read.

“I Sanza visited Major’s cell on the 5^th of August 2001. Looking at Major you would not think he is a criminal. No tattoos, no scars, just a pretty face. Major was arrested for robbery with an AK-47. One or two of his bros were shot and he copped a life sentence that is 25 years. His bed is single and is almost at the end of the cell. There is a small table near his bed. It’s got a shiny Shoprite advert from the newspaper as a tablecloth. On top of it is a small wood ashtray. The other thing about Major is that he can draw, just a few lines of his pen and there will be the most dead-on picture. You must hope it’s not of you because he can make you look like any creature he wants.

“I am sitting in Major’s cell, it is empty, we are the only people in it. He is sitting on the opposite bed, sewing. Sometimes his hand rises up with the needle pinched between his fingers and sometimes he will stare at it for a short second before he dips it back into the green cloth on his lap. Sometimes coming to an end, he will roughly bite off a piece of thread before starting again.

“He is always in his cell to avoid other prisoners. He has a thin body, and he is very terrified of rape. He is not a moffie but he likes needlework, tailoring clothes. Some, they call him Stalala. Major can add pockets, flaps, another colour, fit pleats, make any prison clothes look like trousers mense wear on the outside of this prison. Some of his big customers are the Numbers’ leaders themselves. His suits are famous. Major has got a small oval face with very white almond eyes. His complexion is like coffee and his hair is very curly and short. His prison clothes are very clean and neatly pressed. He sometimes looks at me, then he bend downs and writes. I know he writes about me.”

As Sanza reads I watch Major’s face and see nothing but pride. This is not too bad, I think, sharp-to-the-point writing. I never knew Sanza would be able to write like this. I make a big show and dance of applauding and the others join in. Even Oom Buks looks relaxed.

“Okay, now let’s hear what Major wrote about Sanza,” I say.

Major, who is sitting on the bed, stands up and begins to read from writing that takes up about a quarter of the page.

“Sanza is sitting next to my bed and while he writes about me I am writing about Sanza. Sanza comes from the townships around Cape Town. In Nyanga, he began as a taxi washer when he was a boy, then a Jack. That is one of those guys who ride hanging out the taxi, calling customers. Shouting out the name of the place the taxi goes to, like Wynberg, but sounding like Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiineberg. Then Sanza became a driver. After some years later he became a tough guy in the taxi wars, selling dagga, providing the getaway car for housebreakers and burglars. He has a very dark skin but the way he talks you cannot tell if he is coloured or Xhosa. He always looks like he wants to fight, chest out – Ek is nie bang vir een van julle, nie een van julle gaan my iets maak nie. In a way, he reminds me of Buks. He was arrested for assault. He beat up his father-in-law who was trying to break up his relationship with his wife and who tried to stab him. He has on a dark-blue jersey with red around the neck and sleeves. Feet are crossed over each other. His shoes shine lekker.”

Everyone claps and the feeling in the room is so, so lekker. This is so simple, I think – just people writing what is obvious and taking a little time to say it back to the other guy, but it makes us feel nice.

“Okay, next,” I say.

Oom Buks doesn’t get up but reads from where he sits.

“Me and Wesley sat in my cell. Wes in and out of prison from an early age, verbetering skool, reformatories, juvenile services, you name it. Wes is a full-on Cape coloured skollie, only he’s from Namibia. From an early age he was into stealing, first just with his friends but later when he moved to Cape Town as a member of the Mongrels gang. They need laaities, that is small guys to fit between burglar bars and windows when they do house jobs. His arms are fast filling up with tattoos of the 28s. Every time I look there is another tattoo or scabs before they fall off and become tattoos. Even though he only has a Standard 5, I feel Wes is baie-baie slim, you know not just shit for brains like most of the ous here. Next to his bed there is always a book or a newspaper and he is always listening to the news or trying to watch those doccies on nature or world politics on the TV but no one lets him.”

There is a brief pause.

“And that is as far as I got because it was time for supper,” mutters Oom Buks.

Over the clapping and laughing, Buks shouts, “Now Wes must say what he wrote about me.”

Wesley stands up and reads.

“Oom Buks is in his fifties or sixties or seventies. He has jet-black hair, jet-black beard, but it is fading a little, fringes of his hair are white and fall like a curtain on his big chest. His eyebrows and lashes are also white. He wears short Bermuda pants made of prison pants. He spends a lot of his time making picture frames and ships out of matches, skaf tins and old lockers. Oom Buks may be old and white and a bit fat but he is not scared of no one. He challenges the whole cell shouting, ‘Jul mense maak my naar!’ He shows no fear, he just shouts, ‘Kak plek, kak mense. Shit place, shit people. Pasop and beware murderers and gangsters.’ He has two sidekicks who won’t join the group. One is a young blond boer, very handsome, nicely trimmed beard, soft face, won’t look mense in the eyes. The other is a tough farm boy, floppy hat, freckles. The power of Oom Buks’ dislike for us protects him.”

Everyone laughs and claps until Don kind of interrupts, speaking up in his soft calm voice. “No one came to visit me but I began to write some of those windows you spoke about last time, Michael, and you said we could write on ahead.” He displays some notes, a very fine, neat handwriting filling each page. Each letter so tiny I think only he with his thick glasses can read it.

“I have also begun to collect as many books as I can for our prison library,” says Don. “Books about the place where I grew up and books about other things. These books, some of them with photos in them, have helped me to remember the details of many places well known to me but that I had almost forgotten.”

Here Don pauses and looks up at us to see if we are listening. He writes and speaks with more confidence than the others, than any of us. He has no need to worry whether we are listening. I see that everyone is hanging on his every word, not sure what to make of this guy who on one hand is a prisoner just like us but on the other hand has something of the warder about him too. His own cell, a job as a librarian, we are still trying to figure him out.

“This place where I grew up was called District 6,” Don continues. “Except for Sophiatown, it was unlike any place in South Africa. From 1966 to 1982, that’s how long they took to level District 6 to the ground.”

Don then picks up a book, one that I have seen in his library. The book is large, like a thick magazine, but Don handles it carefully as if it is made of butterfly wings. He holds it at head height and turns it almost in slow motion so that it hides his face, and makes him appear to have a book for a head.

After holding this one photo up and swivelling it both ways so we all have a chance to see it, he lowers the book slowly and reads directly from it.

“On February 11^th 1966, District 6 was declared a white area under the Group Areas Act. Fifty-five thousand people were forced to move and every single building except for churches and other religious buildings were flattened by the bulldozers.”

It’s only a sentence – once sentence – but the way he reads it and pauses to look at us, it’s as if he is able to slow down, even halt and reverse the river of time. It is as though Don demands that we hear the bulldozers and the walls of the people’s homes as they crumble and fall.

After a while I find myself thinking, hey, this guy is treating us like kids. He is also doing something sneaky, like he’s turning my writing group into his lectures because I could attract some crowds and he couldn’t. I begin to feel angry but there is also something about what Don is saying and how he says it that pulls me in and makes me want him to go on.

“When it was still standing and full of people,” Don continues, now and then checking his notes as he speaks, “District Six had blacks, coloureds, Muslims, turbaned sheiks in long robes, whites, Jews, Italians, Portuguese, Xhosa, you name it. There was jazz, fashion, all-night dancing, gangsters, politics. More than anything there was a sense of community. Poor people, ordinary people, helping each other out. If someone came to your door for sugar or a tea bag, you gave it happily because next time it might be you who asks. There were many shacks but also double-storey apartments with carved wood balconies that went right around the building. People would eat – especially their supper – out on those balconies and just mix and shout down to the street.” Again he stops and looks up at us.

“It was a very crowded place, District 6,” says Don, still reading from his notes. “As many as fifteen people slept in one room. The communal tap in the back yard was shared by many families. Even though they were fancy houses, most didn’t have electricity that worked. The houses were owned by white landlords who didn’t live in District 6 and charged rent for people to live in their houses or to put up shacks on their land. These landlords didn’t do anything to improve or maintain the place.”

Here I begin to lose interest a little bit. It’s not like we are from overseas or anything and didn’t grow up in apartheid under crowded township conditions.

“Hawkers sold fruit and veg during the day,” continues Don. “Oranges and peaches and apricots and tomatoes piled in these huge high pyramids on their wagons or on the pavements, calling out rhymes like, ‘Nice and firm, got no worm’, ‘Nice and sweet for you to eat.’ At night these fruit-and-veg wagons would be lined up in the narrow, cobbled alleys, leaning against the walls with their wheels taken off so no one could steal the wagons themselves.”

As much as Louis L’Amour – maybe its because I can see and hear Don – maybe even more than L’Amour, Don has the power to take me from where I am to somewhere else. Being a prisoner, I think, also helps our minds and imaginations to be more flexible like. If our imaginations can see and smell and hear the place, it’s like a part of us is no longer here in Piketberg Prison.

Don’s voice comes back, fading out my thoughts.

“As boys we used to jump onto the back bumpers of moving cars, only getting off and running away when the driver slammed on his brakes and got out to try and beat us. And I remember that game we called Fox and Geese, like snooker but with discs instead of balls that you had to slide across a wooden board into the four pockets of the table. In the evenings, in summer, we would play street cricket. Many people joined in and the traffic could hardly move.”

Another brief pause.

“All the races lived together in District 6, but it was no paradise,” says Don. “It had the smell of poverty, the smell of human shit, of blocked drains, overflowing refuse bins and drunks’ vomit on the street. People did not always treat each other so fairly. Malays looked down on other Africans, those they called Hotnots, Boesmans and Kaffirs.”

Remember I told you Don always seemed to cover his forearms with long sleeves? In this lecture everyone learned that Don has some chappies of his own. Just five dots on his right forearm. Four dots for the walls of a prison and the fifth dot in the middle is the prisoner trapped between the four walls. “Even before I went to prison I got this tattoo,” Don explains. “So, you see, a part of me was expecting to end up here. This is true for many young men and I find this hard to accept.”

But the most interesting thing we learned was this. Don, as a young gangster, got caught up in a gang war and a stray bullet from his gun killed a little girl. At that time there were political as well as non-political prisoners on Robben Island, which is where Don landed up.

He ends the lecture talking about how, in the wild, lions and other predators help their young to make their first kill. And that’s the same with gangsters too – a young gangster is encouraged to kill, and the person he kills is most often another young man, often someone from the same community, or someone the killer knows, maybe even went to school with, young men killing each other for no good reason. At the end of the lecture there are lots of questions about Robben Island.

“If you come to my lecture on Thursday,” Don continues, “I speak a lot about the Island.”

It’s time to end the group so we go back to our cell.

 

Back on my bunk I pick up L’Amour’s The Roving Trail. But I can’t concentrate. I’m more than excited about my group. I feel I’ve had a glimpse of some powerful pieces of writing that might somehow make itself into a book. Not only Don, but the others too. The feeling I have is not that usual feeling that every step we take is like walking through mud – that every breath, word, thought is a waste of time and that we are not in control of our own lives. I also think about Homeless Talk and Jonathan. Homeless. Definitely, I was homeless, but more than that I was directionless. Just surviving, really. And drinking a lot. Funny how easy it has been to stop drinking in prison. Not a drop has passed my lips in six months now.

“You know, before it was like it was something I wanted to boast about, but now I feel uneasy about it, since Don spoke about killing that little girl,” says Sanza.

“Like Don said,” Wesley adds, “my first kill was the thing that makes you break with a certain kind of life or childhood. When you do it you are choosing to become a gangster for life. There is no turning back after that.”

It surprises me that none of them speaks about the details, no boasting, just their feelings and also the pressure to kill.

“I was never told I had to kill someone,” continues Wes, “but there was always that ‘What, are you scared to kill?’ I felt I had to prove myself.”

“You right, there was that,” says Sanza, “but it was also more like if another gang insulted us or beat us in a fight, the next step up was just to kill someone. Like it was just natural and casual.”

“Killing is the moment when you get labelled enemy number one by the other gang and the family of the person you killed. From then you are headhunted,” explains Wes.

“That’s right, yes,” agrees Sanza. “There were times I wanted to leave the gang but once you’ve killed someone and are headhunted, if you leave your own gang you will be found dead in a gutter because you don’t have protection any more.”

“Another reason you can’t just leave a gang,” continues Wes, “is because there are a lot of secrets that you know from being in the gang. If the police get information about a murder even five years after you’ve left the gang, the gang will think you gave the information to the police and they will come to get you.”

Then both Wes and Sanza, and this other guy Alphonse, they all speak how their first kill was the one that haunts them the most. It is always the first kill that visits you in your dreams.

I think about this conversation the whole day. It’s like Don just wants them all to stop being gansters, but it’s not as easy as that.

Don’s first lecture is a blockbuster. It’s all about Robben Island, which in the 1970s was known as ‘The University’. Not only was Don there, but his lecturers were the likes of Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela and Mac Maharaj. When Don got to Robben Island the senior members of the ANC on the Island were shocked at how little both the non-political prisoners and the young political prisoners knew about the history of the ANC as well as about the history of apartheid and colonialism. Of course, the lectures and discussions could not be done openly so they were conducted in the stone quarry. The way lecturers organised the courses was like this… If you wanted to attend a certain lecture series, you made sure you got into a particular work gang that was sent to the quarry where the lecture takes place. While you are working, handling a shovel or a pick, at the same time you are listening to the professor – and often not only listening but also discussing the topic with your professor and among the group.

Then Don, right in the middle of this, his first lecture, drops a bombshell. He tells us he has an agenda, that his vision is that we too at Piketberg Prison can have a culture of learning, of respect, so we can find ourselves and our roles in the great river of history. He tells us that he respects gangs and gangsters, that they are very organised and very disciplined, but that he thinks they have not thought enough about how to and where to direct all that rightful anger and frustration. As he says this, I think he is either very brave or very stupid to be insulting the gangsters.

The short powerful man called Benny, who I have heard is the leader of the 26s, raises his hand and asks Don about the Numbers. Were they not there on Robben Island?

“They were there,” continues Don, “in a medium-security section on the other end of the Island, but they did not flourish. They found it hard to recruit new members. Something else was going on there, on the Island, that was much more interesting. That was the University that I just described to you. And, also, if you stab a white warder there on the Island you die, you just get thrown into the sea.”

With that, Don adjusts his spectacles, bows his head just a fraction and gathers up his notes and his books.

Today is the day for my third group meeting. I am fighting hard not to let Don’s project make me lose my motivation and I feel a little irritated with him because that is just what I do feel. I admire what he’s doing but I also feel he’s stolen my fire. It was a non-eventful day out at the farm. To get onions to swell nice and fat and round, you must trample their leaves so that the growth goes into the bulb and not the leaves. So it was an easy day, just trampling onions, lots of time to talk because we walk shoulder to shoulder down the rows of onions. No bending and digging like when you’re harvesting potatoes.

I get back to the prison at normal time, have a quick supper and go to my cell to wait for the guys. After ten minutes of waiting, only Buks and Major arrive.

“Don is sick,” mumbles Buks, not looking me in the eye.

“I don’t know where Wes and Sanza are,” says Major, shifting from one foot to the other. I feel more than a little jealous that Don’s lecture group is more popular than mine.

Buks is in a bad mood as usual and says very little. We begin anyway and Major reads something about taking some girls to a township cinema and moving their panties to one side during the movie while the girls sit on the boys’ laps. Sure, any page-turner needs sex, but I wonder about this piece. Is it good enough for a book? What kind of book is this going to be?

And as for Buks’ writing, he hands it to me, saying he doesn’t feel like reading. It’s got more crossing-out than anything else and is more or less unreadable, the handwriting more like a child’s than an adult’s. I think, where the fok is all that good stuff he told me about how he was a member of the AWB but got into trouble for falling in love with his coloured maid’s daughter and had a child with her, a child he loved? Not a word about that.

And the time the baboons – real baboons, although he also calls darkies baboons – were stealing and ruining all his fruit in his orchard so he caught one baboon and painted it white. The rest of the troop thinks this white-painted baboon is a man so they run away from it. But the painted baboon doesn’t know that it’s white, so it runs to keep up with the pack, who are running from it. So they all keep running and they all – that is, the white baboon and the others – they run themselves to death far away from Oom Buks’ fruit orchard. Probably the kind of bullshit story that Buks heard over a beer at the pub, but a good story all the same. Nothing about that either. Just all these false starts and more crossing-out than writing.

After the group, when we’re alone, I ask him why he didn’t write about that other stuff. “I tried to write it, but it wouldn’t come out right,” mumbles Buks. “Those darkies can write better than me,” he adds, a fierce pride in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Mike.”

I hunt down Wes. I find him in his cell sitting on his bed doing nothing. He doesn’t meet my eyes. “Can I talk to you alone for a minute?” I ask. “Why didn’t you come to the group? I thought you were a man of your word.”

“I cannot talk about it,” says Wes, “but those up the line in the Number, they’re not so into your group. I think you should forget it, for your own good.” I try to press him for more information, but he just closes up like a shellfish.

The kitchen has run low on salt and the food tastes even worse than it usually does, so many of the prisoners are in a bad mood. This makes me think of freedom – not only at home, but even in taverns, because if you order food sitting right there in front of you are the salt and pepper and you can control how salty or peppery you like your food. All those freedoms all free people take for granted. And even if you’re homeless, you are free in certain ways. Makes me think of all the street kids I met who had families. Yes, they were broken families but still families and still the street kids ran away from them to run free and live on the streets.

Today is Don’s second lecture. The room is a little fuller than last time. Besides Buks and Major, and Wes and Sanza – who couldn’t even make it to my group – there are six other guys, all gangsters, all covered with tattoos. Looks like two from each gang. The three from last time, but also three more. I don’t know them but some of them, I think, are in the high command. Maybe even the top guns. I am jealous, to be truthful. Why is it they come to and support this group and not mine? Jealous, but also divided in my feelings because I am enjoying Don’s talks so much. I used to enjoy History at school, and in Don’s lectures I even find myself taking notes, as well as following up by taking the books from the library he bases his lectures on.

In my mind I can’t help linking this stuff Don is telling us with me being in prison. If our land wasn’t taken from us I wouldn’t have been poor and homeless and landless and arrested just for walking down the street. This lecture is about famous outlaws who fought against the colonisation of South Africa and who also spent time in prison. Don tells us about a Khoi chief called Kora who, with his men, killed a boatload of Portuguese explorers when they tried to leave their ship to set foot on African soil. This same Kora was kidnapped by the British and taken to England so that the English could, through Kora, understand the minds of the Khoi. Kora made it back to his people and, after his time in England, he knew what was what and he stopped his tribesmen from trading bits of junk and scrap metal for sheep and cattle. It was for this reason that Kora was eventually hanged by a Dutch captain.

Don then tells us that by 1654 the Dutch had established a refreshment station at the Cape that was fast growing into a settlement with market gardens stretching all the way to Stellenbosch, which is 200 kilometres away from Cape Town. Many Khoi clans were forced from their own traditional pastures by the Dutch East India’s own cattle herders, and by the Company expanding gardens and farmlands. Twenty years later the Company had taken the whole of the Cape peninsula and with it all the hunting and gathering grounds of the Bushmen and all the grazing pastures of the Khoi.

Today there is great excitement. A guitar has somehow found itself into the prison. We are sitting in Section C and most of the warders have gone home. No warder would risk sleeping on the same side of the locked gates as us – he wouldn’t wake up, that’s for sure.

The guitar, a lekker pale, almost yellow wood, one with a dark stem, is in the hands of a guy called Boelie. Everyone who knows how to play guitar wants to show off their skills. So far no one has played it yet – it just gets passed around and each guy is allowed only to strum it a few times and test if their fingers remember how to play a few different chords. First guy to play proper is Boelie, who must be the guy who got the guitar smuggled in. He sings in Afrikaans in a very low, sweet voice.

Suikerbossie ek wil jou hê

Suikerbossie ek wil jou hê

Suikerbossie ek wil jou hê

Wat sal jou mama daarvan sê?

Dan loop ons so onder deur die maan

Dan loop ons so onder deur die maan

Dan loop ons so onder deur die maan

Ek en my suikerbossie saam.

A song about a girl called Sugar Bush and the singer wanting her but what will the mother say, and then the guy and the girl walking together under the moon. Jeez, this ou is good, I tell myself. His voice is so soft, but it’s like it totally gets into you, almost making me want to cry.

Then it’s a guy called Elridge, his style totally different to Boelie. Firstly, he stands up, and Boelie was sitting. Elridge comes at you like he’s Elvis fokken Presley, loud strumming and thumping the guitar every now and then with the palm of his hand.

The third guy is a ou called James, who’s not very good and after half a song he’s asked to hand the guitar over.

One of the best is this Xhosa guy Thembelani who stamps his feet a lot like a gumboot dancer and does more than one voice. At times it sounds as if he’s backed up by a whole Xhosa choir. Sometimes his voice sounds like a young girl and other times like the deep noises he is making are coming from his stomach.

“Hey, didn’t Don say he could play the banjo?” asks Wes. “That’s almost like a guitar.”

Don had mentioned in one of his talks that his family was big into the Coon Carnival and that he had been part of a troupe. I had also been wondering where Don was and how much he would enjoy this.

So Wes goes off to call him and a few minutes later Don arrives looking sleepy. The guitar is taken from another guy who is also not all that great and handed to Don. As Don takes the guitar I see the excitement in his eyes. At first he handles the guitar like he holds books, very gently. Without him even strumming any of the strings it seems to answer to his body and make some humming sounds. Then it’s as if the guitar takes over. Don just turns into this jukebox, the fingers of his left hand moving so very fast across the neck and his strumming also so very confident.

First he plays golden oldies like we listen to on Cape Talk Solid Gold, and then it’s like we are tuned to a boere channel where they only play Afrikaans country and western, and then some moppies from the Coon Carnival. Don, I see now, is a real crowd pleaser. The amazing thing is that almost any song that anyone asks he knows how to play.

The more he plays the more the cell fills up and soon there is no more room. At about midnight he stops taking requests. “Can we do it tomorrow night again?” asks one guy and all the others echo this request. Don doesn’t answer him for a long time, he just thinks and thinks. Not tomorrow, he says eventually, “I need two weeks. In the meantime you guys meet and play – there is talent aplenty without me.”

I haven’t been here long enough to read what is going on but there is definitely tension in the air. I never saw it, but I heard that the 28s’ general, Pieter, nearly beat another prisoner to death. He suspected this prisoner of being vuil, in other words dirty, which means having the tattoos of another gang or leaking gang secrets. They say Pieter tied a tin cup to a piece of chord and laid into this guy till you couldn’t even recognise his face.

Wes told me there’s talk of gang war breaking out here. He told me that if there is a gang war in another major prison, it spreads to all the others, even if the different gangs have been getting on okay in one prison or another. If your country goes to war, you go to war. Don has also been acting weird. I have seen guys entering and leaving the library at odd times and he locks the door once they are in, but I have made a point to get a glimpse of them when they come out. The odd thing is that more than one group goes in, each at different times, and the groups are different races. The first group I noticed were all dark-skinned, mostly Xhosas. And the second were coloureds, although there seems to be two coloured groups. So I wasn’t surprised when the last group was made up of Buks and a few other whites. I don’t know why he hasn’t invited me. When I asked him, he says to me it’s top secret. Has this got anything to do with the looming gang tension, I wonder.

There has been a lot of buzz around the prison this week. Tonight on SABC 1 there’s going to be a screening of a documentary about the Numbers gangs.

The TV section of the newspaper that talks about it – just a few lines – just states: “Killers Don’t Cry, SABC 1, 7.30–8.25. A never-before investigation of SA’s prison gangs and secret rituals.”

The scrap of newspaper has been passed around many times until it’s not readable, but the words are already in the minds and on the lips of the convicts and are passed from cell to cell. “What secrets will be given away?” is what most of the Numbers gangs brothers are asking. I still don’t understand too much about these gangs, but I’ve heard it said that die Nommer se besigheid moenie oorgesprooi word nie – the Numbers’ business should not be spread around – and that those from within the Numbers who share deep Numbers knowledge with outsiders are heavily punished, more often than not by death.

At 7 pm everyone is on their beds, parked in front of the TVs. First they watch the news, but talking all the time, and then silence for the Toyota bakkies ad and then the one for Sanlam insurance. Then the long-awaited programme.

I’m with a group that includes Sanza, Major, Oom Buks, Wes, Don and a few others. The top brass of the Numbers have their own private viewing but a few lower-ranking guys are watching with us.

The words Killers Don’t Cry scroll across the screen in blood red. The programme begins with opening music with no words, then on comes this white guy with a British accent.

“I am Allan Little, special correspondent for the BBC, at the maximum-security prison, Pollsmoor, Cape Town. This is the story of a dark and until now impenetrable secret. It is the story of a brave and at times breathtaking experiment in human nature. In this prison a brutal and all-powerful gang system reigns. It is known as the Numbers.”

Allan Little looks like he’s been around the block himself. He has a few tattoos and a shaven head.

Off-screen you can hear loud knocking.

Allan Little’s voice. “This is the story of an attempt to reach into the hearts of evil men, to understand their depravity and to try to change them. After months of negotiation we were allowed to enter the secret world of the Numbers gangs. We were warned that the prison houses mass murderers, multiple rapists and armed robbers. The gang system rewards violence. Only those who are willing to commit atrocity, to maim and murder, can rise to the top. Mogamat Benjamin has killed more people than he can remember. It has made him the highest-ranking gangster here. He is a general.”

The camera zooms in on a face pocked with tattoos.

“I am Mogamat Benjamin. In the camp of 28s, a person’s life is in my hands. The final decision is mine. There are people who I order killed and they are killed. On my file written in red it says, ‘Notorious. Dangerous.’”

The soundtrack changes to prisoners chanting and singing.

Allan Little. “Most prisoners here are awaiting trial. It can take up to four years for a case to come to court. While they are here the Numbers gangs can trap them for life.”

Then this coloured warder, who is head of security at Pollsmoor, is interviewed and he tells us how the gangsters know no language other than violence. Allan Little says the prison warders patrol the passages, but behind the steel doors the territory belongs to the gangs. He then says that the gangs have their own laws and punishments, “which we will see today but until now were under unbreakable secrecy”.

“Fok that!” shouts Wes. “Who does that Mogamat think hy is, spraying our secrets?”

Allan Little. “Mogamat has been in prison for 34 years. His appearance belies his record, for multiple murder made him a general, and his status entitles him to a uniform.”

Mogamat Benjamin. “The ranks of our gangs and all we do is based on the military. The uniforms we wear today are all in our minds. I am a man of gold. Everything in me is gold. My rank is gold; my cap is gold; the buckles on my boots are gold; even my belt is gold. In other words, I am a blood officer.”

Allan Little. “Mogamat lives up in Cell 191 with 36 other prisoners. Pollsmoor is 300 per cent overcrowded. The gang known as the 28s is the oldest gang of all. It was founded in 1906 as a revolt by 28 black prisoners.”

“Dis kak, shit, rubbish,” says a guy to my right. “Where they get their information? We called the 28s because Nongoloza, our forefather, had eight generals, long before anyone was in prison. Fok this Mogamat, he is spreading lies.”

Allan Little. “Members of the 28 live alongside two other gangs – the 26s and the 27s, crowded together in this one cramped room. The men of the 28s have sex with each other in the night. There is no doubt about who has absolute control.”

“Fok him! We’ll kill this Mogamat…” spits the same guy near me, the 28 who got upset just now.

Mogamat. “There is no man in Pollsmoor with a higher rank than me. I earned every rank by stabbing a warder.”

Allan Little. “Mogamat’s second-in-command is Erefaan Jacobs. He holds the rank of judge in the 28s. His job is to enforce gang law, and to punish those who break it. He too has killed fellow inmates.”

Erefaan Jacobs comes on. He is also covered with tattoos, even across his face. He has a beak nose and a scar across his cheek like an initiation scar but it goes through his lip.

“When you join the gang,” says Jacobs, “we develop you so that you are fearless. A lot of men are scared, but once you’ve attacked someone you’ll do it again and feel brave. You can only come into the camp by spilling blood.”

Allan Little. “The gangs demand constant demonstrations of loyalty. They cut the emblems of their allegiance into their skin. This is their uniform. It carries their rank. For in prison a spoken oath is not sufficient. The Number demands that you be marked indelibly for life.”

Then this heavily tattooed man comes on the screen and he says that people won’t believe you if you tell them you are a 28, that words count for nothing in prison.

“He’s telling us that tattoos tell the real story. At least one ou is telling the truth,” chips in Wes.

Allan Little. “Some go further still and tattoo their faces. It is the absolute abandonment of all hope of a life outside.”

Then Mogamat shows Allan Little how to make a weapon from a toothbrush and a blade stolen from the prison hospital.

Mogamat. “With this weapon I am going to go for your neck or your eyes. It won’t help to go for your head. I’ll stab you in your eye and when you grab your eye I’ll stab you in your neck and then I stab you to death by cutting your artery.”

Then his second-in-command tells how if the warders give them grief – anything the 28s don’t agree with – they stab them and take them out.

And Allan Little chips in like he’s commentating on a National Geographic wildlife film. He says that the prison warders are the gang’s natural targets and that they are only lightly armed with batons and tear-gas canisters and that they are underpaid and overworked. And that they are outnumbered one hundred to one. Then this white warder, a big strong boer called Barry Coetzee, comes on the screen and tells us it’s not the warders that control the prison but the Numbers. The Numbers make the decisions. Allan Little then reveals that someone in the Numbers gangs has been ordered to stab Barry Coetzee as a test of courage.

“Fok, this is better than reality TV or Rambo,” says Sanza. That draws hard stares from a heavily tattooed guy.

Warder Barry Coetzee then says, “A Number has been called on me, which means I’ll be stabbed or cut with a blade. My blood has to flow. So it could mean either I die or I bleed. There’s no way you can defend yourself. It’s terrifying. It’s a psychological war. You never know where. You never know when. I’m scared to come to work but I must [so that I can] earn a salary. I get up in the morning and know sooner or later it will happen.”

Then it’s Erefaan Jacobs, the second-in-command, again. “We are like people hunting this person. Maybe we won’t find him today, but then there’s always tomorrow. It’s cruel, man. It’s like a lion hunting down its prey, then ripping it apart.”

Allan Little. “Nearly half the warders in maximum security have been stabbed at least once. Behind the steel doors the hours of darkness belong, unchallenged, to the Numbers gangs and to their rituals of punishment and recruitment. Their codes are spoken in a language known only to them, a hybrid of all South Africa’s tongues that can only be learned in prison. This is the moment of initiation into the secret all-embracing world of the Numbers. The moment the new recruits must pledge their oath to the gangs. An intricate and carefully balanced interplay between the gangs decides which camp a new recruit will enter. The gangs consider the commitment made at this moment sacred and lifelong. It has never been filmed before. For the new recruits, the birds or the franse, showing fear at this moment is disastrous.”

Erefaan Jacobs. “We don’t have scared people in our camp. If you’re scared you could betray us. If we see you are scared we’ll kill you. It’s happened. Many people’s heads were cut off in cells where I was present. I would see that tonight they would kill you. The whole day I know it. You talk to me, I’ll laugh with you, but I know tonight we’ll kill you.”

Mogamat Benjamin. “I was naked so that the blood wouldn’t splatter my clothes. I was the first to sever the artery. The heart was removed and eaten. I personally ate first.”

The rest of the programme was a bit boring. Allan Little gaaned aan about this new warder Johnny Jansen and how he wanted the prisons to change along with the new South Africa. After the programme, Wes joined the other Numbers guys in our cell. They just pulled the curtains over their beds and talked late into the night. Me, I went to sleep pushing toilet paper into my ears to keep their voices and the TV out.

While we were out in the onion fields today there was a lot of discussion about the TV programme last night but it was like the Numbers guys in the work gang kept it to themselves. I had my mind on my own group.

We are meant to meet tonight. I am not sure if I have what it takes to squeeze good-enough stories out of these guys and then turn it into a book. That is quite a tall order, if you ask me. After work I shower and come back to the cell and arrange the beds and I wait and wait. Not even Don comes.

After 20 minutes I go looking for Buks, Major and Sanza but I can’t find a single one of them. It’s like they’re avoiding me. Don I find on his bed, but he doesn’t wake up when I shake him gently. He just turns over and buries his head under the blanket, mumbling something about talking tomorrow.

I keep looking for the others and eventually Sanza comes home to roost in our cell.

“What happened tonight?” I ask. “Why did none of you come back to the writing group?”

He just shrugs.

“Why? Why?” I ask.

“You’ll find out later,” he tells me. “The generals want to talk to you and will call you tomorrow at the latest. But keep your cool – things are not good between the gangs at the moment. There’s talk of war. In some of the other prisons the 27s and the 28s are battling for power, and the two top generals here – of each of those gangs – things are tense with them. They on edge, so don’t try be a tough nut with these guys, cos they will make you pay.”

I’m dead tired and just pull off my shoes and pass out on my bed. If someone wants to steal my shoes or my knife, they can have them.

It has been a tough week. Tomorrow has come and gone thrice and still no word from the generals and no one, not even Don, will explain why they won’t come to the group any more. When I asked Don why he stopped coming, all he would tell me was something about a tactical choice and that I shouldn’t worry.

The food this week has been worse than usual. For one thing, there was less and, second, everything had that kind of almost-rotten taste. Not only the meat but the vegetables too. Even the bananas they gave us were black on the outside and all soft and rotten inside. What I miss the most in here are my breakfasts when I was homeless. No matter how poor I was, I often still managed to buy myself a bix box of Coco Pops and a carton of milk now and then. I’d hide the Coco Pops in this secret place close to my drain. The best was to drink the sweet chocolate-flavoured milk left over in the bowl once the Coco Pops were finished.

There I am standing alone and instructed to remain while the rest of the class is told to step forward to go on a school outing to the fun fair. I keep on asking why I’m the only one to be left out but no one can tell me. This goes on and on until my aunt Nomawhetu tells me it’s because I don’t know how to talk to people. I try tell her that it’s not true, then I wake up and realise it’s a dream. I am taking it badly, my group not working out, but a part of me is relieved because it didn’t come that easy to me. A voice in my head was always telling me I have bitten off more than I can chew. A loner is what I am, and a poet. I never said I was a group leader or a writer, never mind an editor.

Two weeks later and we’re waiting for Don’s promised music session. It’s been a frustrating time because it’s been raining heavily, with some thunder and lightning, so for four days in total the work gang couldn’t go out to the fields. It made me realise how much I miss it, not so much the exercise, but just leaving the prison, even though we’re accompanied by guards with guns.

About 40 of us are packed into the cell. Lights can never be completely switched off in prison so Don asks us to shut our eyes. The first thing we hear once the murmuring has settled down is a rattling sound… then a whistle… then clapping. Then he tells us that we can open our eyes and I see that the rattling is coming from a few guys who have some pebbles or beans or something in their tin cups, the whistling just from their mouths. There are no pipes or flutes or anything like that and the clapping is coming just from the hands of some other guys.

Don is whistling as well, but he is the conductor, nodding at that guy, pointing at that one, keeping the whole orchestra going. Then Don gets about 20 of us to form a circle and follow the rhythm, shuffling and stamping, going in a clockwise direction circling the musicians who keep a steady rhythm going. Then the music dies down a little and we hear Don’s voice.

“This is trance music,” he says, “not like, but also not completely unlike, the kind of music young people in cities listen to these days in those clubs where they take that drug called ecstacy, listening and dancing to that music with no words, dancing to just a simple rythym that repeats itself over and over.”

Keeping in time with the whistle, clapping and rattle rhythm, Don’s voice is almost like a voiceover: “For the San, trance music was mostly used for healing and for overcoming hardship.”

I now see what Don is doing. He got us to come here for music but he gives us history. Clever bastard.

“The San recognised an energy in all life and also in their own bodies,” Don continues. “They called this energy Kun, and with the help of music and dancing they used to heat it up till this energy boils and boils and rises up and up in your body till you feel it rise to the very end of the furthest, highest hair on your head.”

All of this he says in his nice voice to the simple rhythm of whistle, one blow, clapping, two claps, rattling of beans in tin cups, two rattles, over and over, but speeding up gently.

“Give yourself over to this rhythm, just follow me,” says Don and we do. “The sounds you are hearing now may have been very close to the music made by the San tens of thousands of years ago. Their rattles were made from wild fruits, seeds, shells and cocoons filled with bits of ostrich shell and strung together with leather, or the ear of a springbok filled with dried berries or small pebbles and then sewn up.

“For the San, the boundary between animals and humans did not exist as it does in Western cultures today. But there is more about this in a later lecture… Ankle rattles were used to mimic sounds of animals, but it was more than just trying to sound like an animal, or to communicate with them – it was also about becoming an animal. Feather headdresses were worn to become the bird, animal skins and paint on the skin to become zebras or lions, all of this under trance. And it was not just animals… We could also become the stars.”

Eventually Don brings the music and dancing to an end and takes a mug with a hole in the bottom and a long string that goes through the handle.

“Try be quiet,” says Don. “Make your mind still and just listen to some of these beautiful sounds.”

A young Bushman-looking guy begins to whirl the mug round his head faster and faster, all of us stepping back so it doesn’t hit us. The sound it makes is like the buzzing of bees.

One old man then opens his palms and shows us a simple blade of grass, which he then holds against his mouth, inhaling and exhaling while plucking the loose ends forwards and backwards with his fingers. At first the sound it makes is like a horse’s hooves but then it sounds just like a bird.

Then out of nowhere the old man produces a bow, little more than a branch tied together at each end with fishing line. There is no arrow. He plucks the string, which produces a guitar-like sound but only one note.

“Hunters would pluck the string of bows to pass the time,” continues Don. “And on that musical note,” he adds, with a smile at his own joke, “let’s call it a night till tomorrow when I am going to introduce you to some remarkable Bushman freedom fighters and poets.”

“Can anyone here speak any San languages?” asks Don, kicking off his lecture with a question. I notice that, like most Westerners, Don talks of San and Bushmen and Khoi as if they’re all the same, different words for one people. Even though the history books tell us there are important differences, even in the New South Africa, people have forgotten what those are. That’s true even for someone like Don.

There is much shaking of heads.

“Jirre, fok nee,” grunts Buks.

Sometimes it is better to say nothing in Don’s lectures.

“Oom Buks, come here please, I want you to be a volunteer,” says Don. “Now you are tough so this will hurt you a little, but it will not harm you so don’t hit me, okay?”

We laugh and Oom Buks smiles and nods, but to me Buks looks a little worried. Don stands beside him and suddenly pinches Buks’ arm below the bicep where his muscle is a bit flabby.

“Eina!” winces Oom Buks. “Jou moer.” We all laugh and Don lets him go.

“Thank you, Oom Buks. ‘Eina’ is a San word, just as is ‘AiKhona’. I suspect that all of us speak a little more San and have more San in our blood and in our cultures than we care to admit. Now I would like to read you something written by a San man named Dia!kwain.”

Don clears his throat and waits until there is complete silence before he begins.

My father used to sing that the string had broken,

the string he used to hear…

that was why things were different now,

for things continue to be unpleasant to me,

I do not hear the ringing sound in the sky I used to hear,

I feel that the string has really broken,

leaving me.

So when I sleep I do not feel the thing that used to vibrate

in me as I lay asleep.

Remember, I used to be a poet so this poem makes a big impression on me.

In prison – in this horrible concrete and steel place designed to keep us in, with no real soil under our feet, with no family, no women, no children, no trees or animals – all of us, I think, feel that something in our life is missing or has been broken. The idea of a broken string reminds me of that thing a cat does when it is content and satisfied; it makes that noise in its throat, prrrrrrrrr, prrrrrr.

“For the Bushmen, before their hunting and foraging grounds were taken from them,” says Don, “the string was not broken and this connection they had to the world and to nature was sacred, like a religious feeling of being connected to all things, to the wind, the sand, the rocks, the plants, the past, the deceased, the spirits, the future, to everything. But then comes an invasion, first about 2000 years ago, of Khoi farmers and cattle herders, and then comes another invasion, a pale tribe from over the sea who have guns and who can ride horses.”

Don tells us about how this poem, called ‘The Broken String’, became known to us. There were two students of African languages, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, who, beginning in 1870, managed to persuade the governor of the Breakwater Prison in Cape Town to release prisoners to them to teach them the language of the Bushmen. Their project took them fourteen years but by the end they had produced a collection of handwritten books totalling over 12 000 pages.

‘The Broken String’ is just one of the ‘poems’ composed by Dia!kwain. Maybe it wasn’t a poem but just part of a longer story and the way he spoke.

Here is another one told by a man called //Kabbo.

I came from that place,

I came here,

I came from my place,

when I was eating a springbok,

we were in the jail.

We put our legs into the stocks.

We came to roll stones at Victoria while we worked at the road.

We carry the stones on our breasts, we rolled great stones.

We again worked the ground.

We carried earth.

We poured down the earth,

we pushed it back.

Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd lived in a suburb of Cape Town called Mowbray. Many Bushmen – mostly relatives of the prisoners loaned by the prison to Bleek and Lloyd, and also including children – arrived at their home. Some built domed shelters made from the branches of trees in Bleek’s garden. Don tells us that the Bushmen were having their land taken forcibly from them and they were being hunted both by the Khoi as well as the Dutch and their servants. Bleek’s home and garden in Mowbray was one of the few places in South Africa where they could be safe. Don tells us that entire Bushman families were hunted like animals and that, so as not to waste bullets, the arms of the San men, women and children were tied and they were driven off cliffs. He also told us about how boers made tobacco pouches made of San women’s breasts, how children were dragged from their mothers’ arms to have their heads smashed on the stones, how San shepherds were tied to the wagons and beaten to death, how Bushmen heads were sometimes taken as trophies, stuffed and mounted, and that their skins were collected and sold on auction in Europe along with the skins of wild animals. For me the real shocker was to hear that live Bushmen were captured and taken to Europe to be displayed as part of exhibitions or freak shows.

Dunno what Sanza and Don were talking about. All I know is I still haven’t been called by the Number. Nor has it been explained to me why my group has been shut down. The talk about the BBC programme carries on every day and then there’s word that there will be another episode by the same Allan Little. This time focusing more on the gangs outside the prison. Every day the Numbers study the TV section of the Cape Times, which comes to the library, looking for news of Episode Two. Don tells me that every day Wes is there in the library bugging him, asking if the Times has arrived and then reading the TV section carefully as if it holds the clues to save the world.

Wes, who has been given the job of checking the newspaper every day, spots this, tears out the page, and brings it to me at a run. He hands me a piece of newspaper neatly torn off from the rest of the page.

 

Thursday, 23 September, A Place Called Home, first in a 13-part series based on the South African bestseller detective thriller, Finding Mr Madini, a story about a homeless boy Sipho Madini living in a drain in Johannesburg who joins a writing group and then goes missing.

 

Shit, I didn’t even know Jonathan had brought that project to a close, never mind a ‘bestselling’ book and a film series for TV! Maybe that was why he was trying to contact me when I was in Sun City – but, no, that would have been too early. They could only have finished the book in the last few months.

“How did you know this was me?” I ask Wes.

“The Numbers network is better than you think,” he answers. “It goes across all prisons in South Africa. They already knew you were the guy who was good with the knife in Sun City and the information on the poster came with your record and reputation. That you go under different names, Mike and Sipho, didn’t worry them too much, cos almost everyone here has more than one name. But now they also know that you have written a famous book. For some reason, they now interested and also a little worried about you…”

I have been summoned to Cell 29B, the place used for Big Three inter-gang meetings, neither the territory of the 28s, 27s or 26s. In the centre is a ‘courtyard’, but really it is four bunk beds curtained off to make a private space, which feels like an office or courtroom.

Here I find the three heavily tattooed men I saw standing together at Don’s second lecture and who have kept on coming, more often than not saying little but always listening, checking things out. The only one I vaguely know is Benny, and the Xhosa-looking guy I have heard he is Sizwe or is it Mandla? Their power kind of drips off them. Maybe it is their natural authority. Or their striking appearance, with all the tattoos coming out their collars, up their necks and onto their faces. Compared to their skins, mine feels very plain. The short one who seems to hold the most authority speaks first. I dunno if it’s because of Don’s lectures, but when I look at them it’s as if I can read their racial history like an open book.

The one whose name I don’t know looks almost Chinese. He has Malay, almost oriental eyes, but with much darker skin, straight hair, a lean chiselled face, high cheekbones and a tattoo of the numeral 28 on his neck extending right up to his ear. He has a face that can intimidate. I have seen him around. He always has his lieutenants around him. Once I saw him with a proper snarl on his face holding another prisoner up against the wall, twisting this guy’s arm high up behind his back. I was amazed that arm didn’t snap. This is the same guy who nearly killed one of his own gang members for being a traitor.

He speaks first. “I am Pieter Hendriks,” he begins. “I am the highest-ranking 28 in this prison; the same for Mandla here, who is the 27 general, and Benny who is the leader of the 26s.”

The 27s’ leader, Mandla, is very dark-skinned and huge, more like a Xhosa than a coloured. Very tall, with the body of a rugby player but with more grace. However, you always feel his eyes on you. I’ve heard he’s an intellectual in spite of his hunky looks.

And the third, the 26 general, Benny – the one I feel I know the most – is tiny, standing just five-foot-three, but lithe and sinewy. He looks like a more modern Bushman, very muscular and fit and good-looking. I sense an unspoken tension between Benny and Pieter but maybe it’s just me who is tense.

The page of the newspaper with my name on it, plus a tattered copy of Jonathan’s poster, gets shoved at me.

“Wat is dit?” demands Pieter. “Wie is djy? Who are you? Michael MacLean or Sipho Madini? And wie is Sipho Madini? As djy my fokken kak stories vertel sal djy jammer wees.”

I shrug. There is nothing more to say, so I tell the truth.

“I am Sipho Madini. I was part of a writing project in Jo’burg with that guy Jonathan before I was arrested, this is no secret. I used the name MacLean when I was arrested because I didn’t want a criminal record against my real name. I told all of this to the guys in the writing group I tried to start up here and that you guys are doing your best to shut down. I didn’t even know the book they talk about in the newspaper had been published. I kind of thought that Jonathan would maybe make it happen, but not this quick – it’s only been eight months – never mind that a TV series has been or is being made. Let’s watch it and see… Maybe it’s nothing to do with me,” I say lamely, before they reluctantly let me go.

The programme’s on Wednesday night, just the day after tomorrow, so there’s not long to wait and in between we have Don’s next lecture.

Yesterday was Don’s fourth lecture. He was wearing a khaki shirt but also a cap that made him look like a real professor, or a trade unionist or something. The prison authorities cannot stop us from wearing caps because Muslims are allowed to wear their skull caps to cover their heads and there is no real way to draw the line.

Don’s lecture was about slavery and we learned that in the early days of the Cape Colony slaves were imported from the east coast of Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius, Ceylon, India, Malaysia and Indonesia. The average Cape slaveholder owned six slaves, but some rich families owned a small army of them.

I also learned that if you owned a slave, you owned her children too and that children conceived by a female slave became her owner’s property from the moment they were born. Slave women were encouraged to have babies as each new infant added to the master’s wealth. But this one takes the cake – one rich woman in Cape Town had a large farm where she practised stock farming and slave breeding!

Then Don read us a whole lot of advertisements advertising slaves for sale, just like they were cattle or second-hand goods; slave traders and slave owners often selling slave children separate from their parents or splitting up brothers and sisters.

Slaves were a good investment. You could even mortgage them. And if you died, you could leave your slaves to your children or whoever in your will. You could also hire slaves out to other people by the month.

The last part of his lecture was about how slaves were punished. People saw this as a form of entertainment and would gather to watch slaves not only whipped but also burnt with branding irons while they were being whipped. These were ‘minor’ punishments for ‘lesser offences’, Don told us. If a slave killed his master, he hoped he would be hanged. More often he got the rack, in which his body was slowly stretched until it was torn apart.

Don ended his lecture by telling us that in 1805 the British took over the Cape Colony and from then on the British authorities tried to improve the lot of slaves and to limit the power of their masters. It became illegal, for example, to flog a female slave, and a limit was placed on the number of strokes or lashings a male slave could receive. Then in 1834, slavery itself was abolished and no one was allowed to keep any slaves at all.

It feels like we have become a regular movie club. All that’s missing is the popcorn. This time I am watching it with Pieter, Benny and Mandla in a cell that is not my own. It’s cold so they’re all are under their blankets staring at the TV bolted to the ceiling. I have to sit on the cold floor.

The news and then a few ads, then comes this Jo’burg pennywhistle jive, the title A Place Called Home scrolls across the screen and then this young boy comes on in a short red-brown leather jacket just like mine, rapping this poem. My fokken poem about eating pigeon meat.

TIPS dub dub

TO SURVIVE dub dub

ON

THE

STREET dub dub

July tip 1: You need a place to sleep,

not just anywhere in winter.

You don’t want to be like one of those glue-

sniffing boys who live with their heads

in their walking blankets.

And you don’t want to mess around

with the security guys,

they

are an unreasonable lot,

they cannot see the

difference

between a criminal and a

cross-eyed baboon.

Some of them suffer from

Rodney King syndrome.

Tip 2: Location

is of utmost importance.

City Centre or close to

it is most preferable.

There garbage cans have

a variety

to offer.

Fruits and vegetables

the vendors have left

after

a day’s work.

If you are afraid

of becoming

a vegetarian,

there is

a lot of

meat.

Pigeons.

Is a pity

Most malundas

are

not

into

it.

My very poem from Homeless Talk, I think it was July 1998.

This boy not only uses my words, but kind of rap-dub-jives them, looking ever so ragged and trendy in his short leather jacket.

“That meant to be you, MacLean?” asks Pieter. “You really write those songs? You are like a natural sabela, ek sê.” I know Sabela is the secret language of the Number, a blend of Afrikaans and Zulu, also of Dutch and Portugeuse and some slave languages. But more than that I cannot say.

Pieter seems to be enjoying this and has got, like, more friendly.

Then they show where this character sleeps – and it’s not my drain in Braamfontein, it’s a much deeper pipe drain you can stand in, but it makes the point that I live in a drain. And then there is a shot of him in the writing group but, can you believe it, they have made Jonathan into a darkie! This is a big shocker for me, turning Jonathan into a black Journalism lecturer who has an affair with one of his students. And it’s a surprise, too, that Valentine is from Liberia not Cameroon, but I must say the thing hangs together quite well.

At the end, Mandla asks me lots of questions, about my life, about the group, about Jonathan, about whether I got money from the book and film.

Of course I didn’t. I didn’t even know about the book and the film. I suspect the TV series is just staying a step ahead and every episode is shot just the week before it appears on TV. Eventually I’m told I can go and that they will be in touch, which comes as no big surprise.

Well after the showing of the TV soapie with me in it, there was nothing to do except wait for the madotas to come back to me. A bit of fame can’t hurt, I hoped. I expected to hear something fast but it took some time. Luckily, there was this to pass the time…

The first day I saw Margareth is the first day that women warders got introduced into the prison system at Piketberg Prison. Up till now there have been no women staff, only one or two, like that large lady who works in the admission block reception and the social worker.

But now they came in wholesale, like an invasion from another planet, each one being escorted by two or three male warders. Eleven in total, looking fresh out of college. The first time I saw them was because of the commotion outside in the courtyard. Whistles and ululations. We were all in the cell, Major sewing and telling us a story. He put down his needle and trouser. Nothing could have prepared us for what we saw. Nine out of the eleven were beautiful and the other two you could make do with. I picked out the one we would come to know as Dudu immediately as the most to my taste. Those bedroom eyes and her wagtail walk. And then there’s Margareth. At that time I never knew her first name, of course, only her surname, which was there on a gold brooch on her breast, ‘Sersant Adriaanse’. Yellow complexion like the richest honey, Afro copper-brown hair, rounded chin, small breasts, standing like a horse on full gallop, body tapering to the most beautiful hips you ever did see. And a good three inches taller than me. I’ve always liked my women tall so I noticed this right away.

Major nodded for us to re-enter our cell and pretend we were not interested in them, so we did and after a few minutes they entered flanked by two male warders on each side. They hardly greeted us, these male warders just showing the ladies the drill and showing off, hitting the poles of the bunks to teach them how to wake us up and to hit at the grilles on the roof to see if it sounds hollow or someone is hiding up there.

We didn’t see them again all day, but I can tell you now every single prisoner’s thoughts and dreams had a very different flavour that night before we all fell asleep.

“Hey, you!” says this young 27-wannabe running errands, trying very hard to get selected and recruited. “The madotas from the Big Three, they all want to see you.”

The three big gangs keep to themselves, but there is a need for them to meet on a daily basis. This meeting, I have heard, is called the meeting of the Valcross. Two from each gang attend and it is at the end of the warders’ day and at the beginning of the gangsters’ ‘day’, which is night. They discuss how things are to be organised for the next fifteen hours, hours that belong not the warders but to the gang leaders.

The short, powerful Benny speaks first.

“Ons het foja dat jy kan goed skryf. Ons foja dat jy nie deel wil wees van enige kamp. Ons is geduldig. Ons is vol en wys ons foja jy wil skryf van die nommer. Ons is vol en wys dat jou en jou main ou kan sterk staan om ’n boek te skryf.”

He is sabela-ing me, talking in the tongue of the Number, testing me, refusing to speak English or Afrikaans on principle. I don’t understand everything but just listen till he finishes.

Then the Xhosa-looking guy, Mandla, translates – not word for word, but in perfect English.

“We know you can write. We know you don’t want to join any gang. We know you are friends with Don, the librarian. We have been patient. We know you have someone who can help you write, that larnie Morgan. And we know that between you and Morgan you are capable of writing a book that is good enough to be published and sold in bookshops.”

“Umm”, I say, wanting to tell them I no longer see or even trust Jonathan.

“Silence,” I am told.

Then the Bushman guy Benny says, this time in English, “You have refused to join all three gangs and we have been patient with you. Now this is not a conversation, it’s a command from the twelve points… You can forget about your writing group and all those who have begun to tell their kak stories. We are now your group. Be ready tomorrow – bring just yourself, we will supply the pens and paper. The only thing you need to do is contact Morgan and tell him he is to help you.”

What they want me and Jonathan to write for them, I still don’t know. They didn’t or wouldn’t say. So, in a trance, I leave them and find my way back to my cell, kick off my shoes, pull the blanket over my face and wait for a train to take me to dream land. Just like when I was a laaitie, that is what I used to do to fall asleep – wait for a big steam engine to come along the silver tracks that could take me to the land of the night. Tonight it takes a long time for the right train to come.

I wake up and shower before the others, half excited, half terrified about what this means. Also feels like I don’t have much choice. I’ll only contact Jonathan once I have a better idea what is expected of us. Problem is I’ve forgotten his cell number.

I am expecting to be called again today but it doesn’t happen, but I see the female warder, Sersant Adriaanse, whose first name I have now managed to learn. She is called Margareth. I guess you could say it was more or less a normal day.

If nothing from the madotas came yesterday, it sure did today. After breakfast of two slices of bread, a chunk of margarine, and a boiled egg, I find myself back in the office of blankets, Cell 29B, summoned by the same messenger as before. Benny, Mandla and Pieter are all there waiting for me.

“To pick up on where we left off yesterday,” says Benny, “we know that you are writing a book about the gangs and the gangs secrets.”

“Not the secrets, not the gangs either,” I splutter, trying to hide my surprise. “It’s more about the lives of these guys before they came to prison. Anyway, no one came to the second meeting, so so far there is no book… But you know about that.”

“Well, we are tired of others, BBC, Allan Little, Jonny Steinberg who wrote the book called The Number – even though that was a good book – and larnies from the university, the newspapers, all telling our story, getting famous, getting money, and many of them getting it wrong. Now tell us more about that white guy, Morgan, who you working with, the one who helped you make this book.”

In his hands he holds a neatly cut-out page of a magazine with a short review of Finding Mr Madini.

Sipho, a brilliant poet is unaware of his success

– Siyabonga Mkhwanazi, City Press, October 1999

Sipho Madini, a brilliant poet who lived in a drain in Johannesburg, is not even aware that his life story and that of his fellow homeless people can be read throughout the country. The book, which has now been launched today, filled the shelves in stores throughout the country. “The present title of the book was not the one initially intended,” says the author Jonathan Morgan, 39. Owing to Madini’s mysterious disappearance, the book developed into a campaign to find Sipho.

Benny says to me, “This newspaper says you and him wrote a good book and people are still looking for you, including Morgan.”

“Please don’t hurt him,” I say quickly. “He’s my friend. You can do what you like to me, but please, he is okay.”

The generals look at each other, then Mandla of the 27s, speaks.

“Okay, listen, you know about Nongoloza, the father of the Numbers gangs?”

“A little,” I say.

“Well, soon you will know a lot. Like Benny told you, anywhere you look now you can see everything you want to know about the Numbers. On the TV, in the Sunday papers, in the fokken magazines, and in the bookshops. Everyone except us is telling our story.”

Benny, chips in: “In the beginning the word was enough, the story and ways of doing things were passed down from general to soldaat, and the Number remained pure. In the beginning even Po, the forefather and patriarch of the 28s, Numbers gangs, was worried that his law was becoming weak and watered down, stolen and misinterpreted, so he had it written in a book called the Makhulu book. Now the time has come for it to be written again. The Makhulu book has the history of the gangs, codes, rules, punishments, structure, hierarchy, uniforms, insignia…”

Here Benny pauses. “You know what insignia are, MacLean?”

Pieter tells me before I can answer.

“It’s those little medals and symbols and signs you see on all military uniforms telling you what army and what rank of soldier you looking at.”

Benny continues: “The Makhulu book has all this, plus flags, salutes, weapons, drilling commands, and how leadership should communicate and settle disputes with other Numbers. It is called the Pure White Book, or sometimes just the White Book.”

More than anything, I am impressed how good at talking all three of these guys are. They can sound rough, with lots of ma se poes and se gat thrown in, especially Pieter and Benny, but when they talk about their gangs, the structure and stuff like that, they are, like, so precise. They all speak with strong accents. Benny and Pieter, more Afrikaans coloured, and Mandla more black. But their English sounds more like what I would expect to find after apartheid, in a high office in Telkom in Cape Town or in government, not deep in the Cape Flats gangland or Piketberg Prison.

“Where is this book?” I ask. “And if you have it, why do you need me?”

“It has become dirty,” says Pieter, the 28s’ general. “It is vuil. It was first written with a pure white pen on pure white pages, which means that not everyone can see it.”

He’s not convinced that I’m getting it.

“Don’t you understand anything?” he continues. “It has never been written – it is in our heads and in our blood and on our tongues only – that is why we spend so much time sabela-ing and teaching the new recruits the book. But, as I said, it is now been lost and with all those others writing it down it has become corrupt… Even the gangs on the outside, most of those gangsters have never been to prison and they are using our language and our rituals.”

I dunno why they are telling me this and this must show on my face because Mandla steps in.

“This is where you come in,” he says, talking to me more kindly than Pieter does and with less swearing. “We are going to tell it to you. We will recite the White Book, cos no one in this prison knows it better than us three. We are ordering you to write the true history of the Numbers, but this time with a black pen on pure white paper. We have all taken an oath not to reveal the Numbers’ secrets. Punishment is death, but on the Valcross we decided the time might be right to tell the world some things about us.”

The 26 general, little Benny – who in my mind I have named ‘the Bushman’, but who in his body is very Bruce Leeish – adds: “That’s as much as you will learn today. We’ll contact you when we are ready. We will also give you time to contact your larnie. And one more thing, here’s a phone with R20 airtime on it. Keep it well hidden, and make your calls by Tuesday. But, remember, if you can’t convince him to do what we asking, you are both in kak. Deep shit. Deep, deep kak.”

I decide not to use their cellphone, a newish Nokia, to phone Jonathan. I don’t want them having his number. Why am I trying to protect him? Looks like he ripped us all off, making money from that TV series.

It is Wednesday, around ten in the morning. I hurry towards the gate of the section. Today, I pretend to be sick and do not go out with the farm team. When I come to the grilled gate of the section, I try to catch the attention of the yellow, lean warder standing behind it. He is in a sort of no-man’s land. A few steps behind him is another gate, which he will have to unlock to let somebody in or out.

“Hola, my broer, can I please come in to phone?” I ask him. He considers it for a bit and decides to oblige. He walks over to the gate and unlocks it.

To my left is a door leading into the warder’s office, to my right a short passage leading up to heavy concrete steps. At the foot of the steps stand three Telkom pay phones. I hurry towards them and, at the first available phone – a coin phone not a card phone – I pick up the receiver off the hook and dial.

It rings and then, “Welcome to Telkom’s directory service. Your call will be answered in approximately two minutes…” comes the white female voice over the phone. “For assistance in English, press 1; for assistance in isiZulu, press 2; for assistance in Afrikaans, press 3.”

English is just fine, and I don’t want to wait to hear all thirteen official languages, so I press 1. A few rings and the phone is answered by a coloured male.

“Telkom Directory Assistance, how can I help you?”

“Good morning, yes, can you please give me the phone number of Homeless Talk?”

“Homeless Talk? Is it a company or what?”

“Yes, something like that,” I tell him. “It’s a newspaper.”

“Province?”

“Jo’burg, Gauteng, Bree Street.”

“Okay, hold a minute, sir. The number you have requested to follow…”

I fumble with a short pencil and the back of a matchbox, the only writing materials I could find at a short notice. On the third ring, a male voice, “Hello?”

“Hello, is this Homeless Talk?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry, this is Sipho Madini.”

“Who?”

“Sipho Madini, okay – a guy who used to write for your paper.”

“Sipho Madini!” the voice exclaims. “You don’t know me, cos I joined after you left, but you are famous here and even beyond here. You know you on TV? Hey, everybody, it’s Sipho Madini!”

The voice sounds far off, as if the guy’s talking over his shoulder. “Where you? Wait a minute, give me your number. You remember, Jonathan, the white guy? He told us to immediately give him your number if and when you call, and he said he’ll immediately call you back.”

I peer at the numbers on the phone box and call them off. He repeats them and sounds as if he is writing them down. “Okay.” He drops the phone and I do the same. I look at the phone wondering what I’ve set in motion.

It’s not even five minutes before the phone rings.

“Is it you, Sipho?” comes the white voice over the phone.

“Yes, it is me.”

Jonathan screams, “Fuckin’ hell! I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear you’re alive! Where are you? How are you? We’ve been worried sick about you.”

“I am in prison.”

“Prison?” he shouts. “What prison?”

“Up the West Coast in the Cape, it’s called Piketberg.”

“Jesus,” he says, “that’s not too far from me. I live in the Cape now. Can you talk?”

“Not really,” I say. “The warder only gave me two minutes and I’ve used them up.”

“Okay, give me a few days,” Jonathan tries to reassure me. “I’ll come visit you. This is a good excuse to visit some surf spots up the West Coast that are on my must-do list.”

“And if you come,” I hastily interrupt, “you must be looking for Michael MacLean and not Sipho Madini. Got it?”

 

I walk back to my cell feeling strangely hopeful, just to have contact with someone else out there. In my hand is still the Nokia. It still has R20 airtime left on it. I dial 053 876 5409, the number engraved in my brain. We never had a land line at home, but our neighbour did, and we were always asking people to phone us back on her phone. I speak to Shirley and asked her to go over the road and call my granny. Although my granny knows I’m here in Piketberg, we haven’t spoken since my arrival. She’s excited to hear my voice, but I explain I can’t talk long. I tell her I’ve written a book and that it’s in the bookshops. I tell her that even if she has no money to buy one, to go look at it, and that one day soon I will send her one and some money. I also ask her if she’s seen my mother, but she hasn’t.

I hurry through the section gate and jump down the high shining stoep into the prison yard. It is Saturday, about 10 am. Sunny, with only a few bright white clouds as if for decoration, and there are a few convicts strewn across the almost-empty prison yard. Why the hurry? My name has been called for a visit, that’s why. I am handed a ticket by the prisoner whose job it is to control such things. My first ever visit in over a year. No one visited me in Sun City, successfully that is. Last time Jonathan tried I didn’t let him find me. It must be him visiting this time, but who knows, it may be my granny and my uncle or maybe someone from Homeless Talk.

At the end of the prison yard, I walk until I arrive in front of a grilled gate in front of which is a warder and a couple of prisoners.

“Sorry, sir,” I say to the warder, “I am here for a visit.”

He looks at me, eyes narrowing. “Name?”

“Michael MacLean,” I answer.

“Ticket?”

I produce the authorisation allowing me access to the visitors’ area and slip it through the bars. The warder takes it, reads it and unlocks the gate, then locks it behind me. I go stand in the sun and he hurries over into the administration office. A minute later, he returns.

“Come, let’s go.”

I walk slightly away from him, noticing his cattle prod, his shock stick, and wishing it was Margareth who was walking with me. We enter into the administration office, past the computers on the desk. At the end of it, he unlocks another grille gate and we make our way to a heavy yellow safe-like door with an iron flap at head height. My warder proceeds to hit once or twice on the door with his giant key, a key so big it could be a weapon. The flap is pushed aside.

“Visit,” my warder informs the guard, and pushes my ticket through the space left vacant by the flap. The guard takes it and the huge door swings open. I enter and the door closes behind me.

This area looks like the inside of a big spaceship. To one side thick glass windows at chest height packed out next to each other until the far end of the room. A couple of small benches, standing two-two, opposite each other. Some convicts are in the room, sitting on benches, next to oldish ladies who you can guess are their mothers. Or they sit with youngish ladies on the opposite benches with a kid or two. All are conferring in low voices.

One or two convicts have a packet of Simba Cheese Puffs open next to them or at their feet, or a plastic full of sweets, chocolates, cans of soft drinks. At the very end I see him, sitting on a bench, but next to him is this long silver thing that looks like the kind they bring dead soldiers back from Vietnam in.

“What’s with the body bag?” I ask.

“It’s got my surfboard in it,” he laughs. “Been at it ever since I came to Cape Town.”

The guy looks the same he always did, just a bit more tanned and more fit-looking. He jumps up and hugs me, which makes me feel kind of good and funny, what with all the moffie stuff you find here and other prisoners looking on. But to his credit, he calls me Michael, but with a big smile on his face, saying Michael extra loud a few times.

“Jeez, Michael, you look well. Hey, Michael, prison meals must be better than scavenging in dustbins in the streets of Jo’burg or eating pigeon. Serious, Michael, you’re looking okay” – kind of overdoing it but making me also smile and be happy.

He sits down on the bench, next to him is his green shoulder bag, the same one he used to have in Jo’burg. And he also has a plastic Pick n Pay bag with two cans of Coke and some chips. I sit on the the one side of the table.

“We’ve got another child now,” he tells me. “Taiji is his name. A baby brother for Masego. Depending on what Chinese characters you use to spell the name, it means either Calm Field or Big Compassion. He keeps us awake at night with his screaming, so I’m guessing its not Calm Field but he doesn’t really care about our need for sleep either so there goes Big Compassion too.”

I just nod. I’m happy to see this guy.

“I brought you some food, and… this.”

He takes out a glossy, red paperback book and shoves it towards me. First thing I notice is my name on the cover.

“Finding Mr Madini, directed by Jonathan Morgan and the Great African Spider Writers.”

“Why the Great African Spider Writers?” I ask him.

“All of our storylines converged in Jo’burg, but began all over Africa,” he explains. “Remember there was Fresew from Ethiopia, Valentine from Cameroon, Stephen from Eastern Cape, and so on.”

I stare at the cover and open the book to see a picture of my face, looking sideway with a big MISSING written on top of it. It is the same picture of the posters that were given out in Sun City, but now it’s in the book proper, like one of the pages.

“Finding Mr Madini was second on the country’s bestseller list, second only to Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull about the TRC,” he tells me.

“Until a few days ago I didn’t even know the book was finished,” I say, weighing the thing in my hands, looking closely at the photo of Valentine and Steven on the front cover.

“Well, we did it,” he says. “It came out in August. I looked all over for you. You can read about our search for you in the book itself – that’s why it’s called Finding Mr Madini. But to be honest, I gave up. I was sure you were dead.”

Then his voice changes and he calls me Sipho again.

“Why the fuck didn’t you let us know you were alive, Sipho? D’you think it was fun looking at dead bodies, trying to find you in all the morgues in Johannesburg? Huh?”

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I guess I didn’t want to be found. I was trying to make it and find myself as a poet and a writer. I thought you’d judge me to be a criminal, no matter if I was guilty or not.”

Then he takes out the scrapbook full of photos and stuff that he made to document the process of putting the book together and turns to a CNA advert for bestselling books in December 2000. The three best sellers then were Desmond Tutu’s No Future Without Forgiveness about the TRC testimony, Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, and our book, Finding Mr Madini. There they are, with Christmas bells around all three covers.

“You must be thinking about the money,” he smiles. “If this was the USA we’d all be rich. In South Africa a bestseller means only 2000 books. The book sold for just over R100, our royalty was about R8 a book and that got split among all 10 of us.”

He’s looking into my face, trying to gauge whether I understand.

“Each person got paid according to their contribution,” he goes on, “calculated by both the number of their words that appear in the book, and the amount of effort they put in on a ten-point scale. The group voted on the effort thing. I argued that although the number of your words was low, as were the number of sessions you attended, your poems and using you going missing as a storyline amounted to a huge contribution, so you got paid relatively high compared to most of the others. So just from the book royalties, I’ve got about R3000 sitting in a savings account under my name – which is all yours, of course.’

“And the film?” I ask. “I saw it on TV. We make anything from the TV?”

“I was getting to that,” he says. “Now that was a little better. The SABC paid us R100 000 for the rights and the agent took R20 000, which left us with R80 000 and your share there is about R8000, so you’ve got R11000 in total that I am holding for you.”

“More money than I’ve ever had,” I tell him. “You say it’s in a bank account for me?”

“Whenever you want some, or all, just tell me,” says Jonathan. “Last week I enquired about a prisoner opening their own bank account and I was told you need to come in personally, which of course is not possible, but here’s a letter from me saying I’m holding the money for you and that it’s yours. Here, you need to keep this letter.” He reaches for a brown envelope in his green bag.

“You doing any of your own writing?” I ask.

“Mmm, the only job I have at the moment is writing this column for a local newspaper. I’ve also been thinking about writing a novel, but can’t come up with a plot or any definite subject matter. If anything, it will be about surfing,” he says, patting his surfboard like it’s a dog he loves or something.

“Surfing’s, like, the exact opposite of writing,” he adds. “No hunching over a laptop, agonising over type and words and sentences, hammering at the keyboard with two fingers. When you’re on a wave, your board cuts and leaves a white trail across the wave. It’s kind of the opposite of writing in so many ways. Maybe a bit more like painting, like you are the paint brush and the wave is both the paint and the canvas, except at the end of a session – in fact, a second or two later – there is no record of whatever mark you might have made on the ocean.”

He really sounds passionate about this surfing, but it hurts me to even think of the ocean and all that open space and freedom.

“My aim is to ride a barrel,” he continues. “It’s also called a tube, a very hollow wave where you’re completely surrounded by the water.”

“So your book will be about surfing and…”

“I really don’t know,” he shrugs. “I had this strange experience the other day. A young guy with long hair and sunglasses knocked on my door. I opened up and he said, ‘This is probably a shot in the dark, but are you the musician who knows how to fly?’ ‘I’m afraid not – on both counts,’ I said, ‘unless you count flying in my sleep.’ ‘Uh, uh,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘The guy I’m talking about used to live here. He drove a maroon bakkie and he really knew how to fly, without wings or anything. He taught me, but I’ve forgotten.’ Well, I now drive a marroon bakkie so I didn’t know what to say, but then this guy just says, ‘Shot, bru,’ smiles and walks away… Don’t you think that’s a great start to a novel?”

“So you not working as a head shrinker?” I ask, remembering from the workshops that Jonathan can be quite quirky and hard to follow.

He shakes his head.

“How about you?” he asks in return. “There must be some pretty interesting material to write about in here.”

“I’ve tried,” I say, reaching down to turn his wrist so I can see the time, “and that’s what we really need to talk about. Jonathan, these Number gangsters here, some really heavy guys, they have got me and you lined up in that little telescope on the rifle with the cross in it.”

On the afternoon of 23 September, I am back in the blanket-walled office, the inner chamber of the Big Three.

“So, how’d it go with your larnie, Morgan?” asks Pieter, the dark Chinaman.

“Okay,” I say. “He’ll help us. He’ll come every second Saturday and take out the stuff I give him.”

I don’t offer more, certainly not how damn excited he was. Like this was the most amazing opportunity, to be an instrument for the true telling of the Numbers gangs – and by the Numbers gangs – but, as part of the deal, to get all this material for his own bestseller, probably with my name in small print acknowledged just as a contributor. I sense trouble between these guys and Jonathan. And guess who’s going to get caught in the crossfire?

It’s easy for him, surfing his fokken way through life, thinking mostly about the way the wind is blowing and the size of the waves on that day, living in a nice house in Cape Town, waking up every day with his sexy Japanese wife next to him, having dogs and cats and chickens and pigeons, and of course his children. But these Numbers don’t need to know anything about these feelings of mine. Putting the ball and chain back in their court, I just shaddup.

“Okay, this is how it’ll work,” says Benny. “One, the warders don’t like to see prisoners’ writing of any kind leaving this place. ’Specially descriptions of what goes on here and conditions of prison life, how we are treated, and so on. So you not to write in a book, only on loose pages, and these you must give to Morgan when he comes to visit. If this doesn’t work, my mense, the 26s – the smokkelaars – will help you smuggle them out and get them to him. He lives near Fish Hoek, right?”

“I don’t know where he lives,” I confess.

“We do,” says Mandla. “At 93 Clovelly Road, near Ocean View where lots of the brothers live, so tell him that if he hears from someone there, not to be surprised.”

“Two,” continues Benny, “as you know, there are three gangs here in prison, three different Numbers. We are not rivals, but we have our differences and our different beliefs. Each of us learned what we know from a different book and each of us will tell you a different story. We don’t want you to mix these up into one story, one that is the average story. Or the one that sounds best to your ears. That might be good enough for the newspapers or magazines, but it’s not good enough for us. You must keep each story separate, that is the true history of the 28s, 27s and 26s. Now that’s it for today… We’ll contact you when we ready.”

I leave them and go back to my cell. The others know something is going down but they know better than to ask.

Nothing from the madotas that I didn’t expect. For the next few days I’m back in the boer’s potato fields. At the shed there is this one girl who is smiling shyly at me. And me back at her, not too confidently but something’s there. This writing was to help me get through this time but it’s becoming so stressfull and complicated. It’s a relief to sommer just leave the prison and all the politics and just be a farm labourer in the open sunshine, with my hat for shade. Two women on the horizon. A visitor every two weeks. Maybe things are looking up for me. But I still feel uneasy.

If you had to trace my movements in prison, from a camera up in the sky, on a satellite or something, you would notice a new pattern. The office of the Big Three, the council, is far on the one side of the prison compound, the side away from the mountain. A cell that gets lots of sun, not icy cold all day like mine and most of the other cells. The three generals, Mandla, Pieter and Benny, as always, are there. At the door stand three guards, not warders. These are bodyguards, one for each general.

Today they lead me into the curtained enclosure, which for some reason has been pushed to the side of the cell. They make me sit on the top bunk so I can see out over the blankets. I can sense that the madotas are excited today. They even ask me if I’m okay, if I need anything. “Toothpaste,” I tell them and, taking a chance, I ask if I can use the cellphone again. They had sent one of their guys to take it back a few days ago.

“Don’t fokken push it,” says Pieter, the 28 leader. He hands me a black Bic pen, which is a bit cracked and old, and several blank, lined sheets of paper with the prison logo in green, black and red in the bottom right-hand corner. “Now just sit, listen and write,” he tells me. “We’ll check what you write and correct what you have misunderstood before you put it in the White Book. If you listen and watch carefully you will meet Nongoloza. It’s him they are calling.”

From up there on the top bunk, facing the entrance to the cell, I hear the stomping of feet and quite a bit of noise getting louder and louder, but I don’t see anyone new. It’s just me, Pieter, Benny and Mandla in the cell. Then Pieter leaves us suddenly, but a few seconds later re-enters, this time followed by a whole bunch of 28s. He is at the head of the group, with the others fanned out behind him.

“I am Nongoloza – Captain of the Dance, Commander of this regiment,” says Pieter. The group shuffles into the centre of the cell, stomping their feet, and clapping their hands softly, their bodies at the same time stiff but also with a measured rhythm of hip-hop and Cape Flats to them. Pieter leads them in what looks a little like toyi-toyi – the ‘war dance’ that survives till today in political marches – but there is also a spinning of their bodies in tight circles.

Then they are standing still, then they are all squatting, but keeping the rhythm going clapping softly, all whispering, the effect more powerful than if they were shouting or moving fast.

The way Pieter is holding his body reminds me of a cat about to pounce, relaxed but also coiled like a spring. These I know are dangerous cats and it is danger that I feel in their dance and movements.

Then Pieter faces away from us, puffs out his chest and broadcasts to no one in particular, translating as he goes along:

Hoe sal ek wys raak? How should I show?

Wat is djy wat soek? What is it that you seek?

He then takes a few paces back, stands on a chair – now facing the opposite direction – and in another voice he continues:

Ek is Nongoloza. Jare terug was ek ’n frans. I am Nongoloza. Years ago I was a bird, a free prisoner, not a member of any Number gang.

Toe het ek my ma en pa gewys dat ek werk gat soek. Then I showed my mother and father that I will go and seek work.

Ek het nie vir hulle gesê nie watte werk ek gat soek. I didn’t tell them what kind of work I was seeking.

Ek het geloop tot binne in ’n grasgroen bos. I walked till I came to a greengrass forest.

Daar het ek gesit vir ’n jaar. There I sat for a year.

Die tweede jaar het ek uitgerol ronde klippe sonder hoek of kant nie. In the second year I rolled out round stones that had no corners or sides.

Ek het gerol tot op a kruispad. I rolled till I came to a crossroads.

Ek het opgestaan. I stood up.

Ek het die stof uit my oë en my klere afgevee. I wiped the dust out of my eyes and clothes.

Ek het geloop tot ek ’n stem gehoor het. I walked till I heard a voice.

Way way umsunu ka nyoko. Ek het gedink hy vloek my ma uit. I thought he was cursing my mother.

So het ek nie die stem gehoor nie, en dan het ek weer ’n stem gehoor. Then I heard nothing, but then again I heard a voice.

Ay way Magubaan – so ek het stil gestaan. Hey Magubaan – so I stood still.

Ek het ’n hand op my linker skouer gevoel, ek het omgedraai. I felt a hand on my left shoulder, I turned.

Ek het ’n man gesien met a khaki uniform, khaki hawersak, and bloedrooi boots met spierwit vieters, silwer caspir met a goue halweleeu kop. I saw a man in a khaki uniform, a khaki haversack, and blood-red boots with pure white puttees, silver clasps with a gold half-lion crest.

Hy vra my om ouens te kom ontmoet met ringe deur die neus, gate deur die ore, en skiere in die gesig. He asked me to come and meet people with rings through their noses, holes in their ears, and scars on their faces.

Hy het my gevra of my bene is sterk om te kan vat aan sy linker-bo mou. He asked me if my bones are strong enough to hold his left sleeve.

Hy het my gevra wat sien ek as die son opkom. He asked me what I see when the sun comes up.

Ek het hom gesê ek sien niks nie. I told him I see nothing.

Hy het my gevra wat sien ek as die son sak. He asked me what I see when the sun goes down.

Ek sien a groen boom met twee klippe. I see a green tree with two stones.

Toe ek by die boom kom sien ek dis nie a boom nie, dis die ouens se rusplek. But when I reach the tree I see it’s not a tree, but a people’s resting place.

Ek het op die rooi klip gesit en afgegly en ek het op die spierwit klip gaan sit. I sat on the red rock and slid off and then went to sit on the pure white rock.

Hy vat uit die hawersak ’n khaki lap met drie kleure – grasgroen, spierwit, en bloedrooi. He then took out from his haversack a khaki cloth with three colours, grass green, pure white and blood red.

Hy maak die kannakanna bloedrooi. He made the kannakanna blood red.

En hy vra vir my of my bene sterk is om te gaan vat op die kannakanna. And he asked me if my bones are strong enough to go on to the kannakanna.

En ek het hom gewys my bene is sterk. And I showed him that my bones are strong.

En dan eet ek die piesang en dan het ek twee keer gesnuif en twee keer genies. And I ate the banana and I sniffed twice and I sneezed twice.

Ek het weer die khaki lap opgerol, en weer in die khaki hawersak gesit. I again rolled the khaki cloth up and put it back in the haversack.

En hy het vir my gevra wat sien ek as die son sak. And he asked me what I see when the sun sets.

Ek sê vir hom ek sien tot a donker grot, ons het daar geslaap vir a jaar. I told him I see towards a dark cave, where we slept for a year.

Hy het gepraat wat ek nie kan verstaan nie. And he spoke things I could not understand.

This might seem like a lot but it only took two minutes for Pieter to say all of this. As he spoke this amazing poem and what his body language communicated made me wish I had a video camera. It was more like a performance. But very confusing: bananas, kannakannas, looking for work, half-lions, silver, strong bones?

I write as fast as I can, and when I miss a word or can’t hear it properly, I just make a question mark to come back later and ask Pieter. Other things I think I heard but I don’t know what they mean in English or Afrikaans. What the fuck is a puttee? After a few minutes, my hand hurts but three pages are full. But before I can even take a breather, Benny gets up and asks if I am ready.

“Ready?” I say. “Ready for what?”

I have taken in as much as I feel I can for one day but they are not through with me. This is a big day for them.

“Can I have some water?” I ask.

“Okay, go drink from the tap in the toilet,” says Benny. “We need some time to get organised, but make sure you back here in ten minutes. We are finished with the 28s for today. This next bit is about the 26s.”

When I return I find more bunk beds have been brought in and pushed back to form a wide circle, like a laager. The outsides are covered with blankets to form a wall with only one entrance, where the blankets can be parted between two beds that are not as close to each other as the rest.

Even Mandla and Pieter are now outside the circle, their faces to the wall, away from the circle. I am led inside and given a chair, and more paper to write on.

Benny, the 26 leader, is the main man now and sits on a top bunk, his legs dangling off the side. I am told to sit next to him.

Sitting outside the circle with his head and eyes down is the young boy who has been running errands for the 26s and who’s the one that always calls me when the generals want to see me.

“The way to understand the 26s,” Benny starts off, “is to witness an induction of a new recruit. We have been watching this boy in the bush and have given him many tests, all of which he has passed. We have given him unlaced shoes and a pick, and we have given him some words to learn to protect him from being made into a wife for the 28s. Today he is to be initiated as a man, as a madota.”

Through the entrance come six more men and they themselves sit in a smaller circle within the bigger circle. As they settle down some coins are scattered on the cement floor.

“You cannot see it,” says Benny, “but they sit around a white flag.” The recruit must wait in the bush till the gates open, says Benny.

Then a heavily tattooed 26 man I have noticed before appears at the entrance.

“You cannot see it with your eyes,” Benny continues, “but this is a captain. He is Captain number 1. Captain number 1 is Captain of the Blood. He comes from skombizo and has permission to stab. Captain 2 is geBritish, that is armed. Now, see this other man coming in? This is the Draad – the wireless operator. He is dressed in gabardine with a gabardine hat with a pure white band and the insignia of the red line and a coin. He also wears brown boots, with pure white puttees and six buckles. He is also geBritish with a bayonet and a revolver.

I underline the word ‘gabardine’ as I write down what Benny says. I need to look up some words in the dictionary.

“You also cannot see it but I can,” says Benny. “He has a pure white radio transmitter in his right hand, stamped with his rank, and pure white swagger stick and also four stars, two on each shoulder. He is chosen for this job for his memory – he has to remember decisions taken at the Big Three gang meetings. For this, he carries a special book and pens. This is an important day, MacLean, you recording our stories. And it is an intergang meeting so that is why Draad is here.”

At this point everyone inside the blanket walls bends one knee and collapses onto and rests on the other knee, and at the same time gives a one-finger-up salute with their right hands.

“That, MacLean, is called ‘downing’. With one finger up it is the salute of the 26s, the one finger standing for five fingers on the one hand plus the one that is up equals six. It is different to the 27 and 28 salute, which are five fingers plus two for the Sevens and five plus three for the Eights.”

I’m doing my best to put all of this into words when another man enters the crowded space. Everyone stays standing, except for Benny, who sits next to me on the top bunk like some kind of radio commentator, at the top of the stadium, giving the commentary.

“This new man, MacLean, is the Nyanga, that is the doctor,” explains Benny. “He has a stethoscope you cannot see, but you will see how he uses it.”

And sure enough the doctor begins to examine the new recruit, looking in his ears and eyes, listening to his heart when he places his hand on the recruit’s chest. The recruit then extends his arms and the doctor examines his palms and then takes the recruit’s right arm, tells him to keep it straight and makes a show of trying to bend it like a test of strength.

The doctor then asks, “Do you suffer from any illness, disability, sickness?”

“Nakanye,” says the recruit, shaking his head.

“Can you tola?” Benny looks at me and points to his mouth.

“Can you fotcha?” Benny points at his ears.

The recruit salutes.

Then the new recruit is circled. He is being checked for vuil papiere, which means ‘dirty papers’ – in other words, tattoos of other gangs.

Then the doctor says, “I, Nyanga, consulted my instruments and diagnose this man fit and for that reason I promote his position as a Six.”

By now there are twelve men in the circle and each of the Number at twelve points is asked to witness what the Nyanga has found.

Each salutes with the one thumb up. Then the Nyanga says, “Now I take the lewende stam – the living blood – of 26 and I burn it into your veins. Bomvana, I take your strength and I break it and divide it up in the camp of 26. Remember, because of this you are not stronger than your brother, nor is he stronger than you; you are given a fourth eye to see there where your brother cannot see and where you cannot see or hear he will lookout. If you ever get tired of doing the work of this house, I will come in person to fetch the stamp of 26 and take your blood as forfeit.”

This seems like the end of the initiation to me but then another man enters and I am told that this is the Inspector. He has binoculars and searches the recruit’s body with the binoculars for dirty marks of spies from other nations and far countries.

Now Benny gets down from the top bunk and talks to the recruit, “Here is the gate you enter but by which none of you may leave. To this place we invite no person nor do we chase anyone away. Listen, you are now madota, a grown man, and the things of a frans, of the innocent prisoner, you have left in the bush. I give you permission to salute with your right thumb, to look for a crown, and to speak the madota’s language, the sabela.

“You are given 26 laws but you will not just do as you please. You will not talk behind your brother’s back. You will not lie to your brother. A new prisoner you will warn two times and the third time the Number will show you how to deal with him. The warder’s clean work you will respect, but not his dirty work. You will stand to the bitter end with your brother under this pure white flag.”

Finally the recruit is marched in military fashion through the gates where each member of the twelve points publically and verbally accepts the newcomer.

“See that new man at the gate?” says Benny to me. “That man is important for you to know as the writer of our stories. He is the gatekeeper. He carries 25 keys in right hand, and in left hand he carries one more key. The twenty-sixth key is the master key. This is the man that the soldiers apply to if they need special leave or tattoos. He also has a pure white special book with 26 unmarked, pure white pages, each with a thin red line, a crown coin, and a number stamped on each page. He carries a black pen for wrongs and white pen for rights. The pure white special book is your brain and how you use it. Please remember that as you write on these pages in front of you, MacLean.”

And with that I am dismissed and released. I go to my cell with all my notes and collapse on my bunk.

A few hours later I wake up, wash my face and I sit in my bed with the pages under the blanket. I take one page out at a time and begin to write them out again, this time more neatly, but not trying to make them completely understandable to an outsider. Jonathan can turn them into proper sentences and be the editor. The main thing is to make sure I understand, and that I can read my notes, which were taken in a big hurry. Using a dictionary from Don’s library, I also look up all the words I didn’t know the meaning of. ‘Puttee’ means a long strip of cloth wound spirally around the leg from ankle to knee for protection and support. ‘Gabardine’ means a kind of strong cloth. ‘Swagger stick’ is a short stick used by police and the military to direct military operations and to hand out punishment. After I’m done I don’t throw the original pages away, but file them beneath the newspaper lining my locker.

Every day now I am in the team that goes potato farming. For the last few weeks we dug them out. Now we have been moved into the big shed with the ladies, but we’re right on the other side. We are helping to pack them into fifteen-kilogram sacks and load them onto trucks, but to be honest I no longer look forward to being out on the farm. I’d rather be working on the writing. The power of the ceremonies of the 26 is still with me and, as I read what I had written word for word as I heard it, it seemed more to me like poetry than anything else. Even before I am a journalist or writer, I feel I am a poet. Before I began writing poems for Homeless Talk, since the age of fourteen I had already been writing poems.

In one of those first writing groups I attended before I got arrested, I told Jonathan the story of how in Kimberley I used to climb that big mountain of garbage thrown away by the whites, looking for books. All my friends were looking for other stuff, like food and toys, but for me first prize was books. And most of all, somehow I liked books of poetry. They were all these maroon or green hard covers, the kind that won’t even sell for 50 cents in a second-hand shop, ancient poetry books, Tennyson, Byron, a few Shakespeare. I also found an old Oxford dictionary with no cover and all of A and most of B missing and I made sure I learned three new words every day. All of this scored me As for English and my vocabularly soon overtook that of my teachers.

 

By the time I hit Jo’burg I had in my bag a thick sheaf of papers of my own poems I thought I might find a publisher for. Then I saw that Homeless Talk paid R50 a poem and R80 a feature article. A poem was much easier for me to write than a feature. Next thing my poems got a bit of a following among the readers. Letters coming in asking why no poems from Sipho Madini if I missed the deadline when drink got the better of me for a week or two. Why, even all those reviewers in the newspapers that Jonathan showed me – John Matshikiza and them – they call me a talented street poet! I hear the lines of the 28 and 26 Numbers poem, when I am packing potatoes.

I walked till I came to a greengrass forest,

I sat there for a year,

rolled out round stones that had no corners or sides

I rolled till I came to a dirt road

I dusted the dust out of my eyes and clothes

Way way umsunu ka nyoko,

People with rings through their noses, holes in their ears,

and scars on their faces

Often I find myself thinking back to that poem Don shared with us called ‘The Broken String’. Somewhere and somehow these Numbers stories seem to have got my broken string humming again.

The girl who is packing the potatoes, I’ve found out her name is Elizabeth. She is small but nicely shaped, and those beautiful San eyes, almost Japanese. Like Kyoko, Jonathan’s wife. Even though Elizabeth is wearing overalls, she wears it in such a way she could be a rap dancer dressing down on TV looking all industrial and sexy.

Things certainly seem to be looking upwards on the female front. Margareth, the warder, and this farm girl. I’m pulled in the direction of the farm girl. These city girls will eat your money. Not that I have that much to boast about, but who knows, maybe this book is going to make me and Jonathan rich… God knows how the madotas will feel about that. We are playing with fire.

The farm job involves packing the potatoes into big fifteen-kilo brown paper bags. It’s very repetitive work that leaves me lots of time to think. Something Don told us in one of his lectures comes back to me. It was that bit about how at the end of their project, which took 14 years, Bleek – who was dead by the time the project was finished – and Lucy Lloyd and the Bushmen had a collection of handwritten books totalling over 12 000 pages. Not only this, but the book is made up of stories, histories, songs and pictures.

This makes me think of me, Jonathan, Don, Benny, Pieter and Mandla and even Major, Buks and Sanza, for example. We are as diverse as those guys, maybe more diverse, and even though it’s not the time of the arrival of the white settlers in Africa that we are living in, it is another chapter further along of the same story. We have stories, dances, music, histories, rituals and even drawings – the tattoos and Major’s sketches. Shit, man, we even have a pure white book on pure white paper that has never been written in black ink ever before!

Last night was another one of Don’s lectures. It was all about a Xhosa girl named Nonqawuse.

He began, along with a few guys, by singing this song:

Oh! Nonqawuse!

The girl of Mhlakaza

She killed our nation

She told the people, she told them all

That the dead will arise from their graves

Bringing joy and bringing wealth

But she was telling a lie

Oh! Nonqawuse!

The girl of Mhlakaza

She killed our nation

She told the people, she told them all

That the dead will arise from their graves

Bringing joy and bringing wealth

But she was telling a lie.

The story, which Don read in a book by JB Peires called The Dead Will Arise, goes like this… In the late 1800s, the British were trying to extend the borders of the Cape Colony into Xhosa territory and they were helped by a young Xhosa girl who made a prophecy. She prophesied that if the Xhosa burned all their crops and killed all their cattle, all their dead relatives and ancestors would be reborn and the white man would be driven back into the sea. Crops were destroyed and thousands and thousands of cattle were killed, bringing the Xhosa nation to its knees. Don told us about Xhosa people searching the abandoned British camps in the hope of picking up left-over livestock bones, organs and intestines and old bits of cowhide and leather bags to eat. He also read us descriptions of Xhosa women and children, weak and emaciated, living only on leaves, roots and berries, their arms and legs more like black sticks than human limbs. And after battles, the defeated Xhosas hanging in the trees, the place stinking horribly from dead bodies and bones lying thick among the loose stones. And how some British soldiers boiled Xhosa heads to remove the flesh so that they could take the skulls home as war trophies.

I have Xhosa blood in me and I know this story does not only sit in books. The old people know this story; they heard it from their parents and grandparents. Maybe I am so interested in Don’s lectures because I am so mixed – Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana, Sotho and coloured, so Don’s lectures are not irrelevant to me.

It’s Saturday and after work I am called to the cell where Pieter sleeps. At night most of the warders have gone home and we are all completely locked in. During the day it is a battle for power between the Numbers and the warders. At night the Number rules, full stop. Pieter is sitting on his bunk bed smoking a joint, as are a few others hanging around. The acid smell of marijuana fills the air.

“Michael,” he says through bloodshot eyes but with a relaxed grin, “please be so kind to come visit me Wednesday. I’ll be ready for you at 8 pm sharp. Most of the men will be at the soccer match under the lights, but me and you, we have work to do.”

On his little bedside table is a half-litre of Nestlé’s evaporated milk and two red plastic cups. With his teeth, Pieter opens the carton and pours me half a cup without asking if I want some. As he pours I notice how steady his hand is and how the condensed milk makes a perfect arc before it splashes into the cup. When both cups are full and I’m about to take a sip he touches his cup against mine and says, “To the Number, MacLean.”

He has made sure that the cell has been emptied of everyone except himself. So this is how it will be now, I think. Each one wants time and space completely alone to tell me their own gang history.

As much as they cooperate in here against a common enemy – that is, the warders – the three gangs have big differences in the way they see things and how they see each other. In the 1980s, I heard, there was this huge war between the 28s and the 27s, costing both camps lots of lives. It spread across all the prisons in the country and could not be controlled by the warders.

“Moenie fokken droom nie. Don’t dream,” growls Pieter, using his powerful arms to lower himself down from off the top bunk. “Let us get to work.”

Now that I am this close I can get a real good look at Pieter. He is taller than I thought, I would say six-foot-three, very broad shoulders and a narrow waist, and his nose looks like it has been broken many times. But there is a fierce, primitive intelligence in his face and eyes.

He sits me down at a little table he has set up. On it is paper and two pens. One of the pens is yellow but it has a black cap and a black stopper at the end, the kind we used to use to remove the ink thing and then blow bits of folded-up paper to sting other kids on the back of their necks. The other pen is completely black, the kind where you press at the bottom end and the nib comes out the top. Both pens, I notice, are brand new.

“I took the long road, the road of blood and of learning,” says Pieter, “to get to this position, but now there are fokken newcomers who are gang leaders from the outside. The gangs they are part of are not Number gangs, just fokken street gangs. There is no Number outside the prison, but the Firm is calling itself the 28s and the Americans the 26s.

“These guys have money and power and when they come here they see a little of the Number and it looks good to them, it looks interesting. They want to be part of it, and not just any part. They want to be leaders, like they were in their gangs on the outside. So what they do is take the short road. They cannot sabela, they are not vleis and blood; all they have is money and drugs, but they are offered the high positions. Dit maak my naar. Sick to the stomach, man.

“Why do we allow these laaities in to the Number and to hold the high offices? It’s because of drugs. These guys know how to smuggle drugs and other luxuries into the prison, and in exchange for these things, the corrupt Numbers captains let them buy their ngunyas, these stars on our shoulders. These same captains who sell the Number are also thinking about their futures… If and when they leave this place, they will get jobs in the street gangs. I tell you this because the White Book is becoming vuil, which is why we need to write it down so it can survive as it was meant to be.”

Then, without any ado, Pieter pulls his shirt over his head and, twisting to one side, points to his right hip somewhere near his kidney.

“This is our salute,” says Pieter, “with the thumb and the first two fingers raised plus five fingers on the other hand – that equals eight.”

On the back of his neck is a book that is open, on one cover is a 2 and on the other an 8 with the sun behind it.

Pointing to it, he tells me, “Later you will hear the story of how we the 28s came to have the White Book.’

Next he points to his right shoulder.

“These are my ngunyas,” continues Pieter, “my pips, showing my rank as highest general of the 28s. These ngunyas were added one by one. I have had many jobs to get here, nearly all involving blood. For a long while I was the nyangi, Minister of Weapons. You have any idea how many deadly weapons we can manufacture right here in prison?”

Before I can answer he tells me.

“There is the tin cup tied to the belt. There is the heavy lock tied on the belt. Knives made of spoons. Knives made of toothbrushes with the tip of the handle melted into a sharp point. Knives made with razors tied to pens. Then there are all the poisons…”

As he speaks I notice the many markings on his skin that are not tattoos, but scars, deeps scars that look like they were made by knives. I have also heard that these guys remove tattoos they don’t like by burning them off or with nail clippers. Before I can ask him more about these, he continues.

“This gun here tells you that we in the 28s are always geBritish; we are the warriors responsible for fighting on behalf of all three groups.

“And this one shows that a 28, like a spider, can be patient and wait a long time before he stabs you.

“Don’t fuck with us, MacLean. This story is sacred,” he says, smiling but somehow a smile that is not meant to be believed.

“These show I am from the bloodline,” continues Pieter, “the gold line of the 28s, the fighting line. It also means I am not afraid to die, through blood is how I got to where I am – by stabbing warders. Now I must use my brains but then it was just my hands and the knife… This one here shows we are warriors. It is the horn out of which our forefathers drank gall.

“And this one is a little bit of a long story…

“I was fifteen years old when I first came to prison, and this was my first tattoo, I told myself when I get out of prison the first thing I will do is kill my mother. Let me just say that I never knew them and that they never loved me or brought me up right. On that same day I came into Pollsmoor Prison, the Number took me as my family. I remember coming into the arrival centre, being fingerprinted, even before that in the stokkies, some older men trying to force me to take a dagga poke – marijuana wrapped in plastic up my arse. I had to show them that I was not going to allow that. I was frightened, yes, but I also knew that this was the test that would set my path for the rest of my sentence. It was the moment when I still had the power to choose to be someone who gets all kinds of things put up his arse or someone who can still, even here in prison, be a boss and has control of his life in prison.

“I fought like hell when they tried to put that poke up my arse, Michael. Already it was clear to me that I was not going to be anyone’s wyfie – wife – but a fighting man of the bloodline, a man of gold. For the first two months I was not allowed by the Number to receive visits from my family or to read or write letters or even to read books so I could focus on the Number, only on the Number. This was fine for my family because they never came anyway. They had washed their hands of me long before. A brotherhood like this I had also never had before. With all the study and the standing together against the other gangs and against the warders, it felt like we really love each other. One man told me, for my wife maybe I can buy her chocolates but for my brothers in the Number, I will die for them and kill for them. And this is how I felt also.

“When you are in the bloodline, there is only one way to move up the ranks. You fokken fight your way up the ladder, you stab warders and you don’t cry out when they beat you and put you in solitary confinement agter die berge on a spare diet with no salt. Nor do you cry out during the carry-ons where warders encircle a prisoner and beat him senseless with bats and sticks. But once you come back from those times agter die berge you are passed from one senior madota to another and you taught to sabela, you are taught all the verses, the history of the Number and all the rules.

“In the silver line, you can advance by having sex with gold line officers. I made sure I would be gold not silver and that I was the one on top. I have had many wyfies here in prison – but do not make the mistake that I am a moffie. I am a madota. A real man needs lots of sex and I take it whenever I want it. My wyfies are protected by me; they must wash my clothes but no other man can touch them and I get them extra bread and food.

“When I was fifteen I was in a street gang and even then, to go up and to become a leader in the gang, the thing that defined your path to the top was your first kill. Your friend Don made us all think about that. A person never forgets their first kill and mine keeps me awake at night and it takes lots of pipes of mandrax before sleep will come.

“It was my second kill that got me imprisoned. Because I was a minor I got nine years. How come, then, 24 years later, I am still here, you might ask?

“Well, blood is our business, especially stabbings of warders. For all of those stabbings and killings in prison, my sentence just kept getting longer. In fact, you can say that each of these tattoos was earned by a stabbing of a warder.”

Here Pieter turns around so that we are facing each other, chest to chest, stomach to stomach.

“This shield you will find on the bodies of the 26s, 27s and the 28s. It shows we all come from one line, which began in Zululand. This line later split. It is the shield of Po, but more about him later…”

As Pieter speaks and I stand close I can hear his breathing and even his heartbeat. I can also smell his sweat. He talks very fast, like many coloureds do, but it is like he is sprinting to the finish line and I am struggling to keep up. I tell him so and he nods his head.

“We are called the 28s because when two of Po’s first members, Nongoloza and Kilikijan, split up, Nongoloza and his men were eight and Kilikijan and his men were seven.

“We are the oldest and strongest of the gangs. The date of our birth is 1812. Each Number has their own speciality. Some say ours is gif – poison – meaning sex and drugs, but our speciality is really justice. We have more judges and prosecutors than any other gang. The 27s’ line of work is blood and 26s’ is money.”

Now that he is talking more slowly, this is easier to follow than the song and dance on Tuesday. Just tattoos and words.

“So that you can understand me, I am not going to sabela,” says Pieter. “I know you know some of this stuff already because you have been a frans for some months now and the Number is everywhere and you are not dom. You are far from stupid, MacLean. I could make something of you here in the 28s. But I am going to talk to you as if you are simple, so that everyone – not only you – can understand this story.

“It all began in 1812 in Zululand with a wise old man called Nkukut, the man we call Po. Po grew up knowing the proud ways of Dingaan, the great Zulu king. But there was famine and drought and disease in the land and young black men begin to leave their villages and look for work in the gold mines where they worked with picks and lamps on their heads.

“Po noticed that many of these strong young men left the villages but not so many came back. Po worried about the future of the villages, so he decided to go to the mines himself to find out where the men go and why they don’t come back. He went to Johannesburg, on the Witwatersrand.

“On the Witwatersrand, where the mines are, men were living in hostels and compounds where there are no women allowed. Compared to how people lived in Po’s own village, these places looked more like prisons and the men looked like slaves or prisoners. Many of them were also dying from tuberculosis, from inhaling the dust of the mines while digging up the white man’s gold.

“Po then leaves the gold mines and goes to the hills outside of Pietermaritzburg, a town closer to his homelands. There he finds a cave.

“So, even now, when we are locked up in solitary confinement, we call it ‘agter die berge’, behind the mountain. It is a time to be quiet and to think.

“Anyway, Po stayed in this cave, behind the mountain, where he sat and thought. He spent his first weeks inventing a secret language. If young men are to be saved, he thought, the white mine bosses must not understand their talk. This language is Sabela.

“From his cave on the mountain, Po could see the roads that lead from the villages to the mining town, and clouds of dust on the road from Zululand. Po saw dust rising, which told him there was a traveller. If he needed to see even further he had binoculars, which he stole from the army.

“From his cave high in the mountain Po came down to the road and found a young man. Po asks him his name and the man answers, ‘It is Nongoloza.’

“‘Where are you going?’ asks Po.

“‘To the mines,’ says Nongoloza.

“Po shakes his head, and says, ‘I have been to the mines – it will kill you.’

“‘What should I do instead?’ asks Nongoloza.

“‘The gold of the white man is good,’ Po answers. ‘You must take it, but not from the ground. You must rob it from the white man himself.’

“Po takes Nongoloza into his cave. Next morning, Po sees another cloud of dust, this one not on the road from Zululand but from Pondoland, the land of the Xhosa.

“Po asks this traveller who he is and the traveller answers, ‘I am Kilikijan. I am a Xhosa, a Pondo.’ Kilikijan joins them in the cave.

“And so it goes till Po has fifteen young migrants in his gang. He teaches them the secret language Sabela. He tells them of pay wagons that roll into the mine compounds on Fridays, and he teaches them the art of highway robbery.

“Po’s young bandiets are successful at stealing wages but, holed up in a cave, they need food and clothes. Po directs them to attack colonial army camps on the perimeter of the mining town. In addition to pillaging food and supplies, they bring back rifles, bayonets, army uniforms.”

“By now Po’s band of brothers are wanted men, outlaws with prices on their heads. They become nomads, moving from cave to cave. They also divide into two groups. Kilikijan takes six men and robs by day, this makes seven men in total. Nongoloza takes seven men and robs by night. This makes eight in total. That is why we call the 27s the sonops – ‘dawn’ – and the 28s sonafs – ‘dusk’.”

Here he turns around again and lowers the band of his underpant, pointing to a tattoo of a sunset, which sits above the crack of his arse.

Now he sits down and stretches his arms high above his head, a big smile on his face. I sense his excitement and satisfaction having told this story. Me too. I am amazed. I kind of knew some of this stuff but didn’t take it too seriously or pay that much attention. I had a block to these stories. Now this reminds me of stories from the Bible, Moses and his Commandments. Joseph and his dream coat. Stories told to me by my grandmother.

“Go now,” says Pieter. “Take your notes and write down what you have understood – but before you pass it on to Morgan, give it back to me so I can check what you have written. I must check whether you have written it as it should be with black ink on pure white paper. And remember, MacLean, this is not your story – don’t forget, die Nommer se besigheid moenie oorgesproei word nie – the Numbers’ business should not be spread around. Remember this or you will face more punishment than you can even imagine. The very same book you are recording for us, the White Book itself, makes punishment for this crime no less than the death sentence… Verstaan djy, MacLean? As djy nie luister nie, sal djy vrek – you will die.”

Last night was Don’s sixth lecture. If the generals haven’t shut these down by now, I doubt that they will. Clearly my group is more threatening to them than Don’s. I guess this most recent lecture will be the test case.

He began his lecture telling us it’s around 1834 and no one in the Colony can speak of anything else except how slavery is about to be abolished.

“Boer slave owners are asking, ‘What right do the British have to tell us how to treat our servants and slaves?’ They are saying, ‘We, the Afrikaners, who have come all the way from Holland, don’t have to stay here and listen to these bloody English.’ So what do you think the Boers did? They packed their bags and their potjies and their servants and their slaves into their wagons and began the Great Trek.”

What was really interesting about Don’s lecture was how he showed us the Great Trek through the eyes of a white man and then a black man using two different books, both of which he has in his library. The one book was called Swallow by Rider Haggard and in it there are lots of kaffirs piling up dead in the battlefields. The other book is called Mhudi by a black man called Sol Plaatje who paints a very different picture and is basically about how waves and waves of Boers moved out of the Cape killing and stealing land as they moved into the interior.

Don has given us much to think about, but it is mine and Jonathan’s gang book that I am still focused on. Jissus, need to be careful what I call it. The generals, especially Pieter, made it very clear that it is their book and that we are just ghost writers. Still, I am very curious to know how the 27s’ history differs from the 28s’ one.

When I arrive at Mandla’s cell he is ready and he is barefoot. His skin is glistening with Vaseline freshly applied and he is wearing an ironed prison trouser and a khaki shirt. There is something unnerving being so close to these top guys. It is like being locked in a cage with a wild animal like a lion; it is their naked power I can feel so close up, the stuff, the energy that made them leaders but also killers.

Mandla’s voice surprises me, though. It is deep and it is kinder than Pieter’s. He slowly unbuttons his shirt, folds it neatly and places it on the bed.

“Michael, we have all agreed to tell the stories in the same way, using the tattoos. Until now that has been the only way to preserve the history, writing it on our bodies. You will see in my story that this is not the first time the law was written down but those other writings have been lost. Under apartheid, conditions were much stricter in the prisons, especially for black and coloured prisoners. We were not allowed to write. There were none of the counselling or support or rehab groups and workshops you see beginning to come to prisons these days, even though they are still slow to come to Piketberg. Then there was just dogs and beatings. Even now the warders are careful about what writing leaves this place. But I have always felt it would be a good thing to have our history written.”

Mandla is huge. Even the tattoos themselves seem, like, bigger, not cramped onto a small painting in a small frame. The first one I cannot help but notice is Casper the Friendly Ghost.

“I had that one done before I was a gangster,” Mandla points out. “It does not belong to any gang, but here in prison you will see lots of Donald Ducks and Mickey Mouses and Caspers. Don’t ask me why.” Then he laughs and says, “I guess it might be because gangsters are like children.”

On his left shoulder are his stars and he catches my eyes looking at them. They are not just stars but sit inside a rectangle and look much more like those things – Pieter calls them pips – soldiers and sailors have on their shoulders to show their rank.

“Unlike Pieter’s,” Mandla tells me, “my pips are on the left-hand side. In the White Book, the 28s always walk on the right side of the road and the 27s and 26s on the left. The history of the 27s is the same as that of the 28s – up to a point, anyway.”

Mandla turns to face me more squarely, and says, “This one is our salute – but it is not just my salute – it is my flag, my gun and my pen.

“All gangs, when we pass each other – even when our hands are behind our backs – are saluting. The 27 salute has just the thumb and index finger raised, because five plus two equals seven.”

Then, turning again so I can see his chest and stomach, he continues.

“In the beginning we were called the Scotland Gang because Nongoloza went to what is now known as Germiston, which is actually a place in Scotland near Glasgow. Our gang formed to defend ourselves from the immoral things of the 28s.

“But we have another flag also… It is an invisible one that we never show in tattoos – red as blood and crossed with two swords, also with a bugle and seven six-pointed stars. The two swords show the battle between Nongoloza and Kilikijan, that is between the 28s and the 27s. The battle was at Mooi River, which in Sabela we say as Moliva. Moliva is also used to show you are in the silver line of the 28s. It means you are a wife for the gold line.

“These six-pointed stars here are telling you of our relationship to the 26s. It is always us who stand between the 26s and the 28s.

“We are called the Hollanders because we can be ruthless like the Boers were to our people. The crown tells you that I am very high up in the 27s.

“We are called the 27s because when Nongoloza and Kilikijan split up. Nongoloza and his men were eight and Kilikijan and his men were seven. They worked by night and we worked by day.

“The old man Po, the forefather of the 28s and the 27s, since the beginning, told Kilikijan and Nongoloza to keep a diary.

“This was the original Pure White Book. There was a large rock near one of the caves. Po told Kilikijan to carve onto the rock how they go about their business and their lives. He told them to carve the words in Sabela, the secret language.

“One day Po brought Nongoloza and Kilikijan together. He told them to go to a white farmer called Rabie, who had this great big bull called Rooiland. ‘Buy this bull from Rabie,’ Po told them.”

At this point Mandla turns around so I can see his back.

“Nongoloza, the forefather of the 28s, and Kilikijan, the forefather of the 27s, go to Rabie’s house. On his doorstep they offer to buy the bull but Rabie says no. He will not sell Rooiland, the great big bull. He tells them to fok off but they will not leave without carrying out Po’s order. So they kill Rabie and herd Rooiland back to the cave.

“At the cave the bandiets have a great big feast, where they slaughter the bull. Po instructs them to preserve certain parts of the beast: the hooves, legs, eyes, ears, tail, and most importantly the hide.

“Po asks Kilikijan and Nongoloza to take one of Rooiland’s horns and fill it with a mixture of gall and blood and to drink this mixture.

“Kilikijan, who you know is our 27s’ forefather, drinks first but spits out the mixture and says, ‘This is poison in here! This stuff will kill me.’

“But Nongoloza just sips the mixture and smiles.

“Now the 28s say us 27s don’t have the stomach to take on the whites and the warders. That we are too weak and afraid. But we as 27s say that Nongoloza’s followers, the 28s, we say that they drunk poison and that they are muti or medicine men and that they are capable of betrayal and evil.

“Po then goes on to tell Kilikijan and Nongoloza to cover the rock on which their diaries are recorded with the bull’s hide. He also tells them to press the bull’s hide against the rock until their diaries are imprinted on the animal’s skin.

“This is now the law of the gang, and whenever there is a disagreement amongst gangs about how the bandiets should do things, they have to go read the rock or the hide, both of which records how things were done at the beginning, and how they should be done in the future.

“Then Nongoloza rolls up the hide and takes it with him. Kilikijan and the 27s are left with the rock. But the rock is difficult to carry. Kilikijan falls and the rock rolls down a hill and hits a tree. It breaks in half.

“The part that hits the tree gets pressed and printed onto the bark of the tree, but the rest of the rock rolls into a river and is lost forever. So Kilikijan peels the bark off the tree and takes it with him, but now he only has half the law while Nongoloza possesses the whole law.

“For some time the two bands go stealing and robbing together. Then one day Nongoloza tells Kilikijan that he is sick and wants to rest for the day. Nongoloza asks that one of Kilikijan’s men, a youngster called Magubane, that this young man stays behind to look after him.

“That evening Kilikijan returns with the band and finds Nongoloza making love to Magubane under a cow hide. Kilikijan raises his sword and challenges Nongoloza to fight. But Nongoloza says, no, it’s written on the hide that women are poison and that soldiers must choose wives from young men in their ranks.

“This makes Kilikijan very angry and frustrated because he has only half the law, and cannot tell whether Nongoloza is making things up to suit himself and to justify his actions so that his gang the 28s could take boywives.”

Mandla pauses briefly to make sure that I understand what this all means.

“But even though we had only half the law, we knew everything we did was according to that law, but to this day we still don’t trust that everything the 28s say are the original law…”

I nod and, satisfied that I am getting his point, Mandla continues.

“Po then comes down from his cave and orders the two men to stop fighting. By this time they are knee deep in blood.

“Po tells Kilikijan to go to the mine compounds to see if sex between men is practised there. He tells them that when they return to his cave, they will find a rock blocking the entrance, but that under the rock they will find an assegai.

“He explains that if the assegai is rusted, this will mean that he, Po, is dead and that they will find his skeleton in the cave. And this came to pass. So Po went to his death without saying whether sex between men is okay or not okay.

“Nongoloza and Kilikijan then went their separate ways, Kilikijan to Delagoa Bay with seven men, including himself, Nongoloza to Germiston with eight men, also including himself. Like I said, this is how we each got our names, 28 and 27, the 2s in front stand for the 2 main madotas, Nongoloza and Kilikijan.

“Kilikijan worked by night and Nongoloza by day. ‘You will recognise me,’ Kilikijan said, as he set out for Delagoa Bay, ‘by the two rays of dawn sunlight, one over my right shoulder, and the other in front of me.’

“Much later in their lives the law catches up with Nongoloza and Kilikijan and they meet up in Point Prison in Durban. They are both serving long sentences for their crimes. But they never talk of sex, whether it is right or wrong for men in prison to have sex with other men. What they agree on is this: ‘The function of 27s is to keep peace between 28 and 26 and to be the ones who guard the law of the Numbers.’

Jissus, this stuff is so fascinating, I think to myself as I write out more neatly the notes I took when Mandla told me the 27s’ history. The paper I am writing on is not pure white, it’s light-blue ledger paper with red and black lines running through it. I guess the ‘pure white book’ version is still to come. But to get to the content… Really, the only difference between the two gangs is the moffie sex bit. But that part of the history where half the law got lost is very clever. The way I see it, if you want to have sex with men in prison, you need a law and a set of ten commandments that say it is okay, but you also don’t want a law or a religion that is the direct opposite to another powerful religion, so you make your own religion similar to theirs but with a few different by-laws. What is strange, though, is if the 28s came first, and they want to justify homosexuality, you would expect they would have that in their version of the story, but it only comes in the second story. It’s as if both stories were worked out together for the sake of peace.

Makes me also think of Christianity and Judaism and Muslim religions. In Judaism and Christianity, both have Abraham as their forefather, but then there is a split and now they fight each other. And Jesus too was a Jew but came up with a new Gospel that the old Jews did not buy into. Maybe I should have been a scholar or something. This stuff is really, really gripping me.

“Hosh, Michael, you ready?” asks Benny. “You will have noticed how I greeted you and – see this tattoo on my shoulder? – that’s the greeting of the 26s.”

Of the three leaders, Benny is the most beautiful-looking – if I can say that. Like I said before, he looks like an old-fashioned Bushman but also like a young kung-fu fighter or film star. His body is so small and compact but also like a body-builder, every muscle defined, and his shoulders look both wide and narrow. I have heard he uses the bars in the cell as a kind of gym to keep his body so fit, using them for sit-ups, pull-ups, all kinds of stretches, acrobatics, gymnastics.

His stars are on his left shoulder like Mandla’s. There are six of them, and there is also the tattoo of the 26 salute, with just the thumb raised.

Last time with Mandla, there was no table and, while it was good to be able to see his tattoos while I was standing up, it was much harder to write even pressing on one of Don’s hard-covered books. Benny, though, has organised the small table and chair again, which is good.

“Unlike the 27s and 28s,” continues Benny, “our story begins in prison. We are the only true prison gang.

“This is our flag. It is pure white and shows we can rob without feeling guilt, but on this flag is also an invisible thin red line, which shows we are always ready to defend our camp and that we are ready for war.

“One day, a long time ago, there were six inmates in Point Prison. You will remember that in his later years Nongoloza and Kilikijan were both in Durban’s Point Prison. Kilikijan got there first and later Nongoloza joined him.

“One day, in this Point Prison, six birds – that is franse, members of neither camp, non-gangsters – sat in a circle and flipped a silver coin. Their leader was a man called Grey – some say his name was Grey, others say he was wearing a grey trenchcoat or a grey prison blanket…

“Now the 27s and 28s had the right to take away anything they liked from a frans. The way it worked was like this… A portion was returned and the rest was shared amongst the madotas. So on this day Nongoloza tried to take the silver coin from Grey.

“But this Grey is no pushover. He refuses to hand over the coin to Nongoloza. Nongoloza has a word with Kilikijan. Kilikijan explains that the flipping of a coin is a form of gambling, and that these men are trained in the art of smuggling and getting valuable things. He knows all about those things…

“During their first days in prison, before Nongoloza arrived, Kilikijan had stabbed a troublesome warder. As punishment, he had been placed in a tiny dungeon and was fed a diet of rotten food with no salt. This was to make him weak. So the six gamblers, with Grey as their leader, were skilled in smuggling and they brought him salt and better food.

“Since then both the 27s and 28s saw the need for people like us. They saw the value of a third gang who could be in charge of the flow of goods and of money. They saw the value of a gang who was not always involved in their ongoing argument around boywives.

“But, okay, let us get back to Grey, who refuses to hand over his coin to Nongoloza. Nongoloza, after hearing this story about Grey, he calms down and asks Kilikijan to bring him Grey’s coin. Once Nongoloza has it in his hands, he bites it and then drops it to the floor.

“‘This coin is hard and when it drops to the floor it makes a noise like a nail. I will call it a spyker, a nail, and I will use it to button my uniform in years to come,’ says Nongoloza.

“Kilikijan replies, ‘No, it is not a nail, it is called a crown. It brings wealth.’

“Kilikijan and Nongoloza then argue and fight over whether this is a nail or a crown, but actually they are fighting over who should absorb Grey’s men into their own gangs.

“Kilikijan wants us, the 26s, to protect the 27s from homosexuality and Nongoloza wants us for extra wives. So, as a compromise, they agree that these men can become the third camp of bandiets – but Nongoloza makes some conditions: first, they will be called the 26s and not the 29s, to show that they will never rise above the original two gangs; and, second they will be the last camp to form in prison – that there will never be a fourth camp. Every other inmate who is not a member of these three gangs has to be a frans, and they cannot join another gang.

“Nongoloza then tells Kilikijan, ‘You will be responsible for their conduct, so when they commit a wrong I will not go to them, I will come to you.’

“‘That is well and good,’ says Kilikijan, ‘but when you wrong them, I will come to you.’

“And so the three camps were clearly defined and so it is even today. The 28s are there to fight on behalf of all three camps for better conditions for inmates. They are permitted to have sex amongst themselves, but they are never to touch a 26.

“The 27s are here to keep the peace between the camps. To learn and maintain the laws of all three camps. They must make right any wrongs by revenge, so when blood is spilled, they must spill blood.

“And us, the 26s, are here to accumulate wealth, to be distributed among all three camps – but we must accumulate this wealth through trickery and cunning, never by violence. Brothers must not spill each other’s blood. So when a 28 commits a wrong, a 27 must spill the blood of a warder or a frans must substitute. The world is divided into bandiete and boere, and the boer is always the number one enemy.”

Maybe you are wondering how things are going on the love side? I am right. Without love, what is life? I am now swinging back in the direction of the female warder Margareth – shit, a man has needs and where in the potato field in front of the other prisoners and warders am I going to get a chance with Elizabeth?

To impress Margareth, I just showed her my copy of Finding Mr Madini, the one Jonathan had given me. Jonathan has also donated one to the prison library. Don was pretty impressed, perhaps even a little bit jealous, I think. I told Margareth all about the group and about Jonathan and Don. Even hinted at the new book we are working on for the Numbers, but kept it all mysterious like – both because I think we need to and secondly to make her more interested. I wish I could make a date to meet with her on a Friday night and go dancing or for a picnic or something, but I’m a goddam prisoner. And maybe she wouldn’t go out with a convict.

Don has been working hard. He has written out three of his lectures. One on the San and the Khoi called ‘The Broken String’, the second on slavery and the third on the Great Trek. He is still busy with the story of Nonqawuse, which is the longest. And my job is to check them for spelling and grammar mistakes or to make other comments, which he then takes into consideration. These essays are for the guys who missed the actual lectures and are a kind of textbook so even those who came to the lectures can check on the facts – what Don calls ‘reference material’. Luckily we don’t have to copy them all out by hand, just the first copy, which we hand to a connection of Don’s among the warders who can make photocopies. The scholars can also, of course, come in and read the original books, which is what Don wants most of all.

Last night was Don’s seventh lecture. It was about the birth of the so-called coloured people. I learned that the men employed by the Dutch East India Company to establish the refreshment station in Cape Town were mostly very rough and uneducated. And that the Khoi set up their small, beehive-shaped huts near the boundary of the Company gardens. From here they were well positioned to beg for beads, tobacco and copper or barter with the white men. The small group of white women in the settlement hated the Khoi women because, or so the white settlers felt, they gave themselves over so easily to the white men. What I found really interesting was this… It didn’t take years or even months for the social structure of the Khoi to collapse. From being a people who had their own pastures and cattle and rich customs, without land on which to graze their cattle, they were reduced to become alcoholics, beggars and prostitutes within weeks. And it was within a year of Van Riebeeck’s arrival that the first of the coloured offspring were born. Even though they were fathered by the white settlers, these children were mostly disowned and treated as an embarrassment. The rest of Don’s lecture was about Adam Kok, the son of a Khoi woman raped by a Boer. Adam Kok is born into slavery and, as he grows up, he sees his people reduced to a band of alcoholic beggars with no pride and having lost their land, language and culture. He sees the most beautiful of the coloured girls becoming prostitutes for the large number of single white men. So what Adam does is lead other Khoi, slaves and mixed-race people – who came to be called the Griquas – away from the Cape Colony in order to live free of the Dutch East India Company.

Don also touched on how, once they crossed the Orange River, they settled in a place near Kimberley but were cheated out of the diamond fields by the British. An interesting part was how the Griqua used to hunt not only wild animals but also Bushmen because the Bushmen are said to have hunted the Griquas’ livestock.

The day I first came to Jo’burg, I was only sixteen, sporting a fluffy German cut, black denim jacket, cream designer T-shirt and goldish trousers that seemed to glint in the night. I still had big dreams then. One was to get any job, even if it was for less than full pay – after all, I was still underage. Another dream was to become a child film star. This idea came from the many adverts in the newspapers at that time. I also half wanted to join MK, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation, the military wing of the ANC. This was 1992 and Mandela had just been released, which of course means my timing was out because MK had just been unbanned. Anyway, at the MK office in Khotso House in Rissik Street, downtown Jo’burg, they turned me away because I had no ID, just my birth certificate.

Funny where the road has taken me… A tour of prisons across South Africa, learning more about my history than I ever thought I would know. And where to from here? Just a job, any reasonable job where the pay cheque comes every month would be good.

But let me tell you how it’s going on the love front. Life is not just about literature, gangs, tattoos and history. We gotta live in the present and also pay attention to matters of the heart and, of course, other organs.

Margareth is curious about this wheel, about me. If you wanna impress a scoop, write a book and casually give her a copy to read. It works. Turns out she loved reading at school and came top of her class at college. It also helps to be in with the three top generals of the prison. Without me asking, they somehow caught onto the Margareth-and-me thing and have arranged privacy for us in the laundry after hours. Last night was our first date.

I have read that in other countries, married prisoners have conjugal rights, so if you are in prison your husband or wife gets to visit you and you allowed to have sex! I can’t imagine that happening in South Africa, but it would be a good thing actually. Maybe it’ll stop the prisoners raping each other and all that. But, hang on, a woman can feel betrayed if I write down too much and it falls into the wrong hands so let me say no more.

The ‘black ink on white paper’ book is coming along. It is not long, just the tattoo stories of Pieter, Mandla and Benny. But there is another part of the book that Don encouraged us to include. He gave me a book from his library called The Small Matter of a Horse by this guy Charles van Onselen. It’s about Numisani Mathebula who, it turns out, was the real-life Zulu on whom the story of Nongoloza is built. In 1867 – or so it is said – Numisani Mathebula was born somewhere in the Natal Colony, which we now know as KwaZulu-Natal, and spent most of his childhood herding his father’s cattle. When he was sixteen years old he worked for different white men as a gardener and looking after his employers’ horses. One day one of these horses went missing. Of course, Numisani was blamed and was told that he had to work for several years without pay to repay this debt. He did what I would have done. Rather than work as a slave for a crime he didn’t commit, he ran away to the Witwatersrand where he got into crime and soon rose to become leader of a gang. His gang made a base for themselves in caves and unused mineshafts to the south of Johannesburg.

Numisani was very successful as a criminal and as a gang leader. By 1899, he ruled over an army with thousands of followers. He called his gang Regiment of the Hills, but at some point he changed the name of his gang to the Ninevites. In these caves and disused mineshafts where the Ninevites lived, they even had white women working for them as bookkeepers. In theory, Numisani liked to think that he was rebelling against the white mine owners, but in practice most of his victims were black miners and other black workers whose wages his gangsters would steal on payday.

Eventually, Numisani was arrested but in prison his natural leadership qualities led to him having the status of a king. When he passed, the prisoners – especially the Zulu ones – would cry out, “Bayete!”, the salute reserved for kings like Shaka and Dingaan.

As you can expect, Numisani and his gangs became a threat to the warders and, even though Numisani was whipped and punished, he continued to be the most powerful figure in Pretoria Prison for two years, and in the end the government transferred him to the Fort in Johannesburg. But guess what, this just gave Numisani an opportunity to recruit more members. The authorities planted spies in Numisani’s organisation but suspected spies were beaten on the chest with clenched fists and others were forced to eat large quantities of porridge and then received blows on their stomachs. They called this the ‘beating of the drum’. I found this interesting because this punishment survives today in the Numbers. Another way of punishing spies, as well as gang members who break the rules, was to toss them into the air on a blanket and let them crash to the concrete floor. If you were lucky, says Van Onselen, if you were caught as a spy you had two teeth removed by having them knocked out or cut out with a pen knife and these were added to a necklace of human teeth worn by Numisani himself.

Even though Numisani was in prison, his influence was felt both in the mine compounds where he had first begun operating, as well as in the townships. In Van Onselen’s book, one old Sotho woman who came to work in Johannesburg as a domestic worker tells how the Ninevites, under their King Nongoloza, used to terrorise and control the township in which she lived. Between three and four in the afternoon, says this old lady, the gangsters would block all the paths and roads and nobody could go anywhere.

After two black policemen were killed and a white miner was clubbed to death – both incidents linked to Numisani – most of Numisani’s most senior officers in the townships were arrested and locked up for life.

At this same time a director of prisons by the name of Roos began a method of running the prisons using respect and talking rather than brutality and violence. He even managed to persuade the ageing Numisani to give up the war against the system and managed to get him to give up his title as King of the Ninevites.

Soon after that, Roos released Numisani and worked with him from the outside to begin to disband the Ninevites. Numisani was then allowed to retire to a small plot the government bought for him in the kingdom of Swaziland. For a while it looked liked the government had succeeded in turning South Africa’s most dangerous criminal into a farmer, but then Numisani said he wanted to return to the Transvaal. Worried that he would begin his old mischief, they gave him a job as a guard in a mental hospital. Here he ate his meals alone, called the Sotho guards who were his colleagues ‘dogs’, and often spat in the faces of anyone with whom he disagreed. He also herded patients around as if they were his troops. His behaviour was said to get worse if he was not supplied with regular amounts of dagga.

Interesting stuff, don’t you think? I wonder how and why the gangsters call this figure Nongoloza and not Numisani? Don tells me that in 1812, the year Po meets Nongoloza and Kilikijan on their way to the mines, is one hundred years too early for mining in South Africa. Not even diamonds –1860s – never mind gold – 1886 – had been discovered. Also, I keep coming back to Don’s question. The big question, Don asked me, was whether I consider Numisani to have been a common criminal or a freedom fighter. To be honest, I think he was a bit of both – as well as a little crazy.

I wonder what effect all Don’s lectures is having on the prisoners. They seem to be interested in what Don has to say but there is still a thickness and heaviness in the air. The old Number tension that hangs over us all the time, the power-hungry fight for supremacy. We continue to hear that the war between the 28s on one hand and the 27s and the 26s on the other hand has spread to almost every prison in the country. How long can Piketberg hold out?

In my dream last night things went like this. Benny calls me and Don from the library into a cell. In the corner is a young frans being tattooed. The tools of the trade: a sewing needle held between several matches, bound with cotton, the sharp end of the needle sticking out; black rubber bracelets that have been melted down sit all gooey in the bottom of cut-off plastic cooldrink bottles.

A tattoo of a face is being transferred onto the abdomen of the recruit’s chest, a face that looks ever so familiar.

“Jislaaik! Fok, jirre – it’s Madiba,” I say, “a tattoo of Madiba.”

“It is clear from Mandela’s features that he has Griqua and San blood running through his veins,” says Benny, “but we must begin at the beginning… Come see the other side of this ou.”

The recruit’s entire back is filled with inked images, some still a little fresh, but all clear enough.

“These are not just any Boesmans, they are //Kabbo, /Han#kass’o and Dia!kwain, the San men who lived with Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd,” says Benny. “And this one is Kora, the Khoi man who got kidnapped all the way to England, and this one Adam Kok. This girl here is Nonqawuse who was responsible for the cattle killings, and this is Numisani Mathebula, the real-life Nongoloza.” Just as I’m getting excited about Piketberg becoming the new University after Robben Island, I’m woken up by banging of batons on the bars, the early-morning call for the farmers.

There is lank tension in the air, talk of gang warfare, but also talk of Pieter needing to stab someone – probably a warder, but someone from another gang or even a frans will do – to show that he is on top of his game and deserving to be the top man of the 28s.

Today Pieter sits outside his cell sabela-ing with two other heavily tattooed men. I hang back and listen.

“The glas blows his bugle, the nyangi throws his pipes, the general sits with his back to the four points,” says Pieter addressing the two other men. “If I am standing outside in the rain and you are standing under an umbrella, what do you do?” asks Pieter.

“I will offer you to come stand with me under my umbrella so you don’t get wet,” replies the other man, the one whose name is Dog.

“No,” says Pieter, “if you do that you are saying you want to be my wyfie and to share my bed. What you must do is leave your umbrella and come stand with me in the rain.”

As he sees me sidle past, he hisses, “MacLean, djy dink djy’s a clever… Remember the business of the Number moenie oorgesproei word nie – it must not be broadcast. Pas op, MacLean. Watch out, you will be offered fame and fortune for this story. There are many out there who will love this story, but before you try sell it on, never forget that this story is ours. Ours.”

When I woke this morning, things were different. I knew it immediately. I knew it even before I opened my eyes. For one thing, there was silence – or as near to silence as you can get behind these four walls overlooked by concrete and barbed wire, with sirens constantly wailing, bells ringing, inmates calling, jibing, talking, fighting.

So when there was no dawn chorus, no clanging or rattling of the bars as the warders began their rounds and the prisoners kick started their day, I knew that this was it. This was the day, the day that would mark the rest of our time here.

Like I said, it’s hard to understand people in here. The generals can sabela all they want about brotherhood, about the gangs standing together, keeping control, watching each other’s backs, presenting a united front, but when push comes to shove – and it will, here in this godforsaken place – there can be only one winner, one commander, one boss.

And when the time came, it came quick – and hard. Wes, the sergeant, the man-boy with the angel’s voice, the tattoos running all the way up his arm and across his neck, he was the first to fall. He never saw it coming, not even for a second. One minute he was stepping out the shower, the next the back of his skull hit the tiles with a deafening thud, a gash sliced across his nightingale throat, a spray of red dancing in mid-air until it hit the walls, the door and began to drip slowly to the wet floor.

And that was it. World War III had begun. There was no going back. Staring death in the face, the prisoners sprang to life. From the deadly silence that hung over this place like a shroud came a crescendo of voices, an echo of metal against metal, hand-made weapons emerging from the woodwork, the smashing of anything that might smash, wails of terror. Then from the outside, the tear gas, the gunshots, rubber bullets ricocheting off already pock-marked walls.

The wardens are too scared to come in today. It will be a long, long day. But by the time night comes, when shadows begin to fall and it’s lights-out, we will know who is who, who has fallen and who will walk in the footsteps of Po. We will know. I understand the story now. How it works. There will be more blood, oh yes – and lots of it. That much I know for sure.