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 lear
ned 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 l
ooks 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?”
White Paper, White Ink Page 14