White Paper, White Ink

by Jonathan Morgan

  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.