“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 fo
od 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 s
ex! 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.
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