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.
Sources
The transcript for the BBC documentary Killers Don’t Cry was found on http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/
programmes/correspondent/transcripts/1298829.txt. It appears in White Paper White Ink in a marginally edited format.
The descriptions of the traditional music orchestrated by Don owe much to Laurie Levine’s The Drum Café’s Traditional Music of South Africa, an extraordinary book (with CD) that is now, sadly, out of print.
For the detailed descriptions of the Numbers gangs’ rituals, language and myths, it is with huge gratitude that I acknowledge a remarkable but perhaps little-recognised book, God’s Gangsters, by Heather Parker-Lewis. In this book, Parker-Lewis, working as a social worker in a Cape Town prison, earns the trust of the Numbers gansters, who reveal to her their hitherto closely guarded rituals and litanies. Without the in-depth and nuanced research of Parker-Lewis, this book would not have been possible. The description of the initiation ceremonies draws heavily on the research of Parker-Lewis as they appear in God’s Gangsters.
The poem, ‘The Broken String’, comes from Neil Bennun’s book with the same title. The poem about the San prisoners rolling stones to reclaim the land on which Cape Town’s Victoria & Alfred Waterfront now stands appears in Pippa Skotnes’ book, Heaven’s Things – A story of the /Xam.
The gang histories and tattoo narratives draw heavily on the work of Jonny Steinberg in his ground-breaking book The Number. The influence of this particular work on my own cannot be overemphasised. In many ways, The Number was the inspiration for White Paper White Ink, which was an attempt to extend Steinberg’s excellent but more academic work on the Numbers to wider audiences via a more popular format, namely the prison thriller. The conversation at the end of the book between Pieter and Dog involving the riddle of the umbrellas, as well as the conversation involving prisoners willing to die for each other, were also gleaned from Steinberg’s book.
The illustrations of the prisoner tattoos are based on tattoos photographed by myself (Jonathan Morgan), as well as from an exceptional collection photographed by Araminta de Clermont and available online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2008/sep/05/photography.
When Pieter, in a conversation with Sipho, explains how the 28s are holding a mirror up to the warders, his words derive from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Numbers_Gang.
The conversation between various prisoners concerning their first kills was based on the research of Don Pinnock in his book The Brotherhoods: Street Gangs and State Control in Cape Town.
The song about Nonqawuse and Don’s fifth lecture about the Xhosa cattle killings, as pointed out by Don himself, derive from JB Peires’ excellent work entitled The Dead Will Arise.
Similarly, when Numisani Mathebula – the real-life Nongoloza – goes on trial, the facts derive from Jonny Steinberg’s The Number as well as from Steinberg’s own source, The Small Matter of a Horse by Charles van Onselen.
References
Loos, J. (2004) Echoes of Slavery: Voices from our Past, New Africa Books, Cape Town.
Breytenbach, C. (2003) The Spirit of District Six, Human & Rousseau, Cape Town.
Steinberg, J. (2004) The Number, Jonathan Ball Publishers, Johannesburg and Cape Town.
Peires, JB. (1989) The Dead Will Arise, Ravan Press, Johannesburg.
Mandela, N. (1994) Long Walk to Freedom (Abridged version), Nolwazi, Johannesburg.
Mandela, N. (1995) Long Walk to Freedom, Little, Brown and Co., London.
Balson, S. (2007) Children of the Mist: The Lost Tribe of South Africa (self–published).
Skotnes, P. (1999) Heaven’s Things: A story of the /Xam, LLRAEC, Cape Town.
Bennun, N. (2004) The Broken String: The Last Words of an Extinct People, Viking, London.
Martin, D.C. (1999) Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town, Past and Present, David Philip Publishers, Cape Town.
Parker-Lewis, H. (2006) God’s Gangsters: The History, Language, Rituals, Secrets and Myths of South Africa’s Prison Gangs, ihilihili press, Cape Town.
Van Onselen, C. (2008) The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of Nongoloza Mathebula, 1867–1948, Protea Book House, Johannesburg.
Morgan, J. (1999) Finding Mr Madini, David Philip Publishers, Cape Town.
Wolfe, T. (1975) The New Journalism, Picador, London.
Pike, S. (2003) Surfing in South Africa, Double Storey, Cape Town.
Haysam, N. (1981) Towards an Understanding of Prison Gangs, Institute of Criminology, University of Cape Town.
Fortune, L. (1996) The House in Tyne Street: Childhood Memories of District Six, Kwela, Cape Town.
Plaatje, S. (1930) Mhudi, Lovedale Press, Alice.
Pinnock, D. (1984) The Brotherhoods: Street Gangs and State Control in Cape Town, David Philip Publishers, Cape Town.
Haggard, R. (1861) Swallow, available online at http://manybooks.net/titles/haggardhetext03swllw10.html.
Levine, L. (2005) The Drum Café’s Traditional Music of South Africa, Jacana Media, Johannesburg.
Penn, N. (2005) The Forgotten Frontier: Colonists and Khoi-San on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century, Double Storey, Cape Town.
Penn, N. (1999) Rogues, Rebels and Runaways: 18th-Century Cape Characters, David Philip Publishers, Cape Town.
About the Authors
Jonathan Morgan has worked as a teacher, community vegetable gardener, clinical psychologist and, most recently, as a writer and editor of psychosocial materials for REPSSI (Regional Psychosocial Support Initiative). Jonathan lives in Cape Town with his wife Kyoko, his daughter Masego and his son Taiji. He loves cycling, hiking and surfing.
Sipho Madini was and is the central character in Finding Mr Madini. He was born in Kimberley and attended school until Standard 9 where he got distinctions for English and Afrikaans. As a nine-year-old he would rummage through the Vergenoeg municipal dump for discarded books. He dreamt of writing his own book someday as well as having it published. At the age of 16 he completed a book about taxi drivers, relationship problems, one-night stands and ghosts. This handwritten manuscript was placed into a big envelope and, from Kimberley, posted to a Johannesburg PO Box address that Sipho had found in a magazine. In 1997 Sipho followed his story to Johannesburg. His adventures there are well described in Finding Mr Madini. Sipho now works as a non-metal welder in Vereeniging. He lives with his girlfriend Maserame and their four-year-old baby girl Kegisaletse.
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