by Ross Kemp
I asked which of the three Number divisions he belonged to. It took him some time to reply. When he did it was like listening to a man speaking from the bottom of a deep well; there was a strangeness in him. ‘The 28s.’
‘How long have you been in the 28s?’
‘Twenty-eight years,’ he replied without irony. ‘I am a senior officer.’
‘Which branch of the 28s?’
‘The blood line.’ The blood line is the fighting wing of the 28s.
A younger man standing nearby suddenly butted in: ‘Don’t speak to the camera.’ The 28 shrugged and turned away.
‘He won’t speak more,’ Malgas said. ‘It is the Number code. Anyone who tells the gang’s secrets is killed.’
It was time to go up to the second floor of the super- maximum security wing that housed some of the most dangerous Number gang members. Two cells had agreed to be interviewed; whether they would talk openly about the gang was another matter. I glanced at Malgas, then stopped and looked at him harder. There was a concerned expression on his face I hadn’t seen till now. He was feeling the fear. If he was a little worried then, I should be very worried.
‘You will see some beds are curtained off; these are the bunks of the officers and their wyfies. You will find it is dark in the cells. We had to put metal sheets over the windows after the neighbours outside the prison complained about the noise. Remember: you focus; you keep a soft face; you breathe, you make eye contact and you think. You never show them any fear. The Number are pack animals: if you show them fear, they are on top of you.’ I took him to mean that literally.
I thought the advice about the ‘soft face’ was interesting. Malgas kept his face expressionless almost all of the time. I suppose if you don’t give any emotion out then the prisoners can’t pick up on it.
Inside the prison it was stark and surprisingly cold: the thick stone walls kept the intense summer heat outside. I could see why Nelson Mandela might have fallen ill. We walked along a bare grey corridor towards the first of the big group cells. Out of nowhere a bright wink of light caught my eye. It was a reflection from a scrap of shaving mirror taped to the end of a stick projecting from between the bars of a cell up ahead. Then more mirrors on sticks began to appear, like the antennae of some strange insect. Most were car wing mirrors: the gangsters wanted to see who was coming. Forewarned being forearmed, in Pollsmoor mirrors are high on the list of prized possessions.
Malgas unlocked the door of the first cell and we stepped inside. It was dark, as he had warned me it would be, so dark that for a moment, coming in from the brightness outside, it took time for your eyes to adjust. I tried to leave a part of my brain – the bit with the fear in it – outside in the corridor. If I had thought the smell in the rest of the prison was bad, in here it was raw: a thick, soupy, caged-animal stink so thick you could chew it. Except for the warders, hardly anyone but the prisoners themselves ever goes inside these cells. Two- and three-tier bunk beds lined the walls. Men stood staring at us in knots of three or four. Meeting their gaze, it was hard not to feel intimidated. We were now totally under their control, I just had to hope that Malgas would keep us safe.
Remembering what Malgas had said, I tried my hardest to relax and show none of the fear I was feeling. As a way of controlling it, I tried to focus on details. I noticed that a lot of the prisoners were missing their front teeth – not as the result of fights but because in Pollsmoor having a gaping hole where they used to be is the height of fashion. If they can afford it, prisoners have gold substitutes put in. Most inmates just have the gap.
This was the hard core of the Number gang, men who had nothing to lose. The worst thing that could happen to them was to get more time in Pollsmoor, but many of them were serving life sentences anyway.
Hardly daring to look round, wyfies sat on the lower bunks, silent. Three leaders of the 28s came forward. They were very interested in the sound equipment we had with us – not for the kit itself but for the batteries, which can be used to power things like mobile phones. As with mirrors, batteries are one of Pollsmoor’s most valuable currencies. They made gang recognition signals with their fingers and hands.
At first no one would say much. I was finding it pretty hard to understand them anyway. South Africa has eleven official languages, but most people from the Cape Flats speak Kapie-taal, a mix of Afrikaans with English and Xhosa, a mainly southern language. Add to that the special dialects used by the gangs, Tsotsi-taal and Fly-taal, and as an English-only outsider you are in trouble. The boys have some pretty pithy ways of wishing you dead: Ek sal jou witbiene maak, for instance – ‘I’ll turn you into white bones.’ Quite a few of the prisoners did not speak any English at all. Those who did had a strong, guttural accent mixed with lots of attitude.
When I made it clear I did not expect them to tell me the inner secrets of the gang and just wanted to talk about the kind of things that happened inside Pollsmoor some of the guys in the cell began to loosen up. The weird thing was that, as bad as they looked and as hard as they were, some of them were giggling and nudging one another like schoolboys. They would stab you as soon as look at you, but there was a strange childlike side to them. Perhaps it came from spending so much of their lives in an institution.
But there the comparison with kids ends. They told me what they usually do when a new prisoner decides to fight rather than give in and become a wyfie. It immediately became clear we were not talking about a fair contest. Surrounding their prey, the gang set about him with a range of weapons. Made out of what comes to hand, these include metal prison mugs fastened to leather belts. To make it more deadly, the rim of the mug is sharpened to a cutting edge. They also use heavy metal padlocks tied to belts or lengths of nylon strap. The victim has little chance. Surrounding him, five or six of the Number attack at a signal. ‘You have to do it with this side,’ said a man holding a mug on the end of a belt. He turned the mug in his hand and ran a fingertip around the sharpened rim. It made me shudder just to look at it. That was going to slice a man’s scalp wide.
‘Why that side?’ I asked.
‘So you make the blood come open.’
A second 28 handed me one of the padlock weapons. ‘Feel the weight and see what it can do to a person’s skull,’ he said. I weighed the thing in my hand and gave the padlock an experimental swing. Your basic low-tech implement, there was no doubt at all it could kill. ‘The heavier the lock the better,’ said this expert at hurting people. ‘If you crack his skull, you’ve got him.’ He took the strap back. ‘You must not take it long like this,’ he said in a heavy voice, ‘because I can catch this thing. Then I cut you.’ Grabbing hold of it right up close to the lock so that it was an extension of his fist, he demonstrated, thwacking the weapon into his palm in a series of flat, vicious blows. ‘You must keep it shorter, like this.’ I had another go, and this time the approving murmur of the men in the cell told me I had done it right.
Always nice to learn new skills.
Aiming for the skull, where it not only hurts the most but stands to do the greatest damage, the gangsters bash anyone who dares stand up to them until he either dies or does what they want. Sometimes, as if massed padlocks weren’t enough, an attacker armed with a knife will stand off a little from the main assault group. One of the 28s in the second cell we now went into showed me how he did it. ‘I step in when I see him and I take shots.’ He stabbed with an imaginary knife, holding it horizontal and jabbing with fast, short-armed, vicious thrusts. In Pollsmoor speak, ‘taking shots’ means stabbing. The biggest problem for the person on the end of all this is that he has no idea when the Number will stop beating and stabbing him. Or even stop at all.
The gangsters told me the same treatment is handed out to anyone who crosses the Number or breaches gang rules, especially its code of silence. But when they come after you for a transgression, the Number don’t bother with tin mugs – it’s the heavy metal padlock. And they stab you for real. The pale scars and laceration marks on their hea
ds and bodies made it clear the men standing around me had all been through the mill.
Even if a man survives a Number beating, there is another test of his mettle before he can join the gang: he must stab a warder or another prisoner to order. One or more of the senior 28s chooses the target. I got lucky: one of the men I was talking to told me how it had happened with him. ‘They told me I could join, but first I had to stab a man. Not a prisoner, one of the warders. When I asked them how, they said I would get a knife, and as soon as it came I had to go and find Mr Murray and kill him.’
‘Did you do it?’
‘I didn’t believe they would get me a knife in the prison. But the next day a Number came and put one in my hand. He was passing. Straight away I covered it and hid it. Followed by other 28s, I found Mr Murray. The first shot was in his chest, the second in his left arm. My third shot was behind his back.’ Murray miraculously survived the attack. The gangster was sentenced on the 8 February in 1983 to six years; he is still there and will be for the rest of his life.
Given the strict secrecy code enforced by beatings and murder I was surprised the Number guys I’d met had told me as much as they had, but I wondered how I was going to find out any more. There was obviously a big macho thing in the Number – a man had to prove his courage, suffer in silence, all that – but from what I had gleaned so far, I suspected there was something much more intriguing, they were keeping to themselves. Back in my nice hotel, after a hot curry and with a much-needed cold beer in my fist, I sat down to read more of what our researcher John Conway had found out.
I got a bit of a shock. The Number have a history, and what a history. One of the strangest, most violent and most sexualized gangs on earth, South Africa’s Number gangsters trace their roots back through the apartheid system to the Zulu and Boer Wars.
Founded in 1906 by a bandit of Zulu origin named Nongoloza Mathebula, the Number gang started up in and around the settlements, mines and prisons of Johannesburg. Blessed with an extremely fertile imagination, Nongoloza invented a gang universe based around the three numbers that were magically important for him – 26, 27 and 28. Originally naming his followers the Ninevites after a biblical warrior tribe, Nongoloza organized his gang along the military lines he had seen work so effectively for the British and the Boers. Nongoloza’s soldiers might not have had real uniforms, but in their minds they had splendid ones based on British examples. For a time the Ninevites had stood up to God’s will; in the same way the Number would stand up to the British and Boer invaders.
Along with imaginary uniforms came a paramilitary structure. Ranks and rules, hierarchies and codes of behaviour – magpie-like, Nongoloza picked from the military techniques he’d been exposed to in the recent wars. He and his men went underground, living in a series of disused mineshafts, caves and tunnels to the south-west of Johannesburg. Perhaps the punishing hit-and-run guerrilla tactics of the heavily outnumbered Boers, who had come inch-close to defeating the British army, inspired him. The gang’s robberies, often from unarmed and defenceless mine workers, became a byword for brutality. The Ninevites, or Number as they gradually became known, terrorized the area surrounding their warrens for the best part of twenty years. All kinds of legends and myths grew up around Nongoloza and his gang: they had beautiful white women living in their subterranean fortresses; they had shops and ammunition magazines and armouries, food stores and workshops of every description. Nongoloza’s followers believed he was bullet proof and had magical powers.
From the outset, there were three Number divisions: the 28s were the gang’s warriors, divided into the blood line, which did the fighting, and the white or private line, which was looked on as female. Imprisoned 28s were permitted to have ritualized sex with the white line. Kept in the dark and used at will, white line members were not told the whole of the gang’s history and inner secrets.
I was learning, but I could see that only the Number themselves understood all of the gang’s secrets, and perhaps even then only its most senior members. In Pollsmoor a 28 officer known as the glas (binoculars) is in charge of recruitment. The glas goes into the new arrivals area and selects likely-looking candidates for each of the Number divisions, as well as for specific roles within the gangs. Once he has chosen a prospect, the glas will ask the man a trick question: ‘If you can have soft soap to wash with or rough soap, which will you choose?’ If the man chooses soft, he will be made into a wyfie. The correct answer for a real man, of course, is rough. Another, more subtle example is ‘If it is raining and you have an umbrella, would you share it with me?’ The correct answer is ‘No, I would come out in the rain with you.’ They are looking for the smart cookies – recruits they believe have the right Number spirit. Also, if you share your umbrella, what else will you share.
Often originally sentenced to short terms of imprisonment, once made assassins there is no way out for the 27s: the more men he kills, the longer a 27 serves. One man I spoke to had been sentenced to six years in February 1983. A quarter of a century later he was still accumulating more and more time. Any money the 26 earn by their trickery is shared between all three Number divisions. The only way of leaving the Number is to reverse the process by which you joined. If you came in with blood then you must leave with blood – kill your way out. If you are a 26 and you came in with money then you must give the Number the same amount of cash to quit. It is possible to leave the Number and move on to live outside the gang, but then it is also possible to win the national lottery.
Captured and imprisoned in 1912, Nongoloza told a prison warder, ‘I reorganized my gang of robbers. I laid them under what has since become known as Nineveh law. I read in the Bible about the great state Nineveh which rebelled against the Lord and I selected that name for my gang as rebels against the government’s laws.’ Was Nongoloza a freedom fighter or a vicious armed robber? You decide.
Not all prisoners in Pollsmoor serve the Number gang as wyfies, only those unlucky enough to end up in a Number-dominated wing, but as in all prisons other types of sexual contact take place. Male transvestites, I discovered, can earn more money as prostitutes in Pollsmoor than outside. In my travels round the prison, I met some.
The first thing Beyoncé, Sandy and Charmaine told me was that the other prisoners looked on them as the only real women in Pollsmoor. As such, the ‘girls’ are given a lot of respect, and get a lot of work. Free to move around the prison without fear of harm, they also told me that some of the Number gangsters made use of their services, even though they already had their pick of wyfies.
When we met, Beyoncé, Sandy and Charmaine had just finished some business in the one-person cell they shared. This was unbelievably small, only as wide as my outstretched arms and no more than half a metre longer than that. Somehow, the prison authorities had managed to squeeze in a three-tier bunk. Beyoncé had a coarse ginger wig held in place with a black Alice band, Charmaine had tight, square-shaped plaits that looked suspiciously like hair extensions and Sandy wore a full-bottomed, blue-black wig that fell to her ample shoulders. In hot pants or tight jeans and high-heeled sandals, all three were festooned with flashy jewellery: rings, brightly coloured bangles, elaborate neck-laces and dangly earrings. In complete contrast, they were also heavily tattooed. Given the lack of space, they explained that while one of them was entertaining a customer, the other two stood outside and chatted to waiting clients. The man who had bought some professional services just before we got there came out looking rather sheepish, but at the same time he had a big smile on his face.
The cell we squeezed into was decked out with garish wallpaper, scarves draped here and there and glossy magazine photographs pinned to the walls in what to me looked like a poignant attempt at home-making. There was an overpowering aroma of what I can only describe as man smells and cheap scent.
My first meeting with them was surreal but, I have to admit, dead funny. ‘Hello,’ said a burly figure with a pierced nose and a heavy Afrikaans lisp. ‘My name’s Beyoncé.’ Toprove it
, she touched the big B tattooed on one side of her neck. Beyoncé had a lot of facial scarring from being beaten up by ungrateful clients, rivals, pimps and robbers. A large publicity shot of pop star Beyoncé Knowles, known both for her beauty and her ability to shake it, was tacked to the cell wall. Pointing to it with a flounce, Pollsmoor Beyoncé lisped, ‘That is a picture of me before my plane crash. Look at my face now; it’s a mess, isn’t it? But people still fancy me.’ She delivered this line with so much aplomb that we all laughed. Craig Matthew, our cameraman, laughed so much his glasses slipped off his forehead and dropped into the cell’s open toilet pan. We all gathered round and looked down. Craig’s specs were resting on top of something highly unpleasant. There was a short silence, followed by a long discussion about who was going to fish out the specs. We were all thinking the same thing.
‘Who’s going to get my glasses out?’ Craig asked.
‘Don’t look at me,’ I said hurriedly.
‘Or me,’ said Jeff Hodd, our soundman.
‘We’re not putting our hands down there,’ the ‘girls’ lisped in chorus. Grim-faced, Craig set about retrieving his spectacles with a couple of pencils. Every time he succeeded in lifting them clear of the mess in the bowl, the glasses slipped back. After several more attempts Craig stood up, let out a long stream of curses and gave up, leaving the specs as a memento of our visit.