Next to the door, which is more to the middle of the truck, stands the only white man among the prisoners in transit, his handcuffed hands holding on to the top of the door, looking through the window sideways. Ruddy face, brown straggly hair and a short squarish beard. On the last lap of our journey he had tried to be uplifting, telling us that he knows the place we are going to, that it is not the first time that he goes there, and that it is not such a bad place. But then he gave up and now stares impassively through the window.
“Hey, madota,” exclaims a guy two rows from me, and in a second everyone is rushing towards his side – which is also my side of the meshed windows – in an attempt to look through. I am squashed into the steel wall and forcefully twist my head so that I can also see through the window. Some of the convicts peer over my head, others past my cheek. We have arrived. Our journey has taken close to two hours. Out there are people in orange prison clothing tending the gardens behind high, heavy mesh fences with razor wire. They are mere specks from where we are now, but I can make out different postures, some standing, a few squatting, some shading their eyes to stare at us.
“Hola!” somebody shouts from within the truck. And I think I hear a replying hola, but it cannot be possible, I think, because of the distance between us. Then one of the convicts down there lifts his hand in a wave, and suddenly the truck explodes into resounding holas, whistles, mfowethu, and the truck suddenly swerves, lurching the body mass of men and chains. I think to myself, this is a real chain reaction. In our handcuffs and chains we all share half-slaps and thumb-to-thumb squeezes, as if we have won some secret wager. Or is it just feeling the welcoming of new blood and bodies?
At the main entrance is a big light-blue-and-white caravan tuck shop with bold letters across its top, proclaiming in smaller letters potjiekos, hamburgers, cheese sandwiches. Not a bad business, selling food to visitors come to visit relatives behind bars.
Beyond the fence stands a tall yellow-brick building. A couple of palm trees in front of it and, next to the wide entrance, a pole reaching high into the sky with the flag of the country, multicolour Y-fronts waving gently in a slow breeze. Whatever amount the ad agency that designed our new national flag got in the way of payment was way too much.
Mounds of greenery on either side of the tar road. High electric fences and circular, towering concrete turrets. The truck slackens and turns left into a short turn-off, coming to a gradual standstill in front of a wide gate leading to a small rectangular building. On top of it in big black letters: Johannesburg Prison.
At the gate, the engine of the truck still keeps running for what feels like ages and the clatter starts to tell on my co-passengers who start to shift their weight from one foot to another, stretching themselves, the look of silent anxiety becoming more pronounced on their faces.
The truck engine suddenly revs louder, a short reverse and it rumbles forward. We roll past on the left-hand side of the heavenwards-stretched arm of the checkpoint boom. A dark, fattish, short guy is holding it down on one side and carries a handgun stretched across his chest on top of a brown bulletproof vest. We come to a standstill in front of a towering entrance with a heavy white steel door that opens and our jail truck slips through into the interior. The door clangs shut behind us and then we are in a courtyard filled only by two empty yellow-and-blue police vehicles.
On other side of the vehicles, masses of waiting prisoners are squatting still manacled and handcuffed, the queue extending right into the admission centre. The door of the police van is unlocked, we are screamed at and, still handcuffed and footchained, we are frogmarched to the admissions hall of the infamous Sun City, a.k.a Sin City – Jo’burg’s biggest prison, named after the mega gambling hotel and casino nearby.
The admission centre is a huge concrete building that processes unsentenced adult males either denied bail or who can’t afford it. But no doubt about it, Sun City is not for guys they lock up drunk for the night in the holding cell of the police station and throw out on the streets the next day. This is one step deeper, where you begin your apprenticehip as a career criminal or a jailbird.
Once in the hall, lined with guards, we are unchained and unhandcuffed, each and every one of us is rubbing the circulation back into our wrists or flexing our ankles. “Ngenani!” commands the prisoner Sleek who was in the truck with us.
“Down!” he shouts, showing us how we have to wait, squatting down on our heels. Next to the table stands an extremely tall white warder with corn-coloured hair, a conspicuous Adam’s apple and weird, bulging eyes. He is standing in front of something that appears to be a pulpit – they might have taken it from the prison’s church.
Next to him, on chairs behind a wood table, sit two black warders with sheaves of paper in front of them. Sleek is still with us. “Madala stokies – repeat offenders – to one side, and new ones to the other side!” barks Sleek again. We divide ourselves down the middle, the readmissions going to the other side of the room, us newcomers remaining this side, all of us forced to squat, four convicts per row.
Word is passed down the line that when you disappear into the room at the end, they don’t only take your name and give you a number but warders also search up your backside with rubber gloves for the infamous dagga bullets and other illegal imports. But even before that happens, if you go to the toilet, the Numbers gangs will try to search you themselves. They know exactly who has the bullet and who has not. I feel my own barriers crumbling. There are just too many people in here not to rub shoulders.
“Wie is djy en waarvandaan kom djy? Who are you and where do you come from?” asks a heavily tattood prisoner. He is in my face. No doubt this guy is talking to me and expecting an answer. I have noticed that most guys here say the same thing over two or three times in different languages. First they say it in the language they think you will understand the best: Afrikaans for coloureds, Zulu for blacks and English if they can’t speak Zulu. But rather than wait to see which is your language, they throw in their second guess just like that.
The main thing is not to show fear so I just tell him that I am Michael from Hillbrow but originally from Kimberley.
He laughs and tells me, “No, man, is djy dom? Are you stupid? You have to answer that you are a frans, and that you come from the bush. Me, I am from the 28s,” he says. “I can teach you a lot.” There is an awkward moment when neither of us says anything. I don’t exactly stare him down, so I just stand there and keep looking at him until he stands up to move up in the queue where he continues his business.
What is this place and what is all this twenty-something number stuff? Twenty this, twenty that. A word that seems to be in every man’s every sentence every time he opens his mouth. The queue moves slowly.
I keep on thinking about Braamfontein, about my few possessions, my few clothes, my books, my pocket Oxford dictionary, my blankets and my toothbrush. I wonder who is using them now. For the rest of the morning, as the line crawls and stops, crawls and stops, I press my foot down against my knife as I shuffle along, not very comfortable but reassuring like. I’ve already made a decision. I didn’t expect to hold onto it this long but here it is with me and I’m going to do my damnedest not to part with it.
In the old days of apartheid, I heard that prisoners had to hand over their footwear and got issued with strong brown boots like you get in the army. Lucky for me the new government has no money for that kind of generosity. My old track shoes also don’t look like much so hopefully no other prisoner is going to covet them.
Before too long, sure enough another prisoner in a green overall – this guy also covered in tattoos – puts his face in mine.
“Wie is djy en waarvandaan kom djy?”
“MacLean from Kimberley,” I tell him.
A twist at the corner of his lip. “Which prison you stimela from?” he asks.
“Stimela?” I mumble. “What’s that?”
“It means steam train,” he tells me. “In the old days prisoners used to arrive
at the gates right off the train, but here it just means where you come from as a frans.”
“Frans?” I ask, thinking that these conversations could be shorter and easier if I learn the lingo.
“New prisoner,” he explains, “like you, not a madota – that is senior rank of the gangs.”
“Ek is sonop van die kamp van die ses-en-twintig. I am sun-up from the camp of the 26,” he volunteers. “You must not join the 28s or the 27s but only the 26s, no matter what. Remember that, my friend – the 26s, we’re the clevers.”
Behind the gang talk I can see a man with some kindness in him. “All you need to survive in prison is good manners, respect for everyone and a good heart,” he says before he moves on.
So thus far I’ve been approached by the 28s and 26s. Somehow the 27s have managed to ignore me or overlook me and I don’t get a pick-up line from any of their lot. I turn my eyes back to the queue in front of me and shift my weight from one foot to another to relieve the strain on my soles caused by the weight of my left foot on the knife. Not only Mr Knife, but the money in my underwear still with me.
Adam’s Apple warder looks through us and towards the old-timers. His eyes fall upon Sleek who is standing among the last row of people of the old and the sick. “What did you bring for us today?”
“These things don’t have money,” hisses Sleek, jerking his head in our direction.
“Who wants to sign in money?” asks Adam’s Apple. He laughs, looks at Sleek, shakes his head and proceeds to push with the small roller on the table as they begin to fingerprint us one by one. “Sthupa left and right.”
“Naam? Your name.”
“Michael MacLean.”
“New one?”
“Yes, makhosi.”
He pushes out a blue card for me. I roll my thumbprints on the card. Then it is my turn to pass through the narrow black door. By 2 pm I am checked in, knife, bucks and all, and get shown to my cell along a long narrow corridor with the yellow lights still on. To our right are cell doors at intervals and to our left is a solid wall, above us a heavy concrete roof.
Well, here I am in a rectangular room lined with bunk beds and with ablutions at the front. Exactly 52 men in each cell, with 100 cells just like this. Some 5200 men in Section A of Sun City. Another 4000 in Section B and 3000 in Section C. Total 12 000 men.
The warders who checked us in only came as far as the cell gate. After shoving and locking us in, two of the guys already there sized us up and showed us to our sleeping places. About eight of us don’t get a bed – there are not enough – but we get a space near the toilet end where we can put down a blanket for a mattress and another to cover us. The other inmates are all sitting on the scaffold beds, staring out in front of them like children at a Christmas party, not sure what to do or say. At the back of the cell, a small portion of the cell is cordoned off with two sheets forming a curtained wall.
I relax several notches and so do the others. If this is the best they can offer then there is nothing to fear. So this is what real prisons are all about.
My education begins straight away.
First night the singing starts.
“Hello, darling; come and visit me, I am in jail, I got arrested…”
Songs of rebellion and lamentation over and over. Being forced to sing till the early hours of the morning without rest, when all I desperately want to do is sleep. Being a natural loner I thought it would be all sitting alone in a dark cell, like Mandela, with lots of time to sleep, think, philosophise and write. But the lights never go off, the hustling and the fighting never stop, and you are never ever alone.
The double bunks are scaffolded and enclosed by sheets called mkhukhus. Four bunks, all covered with sheets, enclose a kind of courtyard, the vertical sheet – called mdiya-diya – forming little curtains so that it’s all domestic-like. The toughest guys each have a ‘wife’, and there are already some advances in that direction.
In no time I come to understand what a frans is. It means the opposite of what it implies. Frans means ‘free’, or bird, as in ‘free like a bird’. Here it means to be a servant to members of the Numbers gangs, to polish boots, make beds and sweep floors and a couple of extra things too for the Number madotas – you know, in the wife line of things.
I am sleeping on the floor, like most of the other awaiting trialists. The double bunk beds are taken by those with money to lease them. In Sun City nothing is free and money speaks the loudest.
My cell of 52 awaiting trialists is ruled by eight people. Four in the back in bunks that are curtained off. A place called China. They rule the cell under the direct nod of the warders to whom these four dogs pay a fee to do the warders’ job for them. In order to pay their rent for owning us, they are ruthless, especially to new arrestees, and try to extract money or goods, which they can convert into money. In turn the warders act dumb to what goes on in the cell. But God help those Chinas if they can’t pay come the end of the week. The Great Wall of China – in other words, their curtains – gets torn down and the Chinas are replaced and all of those they exploited get their revenge.
But it’s not the Chinas who actually implement the law of the cell. It is Japan. On the first day you get summoned by Japan – the other four of the eight who rule the cell. Japan is also a curtained area, but at the entrance to the cell. Every newcomer has an admissions interview in Japan. My turn has come and I am told I am wanted there. With a swagger I walk down the cell and part the curtain. In the centre of the cordoned-off area is a small cooking pot on a paraffin burner, bubbling with meat stew. On the bottom bunk is a fat man wearing an immaculate white shirt and orange trousers. To my left an older guy with a rusty complexion is sitting on a bed, while the head of a young boy sticks out from beneath the sheets. To my right another young boy still in bed. All are looking at me.
“Hola, gazzie,” mumbles the fat guy, who also seems to double up as cook, because every now and then he stirs the pot.
“Wie is djy and waarvandaan kom djy? What’s your name and where d’you come from?”
I deliberately avoid the stock frans answer and just tell them, “My name is Michael and I come from Braamfontien where I share a flat with a few friends – the rent is cheap.”
“You know this is jail,” he says. “So what did you bring for the guys?”
“Nothing,” I answer curtly.
He repeats the question. “So what did you bring for the guys?”
“Nothing,” I answer again.
Rusty Face asks me, “What will you say if we search you?”
I came prepared for this interview. Mr Knife has migrated from my sole to my pocket. With a flick of my wrist I open the okapi.
“None of you is going to search me,” I answer with a solemn face, my voice deadpan. “The first one who…”
“I see you’re lekker hardegat,” says the fat one, the one who seems to be the leader. “Tomorrow you must leave our cell and go to your brothers.”
“This prison is big. I’m sure I can find many brothers,” I say, parting the curtain and stepping out of the enclosure.
It’s already time for sleep but for some reason I lie face down with the palms of my hands flat on the floor directly under my armpits and begin to do press-ups. I surprise myself and do 50 before my arms collapse at the elbow.
That night I lie in bed under the scratchy blanket with my shoes on, flexing my arch against Mr Knife.
Sleeping on the floor next to all those other bodies, I have discovered, is not good. As soon as you have fallen asleep someone is sure to push up against you in ways you don’t want. Last night a guy I couldn’t even see tried to feel me up. I hit him hard in the face and moved my blanket to another place. One blanket down on the floor, one on top, sleep in clothes, that is how it is here.
But the floor is too crowded and you don’t have your own space so I have traded both my lunchtime slices of bread with Malcolm – a big but soft coloured from Eldos – for a bed, the top bunk above his, which he some
how owns. Top bunks are the cheapest but also come with their problems.
It is night, the cell bathed in a yellow glow, and I am staring at the ceiling from the top bed, which is just a few feet away from the ceiling. My shoes are none other than on my feet. Where he is standing, his head is almost level with me, although I am lying and he is standing. This is how it began.
“I just came to ask for Vaseline,” says Malcolm. I stare into his almost delicate face. He speaks by rushing through his words to hide his slight stutter. He does not have on a top, only striped prison pyjama pants severed at the knees.
“Take it then,” I say.
“I want to smear my legs,” he explains, taking the jar of Vaseline. He sits down on his bed and starts to rub the Vaseline into his palms and then onto his legs with slow and steady movements, occasionally glancing up at me.
Then I see him get up again and step closer. “Let me, let me… smear you,” the stutter now coming through. I say nothing but sit up and bring my left shoe onto my right knee. “My broer,” he pleads, his voice slightly shaking, “I will not tell anyone, just one round.”
I extract Mr Knife, spring down and hold the blade against his throat. “Don’t fok with me, verstaan?” I whisper again through gritted teeth. “Verstaan? Unnerstand?” I say again, increasing the pressure till there is a little blood and till he nods. I leave him and a minute later he stands up and storms out through the partitioning sheet. I am still trembling. I had known that this day would come, from the first day when I started sleeping on top of his bed.
In the morning he puts out a complaint from our end of the cell. “It is better that this guy leaves here,” he gestures towards me. “He has no cooperation.”
“What’s the problem?” asks Mxhagazisi, one of the Chinas.
Malcolm searches for an answer, and latches onto the first thing he can think of: “MacLean, he doesn’t wash!”
It seems that my cellmates are stuck with me, and me with them, for the time being. I have tried to find another cell but it seems no one will have me. Today was like the day before which was like the day before which was like the day before. In this place I feel days can become years.
White Paper, White Ink Page 4
