We didn’t see them again all day, but I can tell you now every single prisoner’s thoughts and dreams had a very different flavour that night before we all fell asleep.
“Hey, you!” says this young 27-wannabe running errands, trying very hard to get selected and recruited. “The madotas from the Big Three, they all want to see you.”
The three big gangs keep to themselves, but there is a need for them to meet on a daily basis. This meeting, I have heard, is called the meeting of the Valcross. Two from each gang attend and it is at the end of the warders’ day and at the beginning of the gangsters’ ‘day’, which is night. They discuss how things are to be organised for the next fifteen hours, hours that belong not the warders but to the gang leaders.
The short, powerful Benny speaks first.
“Ons het foja dat jy kan goed skryf. Ons foja dat jy nie deel wil wees van enige kamp. Ons is geduldig. Ons is vol en wys ons foja jy wil skryf van die nommer. Ons is vol en wys dat jou en jou main ou kan sterk staan om ’n boek te skryf.”
He is sabela-ing me, talking in the tongue of the Number, testing me, refusing to speak English or Afrikaans on principle. I don’t understand everything but just listen till he finishes.
Then the Xhosa-looking guy, Mandla, translates – not word for word, but in perfect English.
“We know you can write. We know you don’t want to join any gang. We know you are friends with Don, the librarian. We have been patient. We know you have someone who can help you write, that larnie Morgan. And we know that between you and Morgan you are capable of writing a book that is good enough to be published and sold in bookshops.”
“Umm”, I say, wanting to tell them I no longer see or even trust Jonathan.
“Silence,” I am told.
Then the Bushman guy Benny says, this time in English, “You have refused to join all three gangs and we have been patient with you. Now this is not a conversation, it’s a command from the twelve points… You can forget about your writing group and all those who have begun to tell their kak stories. We are now your group. Be ready tomorrow – bring just yourself, we will supply the pens and paper. The only thing you need to do is contact Morgan and tell him he is to help you.”
What they want me and Jonathan to write for them, I still don’t know. They didn’t or wouldn’t say. So, in a trance, I leave them and find my way back to my cell, kick off my shoes, pull the blanket over my face and wait for a train to take me to dream land. Just like when I was a laaitie, that is what I used to do to fall asleep – wait for a big steam engine to come along the silver tracks that could take me to the land of the night. Tonight it takes a long time for the right train to come.
I wake up and shower before the others, half excited, half terrified about what this means. Also feels like I don’t have much choice. I’ll only contact Jonathan once I have a better idea what is expected of us. Problem is I’ve forgotten his cell number.
I am expecting to be called again today but it doesn’t happen, but I see the female warder, Sersant Adriaanse, whose first name I have now managed to learn. She is called Margareth. I guess you could say it was more or less a normal day.
If nothing from the madotas came yesterday, it sure did today. After breakfast of two slices of bread, a chunk of margarine, and a boiled egg, I find myself back in the office of blankets, Cell 29B, summoned by the same messenger as before. Benny, Mandla and Pieter are all there waiting for me.
“To pick up on where we left off yesterday,” says Benny, “we know that you are writing a book about the gangs and the gangs secrets.”
“Not the secrets, not the gangs either,” I splutter, trying to hide my surprise. “It’s more about the lives of these guys before they came to prison. Anyway, no one came to the second meeting, so so far there is no book… But you know about that.”
“Well, we are tired of others, BBC, Allan Little, Jonny Steinberg who wrote the book called The Number – even though that was a good book – and larnies from the university, the newspapers, all telling our story, getting famous, getting money, and many of them getting it wrong. Now tell us more about that white guy, Morgan, who you working with, the one who helped you make this book.”
In his hands he holds a neatly cut-out page of a magazine with a short review of Finding Mr Madini.
Sipho, a brilliant poet is unaware of his success
– Siyabonga Mkhwanazi, City Press, October 1999
Sipho Madini, a brilliant poet who lived in a drain in Johannesburg, is not even aware that his life story and that of his fellow homeless people can be read throughout the country. The book, which has now been launched today, filled the shelves in stores throughout the country. “The present title of the book was not the one initially intended,” says the author Jonathan Morgan, 39. Owing to Madini’s mysterious disappearance, the book developed into a campaign to find Sipho.
Benny says to me, “This newspaper says you and him wrote a good book and people are still looking for you, including Morgan.”
“Please don’t hurt him,” I say quickly. “He’s my friend. You can do what you like to me, but please, he is okay.”
The generals look at each other, then Mandla of the 27s, speaks.
“Okay, listen, you know about Nongoloza, the father of the Numbers gangs?”
“A little,” I say.
“Well, soon you will know a lot. Like Benny told you, anywhere you look now you can see everything you want to know about the Numbers. On the TV, in the Sunday papers, in the fokken magazines, and in the bookshops. Everyone except us is telling our story.”
Benny, chips in: “In the beginning the word was enough, the story and ways of doing things were passed down from general to soldaat, and the Number remained pure. In the beginning even Po, the forefather and patriarch of the 28s, Numbers gangs, was worried that his law was becoming weak and watered down, stolen and misinterpreted, so he had it written in a book called the Makhulu book. Now the time has come for it to be written again. The Makhulu book has the history of the gangs, codes, rules, punishments, structure, hierarchy, uniforms, insignia…”
Here Benny pauses. “You know what insignia are, MacLean?”
Pieter tells me before I can answer.
“It’s those little medals and symbols and signs you see on all military uniforms telling you what army and what rank of soldier you looking at.”
Benny continues: “The Makhulu book has all this, plus flags, salutes, weapons, drilling commands, and how leadership should communicate and settle disputes with other Numbers. It is called the Pure White Book, or sometimes just the White Book.”
More than anything, I am impressed how good at talking all three of these guys are. They can sound rough, with lots of ma se poes and se gat thrown in, especially Pieter and Benny, but when they talk about their gangs, the structure and stuff like that, they are, like, so precise. They all speak with strong accents. Benny and Pieter, more Afrikaans coloured, and Mandla more black. But their English sounds more like what I would expect to find after apartheid, in a high office in Telkom in Cape Town or in government, not deep in the Cape Flats gangland or Piketberg Prison.
“Where is this book?” I ask. “And if you have it, why do you need me?”
“It has become dirty,” says Pieter, the 28s’ general. “It is vuil. It was first written with a pure white pen on pure white pages, which means that not everyone can see it.”
He’s not convinced that I’m getting it.
“Don’t you understand anything?” he continues. “It has never been written – it is in our heads and in our blood and on our tongues only – that is why we spend so much time sabela-ing and teaching the new recruits the book. But, as I said, it is now been lost and with all those others writing it down it has become corrupt… Even the gangs on the outside, most of those gangsters have never been to prison and they are using our language and our rituals.”
I dunno why they are telling me this and this must show on my face because Mandla steps in.
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“This is where you come in,” he says, talking to me more kindly than Pieter does and with less swearing. “We are going to tell it to you. We will recite the White Book, cos no one in this prison knows it better than us three. We are ordering you to write the true history of the Numbers, but this time with a black pen on pure white paper. We have all taken an oath not to reveal the Numbers’ secrets. Punishment is death, but on the Valcross we decided the time might be right to tell the world some things about us.”
The 26 general, little Benny – who in my mind I have named ‘the Bushman’, but who in his body is very Bruce Leeish – adds: “That’s as much as you will learn today. We’ll contact you when we are ready. We will also give you time to contact your larnie. And one more thing, here’s a phone with R20 airtime on it. Keep it well hidden, and make your calls by Tuesday. But, remember, if you can’t convince him to do what we asking, you are both in kak. Deep shit. Deep, deep kak.”
I decide not to use their cellphone, a newish Nokia, to phone Jonathan. I don’t want them having his number. Why am I trying to protect him? Looks like he ripped us all off, making money from that TV series.
It is Wednesday, around ten in the morning. I hurry towards the gate of the section. Today, I pretend to be sick and do not go out with the farm team. When I come to the grilled gate of the section, I try to catch the attention of the yellow, lean warder standing behind it. He is in a sort of no-man’s land. A few steps behind him is another gate, which he will have to unlock to let somebody in or out.
“Hola, my broer, can I please come in to phone?” I ask him. He considers it for a bit and decides to oblige. He walks over to the gate and unlocks it.
To my left is a door leading into the warder’s office, to my right a short passage leading up to heavy concrete steps. At the foot of the steps stand three Telkom pay phones. I hurry towards them and, at the first available phone – a coin phone not a card phone – I pick up the receiver off the hook and dial.
It rings and then, “Welcome to Telkom’s directory service. Your call will be answered in approximately two minutes…” comes the white female voice over the phone. “For assistance in English, press 1; for assistance in isiZulu, press 2; for assistance in Afrikaans, press 3.”
English is just fine, and I don’t want to wait to hear all thirteen official languages, so I press 1. A few rings and the phone is answered by a coloured male.
“Telkom Directory Assistance, how can I help you?”
“Good morning, yes, can you please give me the phone number of Homeless Talk?”
“Homeless Talk? Is it a company or what?”
“Yes, something like that,” I tell him. “It’s a newspaper.”
“Province?”
“Jo’burg, Gauteng, Bree Street.”
“Okay, hold a minute, sir. The number you have requested to follow…”
I fumble with a short pencil and the back of a matchbox, the only writing materials I could find at a short notice. On the third ring, a male voice, “Hello?”
“Hello, is this Homeless Talk?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry, this is Sipho Madini.”
“Who?”
“Sipho Madini, okay – a guy who used to write for your paper.”
“Sipho Madini!” the voice exclaims. “You don’t know me, cos I joined after you left, but you are famous here and even beyond here. You know you on TV? Hey, everybody, it’s Sipho Madini!”
The voice sounds far off, as if the guy’s talking over his shoulder. “Where you? Wait a minute, give me your number. You remember, Jonathan, the white guy? He told us to immediately give him your number if and when you call, and he said he’ll immediately call you back.”
I peer at the numbers on the phone box and call them off. He repeats them and sounds as if he is writing them down. “Okay.” He drops the phone and I do the same. I look at the phone wondering what I’ve set in motion.
It’s not even five minutes before the phone rings.
“Is it you, Sipho?” comes the white voice over the phone.
“Yes, it is me.”
Jonathan screams, “Fuckin’ hell! I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear you’re alive! Where are you? How are you? We’ve been worried sick about you.”
“I am in prison.”
“Prison?” he shouts. “What prison?”
“Up the West Coast in the Cape, it’s called Piketberg.”
“Jesus,” he says, “that’s not too far from me. I live in the Cape now. Can you talk?”
“Not really,” I say. “The warder only gave me two minutes and I’ve used them up.”
“Okay, give me a few days,” Jonathan tries to reassure me. “I’ll come visit you. This is a good excuse to visit some surf spots up the West Coast that are on my must-do list.”
“And if you come,” I hastily interrupt, “you must be looking for Michael MacLean and not Sipho Madini. Got it?”
I walk back to my cell feeling strangely hopeful, just to have contact with someone else out there. In my hand is still the Nokia. It still has R20 airtime left on it. I dial 053 876 5409, the number engraved in my brain. We never had a land line at home, but our neighbour did, and we were always asking people to phone us back on her phone. I speak to Shirley and asked her to go over the road and call my granny. Although my granny knows I’m here in Piketberg, we haven’t spoken since my arrival. She’s excited to hear my voice, but I explain I can’t talk long. I tell her I’ve written a book and that it’s in the bookshops. I tell her that even if she has no money to buy one, to go look at it, and that one day soon I will send her one and some money. I also ask her if she’s seen my mother, but she hasn’t.
I hurry through the section gate and jump down the high shining stoep into the prison yard. It is Saturday, about 10 am. Sunny, with only a few bright white clouds as if for decoration, and there are a few convicts strewn across the almost-empty prison yard. Why the hurry? My name has been called for a visit, that’s why. I am handed a ticket by the prisoner whose job it is to control such things. My first ever visit in over a year. No one visited me in Sun City, successfully that is. Last time Jonathan tried I didn’t let him find me. It must be him visiting this time, but who knows, it may be my granny and my uncle or maybe someone from Homeless Talk.
At the end of the prison yard, I walk until I arrive in front of a grilled gate in front of which is a warder and a couple of prisoners.
“Sorry, sir,” I say to the warder, “I am here for a visit.”
He looks at me, eyes narrowing. “Name?”
“Michael MacLean,” I answer.
“Ticket?”
I produce the authorisation allowing me access to the visitors’ area and slip it through the bars. The warder takes it, reads it and unlocks the gate, then locks it behind me. I go stand in the sun and he hurries over into the administration office. A minute later, he returns.
“Come, let’s go.”
I walk slightly away from him, noticing his cattle prod, his shock stick, and wishing it was Margareth who was walking with me. We enter into the administration office, past the computers on the desk. At the end of it, he unlocks another grille gate and we make our way to a heavy yellow safe-like door with an iron flap at head height. My warder proceeds to hit once or twice on the door with his giant key, a key so big it could be a weapon. The flap is pushed aside.
“Visit,” my warder informs the guard, and pushes my ticket through the space left vacant by the flap. The guard takes it and the huge door swings open. I enter and the door closes behind me.
This area looks like the inside of a big spaceship. To one side thick glass windows at chest height packed out next to each other until the far end of the room. A couple of small benches, standing two-two, opposite each other. Some convicts are in the room, sitting on benches, next to oldish ladies who you can guess are their mothers. Or they sit with youngish ladies on the opposite benches with a kid or two. All are conferring in low voices.
> One or two convicts have a packet of Simba Cheese Puffs open next to them or at their feet, or a plastic full of sweets, chocolates, cans of soft drinks. At the very end I see him, sitting on a bench, but next to him is this long silver thing that looks like the kind they bring dead soldiers back from Vietnam in.
“What’s with the body bag?” I ask.
“It’s got my surfboard in it,” he laughs. “Been at it ever since I came to Cape Town.”
The guy looks the same he always did, just a bit more tanned and more fit-looking. He jumps up and hugs me, which makes me feel kind of good and funny, what with all the moffie stuff you find here and other prisoners looking on. But to his credit, he calls me Michael, but with a big smile on his face, saying Michael extra loud a few times.
“Jeez, Michael, you look well. Hey, Michael, prison meals must be better than scavenging in dustbins in the streets of Jo’burg or eating pigeon. Serious, Michael, you’re looking okay” – kind of overdoing it but making me also smile and be happy.
He sits down on the bench, next to him is his green shoulder bag, the same one he used to have in Jo’burg. And he also has a plastic Pick n Pay bag with two cans of Coke and some chips. I sit on the the one side of the table.
“We’ve got another child now,” he tells me. “Taiji is his name. A baby brother for Masego. Depending on what Chinese characters you use to spell the name, it means either Calm Field or Big Compassion. He keeps us awake at night with his screaming, so I’m guessing its not Calm Field but he doesn’t really care about our need for sleep either so there goes Big Compassion too.”
I just nod. I’m happy to see this guy.
“I brought you some food, and… this.”
He takes out a glossy, red paperback book and shoves it towards me. First thing I notice is my name on the cover.
“Finding Mr Madini, directed by Jonathan Morgan and the Great African Spider Writers.”
“Why the Great African Spider Writers?” I ask him.
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