Tangeni Amupadhi
Like President Nelson Mandela, Gaaitsiwe “Conka” Rakuba is a veteran prisoner who celebrated 27 Christmases behind bars. But he was jailed for different reasons.
Rakuba (42) is a career prisoner: he first went to jail in 1970 and since then hadn’t spent more than three months “outside”, until his release last year. This month he will have been out for nine months, and he has sworn he will stay clean.
“I finished my whole life in prison. But now I would rather suffer on the outside than go back there,” he says. “I told myself I should forget about crime – it doesn’t pay.”
Besides, he was warned upon his release that his next sentence will be indefinite because he is now regarded as an habitual offender.
Rakuba is one of those boys who grew up in Meadowlands, Soweto, with a saturation of American gangster movies. They envied the thugs they saw on screen, and young men who had not served time were regarded as “sissies”.
He was given the nickname “Concrete” after miraculously escaping unhurt when rival gang members stoned him with bricks, burying him alive. It has since been shortened to “Conka”.
His prison career began when he tried to sell a stolen tape recorder and car wheel cap to a police officer in civilian clothes. He went to prison for a misdemeanour, and emerged a big- time crook.
He “graduated” to robbery, car theft and hijacking after being released from prison, often getting caught before he could enjoy the fruits of his “labour”.
He has done time in at least 10 Gauteng prisons, under different names: Hlomendlini Mhlongo from Durban, Herold Birds and Girly Mulligan. His last crime was hijacking a car in Krugersdorp, which earned him an eight-year jail term.
In prison he was part of the Airforce RAF4, a prison gang whose members wear tattoos on their hands and below their armpits. The gang specialises in escapes. Being a veteran, he was known in prison as “professor”, or madala.
“As a professor, I had an office. My word was law,” he boasts. “The madala could not lie, because I knew all the rules and regulations of prison. If gangs wanted to fight, I had to sanction that.”
He also wielded some authority over prison officials, who loved and respected him.
A warder at Krugersdorp prison says Rakuba was a “nice guy who never gave serious trouble. He would ask us what we wanted to drink, and within a moment the drinks would be there. We miss him.”
Rakuba recalls with pride his easy life in prison: “I’ve done all kinds of tricks to prisoners and to the members [warders]. I could smuggle in six boxes of dagga, bottles of brandy, 1 000 mandrax tablets and have a braai in prison. I used to run a business.
“I played cripple for four years just to get the sympathy of warders, and that’s not a lie. But one day another bandiet grabbed R40 I got from my relatives. I forgot the handicap stuff and chased after him. When people saw this, they started questioning whether I was really a cripple.
“The next morning I became a preacher, saying God performed a miracle on me – that’s the kind of life you live in prison.”
He says life on the outside is not easy – he needs a job to survive, and his curriculum vitae is hardly an asset. He did not learn a trade in prison. He thought of selling dagga, but quickly discarded that idea because it could get him back behind bars.
Like Rip van Winkle, Rakuba has discovered South Africa has changed substantially while he was “away”: he recently handed in his apartheid-era dompas and applied for an identity document as a “new” South African.