DAY ONE (Thursday)
Dagga Makes The World Go Round
`Follow!” yells the bored, overweight prison guard as he slams shut the outer door of Pretoria Local’s first floor.
“Follow! Follow! Follow!” He moves down the line counting the 25 “new ones” that are hastily kneeling in twos on the floor along the outer wall of the cell. He comes to a stop next to one of three white boys in the group, a stocky, curly-haired Afrikaner called Henk, who is crouched on his haunches.
“Kniel, moerskont!” He slaps him across the back of the head. Henk mutters obscenities.
“Wat s jy?” rumbles the guard. “Huh?” Thwack. “Wat s jy, hond?” Thwack. Henk sulks. From the courtyard already it has been patently obvious that there is going to be trouble with Henk. Henk doesn’t like black folk and black folk don’t like him.
“Turn!” yells the guard. “Turn! Turn! Turn!”
The new ones scramble to their feet and into the hok past the disdainful leer of James, the cell skoonmaker (caretaker) and his two lieutenants. The hokke are holding cells for new prisoners or those returning from a day in court.
They look like any other cell in the prison. Dirty, despite every effort to keep them clean. Peeling yellow plaster, broken windows, hard concrete floors, metal bunk beds to sleep 30. The pecking order of the cell runs from back to front, from the toilet where you enter to the television at the opposite end.
The prison was built in 1979 to house 2 200 prisoners and is currently home to more than 5 000, so inevitably some will sleep three to a mattress in a tangle of limbs next to the urinal and others will sleep in double beds. It’s a matter of space and economics.
Once the new ones have spent 24 hours in the hokke they will be allowed to choose which of the 26 cells on the four floors of the prison they want to occupy until their sentencing. Innocent or guilty, that could mean a stay of up to five years, as few of the country’s 54 000 awaiting trial prisoners can afford bail if it is granted. They will cost the state R80 each for every day of their stay. That’s R5-million a day. If they have power or money – ideally both, plus regular visitors – they will be able to buy themselves any bed they want. If not, they will sleep in piss. Just like the real world.
Right now, though, these and other pending traumas dissipate as the still-disoriented prisoners spot the rows of freshly made-up beds, hoist themselves up and lie back in comfort for the first time in a long day.
“Off! Off the fucken beds! You! You’re fucking up the sheets with your shoes, arsehole. Off!” yells James, the skoonmaker. “If you want those beds you pay 50c TV money – else you sleep in the toilet.”
James, a lean coloured boy and member of the 26s gang, and his lieutenants, AJ and Sonny-boy, return to their card game while the prisoners huddle on the farthest bed and stare hypnotically at the neon flashes of Yo-TV. They don’t move for 15 minutes, when Sonnyboy saunters by again.
“Come. We’re serious. TV money or the toilets.”
“Aag fok jou, man,” mutters Henk.
“What?” asks an incredulous Sonnyboy, AJ sidling up behind him.
“You can’t make us pay for a bed.”
“You pay for the TV.”
“Jou ma se TV, man.”
“Jou ma se poes.”
“Fuck you, okay, fuck you,” whines Henk. “My mother died, okay, so don’t speak about her like that, okay.” Sonnyboy smacks him; he lashes out at Sonnyboy.
Within seconds Henk is on the floor and James’s metal-tipped cowboy boot is being shafted repeatedly into his ribcage. When Henk puts out his hand to block the jabs, it connects with the tip of the boot and tears open, blood spilling across the cell floor. It’s not until Henk is screaming in genuine agony that the skoonmaker backs off.
Now everyone is clear about the power situation as well as the race situation in this cell. Minutes later, Henk is blubbing to a guard, who feigns interest in his sore hand. The guard isn’t going to do anything unless Henk lays a charge. Hell, this is exactly why the guards chose James to be skoonmaker – to do their dirty work for them; sort out the problem cases, bring order to a gang of men they pretty much regard as guilty until proven innocent.
As the cell settles into some sort of sleeping order, James and AJ – juices still flowing -make their move on the boys they consider cute enough to share their beds for a night. Tonight’s sex will be a bit like consensual rape.
Think about it, what boy is going to say no to a double bed with clean sheets, free dagga and some food after what he’s just been through? Within 48 hours of his very sudden arrest he has been cuffed, booked, fingerprinted and brazenly jeered; detained in a dank police cell; bundled off to face a magistrate with barely a clue about bail procedure; re-cuffed to a stranger; shoved into a cattle van; freshly manhandled, jeered and fingerprinted at the prison; then shunted into a courtyard for a four-hour wait to be admitted to the hokke.
Anyway, his other option could just as well be the rape without the consent.
The only certainty is that condoms will not be used.
Early evening is a time of feverish activity for the lieutenants, filled with the business of selling food; stops of twak (tobacco) at R1; loose cigarettes at 50c; and, most importantly, rolls of bos (dagga) at R1 each. As a calming agent and as an economic force, it is dagga that makes the world go round inside.
Nasal whines from underdressed soul bitches on Channel O spill into the next morning.
DAY TWO (Friday)
They Don’t Really Care About Us
`Kombuis!” comes a cry from down the hall. “Kombuis! Kombuis! Kombuis!” echoes the skoonmaker. Each section trundles towards the kitchen like a herd of great animals, forming a crude kneeling formation around the entrance. They will wait for anything up to an hour to get in, passing comments about today’s collection of new ones as they crouch before the gattas (guards) on duty.
One wall of the kitchen is decorated with a few fading posters from the Meat Board and Potato Board. They depict glazed roasts and succulent baby carrots; dollops of butter slithering down the sides of steaming baked potatoes.
At the back of the dining room a pastor leads five or six prisoners in grace. At the front near the entrance is a table supporting stacks of badly washed metal plates. Rows of dilapidated tables and benches fill up in the centre as each section files in. It’s not at all like a Michael Jackson video. There are no sculpted niggas in white vests banging their cups on the table to a dance beat. In fact, there are no cups. If prisoners want any of the sweet, weak tea, they bring their own. Plastic Coke bottles are cut down; jam jars scald hands.
Right up front is a harsh sheet of metal that comes to an end 15cm from a ledge. On the wall next to it hangs an obligatory menu. Faded chalk letters offer details of the day’s meals. Since the food has basically not changed in 10 years, neither has the board.
Breakfast: first stop below the metal grid is for pap; second stop sugar; third stop a quarter-loaf hunk of bread intended to be kept for supper, which is not served in the prison.
Lunch: meat, fish or chicken; stywe pap; two vegetables. At breakfast the new ones eat the steaming pap with their bare hands. They are allowed into the kitchen first because they are still using plates. Most prisoners do take-outs, which is to say that they come bearing skaftings or plastic ice-cream dishes.
The kitchen is another hub of economic activity and the chef something of a celebrity. Fifty cents slipped under the metal grille along with your plate ensures an extra portion of whatever is being served and, after lunch, cell bosses buy containers of extra food at discount rates to resell at night, particularly in the hokke where the new ones haven’t eaten since 6am. Tea is pooled in a bak, reheated with a bare element and sold throughout the evening.
After breakfast the new ones wait at least two hours to see the doctor to be weighed and measured. Gunshot wounds and dog bites are finally tended to by a very different breed of guard – thinner, more compassionate and possessed of a healthy disregard for the police and the weapons they wield so freely.
You strike up a conversation with a young man called Petrus. Invariably the conversation comes round to what you did to get arrested (anything from hawking without a licence to murder, defrauding your boss to hijacking a car); how you’re innocent; and the state of your court case. Petrus is stunned to learn you have a lawyer and demands to know if it’s a “boer or a bra” lawyer.
When you say boer he nods his head furiously and breaks into a grin.
“Then you’re okay; you’re okay,” he muses before asking whether you will also be able to help him. He is about to go to trial but has no lawyer. “What about Legal Aid?” you ask. All prisoners are entitled to a free lawyer. Unlike most, Petrus has heard of Legal Aid, but distrusts anything free and state-sponsored. “Them,” he says, “they work with the magistraat.”
Your conversation is punctuated by the sound of names being read off a series of lists doing the rounds. Soon enough you discover the importance of these. They circulate between 10am and 2pm on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday and they mean that you have a visitor waiting on the second floor.
Yawn, you think. What a clich, forlorn inmates hanging on to every name in the hope of some contact with the outside world. But the clich is, as always, the truth, and by the time list 20 of 23 is circulating and Sonnyboy gives a smile and calls your name you almost burst into tears of relief and run to the battered glass booths where you are allowed an awkward two- minute chat with the love of your other life. You may receive up to R100 in cash. Supplies are crudely checked; bribes easy to arrange despite the stern appearance of the matron fondling your plastic bags for sharp objects.
Back in the cell your chocolate and newspaper reverie is broken by the arrival of today’s new ones.
“Follow! Follow! Follow!”
“Where?” you want to ask as you hurry to be counted three or four times within half an hour.
This batch will stay the weekend. As will you, having just bought yourself a good bed, locker, two packs of cigarettes and the right to stay in a relatively uncrowded cell for the week preceding your second bail hearing.
DAY THREE (Saturday)
The Electronic Shrine
Six o’clock wake-up. The first thing you register is that you’re still exhausted. The cell was abuzz with the heady thrill of a slasher pic on e.tv where the babe really got it, and the TV was left blaring until 2am.
At 4am you woke to the sound of Msiza, a new transfer from Weskoppies mental hospital, engaged in a furious monologue while sweeping the cell in search of cigarette butts or any other objects that might have fallen from the bunks during the night’s dagga daze. He’s just landed a whole, unlit cigarette when with a muted cry of “fokken rasa wena!” Sonnyboy comes swooping from above and cracks him on the skull. Msiza doesn’t mind. He has a cigarette and he proudly takes it and his ceaseless monologue back to the toilets.
Cigarettes are the prison’s most valued currency and civic-minded new inmates can find themselves shed of a pack within minutes.
7am. The second thing you register is the pungent odour of industrial-strength disinfectant being applied to the floor by the cell madala while Channel O blares anew. Vaguely, you consider the theory that the prison system is designed to keep inmates perpetually tired and passive. Upstairs, you hear, they are sleeping in shifts because of the severe overcrowding. Sixty-five to a cell. 8am. The next thing you register is a guard who has popped by to find out why you’re not at breakfast and whether you might not be persuaded to pay him a little something to let you sleep in peace. “Fokof, sersant,” you mumble to his retreating back. You already paid him 30 bucks to keep your bed.
Despite the radical transformation of the Department of Correctional Services, prison guards remain a curious breed, occupying a space on the indoor food chain that’s a nudge closer to crime than punishment.
With the possible exception of the hospital staff, most gattas are as overweight as they are lazy, apparently comfortable with their life of resounding clangs, systematic bribes and empty threats. If a guard suspects you have money – or worse, if he sees you receive significant cash from a visitor – you can be sure he’ll have found a way of making you part with a quarter of it before his shift ends.
An after-hours phone call can cost R10 (that free call, by the way, is pure myth). Being bust smoking dagga can set you back R20. If he can’t find any excuse for the bribe, he may well just hold out his hand. For the most part, of course, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship and the guards deal mainly with the skoonmakers.
A well-paid guard is a happy guard who leaves the cell to its own devices. Plus, the prison shop is open only in the mid-afternoon, so the rest of the time it is the guards that will – for a fee – handle the cell’s shopping. Anything is available inside – for a fee – from colddrink to booze, grass to crack.
The only official receipt the cell receives is for the weekly R30 TV payment.
It used to be R50, but M-Net got banned (along with pets) last year. Anyway, even if the TV cost R100, the money would be found, because considering the overwhelming lack of industrial or recreational facilities in prison, television is a holy shrine, a window on the world, an escape from Alcatraz.
And on Saturday afternoons such as this one, the shrine becomes a god. Pirates vs Chiefs is an emotional thunderstorm to the hot, lazy afternoon. Goddamn if you can’t hear the entire prison roar and groan in unison. For close on two hours there is no inside or outside.
After the soccer, James, AJ and Sonnyboy huddle to talk business; a daily ritual that amounts to speculating where money resides in the cell and how to get hold of it. The meeting winds down with the appearance of a homemade dagga pipe. A paying guest, you are called over.
“There’s plenty money in the cell tonight,” whispers AJ conspiratorially as he fills the pipe. A well-known Mamelodi gangster is back inside and has bought four beds for himself and a friend arrested with him. “Fuckit man, he’s got fat. Fat and lekker. No problems.”
Envy rides AJ’s voice with a shudder. “Checkit, checkit, snap of the fingers … Upstairs they already making him up a bed.” He takes a long, steady hit on the pipe. When it comes back to him he passes it over James’s shoulder to his bumboy. James glares and snatches it back with a click of the tongue.
AJ, mortified, grabs it from James and reminds him that it’s his pipe and his dagga. James is indignant and turns to Sonnyboy for support, but Sonnyboy is gazing into space. The boy smiles ever so slightly when AJ relights it and passes it back.
James makes up his mind to hate the boy for the rest of the weekend. He and AJ start to quarrel, but are too stoned to know why. As always, their spats end with James hogging the pipe and giving AJ a hurt sneer, accusing him of being selfish and owing him money.
In a cloud of dagga and to the strains of Ezimtoti, the evening gives way to night. Even Msiza is quiet for The Fugitive, a movie that has to rate a nine on the all-time prison chart. Later, everyone has a story about their own escape from the law, but you can’t keep your eyes or ears open anymore. For the first time you’ve acclimatised enough to realise how badly you do not want to be here. As you slide towards a muggy sleep, at the back of your mind there’s a locked door. A week. What if it was a year?
DAY FOUR (Sunday)
Msiza’s Fit
At 5am the cell is rudely woken by a great bellowing from beneath a bunk near the back.
“Wat is jou naam, hond?” screams Msiza to himself. “Msiza! Nelson Msiza!” he cries. “Wat?” And then spells it out with a roar: “M-S-I-Z-A! Nelson M-S-I-Z-A!” Over and over until Sonnyboy moves in with his weapon of choice – a short length of pipe fashioned from a crutch – and there is silence followed by a spattering of tired cheers.
Though Msiza will spend most of Valentine’s Day simpering beneath the bed, at lunch he is spotted entertaining gattas by pulling wild Elvis moves in the middle of the kitchen. On Monday Msiza is returned to the “mal hospitaal” and within two days has passed into C-Section mythology, his exploits recalled over dagga pipes late into the evening.
It is a doggedly humid afternoon and the prison choir is rehearsing in the tuck shop courtyard when a fight breaks out over a sixpack of Coke; punches hurled to the beautiful, motley soundtrack.
Tempers are frayed all round by lock-up time, but soccer is again the salvation. Today’s match is even more intense: the local side, Mamelodi Sundowns, are playing for the log lead.
On AJ’s neatly made-up double bed, his boy feigns interest, languidly cleaning his nails and smiling his smile each time a cigarette is passed his way. One weekend is not long and he knows it. You worry about him; he’s a nice kid and the pile of condoms you got from the hospital and left in the bathroom became water balloons sometime round midnight last night.
You buy a Sunday paper at a ludicrous price from a gatta who confiscated it in the lunch queue. Newspapers abound inside, read in detail before being passed around to be used to roll joints and cigarettes.
Your star sign reads: “Cancer. A good time to break out of your laborious routine and travel to a new destination, whether for work or for pleasure …
Also a good time to do fun things with people you trust …”
Into the evening and post-match depression. Sundowns were so appalling no one even bothers to analyse the defeat, instead turning their attention to Daisy Fuentes’s tits. You can’t help noticing that Simunye’s Valentine’s obsession is bordering on the unhealthy. Inmates scratch uselessly at scabies welts.
The shower is broken and getting clean now involves a bucket inside the stall; a dank grey blanket for a shower curtain. Themba, the cleaner, is washing the blood from a gunshot victim’s jeans in exchange for a cigarette. Steadily, the bathroom fills up with prisoners going about the weekly washing ritual. Drying clothes block out the little air seeping through the windows. Fat, fearless cockroaches perch near your head on the wall and don’t even bother to move when you flick at them.
The weekend drips on. James is moody. He talks about his case for over an hour. Nostalgia sets in. The Soul Sessions Valentine’s special comes on TV and James, totally in his moment, sings along – word perfect and at the top of his unremarkable voice – to every tune they can dish up.
Could someone please make Romeo Khumalo go away.
DAY FIVE (Monday)
The Weather Inside
A row of posters decorates the wall outside the hospital: Use a condom. TB can be cured. Are you suffering from hypertension? That last one cracks you up. “Reduce stress in your daily life,” it reads. “Cut down on smoking. Try to keep trim.” It’s matched on the irony stakes only by the experience of watching the weather forecast on TV, but no one in the gunshot-wound queue shares your humour.
Inside the clinic, the staff ask you if you need more condoms and you look at them funny.
On the way to breakfast an ugly bastard with a scar stops you.
“Hey larnie, give me that cigarette.”
“Fuck you.”
“Pardon?” A klap to your arm and the cigarette drops to the ground.
You don’t even see Sonnyboy materialise from behind you until he brings Scarface down. You collect your daily pap and are leaving the kitchen when Scarface reappears from below. He grabs your crotch and makes a lewd comment just like on TV.
Morning gives way to midday. You lie on your bed listening to the visitors’ lists and gaze impassively at AJ narrowly avoiding death as he rewires the cell. The plugs are shot to shit and all that’s left are three live wires emerging from two holes in the roof, for the light bulb and the TV. James has decided that the TV must be lowered so that the non-paying masses at the back can’t see, but there isn’t enough cabling, so the light bulb’s reconnected higher up and the wires pulled closer to the TV.
On list eight you hear Mzwakhe Mbuli’s name called and you ask James about him.
“What? What about that ou?” he asks. “The one who’s always in the papers? Fuck him, my case also made the papers, bro,” and before you can find an exit you’re listening to it all again. How his cousin collected him one day and said there was work; introduced to an Indian woman who gave him a gun and instructed him to shoot her husband; how he got cold feet but was found with the – planted – gun … Like everyone, he’s innocent, and is testing his bullshit court story on you to hear if it’s believable. He starts outlining another three separate charges, omitting the one about the time he slashed his wife with a blade.
You’re saved by the bell. List 19 of 20. As you rush up the stairs to the visitor’s booths you hear cries of “Follow! Follow! Follow!” behind you and when you get back the cell is locked. You wait an hour to find a guard to unlock it – for a small fee. Now you’re paying them to lock you up.
An afternoon of cartoons and kwaito. (What’s the favourite tune of the moment? Boom Shaka’s Free, of course.)
James is playing dice. He loses R54, but later tells everyone he won R60 after starting with just 50c. The R60 he in fact landed after robbing a shy, older white dude with a Bible who had paid him to look after his bags while he waited for his bail money to come through.
When the white dude comes back, unsuccessful, he confronts James about the money. James rushes about the cell accusing everyone of ripping off his brother, his friend, his china. “I’ll kill the fucker who did this to you,” he says. In the background, The Bold & The Beautiful soundtrack is seeping from every cell in the prison.
The weather inside is becoming unpleasantly overcast. James paces and snaps at people. You pretend to be asleep from 7pm. Cockroaches stare as you begin to scratch desperately at your legs and stomach and the first scabies welts start to rise on your skin
DAY SIX (Tuesday)
The Fight
`If I was at home right now I’d be watering the garden,” says AJ as he hangs by one arm from a bunk, gazing out the row of tiny windows to catch a glimpse of the sunset.
A shrill whistle from the cell across the way is followed by a request to buy dagga and James busies himself with the skipper, a small pouch attached to a length of twine used to transport goods between cells.
All day there have been steady spurts of cleaning activity in preparation for tonight. Sheets are stretched, bunks rearranged, twak rolled, skaftings washed.
On Tuesdays the hokke fill up late with two intakes of prisoners who have been in court all day. Most have had contact with friends or family and will thus be carrying some money. A brief meeting is held to discuss the state of supplies.
Petrus is among the first batch in, still without a lawyer. Tomorrow he’ll be sentenced and he’s anxious. You offer him a cigarette and he leans forward gratefully, but James blocks the way. “My bra, don’t give all your stuff away like that.” Rather give it to him, he means. You pass one to Petrus on the way to the toilet later.
Shitting in prison. You don’t want to know. There’s no cubicle or door and the toilet’s basically situated in someone’s bedroom.
The second group arrives at about 8pm and immediately the cell is alive with drunken energy. Sharkey, unbelievably drunk, stumbles ahead of the pack and lunges for AJ.
“Aaay-jaay. My bra. Djy’s my bra, n? My bra, I need a cool bed, okay? I’ve got the cash, check. Here man, check.”
AJ unfastens Sharkey’s grip and sits him down. Sharkey is facing attempted murder charges and twice during the court proceedings he had bribed the policemen guarding him to go and buy him half-jacks of vodka. He roars around the cell, spitting and hugging, finally grabbing hold of James.
“Jaaames. Long time ek s. Djy’s my bra, n? N, James?”
James turns his attention to a frightened- looking Indian boy entering the hok.
“My laaitie!” cries James when he sees Chad, an acquaintance from the old neighbourhood. Chad, up on a hit-and-run charge, returns the greeting and points to Sharkey. “He’s the one. Tell him to give it back, man.”
In his drunken spree, Sharkey had rolled Chad at the back of the police van and had taken his expensive gold watch and R20.
You lie on your bed and watch the aggression unfold. For days now, James has been looking for a fight. A few smacks and threats and Sharkey is forced to return the watch and is relegated to a bed near the back. AJ tries to keep the peace, inviting a crowd of dagga-heads to bring their pipe and guitar into the circle up front. James takes the guitar and starts to sing.
“Jissis! Djy sing kaaak!’ squawks Sharkey right behind him. The vodka has made him brave.
“Ignore him,” pleads AJ.
James strums at the guitar, glaring at Sharkey and muttering obscenities.
Sharkey puts an arm around James and begins needling him about slashing his wife. “I may be a thief,” he says, “but I don’t beat up on women.”
There is an almost tangible splintering of tension as James rises. In one fluid motion he places the guitar on a bed, shoves Sharkey against a wall, pulls his belt from his waist, slips the padlock off his locker and feeds it on to the belt. He raises the cruel-looking club – metal lock on leather strap – and looks at Sharkey.
Sharkey laughs in his face. “Maar djy’s my …”
The lock comes down, first on Sharkey’s shoulder, then on his cheek. It splits open like ripe fruit. Your stomach turns. Despite both AJ and Sonnyboy’s attempts to pull James off, he lashes out another four or five times until Sharkey is on the ground and bellowing in agony. Then James spits in his face.
“Fok jou, Sharkey, djy wiet mos ek’t `n vuil hand.”
Chad, seeking refuge on your bunk, offers you a Camel with trembling hands while Themba cleans up the blood and Sonnyboy placates Sharkey, cleaning his wounds and feeding him dagga to try and dissuade him from laying charges against the skoonmaker.
James is in his moment again. He struts around the cell in his underpants, lighting joints like cigarettes and retelling the events of the fight over and over, even though everyone saw it for themselves.
Tomorrow is your bail hearing. It couldn’t have come a moment later, you realise, and spend a sleepless night listening to war stories from the courts. You’re consumed with worry. What if something goes wrong?
DAY SEVEN (Wednesday)
The Legless Man
How do you describe the waiting? How do you put time passing behind bars in a sentence? The grand clichs: hours becoming days, days weeks and all the while you’re thinking the outside world has forgotten about you; isn’t going to visit again.
It takes six hours to be set free once your bail has been approved. The final wait – in the prison’s entrance area – is the last straw. In a fury you break your ballpoint pen in half and get up to pace.
At 5pm you see Petrus and co return. They disappear into a room and re-emerge in green uniforms. Sentenced prisoners awaiting transfer; shackled and kept separate at all times. You go over and talk with Petrus. An accomplice to car hijacking, it took a year’s wait in prison to receive a six-month sentence.
At 6pm you strike up a conversation with a man with one leg and a T-shirt that reads: “When I die I hope they bury me upside down so the world can kiss my ass.” Bust for cocaine, the police shot him and his knee shattered. “Tigers don’t cry,” he says with a smile.
Suddenly the entrance area breaks into a crazy fluster. At the front gate there’s a cop with a young Alsatian straining at the leash. Inmates and guards scatter like leaves in a breeze. The one-legged man hobbles off, leaving behind the plastic bag that contains all his worldly possessions. As the dog passes the bag, he lunges for it and rips it to shreds. The policeman laughs a hearty laugh. Hard drugs were found in H-section and so he’s taking the animal inside for a bit of terrorist fun.
At 7pm you are finally bundled into a police van – seated in the front this time – and driven to the gates. Your head reels. It’s so strange seeing the prison from the outside. It looks so neatly stacked and clean. You can’t believe what you feel when you see the front gates. It’s just like in the goddamn movies.
l All names have been changed
Charl Blignaut was held after being arrested for alleged possession of drugs