Number Four has always been a part of black life in Johannesburg. As children, many of us knew a brother, an uncle or even a father who had been inside. It was also common for us to witness cleansing rituals for people who came back from the prison. When a person came out of Number Four, their family would bathe them in water mixed with the crushed leaves of an aloe plant.
It was believed this would cleanse them from what is known in Setswana as sefifi — or ibhadi, as the Zulu people call it. If a person was not cleansed, a dark spell would follow them for the rest of their lives. On visiting Number Four as curator, I certainly felt the dark spell of a place saturated with stories of human anguish.
Like most people I know, I was terrified of the place, but I did not have first-hand experience of what it was like to be locked up in such a godforsaken place. Our task as the curatorial team for Number Four has been to create an experience in the form of an exhibition for visitors that will make them understand what it might have been like to be a black man kept in a racist prison.
The exhibition also had to speak to the fact that, even under the most brutalising circumstances, people survived. This would be a metaphor of our evolution as a society that overcame its dark past. This was a tough call. But if we achieved it, we knew that this would go some way in cleansing the spirit of our people.
To come to terms with this task, my colleagues and I spent weeks talking to the men who had been through the doors of Number Four. Some were political prisoners. But the vast majority were “ordinary” folk who found themselves on the wrong side of the white man’s law.
As a pass offender, a certain Mr Gama put it: “I was arrested many times for pass [offences]. I don’t even know how many times. I grew up in jail.” Some of the men we spoke to were serious criminals — murderers, rapists and robbers. Thinking about it today, going to Number Four was like an urban rite of passage for thousands of young, black men growing up in a sick society.
We heard many tales of people being stripped, beaten, robbed, raped, and even killed. In those days, black prisoners were forced to endure psychological and physical torture on a daily basis without any recourse. For the prison to function, the prison warders colluded with gangsters and cell bosses to create a brutal order that dehumanised people.
We would often walk through the crevices of the disused prison, listening to the men describe their experiences. Their recollections gave us a glimpse into the desperation of men thrown together in overcrowded, lice- infested and stinking cells. We came across many who had been brutalised and some who had brutalised others. I am still haunted by the eyes of a man who introduced himself to me as “Xikwembu xa Yina” (“God almighty” in Shangaan). When I asked him why he was called that, he bragged that in Number Four he could decide whether people, like me, lived or died. I also shared a cigarette and exchanged jokes with someone called Bra Jack, who told me in vivid detail how he boxed a man to death for a tin of polish.
Human cruelty is only one side of the story we were told. We also heard about resistance and resilience. An elderly, ex-political prisoner, who had been thrown in a cell with common criminals, told us a story of how he volunteered to wash the wounds of men who had been flogged. Many spoke of friendships. Acts of sharing and caring among condemned men. They also remembered with fondness how people would feed the imagination with songs and stories when all their ears were subjected to were insults and the painful groans of grown men. Such solidarity and fellow feeling was certainly easier among political prisoners who came in as groups fortified by strong political beliefs. For the common prisoner, life was about survival on a day-to-day basis — scoring a cigarette, trading a plate of food, getting a visit from a loved one — most of time, life was about escaping violence.
A lot is changing about Number Four, but it still has an eerie atmosphere about it. It still heaves with memories about the sickness of racism. The Constitutional Court is emerging from its ruins as symbol that affirms our dignity, regardless of our race or station in life. It will tell the story of our restoration and cleanse the psyche of the nation.
As one of the men told us: “It is here where they trampled on our rights and it is here that hope is coming alive. I am no longer afraid to walk past the Old Fort, I want my children to know what happened inside here.”
The exhibition is based on the memories of the men who were in Number Four. It seeks to explore a number of key questions that are pertinent to our society today. For example, in a society that criminalised people because of their race, who, in fact, is a criminal? The exhibition also gives some insight into the sub-human conditions that people were subjected to by asking: What was life like in the cells? What did people eat? What did they wear?
The exhibition will explore the question of power and punishment. How was power expressed and negotiated? What forms did punishment take? We have sought to explore the subtle and overt ways that people used to resist power and how they survived. The exhibition uses sound visuals, film and personal testimony to explore these different themes. It will display artefacts, instruments of torture and punishment.
We have also collected items that prisoners created as a way of expressing themselves. For the men who survived Number Four and shared their memories as free men, the pain may not go away. But as harvesters of their stories, we hope the exhibition goes some way in ridding future generations of the dark spell of prisons like Number Four.