On a busy workday I meet writer Jonny Steinberg at the Seattle for an interview over coffee. Two bald men squaring off amid the endless carping: “One latte! Skinny cappuccino!” A regular day at the mall.
There’s an implicit irony in our circumstance, even in the half an hour it takes to gather the story behind Steinberg’s substantial new book The Number (Jonathan Ball). Today Steinberg is the interviewee. He who has spent the bulk of his working life interviewing others is now talking into the microphone.
Having emerged from the netherworld of Pollsmoor prison, where he toiled for months recording the life of a career criminal, Steinberg is reduced to a fleeting meeting with a reporter to promote his work. One gets the feeling that he finds it vulgar.
Taking a cue from my subject, I had requested an interview at Steinberg’s home, for the sake of texture. That was not on the cards. Steinberg’s partner, I was told by his publisher, works from home. Such an intrusion would be a disturbance. So Seattle would have to do.
Steinberg is early, peering into his watch. I am late. With the dictaphone running (endless coffee orders rattled off in the background), I moan about an occupational hazard: transcribing tapes. “I like transcribing,” he counters impatiently: “you get to listen to the interview all over again and think about it.” Okay, so Steinberg’s a perfectionist.
The Number is dubbed “One man’s search for identity in the Cape underworld and prison gangs.” The promo-speak press release tells us: “In June 2003, a 44-year-old coloured man named Magadien Wentzel walked out of Pollsmoor prison in Cape Town. Behind him lay a lifelong career in the 28s, South Africa’s oldest and most reviled prison gang … In front of him lay the prospect of a law-abiding future, and a life in a household of 10 adults and eight children, none of whom earned a living.” It rings like the opening of a low-budget television drama.
For you or me — non-entities in the lives of Steinberg and his subject — the book provides a mosaic of experience we need never piece together. But they are shards we’ve had ample access to in the media. South Africans have had enough chance to contemplate the horrors of prison gangs, thanks to emotional talk-show hosts and documentary filmmakers.
Allan Little’s award-winning BBC documentary Killers Don’t Cry introduced the exotic mythology of the numbers gangs to an international audience. Steinberg himself gave the world a taste of Pollsmoor when in 2002 he contributed an essay to Benetton’s Colors magazine that focused on prisons. And so we have the genesis of The Number.
Last year at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown Steinberg was invited to present his research on prison gangs as part of the Winter School series of lectures on Rhodes campus. He delivered what would become chapter three of his book, an epic mythology about the founding fathers of the numbers gangs: Nongoloza and Kilikijan.
Like a big Hollywood production, the tale consisted of bands of outlaws, battles with sabres in blood-washed landscapes, a code of law written on stone, sodomy, and the ritual slaughter of a holy cow. The arty festival audience listened in horror.
An aged man who had worked in the prisons in the apartheid era stood up and gave Steinberg’s narrative an endorsement. South Africa’s organised prisoners did indeed live according to this myth. He’d been there, seen that. Otherwise nobody knew quite what to do with Steinberg’s information.
Fleshed out in its fullness, The Number has the opposite effect. It is impossible to reflect on the tale without a sense of empathy and concern, not only for the individual Steinberg has chosen to write about, but for the whole crazy, mixed-up scene that made him.
At the entrance to the plush Rosebank Mall is Benetton’s showcase store. Copies of its magazine — devoted to what Steinberg calls “champagne activism” — lie in piles waiting to be consumed by suburban fashion victims.
You can imagine youngsters paying dearly for volume 50. For this issue, Steinberg collaborated with hot-shot South African photographer Adam Broomberg to produce a startling spread of words and images about Pollsmoor. Topless, tattoed convicts stare with a mixture of disdain and torment from the fabulously designed pages.
For most, the Benetton rag would translate into a distant madness. Reading The Number one can understand Steinberg’s motivation: the basic drive to do some thorough investigation.
The Number is funded by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. The work is an aid to the centre’s criminal justice programme. But it’s not a piece of academia, nor is it a cold, calculated study. Steinberg is emphatic: The Number is about one man only; piecing together the disparate elements of his existence.
According to Steinberg his task “was quite simple. It was to tell a story as best I could. To tell a person’s story as best as I could. That’s difficult enough alone,” he says. “Try getting beyond that and you’re in above your head.”
Regardless of the presence of a major funding agent, Steinberg professes that “there was no social agenda, or no policy agenda. I saw a world that intrigued me — I wanted to write about it. I knew that I couldn’t write about it intelligently without its being about a human being. I found a human being and wrote his story.
“I had a routine,” Steinberg says about the process. “Between seven and 10 in the morning I’d shadow a warden. Just shadow him around the prison, watch what he did, talk to the inmates. Between 10 and 12 I’d go to Wentzel in his cell with a tape recorder and talk to him. Then I’d rejoin the warder at lunch time and talk to more prisoners. I’d do that until two. So I did that every day, it was routine.”
Wentzel, a long-standing member of the 28s, “had a room of his own”, Steinberg tells us upfront, “an unusual privilege in this overcrowded prison. I would learn later that [prison head] Jansen had given him this precious solitude, and that there were people who were not happy about it.”
And so from there Steinberg spent more than 50 hours gathering anecdotes about someone reared a Christian by a poor Cape Flats community. But Wentzel has Muslim roots (one of his many names is Magadien) and in his youth he had a wealthy white benefactor who may have been his father.
To tell more would do an injustice to the intensive research conducted by Steinberg. It is deep and probing and there are times when he appears to be romantically involved in his subject.
“I don’t think the book is romantic,” he counters. “I don’t think I am caught up in the romance of prison life.”
Instead Steinberg points to the romanticism of a prisoner like Wentzel in recalling his harsh experience: “Magadien’s earliest memories of prison make the violence abstract and stylised and barely real. I wanted to try and explain why. Why he’d forgotten what it was that he was doing. Why he had stylised and abstracted the violence of his own experience in prison.
“He had invented a sanctuary for himself that never really existed in the real world. It never existed in the present and it always existed in the past. He never experienced prison with the romanticism that he remembers it with now.
“Parts of him think it was hell. But when he is looking back and trying to construct an identity for himself, which is both dignified and makes sense of the life he’s lived, he takes his earliest experience in prison and makes it into an idyll.
“In the end he probably does redeem himself. But he had to cross a mountain. It’s a lot more complicated than any discourse of rehabilitation. It took an enormous amount of desperation. He’d reached his early 40s and his life as a criminal was completely hollowed out. He couldn’t go back there, just out of sheer terror. And that’s what his rehabilitation was about. It was an escape from something that had begun to terrify him.”
This is the philosophical background. If you want the dirt, read The Number.