A man shuffled up to me in the media room at the 1820 Settlers’ Monument in Grahamstown on Thursday and abruptly asked who I was and which newspaper I wrote for. After furnishing him with the details he gave me two tickets to Prison Codes; the show written and directed by Boebie Hamza about life inside jail.
Lately I have been carrying around in my satchel Italian journalist Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia, and reading a page or two of while waiting for food to be served or late at night before I sleep. It’s a first person, sordid account of the Neapolitan mafia controlling Naples (Napoli to the Italians). That morning I read page 114 in which Saviano quoted a letter from a boy locked up in a juvenile detention centre.
‘Everyone I know is either dead or in jail. I want to become a boss. I want to have supermarkets, stores, factories, I want to have women. I want three cars, I want respect when I go into a store, I want to have warehouses all over the world. And then I want to die. I want to die like a man, like someone who truly commands. I want to be killed,” the youngster wrote.
Saviano is now under police protection for his exposé that has been turned into a movie. I didn’t need much convincing to go and watch the show for it seemed to seamlessly segue into what I was already preoccupied with.
At 2pm I found myself at Kingswood College where the performance was taking place. In the small audience were cops, coloured and white people.
Prison Codes tells the story of Davids, a man who goes to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He knew the gangsters who were trying to rape a woman he rescued. He couldn’t squeal because he wanted to protect his wife and unborn child from the gangsters running amok in his neighbourhood. Davids goes to prison for his refusal to implicate the gangsters.
Inside, he’s confronted with violence and is saved by an inmate. By accepting protection, he becomes part of his gang. What happens is an abrupt metamorphosis; the Davids who emerges is unrecognisable from the loving, family man who went to prison.
Most of the dialogue was in Afrikaans and my knowledge of the language is non-existent. There’s a bit of English here and there, but what’s apparent is that these guys look believable as gangsters: the slang, the body movements, the tattoos, the deathly stares and the rapping — hip-hop style. People around me who understood Afrikaans routinely broke into laughter, so it’s safe to assume the dialogue was funny.
The play’s mood is set by the music. There is Afrikaans rap when they want to bring on the gangster vibe and soulful singing when they want to infuse sentimentality. At times it worked — especially with the rap. The hip-hop seemed to naturally complement the air of menace that hangs over the production. I’m not sure the soulful singing in English worked as well. It could be that the gangsters didn’t quite know how to assume the demeanour and voice of the penitent, the tone used by people feeling sorry for themselves. Or is it that most of the gangsters are good rappers but not good singers? I must say that Grace Pienaar, playing the role of the pregnant woman, was quite outstanding in vocals.
Later, over supper, I looked again into Gomorrah. A young man, passing by a place cordoned off by the police following a murder, comments : ‘a death a day, that’s the refrain of Naples”.
In jail, if what I had just seen that afternoon was to be believed, a different death occurs, perhaps not daily. An innocent man goes to jail and learns gangsterism. That’s a death, a life lost.