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Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2004, ISBN: 1868422054

Reviewed by Francis B. Nyamnjoh

The Number very broadly articulates the democratization of South African society since the end of apartheid in 1994, and the impact of this transition on prison communities structured on the principles of apartheid and the discipline and punish logic of prisons everywhere. In the words of the author, the book demonstrates “why generations of young black men lived violent lives under apartheid, and why generations more will live violently under democracy” (p.11).

Using the life of William Steenkamp/Magadien Wentzel, Steinberg demonstrates the proximity of the history of crime to the central fault lines that have shaped and continue to shape South African society. In William Steenkamp/Magadien, Steinberg sees the sort of man he wanted to write about, especially as: “I was frightened of penning a story about hell; I wanted to find a redemptive tale, to write about someone who had journeyed to the heart of the inferno but had come out the other side.” (p.27-28). The Number thus recounts Steinberg’s and Magadien’s journey into the latter’s past (p.44) Thus informed by how William Steenkamp/Magadien Wentzel has come to understand his own past and why, The Number, a highly researched book rich in prison ethnography and organizational sociology, is as much about history as it is about memory. Two themes have caught my attention: (a) democratization and (b) identity.

On Prisons and Democracy in South Africa

In post-apartheid South Africa where the rhetoric of equality of humanity, democracy peace and reconciliation are the order of the day, personal and communal identities are increasingly seeking representation for a complexity and plurality that the rigid policing of identities in the past had rendered invisible to the insensitive bureaucracies of legality and legitimacy. Considered as the most outlawed and subhuman of dehumanized blackness under apartheid when it was commonplace for white men to play out “their fantasies that blacks were animals, and in the process brought out the animals in themselves” (p.10), the black prison population has not been indifferent to the democracy bandwagon, often appropriating it to reinterpret the past, justify their actions and dream new futures of tolerance, belonging and conviviality.

Even the prison administration, used to disciplining and punishing, would have to re-invent itself through a revalorization of black humanity and a more empathic and contextualised understanding of crime and punishment. Both of these dimensions are captured through the story of a prisoner widely known under the false name of William Steenkamp [name in a stolen ID book (p.303)], who joined the 28s [one of the three competing and complementary prison gangster groups – The Number] in the late 1970s while still in his teens, and whom Jonny Steinberg, author of The Number, first met in October 2002, when he was about to be released from Pollsmoor prison.

The winds of change in tune with democracy and the contradictions arising from it in South African prisons are well epitomized by two coloured people at the centre of The Number - Jansen, the new administrator of Pollsmoor, whose philosophy and approach to prisoners Steinberg describes below, and Steenkamp, Steinberg’s main informant:

“He [Jansen] came armed with a philosophy as laudable as it was naïve: an evangelical belief that all men’s souls are naturally gentle, that only the cruelty of history had made them bad. He identified with the gangsters behind the bars. The humiliations he had suffered as a coloured warder working in apartheid’s jails were the same humiliations, he thought, that had turned many Cape Flats men into monsters…” (pp.24-25).

But both Jansen (as concerns democratising South African prison management) and democratization of the wider society face formidable hurdles, as the reality remains schizophrenic and pregnant with rhetoric.

It is therefore little surprise that Pollsmoor prison is “a world nourished by stories” as “weapons, tools, [and] the stuff of action”, and a place where prisoners want to unload their stories into a journalist’s notebook, organized around the master story of Nongoloza, the God of South African prisoners (p.17-18). Thanks to the mythical feats of Nongoloza, the prison Number gangs – the 26s, 27s and 28s - had demonstrated courage in the struggle against the indignities of apartheid.

A central theme of the book is that to change for the better, prisoners need the active cooperation of the outside world, a concern which William Steenkamp articulates superbly in the following words:

“It is no use us prisoners changing…if the world outside is still the same. You are still labeled a criminal when you leave, which means you don’t get a job. And inside here, we are told when to eat, sleep, walk, exercise, play sport, when to watch TV and when to phone our families. How can you expect a person enslaved in this mentality to have responsibility on the outside? That is why we always come back.” (p.29)

That is why prisoners consider the state and social structures - “the system” - “a factory for criminals”, making “criminals out of decent people” (35). It is also why The Number, whose death prisoners seeking redemption may wish, remains very strong even after democracy came in 1994, not only in prison, but also in the streets of cities and townships across South Africa (pp.38-39). Parallel to this, is the resilience of racism, despite the rhetoric of transformation and celebration of The Rainbow Nation.

On Identity – What is in a Name?

William Steenkamp, who has “served five or six sentences over the last 20 years, each time under a different name” (p.40), was, in the words of Steinberg, “a hell of identities not yet erased, and identities not yet formed.”(p.43). He captures his identity crisis (or should I say wealth) thus:

“My mother, she is the Wentzel in my life; she is a Muslim. My foster-mother, in whose house I grew up, her name is Mekka; she is a Christian. When I was a child I went to church. I sang in the choir. When I was told who my real family was, I was sent to mosque. So you can say I am confused. My father was a Christian. But I am not sure if he was really my father. If he was my father, why didn’t they give me his surname? Why Wentzel? Why my mother’s name?”

“I want to know who my father is, and when I find out, I want to take his name. And then my sons must take his name. JR and Steenkamp must disappear. I owe it to my children that they know who they are. And to their children and the children after that. I have fucked up my life. Why must I also fuck up the lives of children who have not yet been born? Why must they wander around nameless like me?” (pp.40-41).

To get a job with Mr Morris, he had to work under the name of William Steenkamp, a stolen ID he had assumed. But the troubles of going through with a false name were enormous, as the identity of ‘William Steenkamp’ haunted his work and made life at home intolerable.

“Do you understand what it means not to have a name? […] You can take it for granted that you are Jonny Steinberg. You’ve never even had to think about what it means. It means you are a Jew, that your grandparents came to South Africa in x year, that your father was born in y year. That you know your name means you will never have to sleep in a gutter or wander the streets like a stroller. You belong.” (p.302).

Uncomfortable with living a lie, “I wanted to go back to jail so this lie would end”, “I couldn’t live this life” (p.41) “I need to be Magadien Wentzel to live a proper life” (p.42). But there was the fear that this might never happen: “I have forgotten my own life … I was too fucking angry to take notice of my own life. I’m scared I will never get it back.” (p.44) And he is right to be scared, as it was all up to “a bunch of faceless bureaucrats, shifting through a biography that had been reduced to a slime dossier” to determine which of his lives was really his, often with an arbitrariness that shattered whatever sense of self he was trying to cultivate. (p.289).

The encounter between Mr Morris and Steenkamp demonstrates that reconciliation and empathy are possible between the world of crime and that of order, between imprisonment and freedom, and between communities rigidly divided and at conflict under apartheid, if only everyone in post-apartheid South Africa could make an effort to see the humanity in the other. Despite Steenkamp’s dishonesty, Mr Morris, a white South African, is able to see the goodness in him.

As for Steenkamp,

“I was brought here to serve this sentence because of what I did to Mr Morris…I loved them, you know, Mr and Mrs Morris. But a piece of me always held back. I would do stupid things to hurt him. I would smash the bakkie on purpose and then blame it on someone else. I would break his glass…A couple of years ago, I phoned Farieda. She said there was a new boss now; the Morrises went bankrupt. I walked back to my cell in a daze. I put my head on the pillow and cried. You see, I knew it was because of me, because of the glass I stole from him. I had destroyed him. He offered me love and I spat on him and destroyed him…When I get out, I want to work and save and try to pay him back. I know it will take me a long time. If he’s not there I can pay back his children. This is one debt I need to repay.” (p.288)

Finally released into the ‘normal’ world where he hopes to re-integrate himself into a ‘normal’ life as a ‘normal’ citizen of the now ‘normal’ South Africa, William Steenkamp/Magadien Wentzel comes “to learn that one cannot reinvent oneself without reinventing the people around whom one has lived a life”, for identity is not just how one sees and positions oneself, and also how others recognize and represent one. Identity, to make sense, is a negotiated reality.

Conclusion

This is a fascinating book with a compelling story told mostly from the standpoint of gangsters in prison who are more used to being disciplined and punished, than being given a voice to share their predicaments with the wider world. Steinberg has succeeded in doing what most writers cannot manage, being able to share, in a creative and irresistible narrative, the results of scientific enquiry or journalistic investigation with the wider reading public whose primary concern is a good story well told. The style is that of a master storyteller, but the content remains factual and sociologically outstanding. The Number is a major contribution to the peace and reconciliation, and to the crystallization of renegotiated identity essentialisms that should come from an understanding of all the facets and nuances of South African society past and present. Through his outstanding craftsmanship Jonny Steinberg has given a voice to the desperately voiceless in a new South Africa where every voice matters.

* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is Head of Publications and Dissemination at CODESRIA

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