Nongoloza's Children: Western Cape prison gangs during and after apartheid: Introduction

Nongoloza's Children is Johnny Steinberg's monograph on the Number Gangs: the 26's, 27's and 28's; their origins, history, structure, practices and evolution and relationships to Street Gangs.

Most 'Poverty is the source of criminality' (Poverty Pimps) addicts, think that township kids join gangs, because they are forced to. For some this may be the case, but for many it is not; it is what they aspire to. Poverty Pimp Addicts also think that many go to prison, because their poverty allows them no choices, but to commit crimes; when in fact, for many individuals who have already made a conscious choice to become a 'big time gangster', where a big time wannabe neurosurgeon registers at UCT to acquire his Ph.D. in neurosurgery; a wannabe big time gangster registers, for the University of Crime, by committing his 'registration criminal act', to gain entry to a prison, where he will acquire his degree, or Ph.D. in violence; his 'street cred'. As far as South African University's of Crime go, Pollsmoor is in the creme de la creme of Universities of Violent Crime.

Nongoloza's Children is long, so I have seperated it into 6 posts:

Over the past two decades, news of the strange world behind the bars of South Africa's prisons has been spilling out in dribs and drabs. Among the things we have learned is that the so-called "Number gangs"—the 26s, 27s and 28s—are about 100 years old, that they originated in the jails, mine compounds and informal settlements of turn-of-the-century Johannesburg, and that today they constitute a formidable force in every prison across the country.

We know, too, that the world of the Number gangs is one of staggering brutality. Its self-styled judiciaries sentence inmates to death, to gang rape, to beatings with prison mugs, padlocks and bars of soap; among the prerequisites of joining the "soldier lines" of the gangs is the taking of a warder's or a non-gangster's blood; leaving a prison gang, sharing a gang's secrets with a warder, or talking casually about the gang's workings to the non-initiated are all punishable crimes.

Finally, we know that sexual relations between prison gangsters and their lovers are highly stylised, caricaturing the most pungently misogynist relationship imaginable between a man and a woman. The passive partner in an archetypal prison relationship is stripped of the jail equivalent of his juridical personhood: he is not allowed to conduct commerce or to leave the cell without his partner's permission; he cooks for his partner, makes his bed, washes his back and cuts his toenails.

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