(DOWNLOAD) "Coded Narratives of Nongoloza, Doggy Dog: Narrating the Self and Nation in Jonny Steinberg's the Number (Report)" by Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Coded Narratives of Nongoloza, Doggy Dog: Narrating the Self and Nation in Jonny Steinberg's the Number (Report)
- Author : Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 87 KB
Description
Jonny Steinberg's The Number: One Man's Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs (2004) is a self-reflexive and sophisticated re/presentation of Magadien's life story as it is framed by crime, prison and other exigencies that have impinged on the lives of many coloured people during and after apartheid. Throughout the book, Steinberg shows that The Number is more than merely the story of Magadien Wentzel, a 43 year-old coloured man from the Cape Flats who, at the time Steinberg meets him, has spent a quarter of a century in South African jails as a senior member of the 28 Number prison gang. Steinberg underscores the sense in which his biography is not simply about the life of an individual by noting in the prologue to the book that "[t]he prospect of recording his [Magadien Wentzel's] story was attractive, not only because his time as an active 28 encompasses a long period of prison gang history, but also because the cornerstones of his life coincide with so many of the beacons of modern South African history" (xx). Among other things, the narrative can be viewed as what Coullie et al (2006: 4) call a collaborative auto/biography or mediated testimony, because "as much as Steinberg recounts Magadien's life story, he is ... also producing an autobiographical narrative about his own encounter with Magadien and his world" (Roux 2009: 29). Interwoven with the story of Magadien are the legendary crime and prison-life stories of Nongoloza and Kilikijan, and that of the infamous murderer, Doggy Dog. The common link connecting Steinberg's principal personages is their membership of, or association with, various South African Number prison gangs. In addition, Magadien and Doggy Dog are contemporaries: in fact, they meet in Pollsmoor prison in the late 1990s. Steinberg suggests that the criminal careers and prison life of Magadien and Doggy Dog mirror those of Nongoloza and Kilikijan respectively. It is precisely the discursive interweaving of these different narratives, widely separated in time and context, on which this article will focus. According to the Number prison lore, the 27s were founded by Kilikijan, and the 28s by Nongoloza, in about 1812. It is said that these individuals led a gang of robbers that terrorised both whites and blacks at a time when South Africa was still under colonial rule. The two fathers of the Number are said to have been recruited into banditry by a Zulu sage called Paul Mabaso, or simply "Po". Po's was an ambivalent rebellion against exploitative and oppressive colonial rule which ended up producing effects similar to those that it had tried to counter. The young men that he wanted to save from the ravages of early colonial industrialisation ended up being notorious outlaws. According to the myth, after the death of Po, Kilikijan led a group of seven or 27 bandits; then he and Nongoloza fell out over the issue of whether homosexual relationships among the bandits should be permitted, and as a result the gang split into two factions. Many years after going their separate ways, Kilikijan was arrested and incarcerated in the Point Prison, Durban. When Nongoloza was subsequently arrested and put in the same prison, he found Kilikijan already a senior prisoner. He had quarrelled with and stabbed a warder, and had been saved from imminent death by a group of six franses (non-gangsters) who smuggled salt and other foods into his solitary confinement cell. These six franses were to become the 26s. (1)
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