On 9 June 2003, a 43-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, for decades rumoured to have specialised in rape and
robbery. In front of him lay the prospect of a law-abiding future,
and life in a household of eight adults and six children, none of
whom earned a living. Jonny Steinberg met Wentzel in prison in the
dying months of 2002. By the time Wentzel was released, he and
Steinberg had spent more than 50 hours discussing his life
experiences. The Number is an account of their conversations and of
Steinberg's journeys to the places and people of Wentzel's past.
Wentzel had lived a bewilderingly schizophrenic life, wandering to
and fro between three worlds: the arcane universe of prison gangs,
steeped in a mythology of banditry and retribution, where he was
known as JR; the fringes of South Africa's criminal economy, where
he lived by a string of stolen names and learned the arts of
commercial fraud; and his scattered family which eked out a living
int the coloured ghettos of the Cape flats. The Number visits each
of those worlds in turn. It is a tale of modern South Africa's
historic events seen through the eyes of the country's underclass.
Surprisingly, perhaps, it is neither a story of passivity nor
despair, but of beguiling ingenuity and cool cynicism. Most of all,
the book is an account of memory and identity, of Wentzel's project
to make some sense of his bewildering past and something worthy of
his future. When Steinberg met him, Wentzel was embarking on a quest
to retrieve the name he had been given at birth. He was also
beginning the daunting task of gathering together the estranged
children he had sired into a nuclear family. It was an eccentric and
painful venture for a man with his past, but it has led him to
construct an account of himself that begs to be told.
