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down on as the scruff of East Bank and the kids in the nicer houses higher up in East Bank
were the cheesier cheese boys. Bongani and his crew would never admit to being cheese boys.
They would insist, “We’re not cheese. We’re hood.” But then the real hood guys would say,
“Eh, you’re not hood. You’re cheese.” “We’re not cheese,” Bongani’s guys would say, pointing
further up East Bank. “They’re cheese.” It was all a bunch of ridiculous posturing about who
was hood and who was cheese.
Bongani was the leader of his crew, the guy who got everyone together and got things
moving. Then there was Mzi, Bongani’s henchman. Small guy, just wanted to tag along, be in
the mix. Bheki was the drinks man, always finding us booze and always coming up with an
excuse to drink. Then there was Kakoatse. We called him G. Mr. Nice Guy. All G was
interested in was women. If women were in the mix, he was in the game. Then, finally, there
was Hitler, the life of the party. Hitler just wanted to dance.
Cheese boys were in a uniquely fucked situation when apartheid ended. It is one thing to
be born in the hood and know that you will never leave the hood. But the cheese boy has been
shown the world outside. His family has done okay. They have a house. They’ve sent him to a
decent school; maybe he’s even matriculated. He has been given more potential, but he has
not been given more opportunity. He has been given an awareness of the world that is out
there, but he has not been given the means to reach it.
The unemployment rate, technically speaking, was “lower” in South Africa during
apartheid, which makes sense. There was slavery—that’s how everyone was employed. When
democracy came, everyone had to be paid a minimum wage. The cost of labor went up, and
suddenly millions of people were out of work. The unemployment rate for young black men
post-apartheid shot up, sometimes as high as 50 percent. What happens to a lot of guys is
they finish high school and they can’t afford university, and even little retail jobs can be hard
to come by when you’re from the hood and you look and talk a certain way. So, for many
young men in South Africa’s townships, freedom looks like this: Every morning they wake
up, maybe their parents go to work or maybe not. Then they go outside and chill on the
corner the whole day, talking shit. They’re free, they’ve been taught how to fish, but no one
will give them a fishing rod.
—
One of the first things I learned in the hood is that there is a very fine line between civilian
and criminal. We like to believe we live in a world of good guys and bad guys, and in the
suburbs it’s easy to believe that, because getting to know a career criminal in the suburbs is a
difficult thing. But then you go to the hood and you see there are so many shades in between.
In the hood, gangsters were your friends and neighbors. You knew them. You talked to
them on the corner, saw them at parties. They were a part of your world. You knew them
from before they became gangsters. It wasn’t, “Hey, that’s a crack dealer.” It was, “Oh, little
Jimmy’s selling crack now.” The weird thing about these gangsters was that they were all, at a
glance, identical. They drove the same red sports car. They dated the same beautiful eighteenyear-old
girls. It was strange. It was like they didn’t have personalities; they shared a
personality. One could be the other, and the other could be the one. They’d each studied how
to be that gangster.