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e a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if
he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another’s pain
and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the
first place.
As much as we needed the money, I never sold the camera. I felt too guilty, like it would
be bad karma, which I know sounds stupid and it didn’t get the family their camera back, but
I just couldn’t do it. That camera made me confront the fact that there were people on the
other end of this thing I was doing, and what I was doing was wrong.
—
One night our crew got invited to dance in Soweto against another crew. Hitler was going to
compete with their best dancer, Hector, who was one of the best dancers in South Africa at
the time. This invitation was a huge deal. We were going over there repping our hood. Alex
and Soweto have always had a huge rivalry. Soweto was seen as the snobbish township and
Alexandra was seen as the gritty and dirty township. Hector was from Diepkloof, which was
the nice, well-off part of Soweto. Diepkloof was where the first million-rand houses were
built after democracy. “Hey, we’re not a township anymore. We’re building nice things now.”
That was the attitude. That’s who we were up against. Hitler practiced a whole week.
We took a minibus over to Diepkloof the night of the dance, me and Bongani, Mzi and
Bheki and G, and Hitler. Hector won the competition. Then G was caught kissing one of their
girls, and it turned into a fight and everything broke down. On our way back to Alex, around
one in the morning, as we were pulling out of Diepkloof to get on the freeway, some cops
pulled our minibus over. They made everyone get out and they searched it. We were standing
outside, lined up alongside the car, when one of the cops came back.
“We’ve found a gun,” he said. “Whose gun is it?”
We all shrugged.
“We don’t know,” we said.
“Nope, somebody knows. It’s somebody’s gun.”
“Officer, we really don’t know,” Bongani said.
He slapped Bongani hard across the face.
“You’re bullshitting me!”
Then he went down the line, slapping each of us across the face, berating us about the
gun. We couldn’t do anything but stand there and take it.
“You guys are trash,” the cop said. “Where are you from?”
“Alex.”
“Ohhhhh, okay, I see. Dogs from Alex. You come here and you rob people and you rape
women and you hijack cars. Bunch of fucking hoodlums.”
“No, we’re dancers. We don’t know—”
“I don’t care. You’re all going to jail until we figure out whose gun this is.”
At a certain point we realized what was going on. This cop was shaking us down for a
bribe. “Spot fine” is the euphemism everyone uses. You go through this elaborate dance with
the cop where you say the thing without saying the thing.