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The guards had given me a mat and a scratchy blanket. I rolled them out on the concrete floor
and tried to get comfortable. Every bad prison movie I’d ever seen was racing through my
head. I was thinking, I’m gonna get raped. I’m gonna get raped. I’m gonna get raped. But of
course I didn’t get raped, because this wasn’t prison. It was jail, and there’s a big difference,
as I would soon come to understand.
I woke up the next morning with that fleeting sensation where you think something has
all been a dream. Then I looked around and remembered that it wasn’t. Breakfast came, and I
settled in to wait.
A day in jail is mostly silence punctuated by passing guards shouting profanities at you,
doing roll call. Inside the holding cell nobody says anything. Nobody walks into a jail cell and
says, “Hi, guys! I’m Brian!” Because everyone is afraid, and no one wants to appear
vulnerable. Nobody wants to be the bitch. Nobody wants to be the guy getting killed. I didn’t
want anyone to know that I was just a kid in for a traffic charge, so I reached back in my mind
for all the stereotypes of what I imagined people act like in prison, and then I tried to act like
that.
In South Africa, everyone knows that colored gangsters are the most ruthless, the most
savage. It’s a stereotype that’s fed to you your whole life. The most notorious colored gangs
are the Numbers Gangs: the 26s, the 27s, the 28s. They control the prisons. They’re known
for being brutally violent—maiming, torturing, raping, cutting off people’s heads—not for the
sake of making money but just to prove how ruthless and savage they are, like Mexican drug
cartels. In fact a lot of these gangs base their thing on those Mexican gangs. They have the
same look: the Converse All Stars with the Dickies pants and the open shirt buttoned only at
the top.
By the time I was a teenager, anytime I was profiled by cops or security guards, it usually
wasn’t because I was black but because I looked colored. I went to a club once with my cousin
and his friend. The bouncer searched Mlungisi, waved him in. He searched our friend, waved
him in. Then he searched me and got up in my face.
“Where’s your knife?”
“I don’t have a knife.”
“I know you have a knife somewhere. Where is it?”
He searched and searched and finally gave up and let me in, looking me over like I was
trouble.
“No shit from you! Okay?”
I figured that if I was in jail people were going to assume I was the kind of colored
person who ends up in jail, a violent criminal. So I played it up. I put on this character; I
played the stereotype. Anytime the cops asked me questions I started speaking in broken
Afrikaans with a thick colored accent. Imagine a white guy in America, just dark enough to
pass for Latino, walking around jail doing bad Mexican-gangster dialogue from the movies.
“Shit’s about to get loco, ese.” That’s basically what I was doing—the South African version of
that. This was my brilliant plan to survive incarceration. But it worked. The guys in the cell
with me, they were there for drunk driving, for domestic abuse, for petty theft. They had no
idea what real colored gangsters were like. Everyone left me alone.
We were all playing a game, only nobody knew we were playing it. When I walked in that