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could understand the other—the Tower of Babel. Few people in South Africa speak Tsonga,
but since my stepfather was Tsonga I had picked it up along the way. I overheard the cop and
the other guy going back and forth with nothing getting across, so I stepped in and translated
for them and sorted everything out.
Nelson Mandela once said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes
to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” He was so right. When
you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and
there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists
beyond me. I see you as a human being.”
That is exactly what happened with the Hulk. The second I spoke to him, this face that
had seemed so threatening and mean lit up with gratitude. “Ah, na khensa, na khensa, na
khensa. Hi wena mani? Mufana wa mukhaladi u xitiela kwini xiTsonga? U huma kwini?”
“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. Who are you? How does a colored guy know Tsonga?
Where are you from?”
Once we started talking I realized he wasn’t the Hulk at all. He was the sweetest man, a
gentle giant, the biggest teddy bear in the world. He was simple, not educated. I’d assumed he
was in for murder, for squashing a family to death with his bare hands, but it wasn’t anything
like that. He’d been arrested for shoplifting PlayStation games. He was out of work and
needed money to send to his family back home, and when he saw how much these games
sold for he thought he could steal a few and sell them to white kids and make a lot of money.
As soon as he told me that, I knew he wasn’t some hardened criminal. I know the world of
pirated things—stolen videogames have no value because it’s cheaper and less risky to copy
them, like Bolo’s parents did.
I tried to help him out a bit. I told him my trick of putting off your bail hearing to get
your defense together, so he stayed in the cell, too, biding his time, and we hit it off and hung
out for a few days, having a good time, getting to know each other. No one else in the cell
knew what to make of us, the ruthless colored gangster and his menacing, Hulk-like friend.
He told me his story, a South African story that was all too familiar to me: The man grows up
under apartheid, working on a farm, part of what’s essentially a slave labor force. It’s a living
hell but it’s at least something. He’s paid a pittance but at least he’s paid. He’s told where to
be and what to do every waking minute of his day. Then apartheid ends and he doesn’t even
have that anymore. He finds his way to Johannesburg, looking for work, trying to feed his
children back home. But he’s lost. He has no education. He has no skills. He doesn’t know
what to do, doesn’t know where to be. The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the
reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope
with it. So what does he do? He takes shit. He becomes a petty thief. He’s in and out of jail.
He gets lucky and finds some construction work, but then he gets laid off from that, and a few
days later he’s in a shop and he sees some PlayStation games and he grabs them, but he
doesn’t even know enough to know that he’s stolen something of no value.
I felt terrible for him. The more time I spent in jail, the more I realized that the law isn’t
rational at all. It’s a lottery. What color is your skin? How much money do you have? Who’s
your lawyer? Who’s the judge? Shoplifting PlayStation games was less of an offense than
driving with bad number plates. He had committed a crime, but he was no more a criminal
than I was. The difference was that he didn’t have any friends or family to help him out. He