farm butter or several pounds of home-cured bacon. She always brought a large bunch of cured tobacco leaf for my granpa. He smoked a Rhodesian blend called African Drum and hated the sharp, raw, unblended tobacco from Marie’s farm, though he was much too polite to tell her. He would hang it by the stems from the ceiling of the garden shed. Occasionally he added a couple of large leaves to a forty-four-gallon drum filled with rainwater which stood directly outside the shed. The tobacco-infused water was used for aphides on the roses. But the water required only a tincture of tobacco, and the supply hanging from the ceiling grew alarmingly. Eventually it was to become one of the most important factors in my rise within the prison system.
For the first year Geel Piet, the half-caste, was a part of morning piano practice, for he was always in the hall on his knees, polishing the floor. After a short while he became entirely invisible, a shadow in the background who greeted Doc and myself with, ‘
Geel Piet was small and battered-looking. His left eye hung lower than his right and the bottom eyelid drooped, showing more of the eye than one would normally see. Both eyes were permanently bloodshot and somewhat weepy. His nose had been completely flattened and his deep yellow face was criss-crossed with scars. A section of his bottom lip had been cut away, leaving a purple wedge of scar tissue to droop in a line of permanent disappointment from the corner of his mouth. He stood around five foot two inches on his buckled legs, for they were more than simply bandy, the result of having been broken several times and no doubt carelessly mended. Had he been able to straighten them he might well have been four or five inches taller. In the process of surviving, Geel Piet had achieved an outward appearance which would have made it near impossible for him to last for very long outside the jail system. He had worn out his luck in the outside world, if indeed he’d ever had any. Born in District Six, the notorious coloured township in Cape Town, Geel Piet had been in and out of jail for forty of his fifty-five years. He took pride in the fact that he knew the workings, at an intimate level, of every major prison in South Africa, and he was the grandmaster in the art of camouflage. Should a warder beat him for whatever imagined reason, Geel Piet bore no animosity, no hate. He had long since transcended both, and regarded a beating as self- inflicted because it resulted from some piece of carelessness. Geel Piet had no sense of morality, no sense of right or wrong. He existed for only one reason, to survive the system and to beat it. To gain more from it than he was entitled to. He had long since realised that, for him anyway, freedom was an illusion. He had accumulated years of sentences, he wasn’t quite sure or no longer cared how many, and was realist enough to know that he was unlikely to survive the system at his age and with his deteriorating health.
After all the years of incarceration he was a polished performer, no less a maestro at his profession than Doc was at his. Perhaps more so, for as a procurer Geel Piet was a genius.
Geel Piet ran the prison black market, in tobacco, sugar, salt and dagga (cannabis). In the end, he controlled the mail coming and going from the prison and thus the money brought in. He also had an encyclopaedic knowledge of boxing and a rare gift for spotting errors of style and weakness in performance. My desire to become a boxer was all too apparent, but it is a sixth sense to men who have to survive on their wits, and who have to sniff the air before every move and wager everything on a chance observation or a cunning guess, that told him I was an easy mark.
It took just over a year for Geel Piet to ingratiate himself to the point where I would unknowingly begin to serve him. Our entire relationship was built upon small conversations eked out over weeks until an understanding formed which eventually led to the conspiracy that made me present him with a leaf of tobacco.
I had been culling a patch of
I was never searched as I entered the prison, although on this particular day, carrying a bucket rather than a bag, a mildly curious guard wanted to know what was in the bucket and had come on over to take a look. In fact I had not been worried, having entirely forgotten about the tobacco leaf. ‘Funny how he likes all these ugly plants, hey?’ the guard said, for Doc’s cactus garden was directly outside the warders’ mess and was the butt of many a joke, most of them about cactus being just the sort of plant for a prison. ‘If the prisoners revolt we’ll all hide in the professor’s garden, those blerrie Kaffirs wouldn’t be game to try to get us out.’
I had taken the bucket through to the hall after the squad workout and as usual Geel Piet, who was becoming more and more useful and who, over the ensuing year would assume the place of personal servant to Doc, took the bucket with the cuttings to Doc’s garden. He had returned with it, his permanently broken face wreathed with smiles. ‘I will help you to be a great boxer,’ he simply said. And that was how it all got started.
I broached the subject of the tobacco with my granpa when I returned home that afternoon after school. I did not really think about the moral issue involved. After a year of going in and out of the prison each weekday I had come to understand the system. Morality was suspended, war existed between two sides and even aged eight I could see the odds were heavily biased towards one of them. The prison warders were an extension of the kids at the hostel: a brutal force confronting a defenceless one where crimes supposed or otherwise were being paid for. The idea of committing further petty crime in this sort of atmosphere and being brutally, often savagely punished was bizarre and quite unreal. Doc and I were not a part of either side, we were an audience who would, from time to time, make a decision to enter the play. While we couldn’t change the plot, we could relieve the actors of their tedium.
My granpa was generally suspicious of unquestioning moral rectitude, preferring to judge each item as it came to him; as prepared to have Inkosi-Inkosikazi cure his gallstones as he was to give the Boers credit for being musicians and good shots. We sat on one of the steps leading up to a terrace. Between much tamping, tapping and lighting of pipe and staring into the distance over the paint-faded and rust-stained roof, and after ascertaining that I was never searched, he decided that the prisoners should have the tobacco.
‘Poor black buggers, it’s worse for them than it was in England in the seventeenth century. Most of them are in for crimes that deserve no more than a tongue lashing.’
He was wrong. Barberton was a heavy-security prison and most of the prisoners, except for the politicals, had committed crimes that were worthy of formal punishment in any society. It was the administration of the prisoners’ life that was the real crime, and it was not unusual for a prisoner to be beaten to death for a comparatively minor infringement of prison rules. Such occasions were discussed among the warders quietly, almost secretly, but with an inner glee.
I think my granpa was partly influenced by the thought that the mounting stock of tobacco leaves from Marie’s farm would start to dissipate and that in some small way he too was fighting the sort of injustice he abhorred. He carefully instructed me in the use of tobacco-infused water for insect control, and gave me a note to Doc explaining how it was done. The plan was for Doc to set up his own drum beside the cactus garden and infuse it with two tobacco leaves at rare intervals. In the event of a single load of tobacco entering the prison being discovered, Doc, a non-smoker, could quite easily explain its destination.
Doc had requested to remain in Barberton prison rather than be transported to an internment camp in the highveld. The thought of being away from his beloved mountains, his cactus garden and his piano was more than he could bear, and I’m sure our friendship also played a large part in his reluctance to leave Barberton. Kommandant Van Zyl, who had come to regard Doc as the personal property of the prison and a constant thorn in the side of the English-speaking town, was more than happy to co-operate. I think in the end the military authorities must have given up trying to extricate him from the civil prison system, and Doc spent the remainder of the war under the benign supervision of the Kommandant.
Of course, Doc was co-conspirator in what became a sophisticated smuggling system. Being in the prison constantly he was there when the work gangs returned at night and left again at dawn. He was forced to see an aspect of Africa he had never witnessed. Doc was a man who preferred not to take sides in any issue other than
