Брайс Кортни - The Power of One

‘Oh I see. You are going to make it possible?’

‘Well, no. The Anglicans and the Dutch Reformed have got the prison ministry and they do absolutely nothing. It’s iniquitous. We’ve prayed a great deal about this, prayed that the Lord would make it possible for the Assembly of God missionaries to have the prison concession so that they can spread his precious word and bring the gospel to those poor unfortunate sinners.’

‘Has it not occurred to you that the Lord may have answered your prayers?’ my granpa asked.

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Well, if the lad has direct access to the prisoners, could he not distribute tracts and that sort of thing?’

It was a master stroke. In return for being allowed to take dictation on Sunday at the prison, I was required to take gospel tracts in Sotho and Zulu from the Assembly of God missionaries and give one to each prisoner after he had dictated his letter to me. My mother and Marie had scored another major triumph, first the hospital and now the prison; they were earning recognition as a couple of hardcore fighters in the Lord’s army. What’s more, my time on a Sunday was counted as first-class work for the Lord.

I don’t exactly know how it happened but I did it just the once, then it suddenly got done all the time. One of the prisoners had said that tobacco was sorely missed, and the next week I cut a piece of tobacco leaf exactly the same size as a tract and slipped it inside one. The next thing I knew Dee and Dum were slipping these neatly cut squares of tobacco leaf into every tract, and I would take a whole bunch with me and sort them into their four African languages and put the various piles in the drawer of the desk at which I sat, leaving an ‘innocent’ pile of Sotho tracts in front of me on the desk. After one of the people had dictated his letter to me I would hand him a tract from the drawer. This was Doc’s idea and on two occasions the warder who attended the letter writing sessions absently picked up a tract, looked at it in a cursory manner and then returned it to the pile on the desk.

Letter writing suddenly became very popular and those of the people who didn’t have anyone to write to would ask me to write to King Georgie. When I asked them what they wanted to say to the King of England it was almost always the same thing.

Dear King Georgie,

The people are happy because you are our great king. I send greetings to the great warrior across the water.

Daniel Mafutu

After a while a letter to King George was simply a euphemism for a tract. One tract and contents made two cigarettes and were an unimagined luxury. Not only had the Tadpole Angel contrived to continue the supply of tobacco into the prison, but the people no longer had to pay for it and it came together with paper to roll it in. For a generation afterwards, cigarettes in South African prisons were known as ‘King Georgies’ and some old lags still use this expression today. And of course the mystique which surrounded the Tadpole Angel continued to grow; nothing, it seemed, was impossible for him. More importantly for the Kommandant, the letter writing experiment proved to be a huge success and before the summer was over he had been made a full colonel and also received a commendation from Pretoria for his work in prison reform. The Assembly of God missionaries kept up the supply of tracts and even had them translated into Swazi and Shangaan. When I told Doc that King Georgies now came in Swazi and Shangaan he smiled and said, ‘God’s ways are mysterious, Peekay. I think because the people cannot read they now send smoke signals up to God.’

It was not long after Geel Piet’s death when Lieutenant Borman started to complain of piles. ‘Now I’m in administration I sit too much,’ he’d say to any person who’d listen. ‘I can’t eat steak, it hurts too much passing through, man, there’s even blood in my shit.’ It was true he seemed to be losing weight and Captain Smit advised him to see a doctor. ‘It’s only piles, my old man was a train driver, he had the same thing.’ His wife sewed a special cushion for him which he brought to work and sometimes he’d walk around carrying the cushion in case he suddenly had to sit somewhere.

‘It’s God’s justice,’ Gert confided to me, ‘Geel Piet wasn’t the only one he’s used the donkey prick on.’ He giggled, ‘I hope the bugger can’t sit for six months!’

No one said anything but you could see it in their eyes, those of us who had been in the gym that night all knew Borman was under a curse.

Geel Piet had once told me how prisoners could think so hard that, collectively, they could make things happen. Like when they knew I had beaten Killer Kroon hours before anyone brought the official news of my win. How they always knew when there was to be a hanging minutes after a judge had issued the warrant, sometimes hundreds of miles from the location of the prison where the hanging was to take place.

‘Ja, it is true, small boss, I have seen it heppen lots of times,’ Geel Piet had said gravely. ‘Sometimes, when there is enough hate, this thinking can kill. The people will think some person to death. Such a death is always long and hard, because the thinking takes place over a long time. It is the hate; when it boils up there is no stopping it, the person will die because there is no muti you can take to stop this hating thing.’

Anyone who is born in rural Africa is superstitious and the warders, who were mostly backwoodsmen, were particularly so. We all watched Borman as he started to shrink. His extended gut remained, but everywhere else the flesh started to fall off him. He seemed to age in front of our eyes and the thinner he became the more vicious he was with the prisoners.

Another prisoner died mysteriously and after a short enquiry Borman was put on a charge and suspended from duty pending the enquiry. Shortly afterwards he experienced a severe rectal haemorrhage and was rushed to Barberton hospital where the surgeon, in an attempt to stop the bleeding caused by a rupture to the wall of the bowel, packed his rectum with giant cotton swabs – a procedure known to be about as excruciatingly painful as it is possible to experience. The doctor’s cursory examination revealed the presence of a fungating growth.

Within weeks of leaving prison Doc was fit enough again to head for the hills and we would climb away from the town at first light every Saturday morning. We’d breakfast on hard boiled eggs and yesterday’s bread with a thermos of sweet, milky coffee high up on a ridge somewhere or beside a stream. Sometimes we’d make for Lamati Falls, a smallish waterfall ten miles into the hills and we’d wait for the morning sun to whiten the water where it crashed into a deep pool which stayed icy cold throughout the year. Doc was like a small boy, the years seemed to fall away from him as we scampered up the sides of mountains or slid down into deep tropical kloofs, where giant tree ferns and the canopy of yellow-wood turned the brilliant sunlight into twilight and where the soil was moist and smelt both of decay and new life at the same time.

Doc was busy taking the photographs for his new book and sometimes we’d hunt all day for a single perfect specimen. It was good to be working with Doc again. He was an exacting task master who, when we found a specimen to his liking, demanded to know the soil types and the shales, the rocks and the other botanical plants which grew within a radius of fifty feet, the direction of the wind and the hours of sunlight the cactus or aloe he was photographing would receive. Some days we’d communicate all day in Latin and in this way Doc gentled me into Ovid, Cicero, Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and Virgil. Mrs Boxall countered this with the English poets. Wordsworth, Masefield and Keats were her favourites, with Byron, Tennyson and Walter de la Mare, if not her favourites, a matter of essential education for a gentleman. I asked Doc about German poets, and he replied that Goethe was the only one in his opinion who could be considered worthy, but that personally he found him a terrible bore and that the Germans put all their poetry into music. He declared I should study the English for their poetry and the Germans for their music.