Born a Crime

everybody. He was that friend who believed in you and saw the potential in you that nobody else did, which was why so many of th ...

North. I’d been to Alex a few times, for brief visits, but I’d never spent any real time there. I’d never been there at night, l ...

the different townships where black people lived, but I had never used the one to describe the other. The walls of apartheid wer ...

honor: You were no longer from the township—you were from the hood. Being from Alex gave you way more street cred than living in ...

of Wynberg that cordons off the rich and white from the poor and black. At the entrance to Alex there’s the huge minibus rank an ...

a KFC. KFC found the black people. KFC did not play games. They were in the hood before McDonald’s, before Burger King, before a ...

epic acts of violence and crazy parties. One minute it’ll be a placid afternoon, people hanging out, doing their thing, and next ...

dark gray, punctuated by bright splashes of color. Someone’s painted a wall lime green, or there’s a bright-red sign above a tak ...

someone else’s shack, and they don’t have any running water, so they’ve bathed in a bucket from the outdoor tap and then dumped ...

sound washes over you, the steady thrum of human activity, people talking in a dozen different languages, chatting, haggling, ar ...

the commotion of the minibus rank. Second Avenue was nice because it had semi-houses that were built when there was still some s ...

serious gangsters were. You only went there if you needed to buy an AK-47. After Twentieth Avenue you hit the Jukskei River, and ...

hood to better schools, like Sandringham. Bongani’s parents lived in East Bank, at the corner of Roosevelt and Springbok Crescen ...

I was seventeen, and by that point life at home had become toxic because of my stepfather. I didn’t want to be there anymore, an ...

Minibus drivers were always looking for new songs because having good music was something they used to attract customers. Anothe ...

throw in a hot dog. If you have a bit more than that, you can throw in a proper sausage, like a bratwurst, or maybe a fried egg. ...

Cheese on a sandwich, cheese in your fridge, that meant you were living the good life. In any township in South Africa, if you h ...

were the cheesier cheese boys. Bongani and his crew would never admit to being cheese boys. They would insist, “We’re not cheese ...

to tag along, be in the mix. Bheki was the drinks man, always finding us booze and always coming up with an excuse to drink. The ...

world outside. His family has done okay. They have a house. They’ve sent him to a decent school; maybe he’s even matriculated. H ...