- In Defence Of Street Crime.
Phezula! and he's running with the genius of bravado, snatched out of her hand as she sat in the minibus hurtling down through Hillbrow – decaying concrete, decaying daylight, toward Bree street rank. The taxi pauses for a minute and he lightening grabs through the window the cellphone she's paying off, her whole life is on that phone, and he vanishes through the cars and alleys and filth. There isn't even the time for anyone to scream Vimba.
Vimba comes later.
For my children to eat, someone must cry.
It started in earnest when he found himself in a shitty separated room in a broken building looking down on the street, the taxis endlessly hurtling past, seeing people in the windows on phones with lives, him here wanting. He began to analyse the patterns, look for gaps. From his window he saw the swift snatching of phones and he saw mistakes and he saw them being taken by mob justice and he began to analyse the escape routes on foot, run them, time them, look for ways different.
When he took his first phone he learnt through his mistakes the people who wouldn't help, the people who would buy phones and the people who were faster and cheaper and then he found someone like him, self taught, without formal education, without even a computer, who could crack any phone – a phone genius, who could fix or rebuild any piece of technology using only trial and error, using only time, who got good prices and demanded nothing upfront. He discovered the risks and then he began to be able to feed his children, and his baby mama started to look at him with respect again.
A respect, he tells me, found lacking for every attempt he had ever made to do things, the right way, the way his mother had insisted he...
His mother had her own short cuts to necessity. He had to leave school early to help feed the nest of siblings left in the wake of his father's final vanishing. The father ever present but gone, sitting there two blocks away broken by defeat, who now holds his hands out to passing cars. He will not be his father. He will put his hands in the passing cars. For his children to eat, somebody must cry. This is his work.
The phone genius sits in the musty nymandawo waiting for the phezula boys and two finger gangs to bring him the materials of his trade: locked phones, chargers, bluetooth speakerboxes, any detritus of technology for him to weave his skills. He has learnt, with the leaking extension cable slipping over the wall from the makeshift tavern, and the spotty internet gleaned from the franchises on the through road, he has learnt how to make something broken worth money. There are witches upstairs who confer midnight rituals for his protection and he pays them a fee for this. He has learned how to flash a NAND chip with a piece of used nyope tinfoil. He can reset an iPhone 8 with a sliced open charging cable and a depleted car battery. He can charge any phone without it having a charging block. He has phones wired to electricity, on permanently, strung out in hiding places in roof cracks, gleaning the wifi on the long route through the makeshift tavern from the franchises on the through road. A mind finding work to do. Among the chancers and the tiknicians his genius is set apart, from the outside it is indistinguishable.
There is skill inherent in the undetected slipping a wallet or a phone two fingers out of someone’s pocket while walking through busy Hillbrow streets, syncing up, syncopated and then running. There is a path to developing these skills. Everyone is educated wherever they are. A street education is a freedom and an exclusion. The necessity to survive, the action itself, the pleasure of displaying your skills by hiding them, the fear of being nothing, of having nothing, outweighing the fear of vimba.
In house breaking there is a sheered genius to the method, intelligent in it's necessity. A leanness of action in the warm winter night, the singing of insects, the rain washed whoosh of the cars as we slunk down the alley next to the abandoned car wash, in through the fence, feeding the emaciated guard dog seduced over many weeks of passing to the merchant – a place to oroborus feed and hide the ever present pain – the slipping past and over the fence into the suburban property, the knowledge that the security guard out front on the street had a nyope problem, that the residents were out to dinner, and we had a traffic light child with us. I will not detail the methods of entry, of disabling the alarms, for some corporate security firm to take advantage of. For the street criminal to eat, someone else must cry. We ate.
There is no path towards using these gifts within polite society. Advantage could be taken of the street criminal's experience. After a life of having to find a way to eat outside of systems, there is nothing to trust. Nothing but his own intelligence, an education owned, an awareness passed beyond caring about any society, other than the sure knowledge that in order for his children to eat, somebody must cry.
For the street criminal, there is no need for an awareness of supposed choices, of what preparedness to becoming a productive member of society might entail, or even of the thin level of education that one might have had, an education here is deeper. Any chance of being included in a formal society has been, by that society, snatched away.
In a burning building many stories up, do you submit to the flames or do you jump?
Make no mistake, the building is on fire.
A life snatched away.
Phezula!