130713, Family day in prison

On Wednesday morning  I set out with one of the bead mamas and 2 of her sons to go and visit her other son in prison in Umtata. I’ve been with them to visit him a few weeks before and we planned to go again this week for the official ‘family day visit’. 

We were under the impression that there’d be a braai, so we stopped at a shop in Umtata to get some supplies and then wasted another hour to go deeper into town on the mission for cheaper meat which turned out to be just a greater waste, because arriving at the prison we found out that there is indeed no braai happening at all.  (Don’t ask me about the misunderstanding, I’m the only umlungu in the whole place and don’t understand everything that’s going on…Xhosa…)  So in the end we had apples for lunch.

There were a good number of people that turned up for family day and we had to wait in queues for the prison taxi to escort us with our food packages and djembe drums to the prison gate.  We were clever this time and left all our cell phones in the car which meant we could skip this great long queue of checking in cellphones and move on to the next one to get into the door.

After that there is yet another queue for strip-searching (After the packages have been searched).  The previous time they had a male / female cubicle where you went in to be searched one at a time.  This time, I guess because of the greater number of people, they did it right in the waiting room (Male and female apart).  So people were being strip-searched right there in front of everyone else.  Very interesting.  They basically felt you up and down and then you had to take down your pants or lift up your skirt.  (At least you’re allowed to keep your underwear on). And I must say the people who did the searching were nice enough. 

Reaching the outside people pointed me into the direction where the music was coming from, I had seemingly lost the rest of my party and people thought I must be part of the entertainment being the only white person and carrying a djembe drum under my arm.  When I got there I found my friend already playing his drum next to the speakers.  The man with the mike saw me and called me closer to join my friend, which I did although it was not really in the plan.  I actually brought the drum for who-ever of his friends wanted to play with him, which in the end turned out to be only me. 

So there I was having a rather epic moment, playing drums together with my inmate friend in front of a couple of thousand prisoners and their family members inside Maximum Prison.  It was fun and I was almost disappointed when it ended after not too long.  But he wanted to spend the time with his family rather, which I understood cause after all the delays and queues we weren’t left with a whole lot of time.

He told me that he has very few friends in the prison and rather keeps to himself than to be part of the gangs.  There is apparently a great deal of weed smoking going on inside the prison and the police themselves are the biggest dealers who sell to the inmates.  I know that sort of thing goes on in prisons all over the world, but really, we think our police are there to uphold the law and some of them try their best, but in actual fact a lot of them should be locked up themselves.