The Choice: The Gayton McKenzie Story

Foreword

In September of this year, it will be seven years since the first edition of this book was published. It’s a book that has changed the lives of many – it has reached school kids, parents, general readers, the thousands of people who attended Gayton’s motivational talks, almost everyone in the media, business leaders, foreign visitors, and, perhaps most importantly, men and women still incarcerated in prisons here and around the world. The letters and emails we have received over the years all bear testament to the power of this book to make you think and to change you. It’s still as fresh and exciting to read now as it was the first time, but it’s a very different feeling for me to read it, because if this book changed anyone’s lives the most, then it was Gayton’s and my own. 

Nelson Mandela once said, in one of his most famous quotes, that ‘there is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered’. I’d like to add that this feeling is even more profound with a book, as there’s nothing quite like returning to a book about you that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. If you have spent many of your best years in those cold, noisy, fetid cells, how different do you imagine an apartment in Sandton, with a Porsche in the garage must feel? Imagine that, and you’ll come close to a fleeting understanding of it.

Gayton has been out of prison for more than ten years now. He’s been out for as long as he was in. He’s no longer entirely and conclusively defined by being an ex-con. A few years ago, when you met him, the first thing he would have said to you was: ‘Hello, my name is Gayton McKenzie and I come from jail.’ Everything about Gayton centred on prison: what led him there, what he learnt and experienced there, and what got him out of there. There was, literally, nothing else for him and about him. He was Gayton ‘Prison’ McKenzie. He thought about prison, spoke about prison, laughed about prison, lost sleep over prison, fought with people about prison, got married because of prison and in a prison dining hall, wrote this book about prison and became famous primarily for having been a prisoner – all because if you’ve spent as long as he and I have in a South African jail, then don’t be surprised if the institution of prison consumes you. To move beyond it, as Gayton has, and transcend the limited world of the prisoner, to become something much more than a mere ex-convict, is no small accomplishment. Today, if you met Gayton, you would probably be introduced to the Mr McKenzie, owner of a mining company, a mining consultancy company, a chain of lounge bars, called ZAR, and ZAR Empire, a developing entertainment and arts business, all of which have turnovers in the millions of rands. After talking to him for hours about business and life, you might be astounded to discover that he was in prison and that his formal education ended in high school.

His is not a life path I would recommend to anyone, just as I wouldn’t recommend my own. Going to prison is a profound blow to anyone’s hope of a good career and a decent life. There are few other examples I can think of (though they do exist), of someone like Gayton, who went to prison as little more than a thoughtless thug, and emerged to become something much more. That doesn’t mean that many others cannot do it (for many others must), it just means that if you do want to do it you should understand that it’s very, very difficult, you need to work harder and smarter than anyone else you know, and you have to be incredibly careful, because the world will watch your every move, but not so careful that you forget to take the right risks – and you can never give up. Maybe then you’ll have a chance of success. You see, the real message of Gayton’s story, and his success, is that he was able to make something of himself despite starting from a position in society that is truly rock bottom. This has been the point of his many motivational talks – which he used to share with people even while he, himself, was only on his way to reaching some of the dreams in his life – that if he could do it, then anyone could. That’s not to say that he did it on his own. Many, many people helped him along the way – but he made himself into someone whom it was possible to help. 

And for every one good thing he received, he always tried to repay it with two.

In prison, he declared that he was going to be successful on the outside, and he promised me, as well as many other guys, that he would find us when the time was right. I was released a while after him, and he was already doing his talks and building a name for himself. Shorly after the first edition of this book was published, I saw him waiting for me at the school where I was working for a humble salary, which at the time I was proud of because I wasn’t doing crime. He asked me to join forces with him as someone he could trust with his life, and I agreed in an instant. I started as his manager, helped to market this very book and I’m happy to say I was right there with him whenever we had a breakthrough in our lives, be it in business or personally. 

He tried to help many others, and he kept his word to as many of the other guys as he could – but, like I said, if you think success comes easily or that anyone owes it to you, then you’re going to find it will always appear to be owing to you, and failure is much, much easier. I’m happy to say, though, that we have been able to improve the lives of some ex-prisoners, by giving them opportunities and work. A few of them make it.

Gayton and I have been through all the struggles and the joys together. We will continue to do so for as long as either of us has breath. Before Gayton’s father, Stanley, whom you will read about very shortly, passed away on in October 2008, he made the two of us promise that we would always be brothers, with an inseparable bond of loyalty. I’m happy that Stanley lived long enough to see the man his son became and was still on the way to becoming. 

Many of our successes were leveraged from the success of this remarkable book and the stories it tells. I hope that while you read it, you will understand why this book has been so transforming to so many, and especially to me and Gayton. I particulaly hope that this is a book that will inspire you to take ownership of your own choices, because we all get opportunities along the way, it doesn’t matter how bad our beginnings may be. As Gayton says in this book, what matters is the path you choose to take to get beyond your bad beginning. That bad beginning could be the very thing that makes you special.

And how you get out of it should be the thing that eventually defines you. 

Kenny Kunene, Sandton

1 March 2013

1

Early Childhood

I was born at two am, 10 March 1974, in Pelonomi hospital in Bloemfontein, a confusing new addition to a confusing world. My grandmother is Irish, my grandfather Japanese. My father is a product of that, but looks like a coloured man. My mother is Sotho. I simply look black. I am not entirely clear about my ethnicity. My parents have the photographs at home, but the genetics have been shuffled with a deck of wildcards, and the result is me, someone who looks nothing like the Irish, but has their luck, who looks nothing like the Japanese, and can’t think of anything I have that’s remotely related to them, except the DVD player at home, and can’t even say I’m a typical Sotho, but at least I can tell you that in Sotho. Ke ka o bolelo ntho eo ka Sesotho.

It is a dry evening in Heidedal and children are kicking up dust on the dirt sidewalks. They are skipping in time to the rhythmical rise and fall of a rope, and playing games like the one they call amperscotch, a variant of hopscotch, where you jump backwards and kick a little stone from outlined block to outlined block in the sand. Watching, in the gathering dusk, is a three-year-old boy who is not allowed to play with his seven-year-old sister or his cousins from the neighbourhood. He clings to the fine wires that enclose the home he will see shrink before him in time as he grows to be a man; as he grows to become someone for whom the definition of enclosures will change, from being there to protect him, to being there to protect everybody else.

This is to become my earliest memory, of a twisting, metal fence that rises up above a toddler body like a reprimand for what I am thinking of doing. The little squares of wire cross their arms and do nothing as I make my first escape into the street, another heedless child asking to be struck by a car among the hodgepodge houses and the thick smoke from cooking fires and bolas, coal heaters made from pierced drums against the Free State winter.

My mother, Louise, has been very clear about it. ‘Gayton, you don’t leave the yard.’ But I am too curious and rebellious, even then. I want to play the games. They say that in many ways you are born with your personality intact, curled up inside you like a dense flower bud waiting to unfold. 

I am given my first hiding that day, and it isn’t to be the last. 

The game I enjoy more than any other takes place in the back of the yard, where the children are caught up in something that is half mock role-play and half serious. My sister, Sharon, plays the part of teacher and I watch as the others write and recite a mantra of ABCs, dotted Is, and crossed Ts. I am perfectly silent, keeping to the condition my sister and the others have set, but I am allowed to say, ‘Juffrou (teacher) ... can I go to the toilet?’ a formalism that the children respect as a fetish of learning. Somehow, this careful illusion of the classroom materialises into something genuine, because one day, when I am four, a truck passes by and my mother hears me say something quite unexpected. 

I have recognised and spoken correctly the arbitrary pattern of letters that have flashed past on the side of the truck. Suddenly everyone knows that there are web-like strands in my spidery young mind, capturing letters and sounds like tiny flies and sucking the juices from them. I can read. The thought of what to do with this lively, curious little boy, who is beginning to outgrow the house’s fence, no doubt troubles my mother as she rings up other people’s purchases at the supermarket, looking at the various families and their children, the affluent whites that buy the chocolate assortments, the macadamia nuts, the red and sparkling wines, canned cherries and cream, thinking: do you have a four year old who can read and write, even if just a couple of words? Is he quiet, attentive, and keen to learn, or wouldn’t he know a word if it formed itself in freckles on his nose? 

She realises that perhaps I need greater stimulation than what her eight-year-old daughter can teach. So, after talking to my father, she tells me I am ready for school.

We live in 44 Jack Colbert Street, which faces the back of Olympia Primêre school, where I am taught in Afrikaans. At the age of four, I walk with my sister to school, just to watch, but it’s not long before I am allowed to attend on my own. By the end of the year, it’s a great surprise, but I am the top pupil in Grade 1. Teachers feel they have a dilemma. I will always be ‘the little kid’ in school. But there is no way I can repeat a year, so they let me continue with the expectation that somewhere along the line I will break, and not make it.

Maybe, on reflection, they will get their wish, but it will prove to be a long wait.

My father says we’re Irish. He makes Irish coffee, and it is apparently the real thing, but I can’t tell you as I never plan to try it. He is always so proud of, particularly, his mother and his Irish descent. I have never been able to make the connection to this white woman, though. She died at the time of my birth, and I sometimes wonder what it might have been like for me had she been around, and had she been genuinely fond of me. Would I have been even more confused, or would it have made things clearer? I was just as unlucky with my grandfather, a sailor, who was dead before her. They loved one another. My father is one of four boys and has three sisters. My uncle, his brother, lives three houses away.

My father gets up early to go to work as a storeman. For some time I can only imagine what he is doing, but I know it has to be something very important, because he always arrives home tired. He gives a little wave of the hand and then uses the same hand to pour the brandy when my mother asks him how the day was. She tells him to fix something in the kitchen and he nods. He is a proud handyman. The house is a small, blue, thick-walled building with a tin roof, identical to almost all the other houses in the neighbourhood. I stay in the dining room, which is also the living room, sleeping on a mattress that we slide under the table each night because there’s no room to sleep anywhere else. I call myself ‘the receptionist’, because people step into this space when they enter the house. I hang my clothing from nails on the walls. My sister has a tiny bedroom to herself, next to the kitchen.

One morning, on a Saturday, I join my father when he goes to work. I am very excited. This walk up the road and quick trip in a taxi minicab is an enormous adventure. As we go through the morning gloom, I look carefully at all the passing black township houses, a churned-up spatter of haywire, piecemeal design. Someone is telling us a story in Sotho as we go, about how the queen once came to visit Bloemfontein and insisted on seeing what separate development was really like. The government prepared very well for her few minutes through the smoky ghetto by building a row of pretty little brick houses with flower pots facing a tarred road, and perfected their sultry-smooth phrases of how well everyone was doing. ‘Just look at their happy smiles,’ her guide would say. Other people in the taxi, blacks and coloureds travelling to their separate occupations in this old and drunken automobile, laugh at the story. ‘I don’t think she was fooled,’ the man says and everyone agrees. Those houses, we are told, are still prime real estate in the black part of the township.

We arrive at my father’s job, in a hulking warehouse with the sign for NCR (National Cash Registers) across the front. I am led to the kitchen and join my father for coffee and meet Miesies G, a cheerful white lady who fusses about how cute I am and asks me questions about my shoe size. While my dad goes off to do his job she gives me a book with crayons and I spend hours colouring in and then go to look around the yard. I see my father in the warehouse carrying boxes, and then a white man shouting his name: ‘Stanley!’

‘Yes, baas?’ he calls.

‘Stanley!’ he yells again and then starts to shout. My dad apologises, but the big man with his wispy grey hair continues to berate him loudly. I don’t know what my father has done, but then, with a final threat from the other man, Stanley is left alone. I don’t want him to see me playing there in the yard, but he notices me and tells me to go back into the kitchen.

‘Make me some coffee.’

Miesies G comes back from somewhere in her car and gives me a pair of shoes and clothing. What I am most excited about, though, is the toys: a model car and a male figurine, a white man. He-Man. I forget about everything and run back outside, wearing my scuffed ‘new shoes’ and slightly faded ‘new’ shirt to make miniature roads for my ‘new’ model car and strike at it with the, by comparison, enormous figure, whose left leg is only slightly broken, hanging limply where some other child must have pulled it too hard.

My father thanks Miesies G profusely for the gifts, making embracing gestures towards his own heart and lowering his head. He makes such a show of it that I realise I may not have been grateful enough myself. ‘Thank you Miesies G,’ he says. ‘You are so good Miesies G. May God bless you.’ When we leave at lunchtime, a shortened day because of the Saturday working hours, I give the woman’s leg a tight hug. She laughs and says I should come again, and my heart exults. My father’s job is so wonderful, I have forgotten, for the moment, what I saw a few hours before. His status as a hero is confirmed to me and I am wondering, on the way home, if anyone else in the taxi is noticing my new outfit and shoes. I make revving noises with my car along the seats of the taxi and feel my father’s hand on my head. ‘Gaytie,’ he says softly.

When we arrive at home I show my sister my new things but she is not impressed. Later, I find my father sitting in the narrow lounge. The curtains are drawn and he is in his worn-out sofa chair, his drink in his hand.

‘Yes. I’ll take you again,’ he promises me, and I am perfectly pleased.

I am by far the smallest and youngest boy in school, an ant among termites. Being bullied is casual and regular. They take money, food and inflict bruises, saying it won’t show because I’m the blackest thing they’ve seen.

‘You think you’re clever, McKenzie? You’re just a runt. Go to school with your brothers in Mangaung.’ (the black township).

I have friends, but none are what you’d call ‘a best friend’. Of my friends, Neil Gallieboy is around most often. Most of the boys my own age have an older brother who has been through much of the nastiness that our lives seem to engender, but not so for me.

You’ll just be sitting on the front step and see older boys walking by staring at you, and you’ll think: what’s the problem? What do you want? As it is, I feel alone and I come to rely on myself. Even my friends seem able to turn on one another quickly and will be into a fight sooner than later.

I learn to fight in school and on the streets of Heidedal, though I am often overpowered. The battles that aren’t simple, sadistic bullying are mostly about things like marbles or, especially, gambling, but on the whole it comes down to something more simple and brutal: who is toughest. I learn to fight, even when the pain is so overwhelming I forget who I’m fighting and why. There’s always somebody who wants to moer (hit) you, and rob you. Marbles double up as ammo for a kettie, a home-made catapult made from a well-chosen fork in a tree branch, the rubber from inner tubes and a bit of leather. I am shot at with everything, from stones to marbles, twisted wires, nails, even chicken bones. Ketties are not particular about ammunition, and I learn to shoot back. I come to feel that if anyone were to set up a kettie tournament, I would win.

It’s not unusual to see children as young as six gambling. They use more traditional props, like dice, but I prefer a game called blikkie. You play using a tin cup and a coin. Children gather to place their money on the ground while you hold your cup upside down and roll the coin inside with an expert motion of the wrist, so that the coin spinning within makes a satisfying sound to rival the flashing lights and electronic sounds of any casino. Every coin that the other boys have put down you must match with a coin of your own. If the first of them puts down heads, all of them do, and you roll your coin and slam down your tin praying that when you lift it you will see tails. We take turns to spin the coin and the coin spinner has the most to lose or gain, including a bloody nose.

I love this game, and though winning or losing is merely a matter of chance I feel there is some skill involved and that my good luck is due to my technique in some way. I have confidence that I am superior, and perhaps all young boys have this sort of self-assurance, but it is something that comes to define me. I want others to see it too, so that I scream all the harder when an older boy gives me a wedgie. I walk home, the inside of my upper thighs burning, the ruined elastic of my underpants hanging like two dead tongues from the top of my pants, and I vow revenge.

When we play cops and robbers, as all children do, no self-respecting Heidedal kid wants to be a cop. We share more bloody noses for the honour of being Billy the Kid, the most notorious gangster in the neighbourhood. Every child knows all the stories of the formidable Billy, how every cop fears him, and every gangster fears him all the more. No door with money behind it can keep Billy the Kid out, and no door with bars can keep him in.

The stories we tell are brutal, though many are softened by a sense of loyalty. Billy the Kid will always come back to pick you up when you’ve been shot.

I never see the man, but I know about him, and can also tell you about Tebogo Mohana, aka Tebza Ngwanya, who runs the underworld of Joburg from Soweto, Jackie Lonti, the Jakkalas (jackal), who no one will dare to oppose on the Cape Flats. Only the Staggie brothers, Rashied and Rashaad, in Cape Town, are spoken of with the same respect. We have debates about who’s toughest and will act out role-plays of gang wars.

The real thing is not very far away. The Philadelphia Kids are my local slice of intimidation and drug dealing. Every area is gang turf. No area of South Africa has as many gangs as a coloured township, and Heidedal is no exception. Its territory is shared among The Fast Guns, The Spaldings, The Stylistics, The Bosbere (bush bears), Hot Stuff and The Philadelphia Kids, whom we just call the PKs. We all know which gang our allegiance is sworn to and kids at school who live in the Hot Stuff area are not disinclined to come over to me and push me around because the PKs did something unacceptable to the Hot Stuff clan. They shove you between them and say, ‘You PKs think you’re so great, don’t you? Well kiss my arse.’ And you’re trying to fight back and thinking: what in the world are you actually on about anyway?

I’m five, and still in my first year of school. Mando is a rough, scarred man, with wiry muscles and a hard glare in his eyes. He lives a minute’s drive from my house, in Karel Botman street. 

 I am in the house when I hear the argument outside. I step outside to look. The quarrel seems to be over cigarettes. The other man moves away and I see that Mando has a knife. He grabs the retreating man by the belt and strikes. As his victim screams, there’s a rich fountain of blood from his neck. He screams again and falls. The blood drains from him and he is soon silent. Mando notices my small presence and he points at the body and says, ‘Ja saanie, jy’t fokol gesien hier.’ (Yes, sonny, you saw fuckall here).

The police come and take away the body and I see Mando walking with his friends afterwards. I’m not the first-ever witness in my neighbourhood who’s been too afraid to say anything. I can’t think of anyone in Heidedal more feared than Mando. He points at me as he passes with his pals and says: ‘Hey, my lightie!’ I’m his little boy now, and the thought terrifies me. There never seems to be a good time to mention that I saw Mando casually murdering a man. I am also terrified that someone else will say something about it and Mando will think it was me. So I keep his secret, as do many others. It’s hardly his first murder, and though he’s always discussed, there’s ‘never proof’. Murder is so common in our area that one could look at the statistics and think there’s a serial killer running about. There probably is.

A toffee apple is the first thing I steal, from an old lady shop owner. 

I am six years old. They are lying there on a table in a kitchen where she has just made them and I help myself on impulse, thinking about the thieving hero, Billy the Kid, and slip one into my trouser pocket. The toffee is still boiling-hot though, so it sears my skin, and when I’ve reached safe distance I pull it out and the toffee is inedible, covered with material from my ruined trouser pocket. I eat what I can and justify the theft by thinking that my pain has caused me to pay more than anyone else anyway.

I come to steal other things, like cassette tapes, just recordings of music I think I need. I am also beginning to understand that money is fluid and hard to hold onto for some. If you are sharp, you can drink from what drips between the fingers of others. ‘The sugar’s up,’ I’ll tell my mother, who knows how I love the trips to the shop. She’ll give me the money and I’ll skim just a bit from the change. I become known as a gopher at other homes, from where the people send me running for occasional essentials. The biggest essential is beer, and I find it isn’t too hard to hustle something out of each trip, doctoring the change: ten cents, five. Probably, there are a few who notice my little ‘business’, but they say nothing, thinking perhaps that boys will be boys, and I am working for it, in a way, after all. I justify it, again, as the only way to retain my self-respect, because if I weren’t taking something I would be little more than a slave.

If you are naughty your parents will threaten you, in a mock-chilling tone, with the police. ‘Hier kom die polieste vir jou.’ (Here the police come for you). It’s as if they know what you’ve been up to already and so they invoke these bogeymen, so that the very sight of the police is enough to send little boys with toffee-apple-red lips screaming home. I am more terrified of the police than I am of the gangsters or God Himself whose Holy Vengeance is the subject of many a sermon at the local church.

For us, the police are never an option, and even if you try they might not be much use to you anyway, because people phone and are often told ‘there’s no van at the moment’. It will be give or take whether it will come at all, and do so within three hours. Later, you’ll see that police van at the local shebeen, with the police laying into the drinks. It is not unusual to see them picking up their girlfriends, too, if that’s even who they are. Not every prostitute in a police vehicle, here, has entered it in handcuffs