as a ‘journalist’, despite the fact that his books are a hybrid of investigative journalism and scholarly research, achieving a quality of social history that is, in South African studies, unique, though he does acknowledge, in The Number, a great debt to Van Onselen. In this regard, Steinberg, like Dlamini, is unique to postapartheid writing, and his mission as a discoverer of deep stories, excavated with due regard for both their surface feel and their below-the-radar complexity, gives his work an edge over writing that is merely imagined or made up. Perhaps this is what Krog means when she says, ‘I want to suggest that at this stage imagination for me is overrated’, and Van Niekerk, too, when she opines that a reading of the best South African nonfiction (in this case, Antony Altbelker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree) ‘almost convinces one that fiction has become redundant in this country’ (Twidle, ‘Literary Non-Fiction’ 5).42
It is as if the analytical edge of nonfiction, in its commitment to establishing a baseline account and its dedication to getting the story right, is necessary precisely because the ‘right story’ can only be achieved, or nearly achieved, in a continuous weighing up of the value of the stories people tell themselves, which are likely to have varying degrees of usefulness. That is to say, Steinberg deploys a mode of nonfictional investigation, akin to journalism in the best sense of that term, to discriminate between orders of information folded into stories. Steinberg is alert to the fact, always, that subjects use stories strategically and pragmatically, so he cannot take them at face value. Much of the information gleaned in the course of a Steinberg-type book, although based on fact, often verges on a kind of fictionality in its arrangement of elements. For example, Steinberg writes, at one stage, that
[Wentzel’s] identification with Sidney Poitier in To Sir with Love is almost certainly a retrospective memory. It is the product of a conciliation he has made with the world during the last three years. It is also the symptom of a peace he has made with himself. (The Number 138)
Explaining this, the author suggests that
[watching To Sir with Love] wasn’t his first experience of black and white. Away from the screen, in his real life, he was watching his mother give her maternal love to two white children. And the feelings this spectacle invoked had made him a virulent racist. He hated the Sampsons in particular, the entire white population in general. Even the ‘pseudo-whites’, the coloured middle class, with their domestic workers and their family cars, he hated with a vengeance. (138)
On the basis of this evaluation of what Steinberg has deduced about Wentzel’s sense of things, over the longer term and in view of the stories he typically tells himself, the author is able to identify his subject’s current storyline as a ‘retrospective memory’, a reconstruction (or fiction, of a sort), in the present, of a memory that, Steinberg concludes, must have had a different charge in the past: ‘Back in the mid-seventies, he must have watched To Sir with Love with ambivalence at best: a toxic mix of longing and envy’ (138).
Such meta-reflexive recalibrating in the face of a superfluity of oral and researched data represents the real work of Steinberg’s (and Dlamini’s) brand of nonfiction. In The Number, as elsewhere in his corpus, the importance of such work is evident in the consequences attendant upon narratives of self-understanding, or delusion. The very destiny of Steinberg’s interlocutors is intricately bound with their stories of origination and validation. This can be seen on both an individual and a collective level. Socially, the prisons become a site in which the political narrative of transition after 1994 gains a sharpened focus. The early years of Mandela’s presidency saw riotous conditions inside gaols like Pollsmoor in the Cape after unrealistic expectations of mass amnesty and ‘freedom’ on an exaggerated scale were not met (The Number 271–276). However, white bosses in the command structure gave way to people of colour fairly quickly, and the new prison directors had their own ideas about running institutions of incarceration. One new manager in particular, Johnny Jansen, decided to turn the prison around, from an authoritarian, violent and mistrustful institution to a place where the governors and inmates might forge a common language. As a man of colour himself, Jansen had experienced the humiliation of racial discrimination at the hands of his former white bosses, ‘[s]o he believed that he knew why the men in his charge had murdered and raped; their psyches had been mangled by the collective humiliation of apartheid’ (319). ‘I don’t think the solution to crime is so complicated,’ Jansen says to Steinberg in the course of The Number. ‘Human beings are supposed to be simple. They didn’t become what they are by choice, but by their circumstances. If you expose them to different ways of doing things, it is like giving a child a new toy’ (319). Steinberg continues:
It was all charmingly romantic. Human beings are naturally good: apartheid had deformed their souls. Jansen himself had almost succumbed to the cancer of racial humiliation; he had wanted to kill. But he was better now, a fully-fledged human being, and he was going to shepherd his flock back to goodness: one victim of apartheid taking the rest by the hand. (319)
Romantic it may well have been, but at this point, Jansen as a senior prison boss is engaged in something quite astonishing in any prison environment, let alone one inextricably linked with apartheid – he is structuring a management revolution in a discourse associated with redemption. It is surely not accidental that healing discourse of this kind was also being used, at the same time, by the TRC, which was in fact sitting in the period that Jansen launched his initiative (1997–1998). The redemptive version of the transition story so key to postapartheid mythography, then, is played out inside Pollsmoor, one of South Africa’s biggest prisons. And, given the confined space of prison, its urgent pressures, Pollsmoor witnesses a dramatic, larger-than-life version of the promise, and outcome, of the transition narrative. Is it fiction or reality? Can it be made to work? What is more, Steinberg’s interlocutor, Wentzel, comes to internalise this redemptive promise (for reasons that are skilfully narrated in The Number), and so his story – and The Number – gain an enhanced significance as postapartheid documents: alongside the TRC, they bear witness to momentous currents of change, and the power of narrative to reconstitute the self.
In the course of Jansen’s ambitious programme, he recruits the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) to come to Pollsmoor. Jansen wants the CCR to conduct conflict resolution workshops for warders and inmates. ‘These were heady days at Pollsmoor,’ Steinberg comments. ‘Its young coloured managers wanted to reinvent the prison; they were searching hungrily for ideas’ (323). The CCR people succeeded in changing the prison ‘profoundly’, Steinberg writes, ‘at least for a while’ (323). During their first 18 months at Pollsmoor, the CCR consultants established a workshop involving inmates and warders ‘in an endeavour to unstitch the coarse and violent practices apartheid had bequeathed to the prison’ (323). The 18 inmates in the workshop consisted mostly of Number gang leaders and members of the inmate committee. The workshop was based on psychological research around ‘human dynamics’. A second course involved ‘creative and constructive approaches to conflict’, while another on trauma debriefing was conducted by clinical psychologist Stephen van Houten (326). ‘It was the first time ever for some prisoners,’ Van Houten reported, ‘that they were able to verbalise their traumatic childhoods and/or their crimes.’ Steinberg sees in this a transformative moment:
That, indeed, is much of what the workshops were about for Magadien. At the age of 39 he learned a foreign language, a language of self. It opened the door to an entirely new universe. The idea that one can make of one’s life a project, an internal and inward-gazing project, that one can retrieve the most intimate of one’s memories, work on them, shape them into a single narrative of meaning – this was radically foreign, and a revelation. (326)
There is a clear similarity between Ndebele’s ‘restoration of narrative’ and Steinberg’s ‘narrative of meaning’, both of which enable affirmative reclamation of previously distorted and mangled senses of self. In addition, the correspondences between this ‘foreign’ notion of trauma debriefing and self-shaping in Pollsmoor, on the one hand, and similar processes going on in the TRC, on the other, cannot go unremarked.
