pulling a trick; zol – hand-rolled smoke.
The above vocabulary constitutes the core of what a later inmate (in his article, “South African Gaol Argot”, in the UNISA journal, English Usage in Southern Africa of May, 1974) defines as ‘Central English’, evidently still petrified there. The unidentified linguist lists as current all the syntactical features which Bosman used in his recorded speech: the double negative (I haven’t got nothing); the misuse of parts of speech (Do it good); the dropped auxiliaries (I done it) and prepositions (Don’t swear me), with the historic present tense used to such vivid effect (So I says to the Bombardier… ). Those familiar with Alex la Guma’s prison stories of the early 1960s will readily recognise those features, together with much of that persistent “tarnished word-currency” (burg, john, juba, rooker, squashies), still largely uncaptured in Oxford’s 1996 Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles.
Much of this carceral parlance Bosman already knew from his reading of turn-of-the-century O. Henry. He used terms like box-man and cracksman (safecracker), to be buncoed (taken for a ride), graft and spiel (scam). More than once he described the bull-pen, the admissions part of the stir (prison). To him lamb meant a predator’s under-age (female) sex partner (see Huysmans’s twelve-year-old in Chapter 4), while punk meant the ambiguous male equivalent (the pansy’s rabbit is Pym’s expression).
Entrance to Pretoria Central Prison, Klawer Street (photo: Craig MacKenzie)
A scene from the Solly Flatt Album, of the Pretoria Prison, late 1920s
A-2 Section entrance
A-2 Section
Quarry
Print-shop
Brush-shop
Scenes from the Solly Flatt album, inside Pretoria Prison, late 1920s
Once the Penguin New Writing volumes had first made vulgar Commonwealth fiction of interest to London while Bosman was there before the war, a writer like Frank Sargeson could splash around these terms, apparently in common use in New Zealand (in his memoir, “That Summer”): cobber; going crook; dees (detectives); dinkum lags; john; peter; possie (vantage point) and screw.
And for the sake of comparison here is a checklist compiled from Phelan’s Jail Journey as the basic phrasebook of his Home institutions. Almost all of it correlates with Bosman’s:
bitches bastard – bad screw; china; chokey (solitary punishment cell); compound (open working area); dip – pickpocket; graft – to cadge gifts with a hard luck story; grass – spy who betrays fellows to warders; the mix – to enlist a warder to make trouble for another convict; mugs – older inmates; plant – hiding place; popper – one in for shooting; red-collar – freedom to go about unsupervised; screw; screwsman – thief; snout; stiff – illicit note from one convict to another; stir; straighten – get someone to do you a favour; swagging a kangar (kangaroo, chew) – carrying a bit of tobacco; tan – club and kick to a standstill; work a ticket – get a transfer; turnover – cell search; wideman – professional robber.
As in Bosman, much of Phelan is given over to the rituals of tinder-boxing and all the argot associated with tobacco as legal tender.
Both writers also remark that, in their experience, the rule of perpetual silence among convicts had only recently been lifted in the prison system of the English-speaking world. In other words boob-slang as they learnt it had previously been only an illegal side-of-the-mouth means of communication. Central English was once the whispered language of dying and dead men.
A more recent record of time spent in Pretoria Central is Steven Botha’s “Concrete Island” (in Frontline, October-November, 1987), a piece so frank and forthright that it makes Cold Stone Jug, once held to be such a shocker, seem tame indeed. To his confession Botha attaches a wordlist of contemporary prison slang, so that we may measure how, even there – half a century on – times and vocabulary have utterly changed. Only two words are recognisable from Bosman’s days: boer for warder and the perpetual old bandiet for the convict serving his term.
Stephen Gray
Johannesburg, 1999
Preamble
“MURDER,” I answered.
There were about a dozen prisoners in the cells at Marshall Square. It was getting on towards the late afternoon of a Sunday that we had spent locked up in a cell that was three-quarters underground and that had barred apertures opening on to the pavement at the corner of McLaren and Marshall Streets, Johannesburg. I had been arrested about fifteen or sixteen hours before.
Those first hours in the cells at Marshall Square, serving as the overture to a long period of imprisonment in the Swartklei Great Prison, were the most miserable I have ever known. By standing on a bench you could get near enough to the barred opening to catch an occasional glimpse of the underneath part of the shoe-leather of passing pedestrians, who, on that dreary Sunday afternoon, consisted almost entirely of natives. The motley collection of prisoners inside the cell took turns in getting on to the bench and trying to attract the attention of the passers-by. Now and again a native would stop. A lengthy discussion would follow. Occasionally (this constituting a triumphant termination to the interview), a piece of lighted cigarette-end would be dropped in through that little hole in the wall against the pavement. This was over twenty years ago. But it is still like that. You can go and look there.
For the rest of the time the dozen inmates of the cell carried on a desultory conversation, a lot of it having to do with what appeared to be highly unbecoming activities on the part of plain-clothes members of the police force, who seemed to spend all their waking hours in working up spurious cases against law-abiding citizens. Then, when it was getting towards late afternoon, one of the prisoners, a dapper little fellow who had done most of the talking and who seemed to exercise some sort of leadership in the cell, felt that it was time we all got sort of cosy together, and started taking more of a personal interest in one another’s affairs.
“I’m in for liquor-selling, myself,” he announced to a man standing next to him, “What they pinch you for?”
“Stealing a wheel-barrow from the P. W. D.,” was the reply, “Not that I done it, mind you. But that’s the charge.”
“And what are you in for?” the cell-boss demanded of the next man.
“Drunk and disorderly and indecent exposure,” came the answer. “And what’s your charge?”
“Forgery. And if I drop this time I’ll get seven
