You Don't Know Me

The prison library is crap generally but occasionally you find something that is like finding a tenner on the street. It is like God just dropped something right in your hands for just you. There is this book I found called The Hammerman. I picked it up because I thought it was like a horror story or something. You know like a proper made-up story but it ain’t. This is one of them true-to-life books. It’s about South Africa in the olden days. I read it and I couldn’t stop thinking about these kids in these gangs. It’s the same thing, let me tell you.

So, all this apartheid shit was happening. Like a few white people in charge of all the blacks. If you were lucky and you were black you might be like a servant to a white guy. But if you were in bad luck, you might even be killed just for saying some next thing to a white person. Brutal. And if I was being tried out there back then this whole case would have been over in a day. One day. And only one verdict. Guilty. Sentenced to life. Game over. But if you were white and you killed a black person – nothing.

Anyway this one year, the white people in South Africa suddenly started getting all jumpy about their blacks. One day everything was cool and the next day they were locking themselves up behind these high, electrified gates at night shitting themselves about what was happening. See, some huge black man was breaking into their houses and smashing their heads open with a hammer. The shit was all over the papers for weeks and weeks. Everyone was hunting this guy. People were scared. And it didn’t make them less scared when people started to calling him the Hammerman. For the whites it was like a name you might give to a monster. But for black people it was a superhero name. And he was like a superhero. He was mysterious. He was uncatchable. And the rumours were saying all kinds about him. He was seven feet tall. He was built like a fucking house. He could run faster than a cheetah. He was invisible. He could fly. The crazier the rumours got the easier people were finding to believe them. They turned him into a legend.

But you know what people were scared of the most? They didn’t know why he was doing it. And those people needed to know why so that they could maybe understand it. Understand him. Understand the monster. And then maybe the monster can become a person, and anyone can kill a person, innit. Everyone was scared – except black people. They weren’t scared.

Black people loved it. To them it was like at last someone was getting their own back for them. One man could change a whole country. It was amazing for them. If they could have sat down and dreamed up something they couldn’t have dreamed up a better thing than this guy. Until Mandela got out, but this was ten years before that happened. This was in a time when there weren’t even riots yet. A time before there was even the hope of a change.

It sounded like from what I was reading in that book that the whites were already a bit wary of black people. It sounded stupid to me at first. Why would they already be a bit scared of black people when most of them were like their slaves? But this is what the writer explains it like. They were scared of them because they couldn’t read them. Their faces were blank to them. When a white man gave a servant a load of shit for dropping a glass and that man just stared back all blank, that fucked with them. They didn’t know what they were thinking. And you can see it. You’re there giving it rah rah to some servant and they just staring at you, saying nothing, not even with their faces. They must have been shit-scared about what they were thinking behind them blank faces. You want to know what your enemy is thinking.

Then here was this massive guy like a superhero calmly walking into white people’s houses and smashing their faces in with a hammer. For no apparent reason. He weren’t stealing any shit. He weren’t raping no women. He was just smashing their skulls in with a hammer. They must have been like, ‘What if the whole country starts doing the same thing?’ The whites might have had all the money and power and what have you. But there were fucking millions of black Africans. Millions of them. All pissed off. All ready for a war. All ready for a bit of freedom and the chance to fight back. What if they rose up one day like the Hammerman and started some revolution shit?