number, The

By (author): J. Steinberg. Jonny Steinberg's Alan Paton Award-winning book is built on fifty hours of interviews with Magadien Wentzel, a member of Pollsmoor Prison's "28s" gang, tracing his life from an impoverished Cape Town childhood through incarceration and attempts to rebuild after release. Functioning as both biography and prison ethnography, it examines the racially and socially warped world of the Cape Flats and the "Number" gang system's codes of marginalisation, violence and survival.