Andrew
Maykuth Online
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| Joanna Thomas next plans to work with the Philadelphia Leadership Foundation. |
CAPE TOWN, South Africa - Mogamat Benjamin is a hard man. He has spent 34 of his 49 years in South African prisons, rising to lead a notorious gang whose methods of control include sodomy and murder. Its members have been known to cut out their victims' hearts and ritualistically eat them, to consume the souls of the dead men.
So Benjamin was skeptical when Joanna Thomas arrived three years ago at Pollsmoor Prison, near Cape Town, seeking to enlist gang leaders in a program to teach them to resolve conflicts nonviolently.
She seemed just another do-gooder with a lame idea. Some inmates thought her an informant.
"I didn't trust her, and I told her so: 'All these years, you people are using me and abusing me,' " Benjamin said.
But there was something that set Thomas apart. She combined femininity and understanding with a fearless, forceful presence, and her message, while blunt, was hopeful: Stop looking outside yourself for the causes of your problems; look inside for the strengths that will lead you beyond them.
As months passed, Benjamin's skepticism faded and his outlook was transformed. By the time he was released last spring, violent incidents at Pollsmoor had declined dramatically and he and several other gang leaders had become unlikely apostles of positive thinking.
Now they travel to high schools in Cape Town's gang-ridden slums to teach children that they are the masters of their destiny.
"These people have really changed," said Freddie Englebrecht, area manager of Pollsmoor Prison, which houses 8,000 inmates. "There is no doubt in my mind."
Thomas' remarkable program, sponsored by the University of Cape Town's Center for Conflict Resolution, inspired a BBC documentary this year. It also got the attention of the Rev. Linward A. Crowe, president of the Philadelphia Leadership Foundation.
Mr. Crowe has hired Thomas as a foundation vice president for training and leadership development. She is expected to arrive in Philadelphia in two months.
"I thought what she had done was unique and very effective," said Mr. Crowe, whose foundation operates outreach programs in the city's prisons and who also chairs the prison committee of Mayor Street's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
Thomas' program is not the only one at work in South Africa's prison system, where the Department of Corrections has been trying to humanize life after decades of racial disparities that ended only with Nelson Mandela's 1994 election as president. (Mandela himself was imprisoned at Pollsmoor.)
In the words of Pollsmoor's Engelbrecht, "We acknowledge the people's dignity as human beings." This fundamental philosophical shift has taken many forms, from reeducating prison employees to giving inmates birds to care for, but officials agree that Thomas' program, buttressed by the others, has been notably successful.
"[It] is aimed at raising self-awareness," Thomas said. "The message we send out is that change is possible: 'I am the author of change, not the prison.'
"This," she said, "is a big thing for black people coming out of apartheid. We were brainwashed to think we couldn't do anything."
Now many prison officials are black or of mixed-race parentage, "coloreds" in apartheid parlance. So are most of Pollsmoor's inmates.
"In the past, people were beaten up, their dignity taken away," said Engelbrecht, a "colored" who could not have risen to head Pollsmoor under the old system. "In the new dispensation of South Africa, we must restore their dignity."
Pollsmoor's gangs were a product of apartheid. The 28s, Benjamin's gang, came first, founded in 1906 when 28 black inmates revolted to protect themselves from white guards.
"[For years, we] were like the freedom fighters inside for human rights," Benjamin said. "That's how we saw ourselves."
The 28s developed a strict hierarchy and sexual code that are still in place; they are known as the men who have sex with each other. There is an elaborate system in which recruits are assigned to gang officers as "wives." The reward for obedience is protection; the penalty for disloyalty is death.
Two subsequent gangs - the 26s and the 27s - rejected the sexual organizing principle of the 28s and built their reputations on killing or robbing guards and inmates. At the peak of their power, the three gangs controlled much of the daily life at prisons such as Pollsmoor, where inmates live in open wards rather than cells and gang leaders rule after the nightly lockdown.
In recent years, however, officials have isolated gang members to prevent recruiting. There are now frequent searches for weapons, and socialization programs have been instituted. As a result, while gangs and gang violence still exist, both are steadily diminishing.
But they were going strong in 1998, when Joanna Thomas, fortified by a strong belief that God would protect her, stepped into Pollsmoor's gang world.
"It's an institution of darkness and evil that's almost impenetrable," said Thomas, 42, who worked in administrative jobs at the Center for Conflict Resolution for seven years before starting fieldwork in 1997.
"My objective was to break the circle of violence and recidivism. I kept thinking: Where do you intervene? I decided if I targeted the gang leaders, it would have a greater impact on the prison and the people outside."
She conducted workshops in an isolated rooftop cell known as the place where Mandela began his secret talks with the apartheid regime. She emphasized to the men that the room was where the old South Africa had begun to change - and where they could do the same.
"It was a constant promotion of dialogue over violence," Thomas said. "The gang leaders who came to the workshops learned more negotiating skills. They were empowered."
Benjamin initially refused to attend, instead sending a lieutenant, Erefaan Jacobs, to observe.
"At first, I just went to the meetings, but I didn't buy it," said Jacobs, 29, his face heavily tattooed with depictions of a man on the gallows and such phrases as "I hate you, Mum."
Slowly, Thomas won Jacobs' trust. Now the former drug dealer, released in April, says he is drug free and has reconciled with his mother. His speech is peppered with feel-good jargon learned through the program.
"I try to focus on positive things," Jacobs said. "I want to stay on the right side. Joanna taught me how to think. I'm a survivor. She taught me how to deal with conflict. She learned me a lot."
Benjamin, too, came around. Like other inmates, he was most impressed with Thomas' openness.
"The way she won our trust was to trust us," he said.
Thomas' program is modeled on several training sessions designed for corporate leaders.
"What she has done is to create a program for human development and training that is often reserved for business leaders," Mr. Crowe said. "She put it into an amalgam and delivered it to some of the most marginalized people imaginable."
Her methods, he believes, can succeed with inmates and urban youth in Philadelphia.
South African prison officials say Thomas' program has contributed to a dramatic reduction in violence. There were 297 violent assaults at Pollsmoor in 1997; now there is one a month.
Engelbrecht hopes that as freed prisoners carry the program's lessons back into society, the gangs' grip on Cape Town's mixed-race neighborhoods will be loosened.
"I believe one of these days - it will take time - we'll actually see a reduction of crime in our society," he said.
Benjamin, meanwhile, says he is resisting drugs and crime but still makes sure to sit facing the door, back to the wall, even in his small cinder-block house.
"I don't want to be a 28 anymore," he said. "I still have some authority around here. I still use it but in a positive way."