Frankie’s Gym
Becoming a Man in Gangland South Africa
[This one was a bit too real for Men’s Health…]
Right here is where Neil Hendricks was stabbed 12 times and lay bleeding in the weeds. His mistake? Standing up to a gang called the Schoolboys, who were harassing a young woman.
“I knew he was going to die,” his father Frankie says.
Frankie remembers later that night, driving around and searching for the perpetrators. He remembers standing over one of them, gripping the guy’s ear in one hand, and an upraised axe in the other, demanding the names of his accomplices.
The past can be a bleak place. And there are few places bleaker than here, in the impoverished townships outside of Cape Town, South Africa. Somehow, these areas haven’t shared in the prosperity in the years following Apartheid. Today, whites still earn six times as much as blacks, and in townships like Frankie’s, where unemployment can be as high as 60%, gangs have no trouble filling their ranks.
The gangs are just one more lingering malignity in the wake of this country’s appalling history. That history looms like a wave over the overwhelmingly young population, always about to topple. As recently as a few months ago, you could still see a “whites only” sign in the nearby Strand, an upscale beach area from which blacks were forcibly evicted in years past.
“Apartheid is out of the mouth,” Frankie explains with a sigh, “but not the heart.”
And yet, Frankie’s own neighborhood seems weirdly immune to history’s negative cycles. There’s no gang activity. The young men have jobs. On the dusty streets neighbors laugh and talk. A jumprope slaps the pavement. Children jewel the curb.
And here’s where a fairly ordinary story of gang violence begins to get a little unusual. Because Frankie’s son Neil did not die of his wounds that day. He survived, and asked his father a favor: Not to avenge him.
But this is no mere story of meek-minded forgiveness. It is a story about history, the enormous, crushing weight of it. No one who reads this is unburdened by history. Ancient humiliations fester and grieve the heart. Voices come back from years ago to cloud your mind with doubt.
There are those among us who are somehow able to dismiss their own history. But most of us cannot claim this power. Nor are we sure we would want to. Our histories bespeak our origins, after all. We want to acknowledge them, but we do not want to be owned by them. What we want, like all the people of South Africa, like anyone the world over, is to be free.
*
A mild spring day at the bottom of a complicated continent, and a young man tugs iron from the molten pull of the earth. We’re behind Frankie’s house, in a tiny, cement yard arranged with bent and rusting gym equipment. The foam padding on a leg-lift machine has been patched with materials borrowed from a local airplane seat fabricator. The dip bars, salvaged from a scrap heap, were spot-welded by a friend. On one side, a low, unpainted shed shelters more gym equipment, although you can’t stand up without knocking your head on the rafters.
Frankie built this gym in the months after his son was stabbed, so young gangsters in the area could explore an alternative to their usual pastimes of murder and assault. It wasn’t enough to forgive; Frankie had to make sure his forgiveness meant something.
Today, Frankie’s gym has 100 members. And despite the primitive conditions, everyone seems strangely energized. Here you don’t see that vacant, slung-jaw stare as guys depart on extended mental vacations between sets. There’s no one riffling magazines, or gaping at banks of wall-mounted TVs. It’s as if they’re all still amazed at having found a way to test their physical limits that leaves no one bleeding.
The positive energy seems to stay with them when they leave Frankie’s. Because everyone I talked to here was employed.
Neil Bowers, 32, is working on a painting crew until he can find something better.
“I’m greatly blessed by having Uncle Frankie in my life,” Bowers says. “Because he used to know me. He used to know what I was capable of, the things I’d done.”
Freedom is still a newish idea to Bowers. With a father in prison, and a mother overwhelmed by seven children, Bowers grew up on the streets, and between age 11 and 30 he was never outside of a prison or reform institution for more than a year at a time.
Bowers recalls these years in a penitential murmur. But when he’s lifting there’s a marked change to his demeanor. In that moment, history vanishes, and it simply becomes a matter of whether he’s strong enough for the task at hand.
Frankie, now 63, started lifting when he was 13. Back then it was the bucket and broomstick method — the cement went in the buckets, and the broomstick lifted them up. There was no way to compete professionally, of course. Even after Apartheid, the sport of bodybuilding never got much support. Frankie used to organize his own competitions at the local high school. It was there that, in 2008, he received a visit from the chair of the Western Province Bodybuilding Union, who invited him to participate in the regional championships.
Now we sit in Frankie’s cramped living room, facing shelves lined with bodybuilding trophies. The adjacent wall bears framed pictures of the legendary anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko, who was murdered by the Security Police in 1977. When you ask about the pictures, Frankie gets a bit circumspect. It’s with some reluctance that Frankie discusses the past at all. He’s seen too much of it, perhaps.
Yet somehow he retains his sense of humor. At 5’5”, with a tucked shirt snugging his belly, and eyes that can be fairly said to twinkle, he reminds you of a jolly friar, the kind that would happily jab you in the ribs when you step out of line.
But there’s a gravity to Frankie, as well. He has a certain presence — the packed density of the lifelong bodybuilder — such that, despite his height, he doesn’t look small even when standing next to someone larger.
Unlike many of the guys who attend his gym, Frankie himself was never a gangster. Somehow their rules just never applied to him. When I ask Frankie how this started, he tells a curious story. It was a Saturday night, decades ago, at the local club, and the leader of a gang called the Scorpions went up to a gangster from a gang called the Sons of Satan and knifed him in the head. Then he broke off the handle.
“I asked him, Why did you do it? He said, Two days ago he gave my girlfriend a smack. That’s why I did it. I said, My brother, what you must do now, take your jacket and go out. Go. I don’t want to see you again.”
What strikes you about this story is that any sane person would think to demand an explanation from a gangster who just stabbed another guy in the head. Even more amazing is that Frankie had the nerve to eject the gangster from his own turf — and that the gangster complied.
There is no mystery to how men become monsters. It happens all the time, in radically differently cultures. Today in South Africa you can still hear the Apartheid regime compared to Hitler’s Germany. If history has taught us anything it’s that becoming a monster is dismayingly easy. But the reverse — how you resist that corruption, and lead the battle against it — is more problematic.
Even Frankie wonders about this. “I actually also want to know,” he says. It’s as if his own nature were not clear to him, or something were protecting him from seeing it.
*
Several highway exits to the west, in the gang-plagued township of Manenberg, an ex-investigator for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (the South African equivalent to the Nuremberg Trials) is expounding an alternative method for dealing with young gangsters.
“We take them to the mountains and we fucking sort them out,” says Zenzile Khoisan.
Small and wiry, constantly smoking, and jittering with an almost insectile energy, the 52 year-old Zenzile was referred to me by a local journalist for a little historical context. Zenzile grew up watching his friends get shot by government forces. He made his first petrol bomb at age 14, and fled into exile three years later, returning only after the fall of Apartheid to help rebuild.
Also with us, chilling in the back seat as we careen around some of the more dangerous corners of Manenberg, is the 64 year-old Boeta Amien, whom Zenzile introduces as something like the godfather of this community, as well as the leader of Cape Town’s armed underground during the Apartheid years. He was also Mandela’s first personal bodyguard.
“I drank his water and tasted his food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned,” Boeta Amien says.
“Boeta,” Zenzile explains, is a title meaning “seasoned man” in the Khoi Khoi language. Boeta Amien presents an interesting contrast to Zenzile — tall, with a patrician air, he’s a lot more languid than you’d expect of a resistance fighter.
“See those young men sitting over there?” Zenzile says, indicating four teens idling in a courtyard. “What do you think is going to happen to them?”
There are 4–5 shootings daily in Manenberg, Zenzile says, rattling off battlefield statistics. “When the gangs start fighting… the bullets fly through the windows.”
Most of us carry our histories only in our minds. When something bad happens, when you come home to find your clothes in the street, or a curt dismissal awaits you at work, you can always move to another town, where the past isn’t so present. But history here seems inescapable. It’s cemented into the project-style architecture slapped together by the Apartheid government to hold the communities they bulldozed; it poisons the schools, where the bar is so low that 30–40% on test scores is considered sufficient for graduation; it haunts every gang shooting, which by now have become the banal subject of YouTube videos.
But for Zenzile and Boeta Amien escaping history was never part of the plan. Instead, they aim to drill deeper into it, to reclaim the ethnic identity of the people who lived here long before the arrival of European traders. And a key component of this project is reconstituting a more traditional sense of what it means to be a man.
“There are seven !naus that a Khoi person goes through in their life,” Zenzile says, pronouncing the word with a click. Each !nau, says Zenzile, who is also a tribal chieftan of his people, corresponds with a different level of personal development, beginning with birth and ending in death. And each !nau brings with it a new elevation of both responsibility and status.
The concept is not entirely foreign. Most of us recognize similar stages of development in our own lives — from puberty, to financial independence, to fatherhood, and so on, right up to the penultimate !nau, which Zenzile describes as taking on the mantle of leadership.
The difference is that, in the Khoi culture, each stage is explicitly prescribed, so there can be no confusion about what being a man actually entails. Ultimately, this has less to do with how much money you make or what brand of shoes you wear than how ready you are to lead yourself, your family, and your people. Such is the lesson that Zenzile bangs into the heads of wayward hoodlums when he takes them to the mountains.
Now we pass a low bridge, once the site of a military checkpoint between two townships.
“I used to enter it every day during the liberation to arm the men,” Boeta Amien remarks. Disguised as a doctor, he concealed the weapons in the back of his truck.
And with this the man’s languid persona begins to add up. Because who but someone of his cool deportment could withstand the daily belligerence of gunned-up checkpoint guards?
“In a liberation struggle you are committed to certain things,” Boeta Amien says. “So it tests you — how much, as a human, you are giving to this cause. Are you this person you say you are?”
The talk of testing sounds familiar. Like Frankie’s answer when I asked him why he likes lifting — “Because it can show you how strong you are.”
It makes you wonder if this constant drive to test ourselves and discover our limits isn’t in some way essential to our psychology, deserving the same recognition as those other, more recognized drives. After all, unless those limits are known, we can never truly trust ourselves. You see this in some guys, a certain dodginess or malaise. Perhaps they simply don’t care who they are. Or maybe they are missing that drive altogether.
Then there are those who have the drive, but no healthy way to express it. And you think of guys like Neil Bowers, who broke into his first house at age ten.
And perhaps this is what Frankie intuited: that all the local gangsters needed was a healthy way of testing their own personal limits. As if the mere act of getting in touch with those limits were enough to scatter the demons and restore a fundamental self-respect.
Just then we slide around a corner and pass a high cement wall on which someone has spray-painted the word M O N S T E R S in huge block letters. A fitting name for a gang, you think. But it is not a gang, Zenzile says. It is merely a name that some young wannabes have chosen for themselves. You wonder how long until they grow into it.
*
When I mention Zenzile to Frankie he says, “Oh, I’ve met him. We did a march a few years ago in Cape Town.”
The two men share similar aspirations for their people, but as individuals they couldn’t be more different: Where Zenzile draws power from injustices committed decades ago, Frankie is more philosophical. We’re grabbing a burger at a local Wimpy’s when he happens to mention that Neil Bowers, who comes to Frankie’s gym daily, was actually one of the gangsters who stabbed his son.
“I think maybe he is feeling guilty,” Frankie says, “like he wants me to start talking about it. But I will never do it. Never never. The past is the past, man.”
It’s the kind of thing Mandela would say. You can see the sense in it. And yet, it is so clearly not true. The following day, Frankie is showing me where the Scorpion stabbing took place when we decide to drop in on an “informal settlement” called Morkel Cottage. Named for the white-owned farm that used to be located here, Morkel Cottage is now a squalid maze of low shacks. The shacks have a shipwrecked look, assembled from scraps, waiting for the wrong wind to blow. Bricks are dispersed on the corrugated iron roofs to keep the wind from lifting them skyward. In winter, the rains come, and turn the paths into torrents. Sometimes dump trucks on their way back from white neighborhoods agree to dump their rubble so it can be used to shore up the runneled terrain. The entire place is a fire hazard. Two years ago a woman burned to death. Shards of glass catch the sun and start fires in the dry weeds.
“This is how we lived before,” Frankie says.
Frankie moved to a place like Morkel Cottage when he was 27, after the white-owned farm where he worked shut down. In those days, they lived by the light of paraffin candles, and his father made extra money building coffins. They couldn’t afford shoes, and Frankie can remember winter days when he would pee on his feet to keep them warm.
But worse than poverty was the steady assault on human dignity that commenced each time you walked out your front door. Frankie remembers waiting in the rain at the service windows of stores he wasn’t allowed to enter. He remembers the X he had to stand behind on public buses, even when the front was empty.
This was the diabolical triumph of Apartheid: the way it made you an accomplice in your own subjugation. And if you didn’t know better you might start believing it, such that where your inner genius used to burn a burning shame would take up residence instead.
Frankie’s own parents believed the white man was superior. “Even if I told them they were wrong they would not listen,” Frankie says. “They believe the baas is always right.”
Frankie kept his spirit alive with minor acts of defiance. He’d walk along the edge of the beach at Gordon’s Bay, putting one foot on the pavement and the other in the sand. For him the beach was off-limits. It’s as if they knew that the freedom you feel when you go down to the water and take in its green expanse would stir the soul in dangerous ways.
Eventually, Frankie found a job at a factory that produced audio CDs. But one could only rise so high in those days. Frankie became a manager. He did his best to become an upstanding member of a downtrodden community, holding on to his sanity and helping others to hold onto theirs. And when the day of emancipation finally arrived he raced down to meet the waves at Gordon’s Bay. Today that moment is one of his happiest memories.
“Yoh!” he exclaims, rocking back. “The guys were taking their clothes off — they were not even out of the car, and rrrrunning to the water, diving into the water, and singing! The white people were standing out there on the beach and they were looking. And the police came — they can do nothing.” He smiles, remembering. “Woh, woh. It was a big relief for us. Very, very big. It was free. Free free free.”
The happy feeling fades as we wind through the trash-strewn paths of Morkel Cottage. Now we pass a row of toilets, one of them missing its door. The kids in the area tore it off and sold it for scrap. The same is true of the soccer goal posts that used to stand in a nearby field. Frankie once tried to raise a soccer team here, but kids kept dropping out, succumbing to a local crystal meth variant known as tik — named for the sound it makes when you smoke it in a broken light bulb. This is what happens when a certain threshold of hopelessness is reached. You graduate from becoming a mere accomplice in your own destruction to a full participant.
*
There are few known to Frankie who have truly escaped the history here. Willie Young is one of them. Frankie and Willie grew up together. But where Frankie mostly stayed out of trouble, Willie got involved in the gangs, and later ended up in prison.
“He was in jail with Mandela,” Frankie says, “on Robben Island.”
Today, though, Willie is a man of wealth. Several years ago he decided to go legit, and open a liquor distribution business, which he operates out of his home. On a good day he’ll bring in $3,000 — a lot in a country where the average black man earns no more than twice that in an entire year.
Now an electric gate clacks aside as Willie leads us past rows of coolers to a courtyard with a pool, over which four jumbo speakers have been suspended. There’s also a bar, a TV projector, and several security cameras.
“It’s a small place,” Willie says, sitting on a bench, “but I did it myself.”
It’s the first time I see the Willie Young smile — all gold, to match the bracelet, and the necklace hanging outside his white striped shirt. Willie’s charm is warm and inclusive, and has something to do with enormous enjoyment he clearly derives from his worldly success. Picture him with arms spread, inviting you to sit, and plying you with rare cans of guarana-infused Smirnoff Ice Double Black.
But there’s something a bit unnerving about Willie, as well. The slow, articulated way he talks, for instance. It reminds you of the way gangsters talk when they’re telling you exactly how they’re going to hurt you in the moments before they actually do. Every now and then, to enunciate a point, he’ll stare at a spot on your arm or leg and then slowly lean in to jab that spot with a forefinger. And somehow you get the sense that, unlike the penitential Neil Bowers, for instance, deep down, Willie Young is the same guy he was 10, 20, 30 years ago. The guy who went to prison at age 15, and was only recently asked by a Colombian drug cartel to distribute vast quantities of cocaine.
Willie started out as one of the original Sons of Satan. Today, he is among the last surviving members, along with Neil Bowers’s father and one other guy. You can trace his history by the gunshot scars — one in the neck, another in the side, another on his right leg.
But getting shot is relatively painless, Willie says. Worse were the years in prison, particularly the three years he spent breaking rocks in a chain-link cage. The cage was just tall enough to accommodate a sledgehammer’s backswing, the only exit a low hatch where, six times a day, a wheelbarrow dumped a new load of rock to be broken. If you didn’t finish six loads a day you wouldn’t get to eat — cabbage soup, stirred with a pickaxe handle. Or coarse, unsalted corn.
Most of us have a rough time waking up on the best of days. We swat the alarm clock and issue pillow-muffled pleas for clemency. How does a man summon the strength to arise when every single day is the worst one possible?
“It becomes like an ordinary thing, man,” Willie says, with a mountainous shrug. “You had to do it. Because you are always under gun surveillance.”
There was one guy who tried to escape. He tied a few blankets together, weighted them with rocks, and tossed them over the wall.
“They shot him through his back,” Willie recalls. “The corn was like, and the blood…” Willie shakes his head. “No. You can’t escape there.”
Willie was eventually transferred to the political wing on Robben Island, after going on a hunger strike to protest prison conditions. He recalls Mandela as a quiet guy who stayed apart from the other prisoners. Willie studied the famous Rivonia trial, which Mandela used as a platform to decry the injustice of Apartheid, as well as other treatises on human freedom, like Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery.
But the incident that impressed him the most concerned Jeff Radebe, Mandela’s future minister of public works. They were returning to their cells one day after exercising in the yard when Radebe whispered, Hey, watch this.
Radebe was wearing shorts at the time, which was the government’s way of reminding black prisoners that they were regarded as mere boys. “And he called this warder,” Willie recalls. “He said, Hey come here you fucking boy. You see? To this warder… He said, I’m talking to you, you fucking boy. You’re a fucking boy, here, man. And the warder was swearing at him, and he said to the warder, Hey you can do me fuck all man. You know we’re fighting you outside.”
Willie recalls the incident with relish. Because he was the same way.
“I’d say, Hey, I’m a fucking boss outside, man. You’re going to call me baas outside.”
And now the Willie Young smile returns, pleased and replete, like a snaggletooth tiger after a meal.
Willie’s next move is to get his law degree, and then a seat in parliament. It sounds like a noble goal, but one is left feeling vaguely troubled, as if somewhere in the code of Willie’s character another round of misery waits to be unleashed.
Even Frankie, one of Willie’s oldest friends, admits to being worried.
“They’ll kill him,” he says later, “because he’s too outspoken.”
And hearing it you know that it is probably true, just as you know that warning Willie would do no good. Because Willie will do what Willie will do. People are who they are.
And right around the corner from this thought is another, more disturbing one, in which you begin to see history as little more than a pointillistic projection of human character. What was Apartheid, after all, if not the collective expression of countless instances in which individual people yielded to fear? To live in a racist society is to see the failure of human character writ large, projected on the walls of history itself. One cannot live in such a society without feeling some fundamental disappointment.
But it is precisely here that one also discovers the origin of hope. Because human character can be altered, as surely as our best selves always lurk somewhere within us, waiting to be freed. And now you begin to see the importance of good leadership, because what are good leaders if not those who, by virtue of their own character, bring out the best in others?
And suddenly you look again at Frankie, who all this time has been sitting quietly, letting Willie spin out his revenge-inflected schemes. It’s not that Frankie was never tempted by revenge. Indeed, he once held it by the axe handle. But it’s as if he saw in that raised axe something more like Willie’s sledgehammer, an omen of bondage he had no wish to serve.
And just as Boeta Amien’s character snapped into focus, with the gun smuggling story, so Frankie’s does now. He is a man defined by his dignity. He does not bow to insults, from whatever quarter they come. Such insults as he has endured he bears quietly. It’s only on asking, for instance, that you learn that his son, who survived twelve stab wounds, later died of tuberculosis, at age 21.
Frankie’s second son, meanwhile, is named after Steve Biko. The white registrar who took the name switched it around so Biko is now his middle name instead of his first. But Frankie isn’t bothered. He carries on, and carries others with him. One hundred men now follow his example, as perhaps he once followed Biko’s. A leader is interested in character, because character is what men will heed.
*
Frankie first learned about Biko through a high school friend of his, Peter Jones, who went on to become Biko’s right-hand man, as well as the last civilian to see Biko alive after they were arrested together in 1977. Jones was released after 533 days, and “banned” — meaning he couldn’t be in a room with more than one person at a time, and was restricted to certain areas.
But Jones and Frankie still managed to sneak away on early weekend mornings to Pringle Bay, just down the coast from Cape Town. There they would dive for abalone, slice it thin, and cook it over a driftwood fire. The water was frigid, Frankie recalls, so they would bring a bottle of Bacardi, and take great gulps before plunging in.
We all have our beginning places, the places we go to remind ourselves of who we are. These are the places you emerge from feeling restored, confident, newly alive. For many it’s nature. For others, a museum, the gym, or a basement workshop. For Frankie, it was Pringle Bay. Here they could talk, and recollect their humanity.
This much Frankie is willing to share, but when I press him for details he suddenly goes quiet. If I want to know more, he says, I have to go ask Peter Jones.
Many years have passed since that late summer day in 1977, when Biko and Peter Jones were arrested at a roadblock outside of Grahamstown. Jones is heavier now, grayer. In a one-story house in a middle-class Cape Town suburb, he slouches in a throne-like chair, legs crossed, fingertips caged, a mogulish air about him. The decor is modern (a flat-screen TV hangs on the wall, and a spidery chandelier from the ceiling), and bespeaks Jones’s success as an accountant.
But something about the coolness of the room suggests the home of a bachelor. During the Apartheid years, the Security Police made it their mission to destroy Jones’s family, and would routinely whisper in his wife’s ear that he was sleeping around. Eventually she came to believe it.
Today Jones devotes much of his time to working for an organization he founded to help rural communities achieve self-reliance. “I’ll probably spend the rest of my life trying to steal back the rest of the country, inch by inch,” he says.
He remembers Frankie from the early days, and their early morning beach barbecues at Pringle Bay. He laughs fondly when reminded of the Bacardi. The talk, he says, was of struggle.
“For our generation in particular,” Jones says, “the entire struggle was a way of life.”
Ideals, Jones says, were not a hobby, but rather that which you lived by. Even when he was arrested with Biko, he doesn’t recall being frightened. The police had handcuffed them to the window bars on the sixth floor of the Security Police Headquarters in Port Elizabeth.
“I remember we were whispering to each other,” Jones chuckles, remembering how Biko joked. “Like he was saying, I’m just gonna say it’s your fault.”
Even later, as the blows from a metal-reinforced hosepipe rained down on his naked body, Jones never regarded himself as a victim.
“I remember coming back one time from the beatings and I couldn’t find a spot on my body that wasn’t sensitive,” Jones says. “And I could only kneel down with the front of my head on the mat and my palms down next to me… But I regarded it as, That’s my business. And nothing was going to change that business.”
Biko was the same way. “He had a remarkable bearing,” Jones says. “He could really deal with police. There’s a story of when he was first detained and the police were saying, Now we’ve finally got you. One guy tried to slap him, and he immediately slapped him back. And suddenly there was this cautiousness around him, that you don’t mess with him.” And here Jones pauses, to make a point: “You can kill him,” he says, “but you can’t mess with him.”
So now it becomes clear, why Frankie has so many of Biko’s pictures on his wall: Dignity has a lineage. It’s passed on from one to the next.
But where did Jones get it from? He admits that neither he nor Biko were raised with political consciousness.
“We had experiences that made us aware,” he says, obscurely.
When I press for an example he thinks for a moment and finally draws one up from the deep — a surprisingly quiet little story, for a revolutionary. When Jones was a boy, his grandmother used to take in washing for local white policemen. One day, his mother was helping with the ironing when one of these policeman barged in, bellowing for his clothes. He didn’t knock. He strode right through the house as if he owned it. And Jones’s mother promptly kicked him out.
More shocked than anything else, the policeman went straight to Jones’s grandmother.
“You must really talk to this daughter of yours,” Jones recalls him saying. “I was just coming in to look for my washing.”
Unperturbed, Jones’s grandmother met the policeman’s glare: “Next time,” she replied, “you’d better knock.”
*
The light is fading. A cold wind sweeps down from Helderberg Mountain. From Frankie’s back yard comes the rattle of iron, a sound which rings through the heart of this story as men break away from the past in search of whom they might become. One wants to be a fireman, one a civil engineer. Another wants to be a professional cricket player, or a doctor if that fails. Neil Bowers is here, too. His painting job is ending soon, but Frankie hopes to get him work building roads.
This is the beginning place. Frankie stands in the midst of it, arms crossed. It’s not easy to carry the weight of so much history, but it can be done. Mandela himself used to wake every morning and work out for an hour and a half, even on Robben Island.
Now Frankie hones in on a guy named Stevie, who placed third in a recent regional bodybuilding competition. Frankie calls him Stevie Wonder.
“He’s a wonder boy,” he says. “And he’s a naughty boy.”
“Ah, ya, ya. I’m a good guy,” Stevie says.
“Just when you sleep,” Frankie replies.
Stevie has been selected to compete in the national championships next year — the first of Frankie’s guys to make it that far.
“He’s promised me he’s going to win,” Frankie says.
It doesn’t seem likely. Stevie will be going up against guys who have access to fully equipped, modern gyms, like the nearby Virgin Active, which stocks dumbbells of every denomination, as well as 68 cardio machines, and a 22-meter swimming pool.
But then suddenly the lights go out, and a chorus of dogs starts to yowl.
“It happens when the wind blows,” Frankie says, with a shrug.
In the gloom the fading figures continue their work. Clanking sounds emerge from the dark of the shed. Someone in there is using the light from a phone to find the weights he needs. The cold wind blows even harder. And you think, Maybe Stevie will win it after all.
