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The return to respectability of the honourable profession of bank robbing

Ashwin Desai
By Ashwin Desai
24 Jul 2024
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Tshifhiwa Matodzi, head honcho of VBS bank, went one better than Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and Gayton McKenzie. He knew that it was better to start a bank than to rob one. The EFF and the SACP went one better than starting a bank – they secured “donations” from VBS.

“Love God and sin boldly” – Martin Luther.

In the 1970s, deep in Durban’s Casbah, movie houses dominated the narrow streets. Queues snaked around the Raj Cinema and the enormous Shah Jehan with its double headers on a Saturday.

Inside we left the playground streets and entered another world. Our hero was John Wayne, who we often saved by warning of cunning Indians lurking in the shadows.

But as we hovered on the edge of our teens, our real heroes were bank robbers.

John Dillinger. So taken were we with him that the phrase for someone smart and streetwise was “he is a Dillinger”.  The scene in which Dillinger gets shot as he leaves the theatre haunts me till today.

Another movie that captured our (im)moral imaginations was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. How beautiful were Robert Redford and Paul Newman? Strong but vulnerable. We urged them on in the front row as bugs bit our bums and those in the back rows slipped their hands over a date’s shy shoulder.

And, of course, in the papers we had our homegrown bank robber, André Stander. A policeman, he would rob a bank at lunchtime and return later to the scene as an investigating officer.

Convicted bank robber

I felt like I was back at the Shah Jehan 50 years ago watching Parliament on Mandela Day. There was Gayton McKenzie, convicted bank robber. A man who has sanitised criminality like no one before. The one-liner to Justice Raymond Zondo about “sitting for 10 years” was a Noahian gem.

Like puffed-up pastry, he took the platform to castigate ex-judge John Hlophe. Hlophe wants Roman-Dutch law consigned to the dustbin of history. But Gayton pointed to the hypocrisy. Before Hlophe was impeached as a judge, he carried out the diktats of the very law upon which he now spews venom.

More than that, Gayton, tongue firmly in cheek, wants to pay for the appeals of those whom Hlophe convicted because the former judge has now confessed that he sentenced them based on laws he does not believe in.

Read more: Music icon Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse wants Gayton McKenzie to ditch the ‘skop en donder’ attitude and help artists

This leaves Hlophe in the unenviable position of apartheid’s hanging judges. Their refuge, after Mandela was released, was to intone that they were only applying the laws of the government of the day.

An ex-convict lecturing an ex-judge about the law. Teasing and humiliating him. It produced pandemonium in the House. Hlophe looked like he had just been impeached again. It was left to Mbuyiseni Ndolozi, the EFF PhD, to try to reclaim lost ground: “He has written papers on it, the judge has written papers on it,” he proclaimed, but it was too late.

Behind him, resplendent in tailored red overalls sat other alleged “bank robbers”. Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu. They were apparently caught in a trap set by one Tshifhiwa Matodzi, head honcho of VBS Bank.

Reading his affidavit, you see a man who knew how to deal with criticism. He simply paid. Not only did his critics stop, they switched and sang his bankrupt praises. You see, Matodzi was one better than Butch and Sundance and Gayton. He knew that it was better to start a bank than to rob one. The Guptas knew this, too.

Surplus value


The SA Communist Party also split some VBS loot. The party, which likes to sing “my mother was a domestic worker, my father was a garden boy”, took money from those stealing from their parents. At the SACP conference, sponsored by VBS, resolutions piled up like surplus value. The comrades are tired, they screeched, of capitalists who buy favours from politicians.

The EFF, they of superior logic, and the SACP, they of superior ideology, had it all figured out. They have gone one better than starting a bank – they cottoned on to securing donations from banks. Like the construction mafia, they have seized upon the  means of protection.

Gayton’s real Damascus turn comes atop the bony mare of life. He tells us that his change came from witnessing a teenaged white boy gang-raped by 20 inmates. The boy was placed there by corrupt warders. 

“The next morning, as I was about to step over the teenager, he looked at me, asked for help and called me ‘Sir’… from that time on life has never been the same.”

Many of us change because we read texts. We read from Marx that the gravedigger of capitalism is the working class. And so we become workerists.

Read more: Motorsport spinning, school sports and Die Stem – Gayton McKenzie delivers maiden speech in Parliament

And that is why, under adverse material conditions, we are able to so quickly somersault into being accumulators of capital through the dispossession of the gravediggers. For us it’s a textual affair, justifiable in words. A lifestyle perhaps. A way to stand out from the better footnoted, escape our station, salve our neuroses and excuse our psychoses.

Gayton is a character out of a story older than Marxism in South Africa. He comes from the line of Nongoloza, who through the Anglo-Boer War and into the first decades of the twentieth century, pitted himself against government-fired lead and manacle steel.

Power relationships


Charles van Onselen reveals the link between Nongoloza’s Ninevites and the prison gangs of today. In a 1985 article, he tells us that “prison gangs may have the most crudely developed ideas about power relationships within wider society, but there is no denying they do manifest some degree of political consciousness…”.

Prophetic.

Gayton comes from this tradition. The Number. In prison you are a 26 or a 28. The 27’s are the most powerful, the only number that can mediate a dispute between the 26s and 28s. There’s also a numbers game in Parliament, and while Gayton knows how to roll the dice, the novice EFF and MK party fell short.

Unlike Nongoloza’s Ninevites, the EFF’s present leadership are not for the long haul. They’re textual revolutionaries. That’s why Hlophe’s supposed written critique of Roman Dutch Law could excuse him in sending black people down for property crimes or excuse him evicting them from African land in Ndlozi’s doctored view. No, the red overalls wear or show a sartorial slogan. Soon, washed over by common law, the red overalls will fade into orange, the camouflage uniforms fatigued by the hypocrisy of it all. 

Then what for them?

Except for the curiosity of advocates about each other’s fees, no other bunch of crooks are as interested in their colleagues’ work as prisoners are. “What are you in for?”, is a question on the whole jail’s lips. We all know how despised child molesters are inside.

Jailbird status


But on the other end of jailbird status, somewhere right near the top, are the bank robbers. They are seen as brave bandits who ventured the classic crime. Although they are criminals, there’s something frank about their violence. Storming in, bodies on the line, grabbing value that shareholders and insurers will lose. That’s why so many bank robbers are celebrated as bosses in jail.

However, much lower down the Order of Hoods, sharing showers with the kiddie-fiddlers, are the conmen. These are the cheats who swindle coins from their own grannies’ hands. Or even worse, the planted shills, who pretend all is above board while the crime unfolds.

Those who mock and expose Gayton are really angered that he is inside the Government of National Unity and they are outside. They are exposed outside. Not exposed as crooks, but as people without the guts to be really epic crooks. Conning villagers, not robbing banks. Unlike Gayton, their reckoning still lies before them.

Gayton’s difference is that he owns his history. Even worse for them he has written books. There is the Hustler’s Bible; Hustler’s Bible 2: The New Testament; and the latest titled From Prison to the Promised Land: Chapter and Verse.

The secret ingredient in his life may well still turn out to be crime. But if and when he uses politics to pull a heist, I have a feeling Gayton will do his Number proud. Maybe nationalise an industry, not cover up the theft of grannies’ pensions. DM

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