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Nongoloza Mathebula
(1867 - 1948) South Africa

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Gang leader

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"Nongoloza" Mathebula was a Zulu migrant who went to Johannesburg in the early 1890s and joined a band of outlaws in the caves of Klipriviersberg, south of Johannesburg. A charismatic figure, he transformed this motley crew into a tightly disciplined army, its rank structure mimicking the judicial and military hierarchies of the Transvaal Republic. He declared the white state his enemy and infused his army with a crisp political purpose.

Nongoloza (Jan Note) was the founder and leader of the Regiment of the Hills - a network of gangsters who operated on the peripheries of Johannesburg during the 1890s. In 1912, after spending extensive periods in prison, Nongoloza gave testimony to Jacob de Villiers Roos, the Director of Prisons in Transvaal province of South Africa.

Through this testimony he revealed the working of his gang. He mantained that "even when we were free on the hills south of Johannesburg some of us had women and others had young men for sexual purposes".

"Reading the Bible", Nongoloza explained, "I came across the state of Nineveh which rebelled against the Lord. I selected this name for my gang as rebels against the government's laws." The gang was renamed "the Ninevites" in the mid-1980s and, as "King of the Ninevites", Note issued a decree that forbade physical contact with women. He introduced a system whereby the men of his regiment took boy-wives from amongst their ranks.

By 1910, he controlled a quasimilitary group of more than 1000 people. The Ninevites were crushed in a series of skirmishes outside Johannesburg in the mid 1910s. But by then, Nongoloza and his generals had all served time in prisons across northern South Africa and had established their credo. The reputation was extended to the prison system, where the rituals associated with same-sex unions were replicated by the Ninevites during the long spells that the gang members spent in South African gaols.

The contemporary "28 Gang", whose influence remains strong in South African prisons, is modelled clsely on the Ninevites. They maintain the same colonial rank structure established by Nongoloza, their imaginations filled with episodes from early Ninevite history. Their pedigree consisting of elaborate but imaginary uniforms, a "law book" of codes and prohibitions, a language unintelligible to outsiders has been passed from generation to generation orally and in secret. The slang word "nongoloz", used to this day, losely translates as "sodomite".

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