The prison was like a home
Aubrey Engelbrecht was raised by adoptive parents until he was nine years old and left school. By 10, he had joined a gang. By 11, he was in prison.
The now 50-year-old explained that he and his brother were given over to social workers after their mother was told to choose between her children and her employment by the white family who had hired her as a domestic worker.
He said his adoptive parents and their biological children would call him slurs such as boesman and pitte kop, and bullied him about the absence of his biological mother. If he retaliated he was punished.
Engelbrecht described being locked in the toilet for extended periods of time, and he was often not fed. He would also often wet the bed. As a result, his adoptive mother made him sleep in a bathtub or on the floor.
“That’s why I don’t know mother love,” he said. “I don’t know what is mother love, and how you get mother love.”
After he left school, Engelbrecht said he began smoking cigarettes, weed and, when he was 10, Mandrax.
“In my heart, it’s heartbroken,” he said of his childhood.
During this time, Engelbrecht became violent and joined a gang. He admitted to having stabbed people in moments of aggression, and described his headspace as one longing to be locked up, like he was in that toilet as a child.
“That thing was inside me. If I am outside for a week, I’m too long outside, then I must stab someone so that I go inside. So I must go in. [That] is the way that I lived. The prison was like a home.”
His first stint in prison was when he was 11, when he was imprisoned with adult men. To establish himself in the prison at such a young age, he joined the CTS Scorpion gang, and said he had to see blood to release anger.
“But the anger don’t come out because it stay inside.”
At 16, he was sentenced again to three years in jail. “I forget peoples outside. I forget all the things outside. So I put my mind inside.”
Engelbrecht continued re-offending in prison until he was sentenced to 31 years and transferred to Goedemoed prison in the Free State, where he described witnessing rape and police brutality.
When in prison, Engelbrecht said he met anti-apartheid activists who served as catalysts for a mental shift in him. He participated in anger management programmes, which taught him the principle of “anger in and anger out”.
“What I was learning, put the blame on yourself,” he said of the realisation of taking accountability for his actions. “This is how I came down.”
He was released early in 1998, but landed in prison one last time from 2010-2013, something he explained while exposing a bullet wound on his arm from brushes with gang violence.
“I go out by the gates and I say to me, ‘If a warden calls me, I will never look back. I will go forward’.”
After joining the street community he now calls home, Engelbrecht explained that he knew he never wanted to go back to prison. “Yes I have tattoos on my face, I have tattoos all over. Yes, people will judge me – always.”
Regarding the charges against Zandile Mafe, he said he had heard from other street dwellers that Mafe was picked up off the bench where he sleeps by two cops.
“I’m 100%, this is a lie,” said Engelbrecht. “Corruption is all over, in the police, in work, in everywhere is corruption.”