Back where it had all started – Leeuwkop Prison – May 1969. I am 25 years old.

But this is the next to the last and final stop – home! It is a mere month before I will have completed my sentence on the 18th of June 1969.

A few days ago, Joas (Baker) Mogale and I were moved out of Victor Verster and sent back here; that is how the prison bureaucracy works. After a lacklustre journey, we arrived here to find a dramatically changed Leeuwkop Prison. Considered to pose minimum risk, we were not locked up in the maximum-security prison but in an adjacent one, for less risky prisoners.

On the first day, we were told to contact our people and ask them to bring us street clothes. The last time I had worn civvies was at Number Four Prison, July 1963 – I was 19 years old. After I had changed to prison uniform, I had given those clothes to my sister Semakaleng but, I still remembered what they were: a coat, pair of trousers, socks, shoes, shirt, underwear and two overalls. She had bound them in a plastic bag to taken them home. Now, looking at Semakaleng, asking her to bring me real clothes, my excitement knew no bounds; in a couple of weeks (months, at the worst) I would be back in Bekkersdal. I would be in civil clothes. I would be home, living a normal life once again.

Thanks, once more, to the generosity of my good friend and brother, Leopard, I not only had civilian clothes, I had real glad rags. I could see that Leopard had gone out to shop for me – specially.

Now I was the proud owner of: a pair of black pants, a pair of very expensive shoes, fawn and shiny shoes, two shirts, a Pringle cardigan, and a jacket. A gentleman, Leopard had not forgotten underwear and toiletries complete with a shaving kit for I had grown a little beard since my teenage days! I was more than ready to hit the streets – walk on them free, resume my interrupted life. Even the sullen stance of the warder who’d handed me the clothes, the day before our release, could not dampen my spirits.