The new Numbers game: Ralph Stanfield takes shortcut into 28s prison gang

News24

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Ralph Stanfield became the alleged head of the 28s street gang after the death of his uncle, Colin Stanfield, in 2004.
After his arrest, Stanfield got a rapid induction into the 28s prison gang and became an initiated member, bypassing years of progression up the ranks.
Stanfield faces multiple criminal charges.
Ralph Stanfield, the alleged leader of the 28s street gang, has leveraged his criminal notoriety on the streets to achieve something exceptional in the South African prison system: rapid induction into the 28s prison gang.
Stanfield was arrested in September 2023 and faces multiple criminal charges. During his incarceration, he has managed to bypass the customary years-long progression through the hierarchical structure of the Number - one of the world's oldest prison gang cultures - to become a ndota.
The term - used to describe an initiated member of a prison numbers gang is derived from the isiZulu indoda, meaning a man.
According to interviews with eight gang members, Stanfield's street credentials earned him this unprecedented position - a development that breaks with the deeply ritualised traditions of prison gang culture.
Stanfield's swift ascendancy in the 28s prison gang represents the culmination of decades of erosion of once-sacred practices. It symbolises a fundamental shift in how power and status transfer between street and prison gang hierarchies in contemporary South Africa.
The Number gangs have dominated South Africa's prisons for decades. The three groups - the 26s, 27s, and 28s - each have their own operations, beliefs and councils, known as parliaments, which sustain them as authorities within the prison system. The 26s are known as strategists and businessmen; the 27s are the enforcers of gang law; and the 28s are the advocates for better prison conditions.
Their mythology dates back to the 19th century, with the apocryphal story of a wise man and two groups of bandits who established a criminal organisation to fight colonial exploitation.
This symbolic legend provides an anchor point for the gangs and, before the transition to democracy, fed into their anti-apartheid ideological stance. For many prisoners, the Number provides an identity, a framework for masculinity, and a code to govern thoughts and actions. For some, it is an entire worldview.
Traditional adherents of the Number do not see themselves as gangsters, but rather as law-makers, restoring order within the chaotic environment of the prison, albeit by violent means: attacking a prison warden, for example, is one of the rites of passage into the Number.
As affiliation with the Number provides inmates with security and status, recruitment is highly selective. When they enter prison, potential members' personalities, physiques and lives are scrutinised by high-ranking ndotas. Inductees must align with the interests of their assigned camp.
Becoming a member of the Number gang has historically involved a series of initiation rituals, an intimate understanding of the gang's history and mythology and a thorough knowledge of a set of commandments outlining the structures and organisational hierarchy, known as the twaalf punte (12 points). Recruits also spend time learning the covert communication system known as sabela.
Sabela is a patois that includes elements of Afrikaans, English, isiZulu and isiXhosa, and has traditionally been used by the Number gangs as their own secret dialect.
Finally, a separation between prison life and life on the streets has long been central to the ethos.
'The Number wasn't built for outside,' a former member of the 28s said.
Various members interviewed agreed that the system was created to reign within the bounds of 'die vier hoeke [the four corners, which is a reference to prison walls]'.
Upon entering prison, one's street gang identity, regardless of rank, was to be abandoned. However, this boundary between prison and street gang cultures has increasingly blurred in recent decades.
Stanfield entered prison as the 28s street gang leader but was not an inducted 28s prison gang member. He had allegedly become the head of the 28s street gang after the death of his uncle, Colin Stanfield, in 2004.
However, he was not a ndota.
His sudden promotion during his incarceration can therefore be seen as a significant break with tradition, and the latest episode in a decades-long erosion of the ritualised processes that the Number gangs once entailed.
The first major shift in the Number's rules and traditions began in the 1980s, coinciding with a massive rise in street gang activity as synthetic drugs such as mandrax (methaqualone) and ecstasy became ubiquitous. From the profits of these drug markets came increasingly professionalised gangs and wealthy gang leaders.
First among these was Jackie Lonte, the boss of the Americans gang, who used his wealth to purchase his rank within the Number when he was imprisoned in the 1980s.
This caused friction between the old order, which protested Lonte's coup, and a new order that embraced the development. In the years that followed, other gang bosses bought their way into the Number, opening the door to further changes.
Gang customs, symbols and hostilities from the outside were imported into prison and vice versa, synergising South African prison and street gangsterism.
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In the 1990s, the new order within the Number began to gain influence, thanks to the financial backing of gang leaders with drug empires outside prison, while external political conditions, as South Africa entered democracy, threatened the old order.
In post-apartheid South Africa, the Number's founding objective - to counter colonial exploitation through banditry - had become obsolete.
Around the turn of the century, further changes were implemented.
The new order within the 27s and 28s began to allow prisoners to be initiated while on remand, rather than only after being convicted and sentenced.
This was partly in response to a massive influx of Americans gang members (who generally became 26s) following the gang's rise under the leadership of Lonte.
In addition, by 2000, the entire top leadership of Pagad (People Against Gangsterism and Drugs), a militant vigilante group that used targeted violence to combat gangsterism, had been arrested. To counter the threat posed by Pagad within the prisons, Number recruitment was expanded.
This shift was fiercely contested by the traditional order, who feared that on-remand prisoners who were not found guilty would leave prison before fully being initiated into the Number system. This risked the complexity of the Number system being inaccurately represented on the outside.
As one former member of the 27s put it: 'The old guard of the Numbers were very adamant that you must not change the Number in any way … it must not be corrupted!'
Some sources argued that these fears have been realised, that former on-remand prisoners have mischaracterised the Number after their release - 'one fucking idiot teaching another fucking idiot', as one member of the 28s put it - and that a simplified version of the Number has been exported to the streets.
As one representative of the traditional order confirmed:
[It] no longer signifies what it signified back in the day. Come 2000, the Number died down.
Moreover, the entanglement of street and prison gangsterism led to the formation of Number street gangs - separate from their prison counterparts - and continued to soften the grip of the traditional order.
The 28s, the gang that Stanfield allegedly leads, have been the most prominent of the three camps on the streets.
By the 2010s, the 28s prison gang increasingly began to view the 28s street gang less as a separate organisation and more as a junior partner. South Africa's high recidivism rates reinforced this situation, as gang members cycled in and out of prison.
When Stanfield stepped into this evolving environment upon his arrest in September 2023, he became a catalyst for further change. As the leader of the street 28s, he was able to exploit and formalise the connections that already existed between his street gang and prison 28s.
Sources close to the 28s have argued that if Stanfield, a figure of respect and authority outside prison, lacked formal recognition inside, the internal balance of power would be disrupted. 'Obviously, it's not going to be good if the boss of all the 28s on the street does not have a rank with the 28s in prison,' one 28s member said.
Stanfield's street status was therefore sufficient to elevate his prison status; he did not need millions of rand to purchase his rank, and he did not have to endure a violent recruitment.
His case may be fairly unique, but his rise to ndota status suggests a further softening of the Number's rules. This new avenue to become part of the prison Number is also solid evidence of the current dominance of the gang's new order.
As much as Stanfield's fast-track admission into the Number is a new development, it also speaks to a systemic shift away from a rigid tradition over time.
The beneficiaries of illicit enterprises outside prison are reshaping the Numbers' mythological roots by means of their wealth and status, redefining what it means to be powerful in South Africa's underworld.
The Number now finds itself in a transitional phase. It is still very much present and fundamental to the structure of everyday life in prison, but changes to its traditions - from the admission of on-remand prisoners to the sudden elevation of Stanfield - are becoming more common.
Stanfield's situation is likely to have some effect on the relationship between the 28s street gang and its prison equivalent, but whether the two will align more closely remains unclear.
However, the continued fragmentation of what was once a unifying system centred around resistance to colonial oppression threatens to cause tensions both on the streets and within the prisons of the Western Cape.
Moreover, the synergy between street and prison gangsterism is likely to allow hostilities to spill over and be acted upon in both spaces. As a senior former 27s member puts it: 'This big divide between the … different factions of the Number causes trouble.'
This article appears in the latest edition of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime's quarterly Western Cape Gang Monitor and is produced by its South Africa Organized Crime Observatory. The Global Initiative is a network of more than 500 experts on organised crime drawn from law enforcement, academia, conservation, technology, media, the private sector and development agencies. It publishes research and analysis on emerging criminal threats and works to develop innovative strategies to counter organised crime globally.