John Fredericks, the storyteller from Strandfontein

Born at the bottom of the pile, he used his ghetto skills to become a writer. Now former skollie John Fredericks is winning rave reviews for his film, 'Noem My Skollie' writes Lin Sampson

At 70 John Fredericks still bears the marks of an old skollie with his scars, tattoos, trademark baseball cap and his carved Apache-like profile.

He speaks a Cape dialect with sibilant esses and flat vowels, a taal dotted with Sebella words, the secret prison dialect used in Pollsmoor.

Few houses in Strandfontein were built with the luxury of a study. He works in a converted garage, painted cornershop-green; it is piled high with scripts, old typewriters and photographs.

Fredericks has been writing his story for 40 years. But up until recently nobody was listening.

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His stories are deeply imbedded in his hard-scrabble background of gangsters, knife fights, petty rivalries, axe murders, drugs; all the uncaringness that fuelled the Cape Flats then, and still does today.

"I remember once the local shopkeeper was rude to my sister and my father tucked two axes into his belt. He was drunk and we went round to the shop. They snatched one axe but he had another one. He smashed up the fridge with all the cheeses and said to me, 'Just help yourself.' That was my first lesson; always carry two of everything."

Over the years Fredericks became a familiar figure at film markets handing out his card inscribed "A Room Full of Scripts" and featuring a picture of himself in a feathered Native American headdress. "I am a hustler. I use my ghetto skills until I get what I want. That is how I survive. I had a rucksack filled with synopses."

He rinses the word "synopses" round his mouth like it's cool drink. For a boy who had to scavenge books from a rubbish heap to learn to read, it still sounds exotic.

"I just mos gave them to everyone. My cousin was with me one time and said, 'Oom, you just gave a script to the bartender.' But I didn't care. I wanted someone, anyone, to read my work. If they didn't take my card I ran after them and slipped it in a pocket."

Year after year, he attended these film markets, telling people that he had a story to tell. Nobody was listening.

"People looked at me as if I was nobody. There were people sitting there. People with money. I am hungry. I have nothing to eat. They order these huge plates of food and they don't even eat it all. I want to shout, 'Give me some.'''

Fredericks grew up in Kewtown, one of the earliest "new" towns full of people who had recently been removed. "We were all strangers to one another, so we were suspicious of each other. It was like living on a large dumping ground.

"We stayed in the very last street. Behind us there was just bush and a sewage farm and a refuse dump, which we called 'tittieland'. If you grew up with that smell, you will never forget it.

"Horses pulled the wagons those days. We would help unharness them, and they would dump the sewage in a big pit. Sometimes escaped convicts would drown there, in shit.

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"I learnt to read with the books I scavenged from the rubbish. It opened my world and it was then I understood that apartheid wasn't normal and that as a coloured person I was a nobody.

"When I was 14 I got my first lashes, mostly for assault. I had become an expert with the knife. I had mos got the thing down to an art. I go for your face because it doesn't matter how big you are; stabbed in the face, you snap.

"When you get lashes you sit bare bum on the concrete floor and it freezes your bum so it doesn't hurt so much. When I was 15 I got my first tattoo, 'Mr Crime', I was labelled mos already. Why would a person growing up in a place like that be good?"

At 17 he got a two-year sentence for robbing a shop.

"At Pollsmoor I was stripped, no shoes, no socks, short pants. It was winter, my nose was running. I had to keep up my pants, they took our belts away, so I am keeping my half loaf of bread, a katkop, in my hand, and I had to wipe my nose on the sleeve of my jacket.

"At night the gang leader would shout, 'Toe met die kop en oop met die hol' (cover your heads, open your bums). The boere were tough on coloured people. To them you were nothing."

sub_head_start GETTING THROUGH THE TOUGH TIMES sub_head_end

Fredericks survived prison by telling stories. "Everyone can do something and that was my skill. In the end they wanted those stories so much, they didn't touch me."

Over the years he began to think about the vicious nature of fate and what had happened to him on the rubbish heap. Rape.

"I didn't think about it until much, much later. But that day on the rubbish heap twisted something in my mind, that it happened to me in a place like that, all the smells, the dirt, other people's cast-offs, shit and sewage. You were already a nobody, now you are less than a nobody. It was almost like a death wish. You lose respect for everything, even yourself."

His story shows an almost metaphysical understanding of how a good boy becomes bad. David Max Brown, a film producer who was born in South Africa and grew up in the UK, felt it was a story too good to miss. "Finally someone did listen," says Fredericks. The result is the movie Noem My Skollie, directed by Daryne Joshua, that ravishes with its authenticity. One of the cast is a prisoner still on parole.

It's not about money. "A neighbour talked rude to my wife and he comes here and wants to fight but when he sees all the important people and my name in the paper, he backs off. I get respect. I might be a skollie but I am also a writer."