This is a prison break in South Africa, fleeing Pretoria. This escape case is not the same as the escape method we talked about before, the prisoner used a very clever way to directly open the prison door, and it was from the cell to open 10 doors in a row, and finally successfully escaped from the prison and regained his freedom. The escape case has a big background, that is, South Africa implemented the apartheid system in 1948, which simply means that the South African government at that time divided all the resources that could be divided into white Europeans and non-whites, this non-white group included blacks, Indians, East Asians and other people of color, of course, the largest number of people is black.
These divisible resources include land, taxis, train kindergartens, movie theaters, coffee shops, hotels, beaches, toilets, and even a park bench that says that this side is for Europeans and there for blacks, and in addition to these superficial segregations, blacks and whites have extremely unequal political rights, and all these inequalities and discrimination have been written into the Constitution, so if anyone rebels against the system then he is against the law.
The protagonist is Tim Jenkin, who graduated from the University of Cape Town in South Africa in 1973. By the time Jenkin graduated, South Africa had already set off a wave of overthrowing the racial system. Although Jenkin is not black, as an ideal college student, he still devotes himself to this career without hesitation. Under the leadership of the ANC, Jenkin bought various machines and began to make and distribute leaflets, he would tie 500 leaflets to a small time bomb, and when the time reached 500 flyers, 500 leaflets instantly floated into the crowd, and Jenkin did this to be able to quickly distribute leaflets and quietly retreat.
But as Jenkin's gang became more and more active, they eventually got targeted by the government and were quickly arrested. Among those arrested was a young man named Stephen, who was a college classmate with Jenkin. There were several months between their arrest and the formal trial, during which time Stephen's father often visited Steven. In order to get rid of the boring prison time, his father brought Stephen a biography called "Babylon", and when Stephen finished reading the book, he suddenly had a feeling of seeing the light, and the two of them decided that they must carry out the prison escape.
In the ensuing trial Jenkin was sentenced to 12 years, Steven was sentenced to 8 years, and both were put in pretoria's local prison, and the first thing they did after entering the prison was to make a feasible escape plan, but the plans they could think of were gradually eliminated. For example, the prison wall is 6 meters high, not only is it installed with sharp barbed wire, but also the prison guards are guarded 24 hours a day, so it is definitely not possible to escape the prison by climbing over the wall. The walls of the cell are all concrete structures, and its layout cannot be carried out by digging holes to escape the prison, and digging tunnels to escape the prison is even more without tools and time, so Jenkin thinks every night whether there are other feasible escape plans.
Then suddenly one day his mind flashed, thinking that since none of these methods worked, he would simply use the key to escape from prison. Jenkin first rolled a piece of paper into a small paper stick, and then he inserted the paper stick into the keyhole, so that he basically knew the depth of the keyhole, and at the same time, he used a small pencil to also insert it into the keyhole and press hard, so that he could roughly understand the internal undulations of the keyhole. Jenkin happened to be in charge of carpentry in prison, so he stuffed some wooden strips and tools into cups and brought them back to the cell, and then he made the general shape of the key based on the imprint on the note, and in order to further improve the accuracy of the key, Jenkin would seize every opportunity to observe the key of the cell.
Once the general structure of the key is determined, Jenkin will insert the key into the keyhole and twist it vigorously, so that it can be fine-tuned according to the signs of the key that are stuck. After many iterations of experimentation, Jenkin finally opened the door one night. The success of this key made Jenkin's confidence increase, and he soon planned a feasible escape route, but there were 10 doors on this route, which meant that he had to build at least 10 keys to successfully escape, this escape plan sounded quite difficult, but Jenkin did not back down, he immediately began to attack the second door.
The doors of each cell have two floors, and when the door inside is opened, there is a solid iron door outside, and this iron door can only be opened from the outside. Jenkin managed to create the key to the second door with every cleaning, but how to open it became a problem. However, under the brainstorming of the big guys working together, a relatively feasible solution was found. Jenkin successfully applied for a broom to put in his room on the grounds of convenience of cleaning, and then he fixed the key to one end of the broom, and reached out of the small window next to it, and successfully opened the second door with the reflection of a mirror.
After solving the first two doors, we came to the third door at the end of the corridor, and it was very coincidental that Jenkin was able to use the first key to open the third door, and after opening the third door, he came to the fourth door of the staircase, because the first four doors were located without real-time guards, so Jenkin easily opened the fourth door. But from the fifth gate, the difficulty rises sharply, because there is a guard office between the fourth and fifth doors, and this is the only road they must pass, so how do they avoid the guards? This question plagued Jenkin for a long time.
Then suddenly one day he found a particularly small storage room under the stairs between the fourth and fifth doors, through which he might be able to avoid the guards. So Jenkin used a quilt to disguise himself as sleeping at night, he calculated the time of the prison guard's patrol to arrive in the storage room early, and when the prison guard went upstairs to patrol, he would come out of the storage room to sample and experiment on the fifth door, and after completing the experiment, he hid back in the storage room, and when the prison guard returned to the office, he returned to the cell.
After more than a year of repeated experiments, Jenkin finally created the key to the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th doors, which was only one step away from the successful escape, but this plan also had some regrets, that is, Jenkin's gang had a total of 8 people in this prison, their original plan was to escape together, but because the transit storage room could only accommodate up to three people, the last to escape was Jenkin, Stephen and another person named Alex. And others who didn't have a chance to escape from prison were responsible for giving them cover.
On December 11, 1979, there was just one prison guard on duty that night, so they decided to start the prison break on an ad hoc basis. Although Jenkin was able to open the first nine doors, the key to the last door was not repeatedly experimented with, so they were most likely trapped in the tenth door, but even so, they decided to give it a go. The three men opened the first four doors according to the plan, and hid in the storage room, at this time the companions began to call the prison guard loudly, and when the prison guard walked out of the office, Jenkin went all the way to the tenth door, but when he inserted the key, it was not a good match, how could not open the door, but fortunately Jenkin left a hand, he carried a small chisel with him, directly broke out of the door. The guards found the three missing during a round the next day, but by this time Jenkin had escaped from South Africa in a taxi, traveling through several countries and finally reaching London.
After arriving in London, they became actively involved in anti-racial causes. Eventually apartheid in South Africa was abolished in 1991. When Mandela was elected president in 1994, he became the first black president in South African history. Since then, the status of whites and blacks has changed dramatically, whites have become extremely unpopular in South Africa, and many white slums have emerged, which is rare in the world.