Message from the King

Chadwick Bosman as Jacob King

We watched this lask week on Netflix. Very good Los Angeles crime thriller. Jacob is a 'cab driver' from South Africa, come to L.A. to look for his sister. The show opens with the INS asking about the purpose of his visit. He has like $500 and intends to stay for a week. The INS agents suspect him of planning to stay. His straight-forward answers and his plain spoken demeanor convince them that he is for real and they let him in. It's a pretty great scene.

He pokes around and quickly discovers that his sister was involved with some very nasty characters. He shortly convinces them that he is not to be trifled with. That's a motorcycle chain he's carrying in the picture, his weapon of choice.

Turns out he is from Cape Flats, a nasty, brutish suburb of Cape Town, home to the infamous Numbers Gangs. Well, semi-infamous anyway. I never heard of them, but Wikipedia has an article. It is a very curious, and unpleasant, story.