by Chris Marais
“And if I close my left eye and turn my head slightly … there! I can see some of the Philippines,” she added. I hauled her up off the bed to go exploring the caverns of Carnival Court.
On our floor there was a foosball table, a multilingual library of tattered backpacker literature (take one, leave one), the Zanzi Bar, where tattooed youngsters played pool beside an old fireplace, and photographs of street children on the walls everywhere. The best feature of Carnival Court, the spot that took me right back to the Café Royal in New Orleans, was the filigreed metal balcony, which ran almost the full length of the block. From here, in good company and with something cold to hand, you could view Long Street in all its colour and intensity.
Charl Henning, the young night manager, was the guy who allowed us into Carnival Court. They did not usually take bookings from South Africans, but because of our writing mission they let us stay.
“This place used to be a bordello,” he said. “Our first backpacker customers four years ago were Japanese hippies who were into trance and pot. Then there was a Malaysian who slipped sleeping potions into everyone’s drinks and rifled through their rooms while they lay passed out. But there’s not much of a crusty element at Carnival Court any more, although some people still come in and try to book a room by the hour.”
Hookers and hustlers. That was the reputation of Long Street for as long as I can remember. I used to come play here in the clubs back in the 1980s, when the street was dark and dodgy and you rubbed shoulders with sailors and prostitutes.
“That’s changed,” said Charl. “Backpackers, bookshops and breakfast places have arrived.”
Angela Church, an attractive 22-year-old serving drinks at the Zanzi Bar, was a bit of a Sunshine Corrigan – a neighbourhood connoisseur.
“Long Street is a wild card,” she said. “All kinds of people walk down this street. I often see a guy who dresses up in 17th-century clothes, complete with ruffled shirt and velvet coat. There’s another fellow who comes around here who is amazingly well read but is homeless.”
Angela, a student of media, literature and film at the University of Cape Town, was doing a special study on street people.
“Humans are human because of their interaction with other people,” she said. “But street people are not seen in that context.”
I went out onto the balcony of the Zanzi Bar with my beer and sat down. Jules strolled out to join me and we began talking about our Shorelines trip. Were we really going to make it all the way around the coast of South Africa? More than eight weeks of wandering still awaited us.
“Me, I could just park here for months on end,” I said. We sat and eavesdropped on Long Street in the late afternoon. The peak-hour traffic flowed uphill, the packs of skateboarders weaved their way downhill and the aroma of a small dagga cigarette wafted up to us.
“Look!” Jules urged, pointing at the street below.
He was unmistakably Maasai. Tall, impossibly thin, like a long-legged heron, braided hair, shukka over the shoulders, fly whisk and milk gourd to hand, thousand-miler sandals on narrow feet. He came loping through the traffic on Long Street, eating up the road with Serengeti strides.
I flew down the stairs of the Carnival Court with my camera and found him shopping at the Long Street Superette. He clutched a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk under his arm and stood at the counter waiting his turn, on one leg.
“Jambo!” I said, unleashing my entire Swahili vocabulary in one breath.
“Habari!” he replied automatically, looking down at me with a smile. And then we switched to sign language.
“Hello strong man,” said a guy from the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Maasai warrior. “Have a banana.” And then I simply somehow lost my Maasai.
I went outside and found Sam Samson.
“If you see that guy in the red tablecloth again, please come and tell me.” He said he would.
We later found out the Warrior of Long Street was Miyere Miyandazi, who had walked all the way from a village near Lake Naivasha in Kenya to Cape Town to protest against human-rights abuses against his tribe and the erosion of the Maasai culture in general.
Everyone in Cape Town seemed to know a little something about Miyere. He’d been spotted in the city and all around the Peninsula. He caused a special sensation down in Kalk Bay outside the Olympia Café, where the bicycle yuppies gather for baguettes and designer coffee. Miyere had stood on one leg for hours (it seemed like days to the customers) outside the café, simply staring in through the plate-glass window.
“And there’s a cow he visits regularly,” said Angela Church from behind the counter at the Zanzi Bar. “It’s somewhere up on Signal Hill.”
By the time our dinner guests arrived, I was in a joyous froth about Long Street. We had a leisurely curry supper across the road at Maharajah’s and ended the night with a party at the Long Street Bar, just below Carnival Court. The next morning, I telephoned one of our group, journalist Geoff Dalglish, to wake him up for his early-bird flight up to Jo’burg. How was he feeling?
“You’ll be hearing from my lawyers,” was his throaty reply. OK. So it had been a good party, then.
We had breakfast at a place called Lola’s, where a young girl sat in the far corner, sobbing gently into her pashmina. We went on a bookshop safari that took in eight great establishments on Long Street. Jules and I had to make constant stops at Room No. 3 to offload our new second-hand (I haven’t got my tongue around ‘pre-loved’ yet) purchases, and one could sense that the book vendors of Long Street were happy.
One of the shops was Clarke’s Books, an ancient establishment that had a creaky upstairs room lined floor to ceiling with the written word. I was instantly transported back to the village of Hay-on-Wye in Wales, the centre of the second-hand book universe.
We fell in with Cathy from Serendipity Bookshoppe, where I bought Tintin in Tibet for Jules, who unashamedly gave me a rather pleasant French kiss in front of everybody on Long Street. Right then, I felt the spirit of New Orleans rise up in my soul, and I thanked God for the fine wife he’d sent me.
I was so taken by the sensational snog that I left my credit card on Cathy’s desk.
Down a crooked alley of antique shops we found a place called Proseworthy and almost broke out the champagne on the spot. Nestled in amongst other works was a book for which we’d been hunting for more than a decade: Eugene Marais’s Road to the Waterberg and other Essays.
I wanted to pay but my credit card was absent.
“Ah, you’re the man they’re all looking for,” said Proseworthy’s Joanne. “Cathy from Serendipity has been calling all the way down the street after you. Your card’s with her.”
We continued to the Long Street Book Shop, where David Smith said:
“Ah. The Long Street tom-toms have been a-beating. I know about you and your card.”
“Yes,” I replied. “There’s a certain Jopie Kotze at a certain Springbok Lodge up north who also knows the card.” I bought Peter Fleming’s News from Tartary from David.
At Select Books, near our reach of Long Street, we met David McLennan, also known as ‘Mr Book Man’ by the street children.
“They know everything about this street,” he said. “A few months ago we had a problem with the plumbing at the back. We needed a long pipe to clear the blockage but had no idea where to get one quickly. I asked the street kids for help and within minutes they were back with the perfect tool.”
Within two days the book dealers of Long Street had become friends. They started giving us some of their books and magazines for free. It felt like we’d stumbled into a village in the middle of a big city.
We lunched at the Café Mozart in Church Street near Greenmarket Square, where waiters in red aprons bustled in and out of the kitchen with concoctions of food so beautiful that it seemed an awful shame to eat them. I had smoked-springbok salad with avocado and feta cheese. Jules had a Moroccan dish of poultry and roast vegetables and then we went off to shop for lo
ud shirts and funky necklaces in this street that sounded just like a husky Tom Waits song.
There were Gabonese masks (try one on while they plait your hair into braids), World War I gas masks (Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – I think not), hippo teeth, stuffed voles, ships in bottles and a special on trumpets, there was a session at the Turkish Baths, an old-school haircut executed by Carmine at the candy-striped barber shop, carved doors from Mali, a shop called White Trash, hot snoek and slap chips, another chocolate expresso and then we found ourselves in the company of our friend the writer Pat Hopkins, drink in hand, back at the Long Street Bar. Hopkins was nearly robbed of all his possessions by the street kids on the way back to his digs on Greenmarket Square in the early hours. But he turned on them like an angry badger, so they wisely slunk back into the shadows.
The next morning, Jules and I did a dawn patrol past the sherbet-coloured homes of the Bo-Kaap as the suburb was waking up and packing kids off to school for the day. Bergies (street people) sat nursing their heads on the pavement, offering us some of their Cape Calypso Late Harvest for R10 a sip. Further along the road, a Palestinian flag snapped in the early-morning breeze, and the owner of the house said:
“We’ve got guests from the Gaza Strip.” And went back inside to chivvy her children along. I was starved and said so. We both agreed on greasy samoosas for breakfast. The man at the Biesmiellah Café said to wait 20 minutes and then he’d feed us the best samoosas in town. They were truly worth the wait.
At the Rose Corner Café the lady behind the counter sold us a Muslim cookbook called Boeka Treats (snacks to break the Ramadan fast with) and we returned to Long Street for more breakfast of the pepper-steak variety at the Halaal Pie Corner.
We darted past St George’s Cathedral to visit the flower sellers of Adderley Street. Jean Solomons, who had been flogging flowers here for 40 years in the family tradition, said she sold roses to “naughty men” on Fridays.
“On Mondays, I sell to the women, who like to take flowers to work.”
Scant metres from Carnival Court was Adult World on Long Street. Jules had never been to a porn shop in her life. We entered a universe where terms such as ‘cramming for the big one’, ‘sweet bullet of passion’ and ‘polar hump’ had their own special meanings.
“Some of our best clients are rugby players who like to dress each other up in frilly maids’ uniforms,” said the lady behind the counter, shocking me to the core. From the Currie Cup to the ‘C’ Cup. We walked out, just in time to see a laundry van come barrelling down Long Street bearing the slogan:
“Everyone has dirty laundry …”
Chapter 10: False Bay
Abalone Rangers
As a Cape fisherman, nothing really surprises Achmat Hendricks out on the inky waters of False Bay. But he’ll never forget the day ‘the Japanese’ came to sea with him.
“The first catch of the day is a little steentjie. One of the Japanese women on board takes a knife out of her bag and stabs it near the gills. I’ve never seen anyone kill a fish so fast. They don’t even take the scales off. They just fleck it open and start eating it raw.”
Achmat steers his boat out into open waters, his jaw having dropped at the sight of the ravenous guests falling like wolves on the fish. Didn’t they have enough breakfast? He realises this is no sight-seeing tour of the legendary place where the Atlantic and Indian oceans butt waves, with a little fishing demonstration thrown in for fun. This is an alfresco instant-sushi experience. These guys want to eat from the seas today – and by their ‘lean and hungry’ look, they plan on dining on both oceans.
“Then I catch an octopus. If you know your octopus, you’ll know it doesn’t die quick. I usually turn it inside out and it can sometimes take a whole day to die. This woman, this same woman, just bites it around the eye and it dies immediately. And then they eat it.”
Jules and I had come down to the Kalk Bay harbour on this, the twentieth day of our coastal trip. We had arranged to spend a morning on the Pelagus, a sleek, 7-metre offshore patrol boat run by the marine and coastal division of the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT). These were the guys who made sure there would be enough to eat from the sea today – and tomorrow. By all accounts, it looked like an impossible job because of the pressure, both local and foreign, on our fish stocks around the coast. Everyone, it seemed, had jumped into a fishing trawler and was steaming towards “South Africa’s teeming seas,” as National Geographic magazine put it. Factory boats and long liners and ski boats and netters were all about, sucking up the stocks. They came from Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, Norway, Japan and other keen seafood-gobbling nations. A fish war was looming. Today, we were going on a patrol around False Bay and beyond to see what the poachers of crayfish and abalone were up to.
I had never been able to get excited about abalone (known in South Africa as perlemoen), simply because I’d never tasted one. To me, they were slimy ashtrays (the shells make great soap dishes and ashtrays and button pots) but to more than a billion Chinese people their flesh is ‘coveted cuisine’, prestigious wedding-feast side-dishes, prized aphrodisiacs and such. I mean, when is Viagra going to catch on over there? The sooner the better, I say. Then the pressure might just be off our rhinos, seahorses, sharks and perlemoen. Assorted bears and tigers too.
Like the feisty lobster, the abalone used to be poor folks’ food. The wandering Strandloper communities ate them 6 000 years ago and left shell middens all along the coast. In those days abalone were bigger than Texas steaks. Today, the Chinese market likes them bite-sized and box-shaped, neat little portions for high-status events.
And although South Africa steamed into the New Millennium on the tracks of sinking interest rates and unprecedented economic growth, it was still almost impossible for the lower-income groups of the country (meaning most of its citizens) to climb on that particular gravy train and benefit from it. In fact, most poor South Africans didn’t even know where the station was. As we travelled along the shoreline of the country, we heard how some individual wheeler-dealers palmed in millions simply by making a telephone call. Mainly, however, we heard how a family of five was struggling to live on a social grant of little more than the equivalent of US$100 a month. And whether you were a billionaire or a pauper, you paid the same prices at the store.
So, like the Namaqualanders who believed they had a right to their diamonds, the people of the southern coastline poached abalone day and night and sold them to the massive, infinitely voracious Chinese market. The natural stocks of abalone began to disappear. And I hadn’t even tasted one yet.
While we were waiting for the DEAT patrol boat, we chatted to Achmat Hendricks, who was preparing his gear for a day on the waves. His hair was tousled and his eyes were still half-lidded from slumber.
“I sleep on my boat,” he said. “I had a little domestic tiff with my wife – something about who earns more – and so I ended up living here. When the storms come to False Bay, the boat does bobble about, but that’s fine. The only problem I have is when I occasionally sleep at my daughter’s place on land – it makes me really giddy.” Achmat suffered from the well-known ‘disembarkation disease’.
The 58-year-old Achmat showed us the healed furrows of deep cuts on his fingers – the sign of a snoek fisherman who works with hand lines. But, as in all of Africa’s fishing waters, the traditional methods were giving way to the hi-tech ships and boats of first-world owners.
“The fast ski boats with their electronic fish finders are massacring everything here,” he said. “And as for the long liners – there is so much wastage that many of us make a small living by just following them and hauling out the dead fish in their wake.”
Jules and I walked down to the edge of the water, where two raggedy men were hanging gutted, headless snoek out to dry. One of them, David September, said the space under the cold, cement gutting table was his home.
“It’s where I lay my head every night,” he declared, grinning through marve
llous gap teeth. “Ali [indicating his mate] and I are the Fish Fleckers of Kalk Bay.” He said it with great professional pride, and then added:
“Can we look after your bakkie while you’re gone?” I said fine.
“And, can we wash it for you, meneer?” OK then.
David September’s face creased around a wide smile:
“Plesier van die oggend! Kar was en oppas!” – The pleasure of the morning. To wash a car and look after it.
I thought that David September, who slept under a concrete table in a storm, could teach your classic Cape Town waitress, an impossibly superior form of life (with the exception of the Long Street variety), a thing or two about the service industry.
The Pelagus pulled up to the quay and Captain George Solomons, a kindly, solid-looking man with searching eyes, welcomed us on board. Leading us down to the galley, he introduced us to the chef, Robert Prinsloo, and offered us a five-star breakfast. On their longer, five-day trips, Robert also had the privilege of being the only crew member allowed a daily fresh-water shower – the rest had to make do with salty sea water.
“Just name it – we’ll prepare it for you.” The tempting aroma of fried bacon and eggs flowed through the galley, but we were mindful of seasickness and declined the feast on offer.
Joining us on the Pelagus was the DEAT marine inspector, Thembiso ‘Osborne’ Thela. The eight crew members, all dressed in orange overalls, were shy, mostly middle-aged gents who had been crewing together for years. We donned life vests and Captain Solomons said:
“My men are just as informed as I am – feel free to ask them anything.”
The day’s mission was to be a ‘visible policing presence’, to check on fishing permits and to keep a sharp look-out for abalone poachers and shark-fin hunters.
“Once we found a boat with 20 dead pregnant sharks on board,” said Captain Solomons. “We managed to cut 26 live babies from their bodies and released them into the waters. Maybe some of them made it.”
