Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  But, if anyone could get them going, Bakili knew it was him. He could speak to them in Swahili, their own language, which he had learnt from his father, whose people were from Arusha in Tanzania. Over the years, he had established an understanding with the bridge men: he would leave them be, as far as it was in his power to do so; they, in turn, would clean their living areas each morning, sweeping away the coals from their night-fires, rolling up their flattened cardboard boxes and returning the boulders they used as chairs back to the bridge abutment walls from which they had prised them.

  When Bakili arrived at the traffic island, one of the men – just out of adolescence, really, and wearing a red overall with reflective strips at the knees – was lying back in the warm sand between the Restios. In one hand he held up a news poster for that day’s Die Son, using it as a parasol. The other arm, missing from the long sleeve lying across his chest, was working up and down inside the overall pants. ‘Ngunga!’ shouted Bakili – wanker – and made as if to stamp on the boy, who giggled when he realised his lewd joke prevented him from freeing his hand to defend himself. Some of the others joined in the laughter, then they all picked up their personal items – their torn jackets, beanies, water bottles and sun-bleached backpacks – and wandered off in the direction of the Grand Parade.

  Across the road, Moshoeshoe had not enjoyed the same success. He had been cutting the grass with his weed eater, but was now staring gravely off in the direction of the civic centre.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Bakili shouted across to him. The old man shook his head, and looked down between his city-issue gumboots.

  ‘Your friends shit everywhere,’ Moshoeshoe said. ‘Mess, man, mess.’

  In the ankle-high grass he’d struck a crap with his weed eater, spraying the stuff all over his work trousers.

  ‘Sorry baba,’ Bakili said, meaning it.

  By the time the mayor arrived in a bright-red suit everything was in order, or looked to be. The people seated before her in the tent were a mixture of MPs in their black suits, faith leaders in their white dog collars and African National Congress members in gold, black and green T-shirts. The mayor greeted them in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa, and said that it was a great day for the City of Cape Town.

  ‘Today,’ she said, ‘we take a step towards making our city even more inclusive.’

  From his position behind the tent, Bakili noticed a group of bridge men approaching down Oswald Pirow, unmistakable in their multicoloured overalls and woollen hats. He glanced nervously at his superior. The media were all over the event, their camera lenses trained on the mayor and the shrouded sign behind her. This was not the time for a scene.

  ‘The apartheid government,’ the mayor was saying, ‘knew full well what it meant to claim ownership of our public spaces. Through a careful strategy of selective naming and selective cultural recognition, it sought to stamp its interpretation of the world on future generations.’

  The group of bridge men reached the intersection and waved at Bakili, who opened both his palms to signal they should come no nearer. They did not. Instead they followed one of their many paths around the bridge off-ramp and disappeared into the gloom beneath the soaring overpasses. There, Bakili knew, they would light their lunch fires, remove from their backpacks the chicken pieces they had just shoplifted from the Shoprite on Adderley Street.

  ‘That apartheid planning,’ the mayor continued, ‘sought to keep us divided, even long after the apartheid government was gone. As such, we have an imbalance in our named public spaces. We recognise some histories, but not our shared history. We are changing that today.’

  With this, the mayor pulled on a cord and the black cover slipped from the sign: ‘Nelson Mandela Boulevard’, the stacked words forming a neat isosceles trapezium. The ANC members began singing out the iconic name as the mayor moved over to the red ribbon across the on-ramp to the former Eastern Boulevard, the bow of which clung awkwardly to the ceremonial scissors after she had snipped it. Behind her, a chorus of Cape Minstrels struck up a spirited rendition of ‘Daar Kom Die Alibama’, the classic goema paean to the 1863 arrival in Cape waters of the confederate warship the CSS Alabama. When the twanging banjos started on the chorus the mayor joined in:

  Nooi, nooi, die rietkooi, nooi, die rietkooi is gemaak,

  Die rietkooi is vir my gemaak, om daarop te slaap.

  With the minstrels still playing De Lille bade farewell to her audience, clambered into the mayoral Prius, and swept up the Nelson Mandela Boulevard on-ramp in a cavalcade of blue lights. The crowd began to disperse just as the first curlicues of smoke began to waft from the underpasses.

  ‘Get those fuckers out of here,’ grunted Bakili’s superior, but like the other VIPs he was on his way back to an office, and Bakili was not about to come between a group of hungry bridge men and their ugali.

  By sunset the new sign, like almost every other flat surface in the area, had gained a strapline.

  NELSON

  MANDELA

  BOULEVARD

  Memory Card. me like ship no like pussy

  ◆

  An afternoon, in March 2011, spent leafing through photographs that my friend David Southwood has taken of the Foreshore, an area of freeway bridges and railway yards at the foot of the city.

  I kept returning to one in particular. It showed the underparts of the Eastern Boulevard flyover, which divides the tall buildings off Martin Hammerschlag from the cold stores and grain chutes of the port. At first, I saw only the towering concrete pillars and, in the background, the Duncan Dock’s gantry cranes, like the beaks of gigantic wading birds. But looking again I noticed the man in the foreground, soaping his head and shoulders over a white paint bucket; to his right, what I had thought were printing imperfections resolved into sticks suspended by bits of string from the branches of a tree.

  ‘Handmade clothes hangers,’ said Dave.

  I started again with the image, the way fighter pilots are supposed to scan the horizon: sweeping left to right, from top to bottom. Each pass struck some surprising new detail: a man sitting alone on the highway bank, his head adorned with a white taqiyah. A tree stuffed with backpacks and, near to it, two concentric rings of men, the inner circle seated and the outer on their feet. Doing what? I felt caught out by these hidden scenes and confessed as much to Dave, telling him he could surely find someone more suitable to help him with his project. He assured me that they had all said no.

  ‘The last writer I took down there was mugged at knifepoint,’ he said.

  Looking again, I noticed the shadow of the bridge on the far embankment, and also the shadows thrown by the trees. From their length and angle, I felt I knew the time of day at which the photograph had been taken, and in which season.

  ‘Yes, midsummer,’ Dave confirmed. ‘Early January.’

  This, at least, is a start: some sense of the seasons here.

  ◆

  The men living under the Foreshore bridges are stowaways. To be precise, they live where they do because it is near to the port, and they are constantly trying to stow away on the ships that dock there. They are, to a man, from Tanzania – youngsters in their twenties and thirties from the slums of Dar es Salaam and Tanga. They want nothing from Cape Town other than the means to leave the continent for good.

  All of this according to Dave, who derived evident satisfaction from supplying these details only after I had agreed to accompany him on one of his visits.

  To get as near to the bridges as possible, he suggested we park outside the Toyota garage in an area of the Foreshore called Culemborg, after the town in Holland in which Jan van Riebeeck was born. I knew the garage well. For many years, before I found somewhere less expensive, it was where I would take my maroon Conquest to be serviced. Getting there was never easy. You first had to overshoot the garage in the permanently busy outbound lanes of Oswald Pirow Drive, and then duck into a secre
tive gap in the traffic island to await an opportunity (usually several minutes in coming) to motor across Oswald Pirow’s three incoming lanes to the service road that lies alongside the Eastern Boulevard on-ramp. The entrance to the garage was immediately on the left, overhead signs guiding you in towards a smiling service adviser and a complimentary cappuccino. I was always happy to hear the squeak of my car’s tyres on the service centre’s brightly painted floor. No doubt the effect was deliberate – a psycho-acoustic ploy to make you forget about the environment just beyond the garage walls, which was easily one of the most squalid in the city.

  Little has changed in the ten years since I last visited, except that today I had to leave the Conquest in a public bay opposite the garage entrance, my tyres crunching on broken glass as I parked. I had forgotten how intimidating the Eastern Boulevard looks from here, rising thirty metres up above the garage’s backyard. The bases of the nearest pillars were blackened by cooking fires, and slogans had been scraped into the soot.

  I was curious to read this bridge literature, but reluctant to go any nearer. Cape Town is a city of many borderlines and this bridge, right at the point where the service road passes beneath on its way to the rail yards, is one of the more defined ones. To know this, you only have to observe the reactions of motorists who travel this way by mistake. The three-point turns are positively cinematic, the speeds at which they backtrack reminiscent of drag racing. It is hard to say why the fear comes on so quickly here. After all, this is not gangland, where hard faces stare into car windows from scrappy corners. ‘Semi-derelict’ is how city planners describe the land here; the road does crumble away fantastically, overlooked by warehouse windows that are shattered, boarded up, or painted white.

  There are no signs at all, not anywhere. The functioning part of the city bristles with them, telling you where to go, where not to smoke, and where the stopcocks are located beneath the pavements. Their sudden absence suggests abandonment, and a kind of permissiveness for which few people have any use.

  Dave arrived. Instead of leading me this way, as I expected he would, we headed down Oswald Pirow in the direction of the port. Where the Eastern Boulevard passes over the city’s last set of traffic lights, we crossed to a hectare of landfill where patches of lurid-green grass vied with oily puddles. As we clodded along, Dave pointed out a surface deposit of beer-bottle sherd and bone chip.

  ‘Cow molars,’ he said. ‘Large groups of stowaways used to gather here every Sunday to boil cow heads, bought for R1 a pop from a Pakistani butchery near the Salt River Circle.’

  When we reached the far end, he turned to his right and began climbing the bridge’s steep abutment wall, digging the toes of his boots into the stone facing and pointing out slogans written here and there in permanent marker or white paint.

  The power of sea forever and ever

  Today Africa Tomorrow Yurope

  Sea never dry

  Escape from cape

  We paused by one inscrutable message – Aver Theang Isgoabe Orite – but then noticed three men sitting above us on the Armco barrier of the highway bridge, their faces deep in their hoodies. We collided with their knees at the top of the wall and jostled against one another uncomfortably, bounded on the left by a sheer drop to the road feeding out from under the flyover and on the right by the cars rushing down the bridge off-ramp to join it. Sandwiched between these two converging roads was a hundred-metre slice of downward-sloping land, open to the port’s cold storage terminal like a viewing embankment in a sports stadium. More traffic poured off the bridge than out from under it, giving me the impression of an eye being narrowed by a heavy lid. Three trees marched down the slope; beneath the first of these, several men lay submerged in a mound of dirty blankets. At the sound of our voices, one of the sleepers wriggled out and pissed against the nearest tree, all the while squinting in our direction.

  He shouted across. ‘Haiyo Dave.’

  ‘Adam!’

  ‘Yeah, is me bruv.’

  ‘Where did you disappear to?’

  ‘I’ve been in Russia, Dave, in St Petersburg.’

  An icy breeze was blowing off the Atlantic and the man’s holey black T-shirt afforded no protection against it. He clutched his hands together at his groin for warmth, presenting a rough tattoo of a container ship when he turned his right forearm outwards.

  ‘We call this place The Freezer, because it’s so fucking cold,’ he said. Two gold-plated incisors glinted in his smile. ‘Some others call it Scrapper, because ships come to load scrap metal just here.’

  Skirting back around the knees of the three sitters, Dave pointed at the alien-speak on the abutment wall: Aver Theang Isgoabe Orite.

  ‘Tha’s not Swahili, Dave, tha’s Bob Marley,’ said Adam, in the tailings of what I’d have said was a Brummie accent if the likelihood of his ever having lived in Birmingham, England, were not so infinitesimally small.

  ‘Baby don’t worry, about a thing. Because every li’l thin’, isgoabe orite,’ he croaked. The three sitters cracked wide grins. ‘These are my seamen brothers. This big brother here is Barak Hussen. He’s been in Cape Town since 2008. This shorter brother is called Sudi Brando. He’s from Magomeni in Dar es Salaam. Nobody fuck with Sudi, I’m telling you. And this younger brother is Daniel Peter, he’s only 19 but he already stowed many boats.’

  Beachboy, Dave explained, is the name taken by Tanzanian stowaways everywhere.

  ‘Tha’s true,’ said Adam. ‘You will find Beachboys from here to Mombasa, all following the Sea Power way. It’s like our Qur’an, only nobody ever wrote it down.’

  While Dave and the stowaway caught up, I absent-mindedly rolled an anvil-shaped rock under my foot. Beneath it, in a sweating plastic sleeve, were the emergency travel documents of one Kham’si Swaleh Kigomba. The ink had bled and the Beachboys who had gathered around to see said that Kigomba had possibly caught a ship, or had more likely been arrested and deported. Nobody could say for sure what had become of him.

  ‘Take it, as a memory,’ Adam advised, and I did want to get the find somewhere nicer, drier. In the end, though, I put it back on the flattened yellow grass, next to a blanched snail shell, and placed the ship-shaped rock back on top.

  ◆

  That was no ordinary place, the narrowing eyelid. The Beachboys say they go there because it is a nice, private spot from which to check out the ships coming and going from the Port of Cape Town’s Duncan Dock. If they are seen at all by passing motorists, they figure as little more than flecks in the corner of the eye.

  I realised, suddenly, that for years I had carried around more information about the corner of the eye than I have ever known what to do with. I know, for example, that it is called the corneal limbus, limbus being Latin for ‘edge’ or ‘border’. The ablative of limbus is limbo, which, in the Middle Ages, described the region that supposedly exists on the borders of Hell, reserved for pre-Christian saints (Limbus patrum) and unbaptised infants (Limbus infantum). Today, the definition is more figurative. If you’re in limbo, you’re in an uncertain space, neither here nor there.

  There is also a more poetic derivation. The limbus of the moon, first described by the 16th-century Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto, is all that we fail to notice or care about on earth. According to the legend, such things end up stored in moon craters. ‘The Courtiers Promises, and Sick Man’s Pray’rs’, suggested the English poet Alexander Pope.

  The Smiles of Harlots, and the Tears of Heirs.

  Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea.

  Dry’d butterflies, and tomes of casuistry […]

  He would have done much better out of Cape Town’s Foreshore, I think, among the cow molars and the pidgin graffiti, scribbled by men caught somewhere between their dreams of Europe and the homes they had left in the slums of Dar es Salaam, six thousand kilometres away.

  Limbus Tanzanium.

  ◆
>
  Dave is away on one of his frequent cross-country drives, so I went looking for the Beachboys alone today, but found The Freezer deserted, possibly because a Central City Improvement District (CCID) ‘information and safety’ trailer had been towed to beneath the bridge, where it looked like an ice cream kiosk that got lost on its way to the beach. The guard, his reflective flak jacket glinting in the open hatch, cut a forlorn figure.

  ‘I’m looking for the Beachboys,’ I said, introducing myself.

  ‘Michael Bakili,’ the guard said, in a thickish Congolese accent. ‘You are looking for the Bongomen?’

  ‘The Beachboys,’ I clarified.

  ‘They are the same,’ he said, explaining that people from Dar es Salaam have a reputation for being schemers, and that this has attracted the nickname ‘bongo’, after ubongo – Swahili for ‘brain’. Dar es Salaam, he said, is often referred to as Bongoland, even within Tanzania. He opened the trailer door and stepped out, all six foot five of him. He said his superiors had posted the trailer under the flyover in an attempt to keep the Bongomen away.

  ‘The City does not want them here. They think all Bongo steal and sell drugs.’

  ‘Do they steal and sell drugs?’

  ‘Yes, but not here.’

  Bakili claimed that he and the Tanzanians had an understanding: he left them alone, sometimes even tipped them off if he knew the police were about to raid the bridges; in return, they kept their living areas clean, even rolling back the boulders they prise from the bridge abutments each night to use as seats around their fires.

  ‘The Bongo are similar to my people from Kinshasa. We are both, how do you say … la débrouille – always coming up with a plan to make money.’

  As to where they had all disappeared to today, Bakili explained that the Bongomen only slept and cooked around the bridges.