But as worthy as these substitutions are, they, too, float on the Foreshore’s history like oil on harbour water. Today, with Adam’s help, I marked the area’s informal place names on a 1:10 000 orthophoto map I recently fetched from the National Geo-spatial Information office in Mowbray.
‘We call this place Maskani,’ said Adam, putting his finger on an area of the railway reserve in lower Woodstock. ‘In Dar es Salaam, a maskani is a street corner where boys do their hustling and gambling. In Cape Town, we do this stuff here in the railways. All the street people know this place as Maskani. It is a Beachboy area, but the coloured gangsters and junkies come here too. Also the prostitutes and the white people who beg at the traffic lights, they know it.’
In a similar act of transference, the Grand Parade is known to hundreds as Kijiweni, Dar-Swahili for ‘place of work’. The landscaped area outside the Ford Imperial dealership off Christiaan Barnard Street, where an ever-leaking sprinkler system has created a fetid, unnatural wetland, is known as Msimbazi, after a particularly polluted river in Dar es Salaam.
Other names include:
Vietnam – the manicured area on the port side of Table Bay Boulevard, called this on account of the large palm trees that flourish there.
The Kitchen – a Beachboy living area on the rail yard side of Table Bay Boulevard, above which smoke from large communal cooking fires always rises.
Beachboy Office – the parking bays outside WOMAG (World of Marble & Granite), on the corner of Marine Drive and N1 Paarden Eiland. This is the place where Woodstock Beachboys meet the drivers of vehicles, be they paramedics responding to a Beachboy emergency or heroin suppliers.
Old Maskani – the vacant lot alongside Fuel44, off Tide Street in lower Woodstock. This was once a shanty town inhabited mainly by coloured Capetonians and Tanzanians. The community was evicted from the land in 2009, in advance of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Many of those evicted were relocated to the Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area in Delft, where they became known as the Woodstock Pavement Dwellers.
Arches – the railway tunnels that lead into the Port of Cape Town beneath Table Bay Boulevard. The name is a trans-verbalisation of hatches, specifically the dark and cavernous hatches found in cargo ships, in which Beachboys seek to stow away.
Wa Tony – the Port of Cape Town’s container dock, named after a Beachboy called Tony, who has the Cape Town record for stowing away successfully on container ships.
Seaman Bar – the pool hall off Draklow Street, lower Woodstock.
Only in respect of the gigantic vertebral shapes that constitute the Foreshore’s breakwater is the Beachboy bent for naming outdone. ‘We call that place Stones,’ said Adam, ‘as in, we’re going to the Stones tonight to try stow a ship.’ Locally, the shapes are known as dolosse, derived from dolos: a South African term for the animal knucklebones used by indigenous medicine men in their divinisation rituals.
◆
‘What does Memory Card mean?’ I asked Adam today, noticing that he had the words tattooed in crack-cocaine font on his skinny right biceps. We were again seated on the cold highway ledge, which had become our unofficial meeting place.
‘That is what people call me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m a peacemaker. I remind the boys what is good and what is bad Beachboy behaviour. I remind them that everyone else is against us, so why fight each other?’
He took off his shirt and revealed a torso covered in tattoos.
‘This is my life story here. I had this done when I was 17,’ he said, indicating the container ship tattoo on his right forearm. ‘That was after I stowed away for the first time in a ship like this, in Durban harbour.’
Shortly before this, Adam had been picked off the streets of Durban and incarcerated in Westville prison for having no documents – his first stretch of time. It was an experience that drove him to commission the outline of the African continent on his abdomen, enclosing the words Getto youth wil neva hav no peace Jah know.
‘Who is Aniya?’ I asked, pointing at a tattoo on his shoulder.
‘Princess Aniya is me daughter,’ he said, pronouncing the word ‘door-ah’ and putting the provenance of his accent – Birmingham – beyond doubt. He went on to relate, speedily, the story of his passage to England: how he had entered through the Port of Hull in 1999 concealed in a Maltese bulk carrier called Global Victory, which he had boarded in the Port of Richards Bay on KwaZulu-Natal’s north coast. In his first months in the United Kingdom, he had lived in Sheffield with a benevolent Cameroonian before bussing to Birmingham, where the Jamaican gangsters around Handsworth had permitted him to hustle small amounts of marijuana. Aniya’s mother, a second-generation Jamaican immigrant called Rochelle ____, had tried to save him from the streets by convincing her own mother to take him in. But, with no other means of making money, Adam had continued to hustle by day and was eventually arrested for dealing. He had met Aniya for the first time in the visitors’ room of Birmingham’s Winson Green prison. Two months later – seven years after his arrival – he was put on a flight back to Dar es Salaam.
I scratched it all down.
‘Tell them,’ said Adam, peering into my notebook, ‘that I’m fucken West Brom for life. Up the Baggies, yeah!’
◆
On two occasions, now, Adam has asked me to account for my interest in the Beachboys. The first time he did this, I fell back on a pitch I had recently submitted to a number of foundations, companies and philanthropic individuals in the hope of securing project funding.
‘Cape Town’s Foreshore has a historical reputation for being inhumane and anti-human,’ I said, reading aloud from my phone. ‘This is partly because the earth here was dredged up from under the ocean during the port expansion works of the 1940s and, to this day, the soil, where it surfaces, retains a pelagic texture and appearance. The monumental bridges and boulevards that were subsequently developed in this reclaimed part of the city only added to this extraterrestrial mystique by making it difficult and frankly dangerous to travel the area on foot.’
At a point I quoted from a popular photo-history book called Cape Town in the Twentieth Century, in which the authors describe how the development of the Foreshore bridges and boulevards ‘snipped the city away from the sea’ producing ‘a soulless city centre, virtually lifeless after office hours save for some restaurants and clubs catering for visiting sailors’.
I did not need to look up to know that I had lost Adam. I couldn’t blame him. As an accounting for my interest, the piece was worse than insincere, and I hadn’t even arrived at my references to Heidegger’s work on bridges. I ploughed on anyway, approximating David Attenborough’s accent in self-mockery.
‘Exposed as it is to the stormy Atlantic, the Foreshore has become a zone of inexorable disintegration, a place where abandoned anchor chains flake away into oil-drenched sands and retired trawlers sag on their stocks – everything succumbing slowly to the rasp of the south-easter and the lash of the winter rains. And yet, as harsh and neglected as this environment is, a community of young men have found shelter here these past 15 years. They live under the forbidding bridges and in the freeway culverts in small tents constructed from plastic and wood. They are from a faraway place – Dar es Salaam on the Swahili Coast – but their stories illuminate a side of the city that is absent from the tourist brochures: an underworld on the rise, complete with its own laws and codes and comprising mostly foreign-born Africans …’
‘Sounds nice, man,’ said Adam.
‘It needs work. I’ll think about it some more.’
When we next talked, I overcorrected and reduced my interest to professional pragmatism. I said that I did not expect my current job to last the year, and it was for this reason that I had jumped at the opportunity to start on a project closer to home, which would leave me with something to do when my employers let me go.
‘You mess up?’
‘You could say that. I’m not doing very well at my work,’ I said, and began confessing, for the first time, the deep feelings of insufficiency with which I had been living since assuming the impressively titled post of Foreign Policy Correspondent for a major local newspaper. It was a position that was handsomely funded by an international foundation, enabling me to spend weeks at a time in New York, Washington, Antananarivo, Juba – any place I wished to visit, really, as long as I could convince my handlers that the jaunt would serve a deeper understanding of how the South African government conducts its relations with other governments, and towards which ends.
‘Nobody in that world says what they really mean,’ I complained. ‘If you write what you think they really mean, their people call and tell you, That’s it, you messed up, don’t ever call us again.’
‘Tha’s politics. Sounds like it isn’t for you,’ said Adam.
I shook my head.
‘No, it’s deeper than that. I seldom prepare adequately before I speak to these diplomats and negotiators. As a result, when I play back the recordings of these conversations, it’s mainly just my own voice that I hear, talking in a wide circle about the things I’m supposed to be getting at. In fact, I have a problem with planning in general. I leave everything to the last second. Usually everything works out, but when things go wrong they go spectacularly wrong.’
I winced as my professional mishaps played back to me, ending, as always, with the first of them, the Ur-fuck-up.
‘I was arrested for border jumping once. I spent a few days in a Zambian jail cell. I think I still have a criminal record there.’
Adam sat up slowly.
‘How’d it ’appen?’
Over the years, the story has become my great mock-heroic dinner piece, gauged to scandalise and entertain friends and family. But seated next to Adam, the two of us gazing out at the shipping in Table Bay, I put it back together more or less as it happened.
‘In 2008, I decided to try journalism. I had no training but I was desperate to make a change in my life. I had been working in bars and restaurants for seven years and that left me with a drinking and drug problem.’
‘Unga?’
‘No.’
‘Tik?’
‘No.’
‘Buttons?’
‘No.’
‘Okay.’
‘I was moving from house to house, not settling. I got myself arrested a few times. One morning, after a very bad weekend, I drove out of Johannesburg and ended up in a place called Wadeville, stuck in a traffic jam. I went through the radio stations, listening out for news, and eventually heard on Highveld FM that a truck had overturned somewhere up ahead and chemicals had splashed over the tarmac. The highway had been closed and the other drivers were going mental, hooting at each other and shouting into their phones.
‘Ahead, there was this truck with a tall load under an orange and white tarpaulin. I watched the driver climb out of his cab with a bucket and walk to a nearby petrol station to fetch water. When he returned he started washing his cab, humming along to the radio, which was playing nineties hits by Whitney Houston and Bryan Adams. He really made an impression on me because he was so calm, like he was washing his car in his own driveway. When the other people saw what he was doing they started to relax as well. They climbed out of their cars and bummed cigarettes from one another. Others walked off to the garage to use the toilet and buy sweets for their kids.
‘At that moment, I wanted to be that trucker. I wanted this so badly that I called the number on the truck’s tarp, and told the receptionist that I was a journalist with an interest in life on the road. The receptionist put me through to the operations manager, a man called Bennett Pillay, who listened to my request and said, “Right … right, I can do that for you. When do you want to go?”’
The following day I was placed in a left-hand-drive International Eagle Pro Sleeper 9800i, bound for Zambia’s Copperbelt with a load of massive paper rolls. The driver was a guy called Willie Phiri, a Zambian in his early fifties who had on a neat blue windbreaker, shorts and long khaki socks. We waited out the evening traffic in the depot and then went rocking through a cold highveld night, northward bound. Almost immediately I was fighting to keep my eyes open and, since Willie seemed to prefer silence while he concentrated on the city roads and traffic, I gave in. For the remaining hours of darkness I slept deeply, warmed by the 15-litre engine below us.
When I woke up, it was the last moments before dawn. Mist filled the hollows in the landscape and a thin red bar spread across the horizon on the right. A truck passed inches from my face, which was still pressed against the window. I realised we had left the highway, toll dodging. Baobabs started to appear, and giant millipedes streamed before us on the tarmac. We stopped to piss among some low koppies and Willie got a rag, bucket and bottle of Sunlight out and washed the bugs off his windscreen ahead of our arrival at his usual truck stop near the Zimbabwean border. I felt better than I had in months. After a very long period of feeling trapped, I was moving and in the care of this very competent, very experienced guy.
‘We stayed just outside Beit Bridge for three days while Willie waited for his clearance papers to come through. I spent a lot of time playing pool and drinking Black Label with the other truck drivers, who were all Zimbabweans. Talking to them was easy because I was born in Zimbabwe, and spent a lot of my childhood there.’
‘I never knew,’ Adam interjected.
‘I’ve been living in South Africa for a long time. My parents moved here in the mid eighties. My mother’s family remained but their farms were taken for the government’s land reform programme in the early 2000s, and now they’re here, too.’
‘I heard about that.’
It had been eight years between visits, and the truckers told stories that were painful to hear: the spectacular collapse of the economy; the hunger in the rural areas and the use of food aid as political patronage; the torture and murder of opposition leaders. The impoverishment of the countryside had turned the truckers into small gods – Big Men who were paid in forex and could bring goods in that nobody in Zimbabwe was selling, like rice, and soap. Family, friends, policemen, teachers and even tribal leaders came before them to grovel for favours. Going home had become complicated, and many of the truckers had taken to meeting their wives in places where they would not be recognised.
Personally, I felt nothing but joy when we crossed the border at last. I could identify the roadside cattle by breed, and could judge from the trees which soil type we were travelling on. Outside Bulawayo, I remembered about the baobab into which soldiers on furlough had hammered empty FM shell casings during the war, standing on their transports to do this so that it would be difficult for passers-by to prise them out. Willie wanted to see this for himself and, by a process of elimination, we found the place. He inched the cab right up to the vast trunk and sure enough, standing on our seats, we could see the casings. Twenty-five years after they had been hammered in, the African giant was busy spitting them out like pips.
We reached Victoria Falls on the border with Zambia at dawn on a Saturday morning, and already the queue of trucks stretched from the border post through the town to its outskirts, a distance of about two kilometres. Willie said that since it would take all day to reach the post, and another to clear no-man’s land, I should stay in Victoria Falls and join him in Livingstone on the Monday morning. After four nights in the cramped cab I readily agreed, and took a bunk in a lodge called Shoestrings, located where the town gives way to bushveld. I had a wash and an English breakfast priced in US dollars, and set about getting drunk.
The barman marked each beer in his ledger with a pencil, a small ‘I’. Occasionally, he’d draw a stripe through a few, which meant I’d had another five. As the day wore on, the lodge filled up with big-game hunters and tour guides who had left their clients on the
Zambian side. The political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe had turned Victoria Falls into a virtual ghost town, but the few who had remained gathered each day at Shoestrings, giving the place the manic energy of a speakeasy.
Full of booze and encouraged by the colourful stories the guides were telling, I made pretentious use of my recent trucking experiences, flaunting them the way a dandy might flaunt his father’s old jeans. In the morning, I felt ashamed and very hungover. I returned to the bar and confronted the forest of crossed-through ‘I’s in the ledger next to my name. The barman whistled, not at the cost of my tab but at the sight of my passport.
‘It is a pity,’ he said, ‘that you did not arrive a week earlier, before the Zambian government doubled the cost of the visa you will require.’
Without having to make any calculations, I knew that I did not have enough money left to move forwards – or backwards, for that matter. ATMs were no longer dispensing cash in Zimbabwe and, even if they had been, I had nothing in my accounts. I thought of asking my long-suffering parents to send me some money through Western Union, but it was Sunday and the local outlet was closed. I had no way of contacting Willie in Livingstone, and knew that he would carry on without me if I had not materialised by 9 a.m. This would effectively kill the story I intended telling, and I would be able to add journalism to my own personal forest of crossed-through opportunities.
The thought made me feel desperate, and I spent the day trying to outwalk my anxieties on the silent railway line to Dar es Salaam. By the time I reached the big baobab where Livingstone is said to have carved his name it was almost dark, not that it had deterred a young German lad, in all the emptiness of that corner of a wrecked country, from climbing all the way to the top. I had checked out of Shoestrings that morning but returned to the bar after sunset, saying I was there to drink and have dinner. In actual fact, I spent the night reading a Redmond O’Hanlon book locked in a toilet cubicle in the communal shower block. When the security guard finally locked the gates, I sneaked down to the bottom of the garden and tried to snag some sleep in a hammock.
Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 4
