Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  An hour before dawn, to get away from the mosquitoes I walked down to the river and milled around in the darkness with the curio sellers who were on their way to the busy tourist market in Livingstone. When the border post opened we crossed the bridge as a group, watching the Zambezi spill over the kilometre length of the falls in the soft morning light. A troop of baboons patrolled the queue of trucks parked in no-man’s land on the other side, climbing up the lashings like pirates, the littler ones getting beneath tarps and riffling around. I envied them their ability to move wherever they wished.

  ‘When I arrived at the Zambian post, an official looked at my small pile of rands and told me I needed US dollars to pay for my visa. “It is not a problem,” he said. “Just carry on to the Royal Livingstone Hotel and change your money there. Then come back, and we will give you your visa.” He handed me back my passport.

  ‘I stopped thinking after that. I simply walked around the boom, hailed a taxi and, fifteen minutes later, was back in the passenger seat in Willie’s cab.’

  ‘Amazing,’ said Adam. ‘You took your chance.’

  We reached the depot in Lusaka after midnight. In the morning, I showered in an open cubicle with several other truckers, all of us semi-hiding our genitals. When I came out I bumped into a thickset white woman, who looked me up and down and said, ‘Yes, okay, I know who you are.’ She handed me a coffee and took me to meet her green-eyed mother, who led us to her brother, the boss of the company. He insisted we take breakfast with him on the veranda of his home, which overlooked a crystal-clear pool paved with glitter stone. A Zambian youth in a frayed chef’s outfit took my order. I told them I thought Willie was marvellous, and the big-bottomed daughter said, ‘Yes, they’re great guys, but man, they steal. Tyres, diesel, you name it. Zambians are the worst thieves in the world.’ Her mother agreed wholeheartedly. ‘And this one,’ she said, indicating the cook with her head, ‘is the worst of the lot. I’ve put locks on the fridges!’

  They explained that they were Zimbabweans who had, like my relatives, lost their properties to the government’s land reform programme a decade before. At first they had emigrated to Cape Town, and later to London, but they had been unable to find happiness in these places.

  ‘We’re from the bush, you know,’ the mother said. ‘The coast, for all its prettiness, leaves us cold.’

  The cook came over to clear our dishes and announced that Willie was about to leave for the Copperbelt. I had managed, by this point, to borrow enough for a flight home, so we were parting ways.

  ‘Do you want me to tell him to drop your bags at the office?’ the daughter asked. ‘Mind you, you’ll probably want to check them before he leaves.’

  Adam shook his head in disgust. ‘Yow, I can’t hardly believe that.’

  Her attitude upset me, but I had also experienced a kind of personal clarification. This woman, her mother and her uncle had assumed that I viewed the world as they did, but they were wrong. I regarded these truckers the way most others did, as Big Men – men to be respected, and envied. The R20 000 or so that Willie earned a month was more than I made in three. He and the other veteran cross-border drivers required no books or news broadcasts to make sense of the world outdoors, because they were out in it day and night.

  Adam, who had listened with great patience while I rehashed the identity crises of my late twenties, now urged me on to the story’s end.

  ‘So they caught you at the airport?’

  ‘Yes. The immigration officer who checked my passport could not find any visa stamp and, when I insisted that I had paid for one in Livingstone, she sent me to speak to the deputy chief – a big, intelligent man who had launched an ambitious crackdown on corruption in the service while his boss was on vacation. I repeated my lie to him and he apologised on behalf of the Zambian government before picking up his phone to call Livingstone. “This might take a while,” said the deputy chief, “the line to Livingstone is very bad.” It was a brown Bakelite with a rotary dial, and I thought perhaps there was a chance he would make a mistake while dialling with his big fingers. A flight attendant from my flight was waiting in the doorway, pleading with this guy to let me go so that the plane could leave. “Hang on, sister,” he said, “hang on. We are working on corruption here. It takes time.”

  ‘Eventually someone picked up, and the deputy chief started laying into him, bumping his fist on the table while he talked. But after a minute his face cleared and instead of shouting he started to listen, keeping his eyes on me all this time. Zambians are the world masters of expressing astonishment, and the deputy chief had a particularly expressive voice, deep like an oboe. “Ohhh, all right,” he said. “Ah-ah. Okay, okay.” After another couple of minutes he gave a short laugh and said, “Fine, thank you very much, officer. Tsalani bwino.” He put the phone back slowly and fell way back into his chair. “Christie,” he said, “the officers in Livingstone remember you verrrry well.”’

  Adam flicked his fingers in delight. ‘He got you. That man was too clever.’

  ‘He told the flight attendant she could go, but that I would be staying. Then he told me I could either pay a US$350 admission of guilt fine, or go to court. I had no money left, so he sent me to the airport police station and knocked off for the day. The duty officers took my fingerprints and locked me in a dark cell with three Zambians. The prisoners were lying crossways when I entered, and when they saw from the light outside how tall I was they kindly shifted lengthways, so that I could lie next to them and extend my legs. I was happy enough, lying in the dark. I remembered the truck driver from the highway in Wadeville, how he had just accepted the situation and found something constructive to do. I used the time to write my article about Willie, in my head. After three days, I was released. When I arrived home, I wrote a story about Willie and the cross-border truckers, and a newspaper published it. I’ve been writing stories ever since.’

  Adam laughed out loud. ‘Tha’s beautiful, man.’

  ‘I often wonder where I would be if that trip hadn’t worked out. Not happily married, I don’t think. Almost certainly a junkie. I don’t know …’

  Adam pulled deeply on his joint and exhaled a large cone of white smoke.

  ‘You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking it don’t matter if you’re not doing your job proper. I’m not a seaman, but I travel all over the world in ships, and it costs me nothing. Seem to me you found your way, too, so fair play. Maybe we gonna travel together some day. You never know, it can happen. Inshallah.’

  And so, we have a gentleman’s agreement. The next time Adam is deported he will call me, and if I have not yet been fired I will fly to Dar es Salaam, where he says we will spend time with his mother and some other people from his past, before returning to South Africa, overland.

  ◆

  Many of the Beachboys claim they like living in Cape Town.

  ‘I love Cape Town,’ Adam often says.

  It is a phrase echoed everywhere you turn in this city. ‘I Love Cape Town’ is, at present, a private tour company’s URL, a Facebook page with over three hundred thousand likes, a purveyor of kiddies’ clothes located in the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, and also Cape Town Tourism’s Twitter handle. Earlier in the year, the city launched a campaign to scrub graffiti from city walls, and now many of these spaces are crowded with city-sanctioned purple, black and red heart stickers ‘designed’ by an artist called Michael Elion. These and other flowerings of the café class attract criticism, much of it deserved, though coming from an undocumented Tanzanian the sentiment is not so easily skipped over.

  To understand the affection Adam feels for the city, it is necessary to go back to the early nineties and the arrival of the first Tanzanian migrants in South Africa.

  ‘Most of them came from Quelimane in Mozambique, not far from Nampula,’ Adam explained today, lying back in the grass beside the Nelson Mandela Boulevard on-ramp.

 
‘They were traders there, bringing stuff in over the Tanzanian border near Mtwara. It was the time of the Mozambique civil war, and so the conditions were bad. The Renamo soldiers would beat them, steal their things and even rape them. If you tried to struggle they would kill you straight. There was no law.’

  By the early nineties, a coincidence of profound events had opened a way for the Tanzanian traders to cross into South Africa: Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison in 1990, signalling the demise of apartheid South Africa, and in 1992 the long civil war in Mozambique ended. The Tanzanian traders travelled south with their psychological baggage, though, and in Adam’s analysis it was inevitable that the communities they established in South African cities ended up mistrustful and vicious, characterised by high levels of ‘bongo-to-bongo’ violence.

  ‘You know, we used to rob the new boys,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about the Tanzanian boys who come to South Africa for the first time. We would bring them to a place like this and ask them questions. Where you from? What are you doing here? Where’s your money? Then we would search the guys. In 1999 this Tanzanian boy came to Durban, 19 or so. Nobody knew him so we took his clothes, his phone, his shoes. Later that night this young boy went to the port after midnight and stowed a big ship. Three other Beachboys also stowed away in the engine room of the same ship. The crew found them after a few days but they only found the youngster at the next port, when they opened the hatches. The ship was full of mayolo – maize – and this boy was too young to know that they spray the maize with chemicals to kill the insects. You can’t breathe that air so this guy had been dead a long time. They put his body on the deck and the captain called the other guys and said, “Do you know him?” The guys said they did not know him but then the one Beachboy started to cry. You see, that night back in Durban when they stole that boy’s things this guy felt bad and took the clothes back to him. The dead person was wearing those clothes so he knew it was the same boy.’

  The practice of robbing new arrivals is still alive and well in Durban, by all accounts, but Adam said something changed in Cape Town in 2008.

  ‘The xenophobia that happened in Johannesburg pushed a lot of Tanzanian boys down here,’ he said. ‘The newcomers had a different mind. They had seen for themselves how South Africans were killing foreigners, and so they knew we had to stick together to survive.’

  By the time Adam reached Cape Town in early 2011, this new Beachboy generation was in the ascendant.

  ‘At this time most of the nineties Beachboys had died or gone to prison, so we changed our Beachboy ways. We stopped robbing the new boys, and now if two Beachboys want to fight we try first to make peace. No Beachboy can tell another Beachboy what to do any more. You can just be yourself. This is why I love Cape Town.’

  Hoping for a kind of narrative perfection, I asked Adam whether he was the Beachboy with the conscience, who had returned the clothes to the young man. He shook his head.

  ‘No, that was another guy.’

  ◆

  ‘If you want my story we must talk soon,’ Adam told me today, ‘before I go somewhere. Taking a ship isn’t like taking a taxi. If I get the chance, I will go, and after that you never know, I might not come back.’

  His only condition was that we talked somewhere nearer to his corner outside the Grand Parade Spar than our usual spot at The Freezer, so that he could keep an eye on his stringers.

  ‘Beachboys will fight each other over any little thing,’ he explained, ‘even the foils we sell for R1, which some use to smoke their unga. I’ve saw this ’appen last week. One boy sold another boy a dirty piece of foil, and the guy came back and said, “Kuma mama ake [mother fucker], you sold me dirty foil,” and when he got close the other guy bit his lip, the bottom one, until it was hanging off his face like a piece of bacon.’

  I suggested we meet outside the headquarters of Woolworths on Longmarket Street. Although separated from the Parade by just a single row of buildings, this is a parallel world of brick avenues and Chinese infinity balls, the air perforated by the click of stiletto heels. Adam appeared trailing a CCID guard, who did not hesitate to ask me, ‘Is this your friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You see, I told you. Now fokof,’ said Adam, deploying that beautiful palindrome of Cape Afrikaans. It was drizzling and I had thought we could talk under the grocer’s eaves, but the guard insisted we move out under the naked plane trees.

  ‘I’m going to start in 1999,’ said Adam, pulling two news posters off nearby streetlights to cover the wet metal of a nearby public bench. ‘That was the year I stowed my first ship, in Durban. Before that I was in Dar es Salaam. That’s another story, which you will learn when you meet me there. If I tell you now you will not understand, not really.’

  I nodded, happy to go along with the pretence that we may actually meet in Tanzania one day.

  ‘I don’t remember the name of the first ship I stowed. I’ve stowed nine ships since and I remember all their names but not the first one. I was in a hurry at the time. I was 17. I had been living with the Durban Beachboys for six months, trying to get a ship every night. Nobody was trying harder than me. One night, February I think, a cargo ship docked at Pier 2. I was with a friend called Nnanani, and another guy called Bambo. Nnanani had already stowed a ship about a month before. He was caught and deported to Dar es Salaam, and he had just arrived back in Durban that day, and already he wanted to stow another ship. We came closer to the port and noticed that the crew was Chinese. Bambo decided to turn back when he saw this because Beachboys were too afraid of Chinese crews at this time. A lot of our guys had already been thrown in the sea by Chinese seamen in the nineties. It is better now, but in 1999 people were proper scared, especially of the mainland Chinese crews. Hong Kong Chinese are better, but you can’t tell who is who from a distance, so Bambo left,’ said Adam.

  When Adam and Nnanani saw that the gangway of the bulk carrier at Pier 2 was unguarded, they sprinted up the steps and made it onto the deck, which, at 1 a.m., was clear. Skirting the cabins, they came to a place where fuel drums had been stacked one on top of the other.

  ‘We each climbed in a drum and made our bodies small,’ said Adam, folding his arms against his chest. ‘After an hour a guy came and shook the drums but he never looked inside. Afterwards I felt the ship going. I don’t know what he was thinking but Nnanani climbed out of his drum and came and shook my drum. I thought I had been caught until I heard him whispering to me. When I came out I saw the sea all around the ship, and the land far away. I thought, What the fuck, Durban is leaving. I’m at sea for the first time. It’s a feeling I can’t really explain.’

  The two friends needed to find somewhere better to hide, and decided to climb the tower of the ship’s cargo crane hand over hand on the vertical ladder until they reached a platform which, if they kept their bodies flattened, shielded them from view.

  ‘It is very high, if you drop you’re dead, but I grew up climbing coconut trees in Tanzania so it wasn’t a problem,’ said Adam.

  The ship tracked South Africa’s east coast in the darkness and by mid morning drew towards another port.

  ‘Nnanani knew what was going on. He said, “Yow, we’re docking at Richards Bay,” a South African port in the forest, near the border with Mozambique. He said we needed to stay hidden until the ship left, but after five days we were still there. I said, “Nnanani, we don’t know when this ship is going to leave and we can’t go on like this. I’m going to try and escape.”’

  Having observed the deck-top activity for days, the stowaways knew exactly when the crew took lunch and, at this time, scuttled down and made for the gangway. Rounding the cabin block once more, they ran into a Congolese security guard.

  ‘The security officer radioed for chief officer, who came and said, “Where you stow?” I said, “Durban.” He said, “You sure?” and then he punched me. He asked again. Nnanani said, “Durba
n,” so he punched him too, and almost broke Nnanani’s thumb. After that he locked us in a cabin and brought us food and water.’

  The Beachboys slept for hours, and when they woke it was to the barking of sniffer dogs, searching the ship for other stowaways. When this process had been concluded, the cabin door was opened and a man the boys had never seen before ordered them down the gangway and into a minibus with the name of a stowaway detection service written on the side. The sniffer dogs went in the back, and Adam was guided into the passenger seat, with Nnanani behind him on a bench.

  ‘I had big amount of ganja in my sock, seventy grams or so. I was thinking, They’re going to take us to the police station straight, so I decided to leave it under the seat of the car. But they just stopped the car outside the port area and said, “Come off.” Richards Bay harbour is surrounded by a big forest and they just left us there in the bushes. We hugged each other then, me and my brother, because we were free to carry on with our lives.’

  Adam and Nnanani were too naïve to know it then, but their sudden release was not out of the ordinary. One of the unlisted services that stowaway detection outfits provide to shipmasters is the removal of stowaways from under the noses of port authorities. The procedural processing of stowaways costs a great deal of time and money – up to R100 000 a case, according to insurers – and shipping companies happily pay for alternative outcomes.

  Adam and Nnanani were dropped on the side of Harbour Arterial, just before the on-ramp to the John Ross Highway, and were advised that a left turn and a fifteen-kilometre walk in the direction of Durban would get them to Empangeni, the nearest town. This was a lie. If the boys had walked just two kilometres in the other direction, they would have reached the town of Richards Bay. Here, they would have encountered some of Richards Bay’s Beachboys, who would have conducted them to the secret encampment in the dense forest near Lake Mzingazi.