Instead, they arrived in Empangeni after dark and slept in some bushes. In the morning, they listened out for voices they could understand.
‘We heard one guy speaking Swahili, name of Sylvester,’ said Adam. ‘This guy was from Mtwara on Tanzania’s south coast. In 2003 Sylvester made a successful drug run to Brazil, and became one of the area’s biggest drug dealers, but in 1999 he was still a barber, working out of a shipping container. He looked at me and said, “Unahitaji kula, you must eat.” I said, “We need to get to Richards Bay, so that we can try stow another ship,” and he said, “No, wewe ni kwenda kufa.” So I said, “Okay, we will go with you and eat food.”’
Nnanani soon caught a taxi back to Durban, but it was a month before Sylvester gave Adam his blessing to carry on to Richards Bay.
‘I think he wanted me to stay and help him with his business, but the only thing I could think of was ships.’
When Adam left for Richards Bay, he was not alone. A week before, a young Tanzanian called Hussen Chiza had come to Empangeni, seeking his cousin. When the young man heard that his cousin had moved to Maputo, he asked Adam if he could join his next stowaway attempt.
‘I told this boy it was going to be difficult. I knew I could walk into Richards Bay and nobody would touch me because I arrived in a ship, not in a taxi or a bus. I was already Sea Power but Hussen was nobody, just a boy, and I knew they were going to rob him. When I told Hussen this, he said he had R3 000. I said, “Okay, give it to me and let’s see what is going to happen.”’
Adam’s strategy was simple. When he and Hussen came among the Richards Bay Beachboys, he announced that they had R3 000 between them, and that they planned to spend all of it on beer and food for the others. All they wanted in return was a chance to try their luck at the port.
‘Richards Bay is not like the other ports,’ Adam explained. ‘In Cape Town and Durban, nobody cares if you walk along the fence, but Richards Bay port is surrounded by forest, and to get there from where the Beachboys stay you have to walk all night. Because of these conditions they have a rule that only two or three guys can go to the port at one time, and they’re only allowed to stay there for four days. If they haven’t stowed a ship in four days they must come back, to give the next group a chance.’
A group had departed hours before Adam and Hussen’s arrival, led by the Beachboy called Dullah Macho Mzungu – Dullah because his first name was Abdullah, and Macho Mzungu because his eyes (macho) were blue, ‘like the eyes of a white person (mzungu)’.
‘The others said we would have to ask Dullah. I could see they were afraid of him. Dullah and his friends had killed another Bongoman and buried the body on the beach not long before, so he was in power at the time. We waited four days for Dullah to return, and when he did we were proper nervous, I can’t lie, but I spoke to him and he was an all right guy. I remember he gave me one of the apples he had taken with him to the port. I took him straight to the Beachboy bar and bought him a drink. I said, “You give me hope, Dullah Macho Mzungu. You didn’t make it, but me, I’m going to make it.” And we drank. After dinner we walked: me, Hussen and two other guys called Chilli and Gift, who I chose because they knew the way. We bought everything for them: glucose, water, food. I remember there was a tin of fish in there, some biscuits, bread, even beer. We also had some ganja and a torch, because it’s dark in the jungle. When we left I didn’t have a penny left.’
The party walked for most of the night and, at 4 a.m., came to the shore of a small bay beside the multipurpose terminal. There were no ships docked at the terminal, so the men crawled into the enormous dolosse scattered nearby and smoked joint after joint.
‘I put my head up in the morning and saw two ships out at sea. I went back down and smoked another spliff, and when I came up I saw the biggest ship I ever seen in my life, coming towards the terminal. I went down and said, “Guys, we need to make quick d’ua [prayer].” Nobody knew how to make a d’ua, so I said three allahamdus [alhamdullilah – God is great], and then we jumped the harbour fence.’
The ship the four stowaways approached with stealthy speed was a behemoth – the 260-metre-long bulk carrier Global Victory, just three years at sea. It had a bright-red hull, which loomed over the men like a planet. When the Tanzanians reached the bottom of the steps, the guard at the top of the gangway walked away from his post, as if on cue. They were aboard in moments.
‘We saw this door in the ship, with handles and locks that looked like scissors. I said, “Yow, Chilli, open this,” and he did. The room was full of paint tins, like a ghala, or hardware store. Hussen and me hid ourselves on the bottom level, and the other two hid on top. We stayed there all day but at night Chilli and Gift came down and said, “We have to leave, it isn’t safe.” I said, “What the fuck, are you crazy? We are safe here. Outside, anyone can come from any direction.” I told Hussen, “Go if you want,” but he said, “Memory, I came with you, I trust you, I’m going to stay.” The other two made it to the engine room but a guy saw them and told them to get off the ship. That is what I found out when I bumped into Chilli in Johannesburg in 2010. After thirty minutes, a guy came to our room and opened the door. He shone his torch a bit and then he closed the door. After another twenty minutes, the ship started shaking. In two hours, the ship was moving. I came out. There was a small hole in the door, just big enough for one eye to see outside. I saw people were busy folding the ropes. I came back and said, “Yow, we’re going, the ship is fucking going.” We hugged each other.’
Adam knew from conversations with other stowaways that it was not enough to make it out to sea, and that to stand any chance of reaching Europe they would have to remain concealed until the vessel was well clear of the port of Cape Town – if, indeed, it would be travelling that way. He knew that the journey from Richards Bay around Cape Point took roughly five days, so the pair counted five nights and, on the sixth day, left their hiding place and hailed the first crew member they spotted.
‘When this guy saw me he shouted, “Stowaway!” and held his chest here, like he was ’avin a heart attack. He told us, “Wait here, wait here!” and ran to fetch the captain, an old Korean guy called Jay Jeong. Captain Jeong looked at us and said, “Don’t worry, boys. We are very far from Africa already.”’
The benevolent captain put Adam and Hussen in a cabin, and ensured that they were well fed and kept in beer and cigarettes.
‘He was like my father,’ said Adam, ‘that is what I thought at the time.’
The two friends were not confined to their cabin, but they happily spent most of each day there, swapping stories. Adam learnt that Hussen was from a village near Kigoma, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.
‘He started telling me about his family – his mother and his sisters. He’d had a hard life, same like me. He never knew his daddy.’
Adam, who likes nothing better than an escape story, was enchanted by Hussen’s flight from Kigoma at the age of 12.
‘Hussen’s aunt, who he was living with, was renting a room to this old shopkeeper, and he used to give Hussen money and tell him to buy stuff for the shop. One day Hussen took that money and rented a bike, which he pedalled to the next village. He left it there in some bushes and paid for a space in a car to Dar es Salaam. He never bin back since that day.’
On board the Global Victory, Adam maintained he was from Somalia and Hussen, who was darker skinned, said he was from Burundi. They had been told by other Beachboys that this was the way things were done, though between them they had no clue why. Their ignorance probably worked in their favour, because the experienced captain believed them and radioed ahead to Rotterdam, the next port of call, to inform the Dutch authorities that he had two bona fide asylum seekers on board his ship.
‘I knew nothing at all about seeking asylum,’ said Adam, ‘and I didn’t speak a word of English. When we arrived in Rotterdam, the Holland authorities sent a guy to communicate with us in Swahili
, and because it was the only thing I could speak they found out that I wasn’t a Somalian guy. That fucked me up, and they sent us back to the ship. When the Dutch police handed us over to Captain Jeong they said, “Here we go, sir, we’re returning your crew.” Mr Jeong looked like was going to cry. He said, “You told me you from Somalia, but you from Tanzania. You lied to me!” He wasn’t happy with us for a bit, but then he came to our cabin and gave us each a cigarette and he said, “You know where the ship is going next?” I said, “No, I don’t know. You tell me, Captain.” He said, “England.” He said if we got off at England they would send us back to Africa. I’m not sure if he was warning us to stay on the ship or encouraging us to leave, but anyway, he gave us that information.’
A day later, the Global Victory was at anchor off the 12th-century city of Kingston upon Hull. Adam and Hussen, who caught sight of the shoreline every time they used the outside toilet, were underwhelmed.
‘I told Hussen, “Yow, if this is all we can tell the people at home about Holland and England, it is better we die right here on the ship.”’
After two weeks at anchor, the ship started shaking again and moved into a berth in the Albert Dock.
‘After half an hour nobody had come to fetch us, so I told Hussen, “Come, let’s pretend to pee and see if we can escape.” We saw there was nobody at the top of the gangway, so we just walked down. There was a guy at an electronic gate at the bottom but the gate opened automatically and he just let us walk through. Outside the port we saw signs on the highway saying Liverpool, Manchester, just like the football teams, and that gave us big nervousness. We felt like everyone who passed us in a car was looking, so we ducked into a park and just chilled there. We had no plan, but Allah was looking after us because in all of the white city of Hull here comes this black guy. Hussen could speak some English and he found out that this guy was a Cameroon guy called Simone, and he was in the park to meet his ganja dealer before going to work a night shift somewhere in Sheffield. He took us to his place and said we could stay the night, then he left and locked the door.’
I had been writing furiously the whole time Adam had been speaking, shielding my notebook from the spitting sky with my coat. I hadn’t looked at Adam in all this time, and when I did I saw that he was shaking with cold.
‘Sorry, Adam, you’re freezing.’
‘I am freezing my fucking balls off.’
‘Let’s stop there. It’s a good place to stop, anyway. You can tell me about England tomorrow, if you have time.’
‘No problem. I have time. I got fokol to do, to be honest with you.’
Passing an electronics store on the way back to the Parade, Adam casually mentioned that he had robbed the place back in 2011. ‘Me and some boys knocked the bottom glass out with a wheelie bin and I crawled in and filled the bin with stuff and left. I got about R10 000 for the gear. We had a big party under the bridge.’
At the Darling Street KFC, Adam crossed to his corner, eyes narrow against the weather, which had steadily worsened. I climbed into the Conquest and turned upslope, heading home.
◆
Adam has been arrested.
We were sitting with Barak and Sudi against the fence of the Ford Imperial dealership off Hertzog Boulevard when a police cruiser stopped in the panhandle of Old Marine Drive. Two male officers stepped out, one paunchy, the other diminutive. Adam broke off telling me about England and watched as the officers walked over to a nearby Cape Willow and peered into its dense canopy.
‘Wapashesha,’ Adam grumbled. ‘That’s what we call the railway police. They always shesha shesha, you know, trying to catch us with drugs. They make life very difficult for Beachboys.’
Shesha is Zulu for ‘rush’, one of many local words absorbed into Beachboy lingo.
‘That fat one is called Wellington, but we call him Kichwa because he has such a big head. The other one is called Prince. We’ve known them for a long time now.’
After a small conference, the little cop meshed his fingers and boosted the big one up to the crook of the tree. A lot of branch shaking ensued and then, to my great surprise, two backpacks fell to the ground. This brought several Beachboys running from the direction of the Nelson Mandela Boulevard off-ramp, Daniel Peter among them. Slung around his shoulder was a large straight-shackle padlock attached to a heavy-duty chain – the type used for locking up traders’ trolleys. The officers quickly wrestled him to the ground, where the smaller of the two – Sergeant Prince – remained sitting on his back. In the hope that we might intervene somehow, Daniel Peter shouted over that one of the bags was his and that it contained his prize sketchbook. The notebook came fluttering to earth when the bag was upended.
Adam stormed over, yelling that the boy had done nothing wrong. ‘You just want money again, kuma mama ake.’
‘Trouble now,’ Barak whispered as the little cop rose, allowing Daniel Peter to wriggle free. Sudi urged restraint – ‘Memory, twende’ – and clucked his tongue.
Prince moved forwards a few steps. ‘You want to get fucked up?’
‘I’m not from this country so you better kill me because if you don’t I will kill you,’ Adam yelled, standing his ground. The threat of mortal violence took the officer by surprise. He looked over at his associate in pure amazement before launching a kick that Adam had anticipated. Adam swayed sideways and the policeman’s kick merely grazed his side before reaching the limits of its force beneath his armpit, at which point Adam reflexively clamped down and began pulling Prince around on one leg, a scene so farcical that even the big cop laughed, until Prince let out a scream of pain.
‘He just had an operation, you poes,’ said Sergeant Kichwa. Adam relaxed his grip and Prince slumped to the ground, clutching the knee that had taken his weight.
‘It’s his second operation on the same leg.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’ Adam sounded genuinely contrite.
‘You can tell the court you are sorry. I’m putting you under arrest. What you did is a Section 67 offence, assaulting an officer. The judge is going to give you one year for this.’
Adam walked forward with his wrists together.
‘Come, let’s go. Your police station is my hotel. Fuck you both.’
Later, after Adam had been bundled into the back of the van and taken off to Cape Town Central, up the road from the Grand Parade, Barak said it was unusual that the wapashesha had actually made the arrest.
‘Normally we just pay them some money, whatever we have, and they leave us. Or they take our cellphones. I think maybe they saw that you were watching them and thought it must be better to make the arrest this time.’
I asked if there was anything I could do.
‘Memory will call you from Pollsmoor,’ said Barak.
Sudi nodded but said nothing.
‘I think I’m going to go now.’
‘In a bit,’ said Barak.
I walked off.
◆
Adam called from Pollsmoor Prison to say that he had been charged with interference.
Over a background din of singing inmates, he asked whether I could buy R60 worth of MTN airtime and SMS the code to the number he was calling from. The phone, he said – an enjin in prison parlance – belonged to another inmate, who would take half the airtime as his own and then allow Adam, effectively, to rent the device out to other inmates for as long as the airtime lasted, swinging it between cells with lengths of string. The inmates would pay him in marijuana stops or bowls of rice.
Since Pollsmoor is the largest prison in the Western Cape and the institution most associated with the enigmatic and notoriously violent Numbers gang, I asked after his safety.
‘I’m in the Muslim cell, which is quieter, and the food is better. There are many Tanzanians inside the cell with me, and even two or three Sea Power, so nobody gonna mess around. It’s just boring, you know. Noth
ing to do.’
I asked whether telling me more of his story over the phone would help to pass the hours.
‘Of course. Where did we leave it?’
‘You and Hussen had just left the Port of Hull, where you met a Cameroonian called Simone who gave you a place to stay.’
‘Okay. Strange to hear that name … Hussen.’
‘That’s what you’ve been calling him.’
‘I actually know him better as Dawoodi, Dawoodi Chisa. You see, Simone introduced us to some Arab Sudanese guys who were very serious Muslims, praying five times every day. We needed their help so we pretended we were very serious Muslims too. Hussen became so good at praying that I started to call him Dawoodi, because everybody knows the Dawoodi Bohra people from India are the most strict Muslims you can find anywhere. Soon everyone was calling him Dawoodi, but he wasn’t really serious about Islam. The Sudanese guys gave us money, and we would use it to secretly go drinking. But a funny thing ’appened you know. After a while Dawoodi started living with these guys, and they took him to Birmingham where there are many more Sudanese refugees. I think he’s still living with them until today, in Birmingham or maybe Middlesbrough, still praying five times.’
Adam had stayed on at Simone’s place until Dawoodi sent cash for the bus journey to Birmingham. The moment the bus had pulled into Birmingham Coach Station, he’d known he was in the right place.
‘On the streets it was just blacks and Indians, nothing white. In Hull City everyone used to look at me but in Birmingham I was invisible. Memory Card had arrived in black town.’
Adam had lived with Dawoodi’s Sudanese connections for several months, but increasingly spent his time with British-Jamaican dealers and bookies on Soho Road in the suburb of Handsworth. To fit in, he had adopted a Jamaican identity.
‘I learnt how to speak Jamaica patois before I knew English. If anyone asked me where I was from, I told them miya Mobay, which means Montego Bay. I never been there but I could describe it like a natural.’
Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 6
