Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  The elderly tramp had insisted on buying food for Adam the following day, and the day after that. He had bought kachasu and invited others around to drink and meet the curious, tattooed traveller. A woman a few years younger than Adam had taken his hand and wouldn’t let it go. Through the elderly man she had said she wanted him to stay – that she knew of a room in a nearby house where they could live. Adam had lied and told her he would think about it. The following day he’d risen and was on the road to the South African border before dawn.

  ‘I feel bad I never said goodbye. They were good people and they loved me. I should ’ave at least let them know where I was, because maybe the next guy who comes to them will be treated differently. Maybe they rob ’im instead of love him.’

  Adam had genuinely been in a hurry, though. It had been his plan all along to make it to South Africa for the FIFA World Cup and, what with all the delays, he had been in real danger of missing out. He had jumped the border at Komatipoort the same day, and arrived in Johannesburg two days later. When the World Cup had officially opened on 11 June he’d been cruising the crowds outside Soccer City, the calabash-shaped stadium near Soweto. He had picked a few pockets and thought smugly that nobody had travelled a harder road to be there. The following day he had worked the crowds outside the Ellis Park Stadium, where Nigeria played Argentina. At night he had stayed with some Tanzanians he knew in Braamfontein, swapping the phones he had pulled for unga. He’d impressed a lot of people with his stories, and become over-enthused – bolshy, even – like a student on a much-anticipated summer break. After the 2–2 Slovenia–USA draw, he’d joined an ecstatic circle of American supporters in chanting U-S-A, U-S-A on the streets of Doornfontein.

  ‘I was watching this young man in a white T-shirt with Brooklyn written across his chest in red,’ said Adam. ‘He had a nice camera, which I took eventually. I walked away from the group. That was my mistake – I was supposed to run. He saw me going and followed, so I put the camera down the back of my pants and said, “What are you talking about?” He called the other guys and they all started shouting at me. I started running and suddenly everyone in that whole valley was after me, including security guards and police. I dropped the camera in a bin and twenty yards on they caught me.’

  The camera was never found but the South African government had established special courts and extraordinary legal procedures with a view to keeping people like Adam off the city streets for the duration of the World Cup. The judge had dismissed the theft charges, but sentenced Adam to three months in Johannesburg Central Prison for failing to prove that he was in South Africa legally. When the last of the World Cup crowds had drained back to their home countries, Adam had been transported to Lindela Repatriation Centre outside Pretoria, where he’d been incarcerated for another two months. Once again, he’d claimed he was an asylum-seeking Somali, but rather than investigate his case the authorities had released him on 26 November.

  Adam had arrived in Cape Town on 15 February 2011, almost a year after he had set out from Dar es Salaam.

  ‘It felt familiar, like I already been here before. The air smelled like the sea in Hull. The buildings looked British but the palms growing near the Castle reminded me of Sheikilango Road in Dar es Salaam. There were police everywhere but also many, many hustlers. I saw a guy pick a pocket right in front of my eyes.’

  And then he had spotted a short, muscular man in jeans and a T-shirt, with a backpack over his shoulders and a white taqiyah on his square head.

  ‘I knew he was a Beachboy. I said, “Oya vipi Munungu,” and he said, “Poa, poa, mambo vipi.” That was Sudi. He’s been my achoose since that day. That’s what Beachboys call the guy you stow away with. It comes from prison language. In prison, your achoose is the person you trust with your life.’

  ◆

  Facebook confirms much of what Adam has told me.

  Rochelle ____ from West Bromwich, Birmingham, regularly posts pictures of herself in revealing dresses, often arching her back when she directs a glossy pout at the camera. At a point in her timeline, the selfies cease and she begins channelling her feelings through a cartooning app called Bitstrips.

  Cartoon Rochelle seems to be lonely a lot of the time. One pictogram has her cartoon likeness carrying the world on its shoulders. In another, she sits alone in a room, thinking, Could do wid sum company. Oh well! In a happier scene, she holds a bouquet of flowers to her chest and says, ‘I love you Princess Aniya’. The only photo album on the page is tagged with this name – Princess Aniya – and it charts the life of a five-year-old girl, from hospital wraps to the face-paint party she attended last week.

  There is no Facebook page for Adam Bashili, but a page for Adam Chazili carries a thumbnail image that is unmistakably him. And although his location is given as Donaldsonville, Louisiana, his friends comment in Swahili and have taken pseudonyms like Mzee Seaman, Jimmy London, Dr Seapower and Sex Man Chateka. Group photographs taken on Cape Town’s Grand Parade dominate the timeline. At one point Adam writes ‘I miss England man’, to which Rochelle replies ‘ya Yoo taking too long’.

  In a more recent comment, he rants about his mother and father, swearing he wishes he could line them up and shoot them for ‘giving me this life’. His timeline cuts short in 2010 with a simple ‘Fuck life’, below which Facebook informs Adam that ‘Sea Side Katuni likes this’.

  ◆

  This morning Adam’s name was the last on the roll for Court 17 in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court, which is two streets upslope from the Grand Parade. As far as courtrooms go, it is pleasant enough: a colonial relic complete with Palladian windows and Tuscan pillars, the latter painted a cheerful green. In the atrium outside, the branches of a Ficus reach up above the level of the courthouse gutters, promoting fantasies of escape even in the innocent.

  I scanned the gallery on entry and recognised Sudi and Barak, who motioned me over. It is increasingly clear that the three friends constitute an underworld troika, and a well-rounded one at that, with Adam as the principal decision-maker and breadwinner and Sudi and Barak supplying many of the qualities in which he is deficient, such as physical menace and restraint. Barak, particularly, is a born diplomat. Never boisterous or over-hearty, he always strikes me – at over six foot tall and with his thick beard and Cushitic features – as a man among boys. Sudi is considerably shorter, his skull and features as compressed as Barak’s are aquiline. He is the group heavy, a former boxer with pectorals like balloons and a reputation for resolving disputes with his fists. As the only one of the three to have attended madrassa, he is also the group’s spiritual adviser, the moralist.

  ‘Sit here,’ Barak mouthed, shifting down the bench to make space. Sudi reached into his pants and pulled out a bag of weed. Adding a ‘y’ to the end of every fifth word, he explained that he knew a policeman who would take it down to Adam in the holding cell for a small fee.

  ‘Court is one of the only ways to take weed-y into prison,’ he whispered. ‘The police don’t mind-y, because it keeps the prisoners quiet.’

  The judge, a coloured woman in her forties, worked through the roll in a stern but understanding manner, shaking her head in dismay whenever the prosecutor failed to produce a docket.

  ‘There can be no excuse,’ she vented at one point. ‘The police station is across the road. Please see to it that the dockets start arriving on time from now on, okay?’

  It is a warning she issues daily, yet the dockets fail to appear, leaving her with little choice but to order the release of an endless succession of suspects, most of whom are almost certainly guilty of the crimes with which they were charged. She is correspondingly short-tempered, and intolerant of bombast and cheek. For this reason, I feared the worst when the clerk of the court cried, ‘Chazili, Adam Chazili.’ Sudi and Barak raised their heads from their arms as Adam came clinking up from the cells, wearing a white Bob Marley T-shirt. He turned his grin on us before facing th
e judge, who asked him to confirm his residential address.

  In a shockingly loud voice he said, ‘No problem your worship,’ and gave a street name and number in Delft, a township of greater Cape Town situated among the dunes behind the airport.

  ‘A lot of us use that address,’ said Barak. ‘The guy who stays there used to be a Beachboy. He don’t mind telling the police anything.’

  ‘Do you have any family?’ the judge asked, and the entire gallery stood up.

  ‘Tha’s my family right there, your worship,’ said Adam, his face a mask of seriousness.

  It was a master class in dock diplomacy: his body language open but communicating no challenge, his answers short and bold without sounding schooled. I had to leave before judgment was passed, but Sudi called soon afterwards to say that the judge had ordered Adam’s release.

  ‘Free bail-y.’

  ◆

  At 3 a.m. last Sunday, the Beachboy called Manyama Kiziwe was stabbed to death on the corner of Castle and Darling, alongside the Grand Parade. A local tabloid reported that Kiziwe had come to South Africa five years before in search of economic opportunity. In all that time, ran the article, he had struggled to find a job, and had endured the most degrading living conditions imaginable. Now he had been murdered, apparently for no reason.

  When Adam read the report, he was amazed.

  ‘It shows you can write any shit in the newspaper. Kiziwe was a dealer, and a robber. He was one of the nineties generation, so he actually bin here in Cape Town longer than he ever lived in Dar es Salaam. If your eyes were closed when he speak, you would think he was a coloured.’

  Even in adolescence, in Dar es Salaam, the deceased had been a troublemaker. It was the reason he was kiziwe – deaf. He had been caught thieving by members of his own community, who had beaten him until his ears had stopped working.

  On the night of his murder, he had been out drinking with his coloured girlfriend in the Rainbow Tavern off Albert Road in lower Woodstock. This is territory controlled by the Hard Livings gang, but since the Beachboys constitute the most loyal customer base for crystal methamphetamine, both as street dealers and as users, a mutual respect is observed. Kiziwe had sold a good quantity of heroin during the day and had money to burn. His girlfriend knew that he kept his money stowed in his sock, though, and let this slip to some gangsters, who followed Kiziwe as he made for the Foreshore underpasses in the early hours of the morning. They caught up with him at the Grand Parade, pulled their weapons and demanded that he hand over the money. Kiziwe was knifed when he fought back.

  At dawn, the city’s underworld was tense as large bands of Beachboys scoured Woodstock and Salt River, knocking on the doors of known gangsters and threatening death if it were discovered that the murderers had been sheltered there. By mid morning it was clear that the killers were long gone. A different form of mobilisation was now initiated: Kiziwe’s closest comrades went around the Beachboy areas asking for donations towards the cost of repatriating the body. They extracted peace payments from Hard Livings notables and from the Tanzanian drug syndicates, too. Everyone gave something, and the amounts went into a notebook next to the names of those who had donated.

  By lunchtime, R25 000 had been raised and paid over to Deo Gloria Funeral Services (‘Doing all things as if unto God’). Manyama Kiziwe’s body was returned to his mother in Dar es Salaam two days later.

  ◆

  To get to The Kitchen, you must head down Tide Road and turn onto Beach. Park at the dumpster in the panhandle at the oil recycling company, and look for the gap between the palisade struts. Turn your body sideways and slide through. Cross the multiple tracks heading directly into the city, and then pick out the path that leads, at this time of the year, through a field of knee-high purple loosestrife. Ahead, you will see the mouths of two railway tunnels, leading under the highway. Take the right tunnel. The overhead power cables have been cut, leaving stubs of cable dangling from the tunnel walls. Small stalactites are forming there along the concrete seams. The blue stone beneath the tracks will be dusty and everywhere around you will see old shoes, bottles and other discarded items – a breccia of refuse and decaying cotton. Do not be fooled by appearances, though – the tracks are in use. Stay near to the walls, which have been overpainted with slogans and tags going back many years. As the orb of light grows at the tunnel’s end you will smell wood smoke, acrid marijuana, perhaps. On a normal day you will emerge into the blinding coastal light to find a handful of young men seated on crates and old cable wheels around a fire that never goes out.

  On an abnormal day, you might find upwards of a hundred young men lining the highway embankment, their faces bowed and their eyes closed. A tall, dark man in a white robe chants a du’a above the sound of gulls and hammer blows in the nearby port.

  ‘Allahumma inna Manyama Kiziwe fi dhimmatika, wa habli jiwaarika, faqihi min fitnaltil qabri, qa adhaban-naari, wa anta ahlul Wafaa’i wal-Haqqi. Faghfir lahu warhamhu. Innaka antal Ghafurur-Raheem.’

  O Allah! Surely Manyama Kiziwe is under Your protection, and in the rope of Your security, so save him from the trial of the grave and from the punishment of the Fire. You fulfil promises and grant rights, so forgive him and have mercy on him. Surely You are Most Forgiving, Most Merciful.

  ◆

  Adam called to say that he had seen a ship he liked the look of in the Ben Schoeman Dock, and that he would probably be gone before the end of the day.

  We met at The Freezer, where he smoked the usual series of joints and unpacked his travel bag at my request.

  Of the two two-litre Coke bottles of cloudy water that emerged first he said, ‘The glucose makes it like that. You must have glucose to survive. Some people prefer Jive [a locally produced soft drink] but old-school Beachboys use glucose.’ Two packets of Tennis biscuits followed some Jungle Oats yoghurt bars, and that was it for food and drink.

  ‘It lasts me maybe ten days.’

  He also had a torch, a short length of tubular metal and five or six empty plastic packets.

  ‘The best place to hide is inside the cargo hold,’ he explained. ‘The only problem is they lock the hatch and don’t open it again. It’s dark down there so you need a light.’

  The length of metal had a more vital function. ‘When your food and water run out, you need to use a small iron like this to hit the hatch, so that the sailors can hear and let you out. Otherwise you will die.’

  The packets would serve a less vital, but still very important, function.

  ‘The first thing the crew will do is report you to the captain, and the first thing the captain will ask is, “Where did you shit in my ship?” That is why I have these,’ said Adam, holding up a plastic bag in each hand and flashing his golden grin, much the way he would, I imagine, when presenting a week’s worth of shit to some surprised shipmaster.

  ◆

  Woken by a text message at 5:46 a.m.

  Yow i m going last night i jup on ship name bluu sky. pls keep on touch with me family. fhone me daughter mum pls. pls tell her what is hapen. Memory Card. sea power.

  Five minutes later the phone went again.

  Sean can feel the ship is moven braa sound so nice. alone this time and have no food. i have only wotar but still me go make.

  A quick search on MarineTraffic returns the following information for the Blue Sky:

  Vessel Type: Tanker

  Flag: Liberia

  Next port of call: Doula, Cameroon

  Estimated time of arrival: 10 August

  SPRING

  It is hard for us today to imagine the expectations that Cape Town harbour once aroused in the breasts of all who passed through it, whether arriving at the quasi-mythical foot of Africa, or departing from it certain only of one thing: the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of ever returning. The vacancy between two landfalls, the void that the ocean used to represent to those
crossing it, its tedium and formlessness which engendered a longing for the shore, for any shore – all that has been lost. The difference between the Cape and the ‘real world’ once amounted to 7 000 nautical miles; at sea it was experienced as an apparently interminable period of suspension, a yawning hiatus in the lives of all who were on board.

  – Henk van Woerden, A Mouthful of Glass

  I’m officially out of a job.

  Some weeks back, I was informed by my editor that the position of Foreign Policy Correspondent would be terminated at the end of the month and that I would not be re-employed in another role. The news came as no surprise (no assurances had ever been given that the gig would become permanent), but since I had spent only a fraction of the travel budget I asked to be allowed to make one last trip. Permission was granted and, since Adam has not made contact, I booked myself to Zambia to coincide with the run-up to the national elections there.

  It ended up a fitting coda: a true chukua safari ki. The escapade had its beginnings in an intriguing call from a Zambian number – an elderly woman with a thick Afrikaans accent, who claimed it was within her power to facilitate an introduction to the Zambian president. When I hesitated she told me an extraordinary story, which I feel I ought to record since it is unlikely that anyone else will.

  Andrea Breytenbach and her husband Wynand had trekked into Zambia from Zimbabwe in the early 2000s, pushed by the loss of their farm and the collapse of the Zimbabwean economy. After living in a tent for a lengthy period, they had bought a dilapidated property on the outskirts of Chipata, which they had duly developed into a lodge called Mama Rula’s. The business was well positioned on the East African backpackers’ route from Nairobi to Cape Town, and had become instantly popular with both overland tour guides and moneyed locals.