Among the first regulars had been a large-bodied man in his sixties, who always ate alone and with great relish. If he used his wonderfully deep voice it was to thank Andrea for another delicious meal, or to share with her the recipes of his childhood: fried tilapia with sides of nsima and kachumbari; black-eyed peas and Bambara groundnuts. Andrea had taken notes and added the dishes to the menu. Their enigmatic guest had been delighted. In fact, he had insisted that the Breytenbachs take their evening meals at his table. In the course of these nightly engagements, the Breytenbachs had discovered that their new friend was Rupiah Banda, former Minister of State Mines and Governor-General of Lusaka Province. In 2000, after 40 years in politics, Banda had taken the decision to retire to his cattle farm near Chipata, only to find his home beset by supplicants day and night. The opening of Mama Rula’s had been well timed to provide Banda with a few hours of sanctuary each evening. It pleased him that the elderly Afrikaners knew nothing of his past, yet delighted in his company.
In 2006, to the surprise of many, Banda had become the country’s deputy president, apparently in repayment for his help in delivering President Levy Mwanawasa’s party the vote in the eastern province. ‘We were very happy for him,’ said Andrea, ‘but also sad because we realised we would probably lose a dear friend. He said, “No, you have an important job now, and your job is to keep me humble, because humility is often the first thing to go when one rises suddenly like this.”’ Henceforth, Mama Rula’s functioned as a de facto state house, with Banda and his entourage taking over the entire lodge whenever his duties brought him to the eastern border. This situation persisted when Mwanawasa had suffered a stroke in 2008, at which point Banda had automatically become the country’s president, a role he assumed formally after the 2008 national elections.
Banda was now seeking a second term, and the Breytenbachs had decided to do their bit for their friend’s international image by reaching out to as many non-Zambian journalists as they could find numbers for. I was the only one to have called back, apparently.
Days later, I was seated in a hardwood and blackened leather chair overlooking the atrium in Zambia’s State House. Cleaners and orderlies moved carefully to and fro in the corridors, while tilapia in a large rectangular tank gazed out at swaying papyrus. Occasionally, the presidential spokesperson appeared and shot me a withering look. He had been against the idea of an in-person interview at this late stage of the re-election campaign, feeling it could serve no purpose. His entirely reasonable objections were overruled, however – apparently by Banda himself. This left the spokesperson with the job of securing me a precious place on the president’s final campaign trip. By noon that day I was in Zambian Air Force One, being served miniature Mars bars and a copy of the Lusaka Times. The president – referred to as HE (His Excellency) by his aides – had come shuffling down the centre aisle in a blue Mandela shirt, his face at once grandfatherly and spry. The ever-scowling spokesperson took the seat next to me.
‘I need you to listen carefully,’ he said. ‘We will be making several stops and, when it is time to leave, the president’s men care only for their principal. Whichever car they tell you to get into, get into it fast, because once the doors shut on HE they will leave anyone who has been daydreaming behind. And I’m afraid they do not take Visa or MasterCard where we are going.’
I heard titters from the secretary of state, who was seated behind me. The president’s Indian doctor was two rows down, playing Tetris on his phone.
It did not take long to reach the northern town of Kasami where, after a short rally, I was ushered into the smallest of three helicopters leaving for Mbala on the Tanzanian border. From Mbala the cavalcade of choppers hopped along the eastern border to Chinsali, Lundazi and, finally, Chipata. In each of these dusty towns a dozen or more SUVs would storm towards the nearest secondary school, where the president would be greeted with song by the local choir while his aides distributed chitenges bearing Banda’s pleasant face with its dented bottom lip. At the start of every short speech, HE would form the thumb and index finger of his right hand into a bird-like shape and sing out chwe, chwe, chwe, to which the crowd would respond in kind, apparently to signify common instinct and purpose, as of flocking birds. This was explained to me by Banda’s American campaign consultant, who had come up with the idea.
Banda’s campaign was certainly well funded. On this last tour of the countryside, those who turned out for his rallies received skirts, shirts and head wraps, but in other places it had been bicycles. Banda, furthermore, had the full apparatus of state at his disposal: its planes and helicopters, even a dedicated team of videographers and presenters from the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation. Of the other candidates in the contest, only the firebrand politician Michael Sata had been able to rent a helicopter for campaign purposes, and only for a short time. The playing field was so uneven that Sata’s party, the Patriotic Front, had decided to contest the election with a single line: Donchi kubeba, meaning ‘don’t tell’ (anyone who you are going to vote for, and on election day make your mark for Sata). The strategy had made a mockery of the polling process, and most political analysts seemed to feel this was an error, a bit like flying at night without navigational instruments.
I wasn’t so sure. Banda himself seemed authentically pleasant and humble, but his support staff exuded an unsavoury overconfidence. In the smallest of the helicopters, into which I was sandwiched with the communications team, northern Zambia was denigrated as cassava country, its inhabitants as cassava munchers. They waved white handkerchiefs regally in the windows as we descended towards waiting crowds and, giggling, said things like, ‘Peaceful Zambians. My people. Zambia is one.’
Leaving Chinsali I was invited to travel in the presidential helicopter, which was easily twice the size of the others, with plush leather seats and luxurious carpeting. I sat with my back to the pilots, facing the president, our legs interlocked for want of room. This was the time accorded for our interview, but the large, elderly man fell asleep immediately and without any preamble of self-consciousness. All conversation in the aircraft ceased immediately. The sun set as we coasted over the eastern hills, where fires burned out of control in every direction, lines of orange on a black canvas.
We spent that night at Mama Rula’s, where I joined the president and the Breytenbachs for dinner. HE seemed genuinely happy in their company, and insisted that a photo be taken of himself with their granddaughter, Saartje, who entered the restaurant wearing a Rupiah Banda head wrap. I realised, as dinner concluded, that there would be no formal interview, that our small talk over fried kampango fillets (brought in for the occasion from Lake Malawi) was as close as I’d come. I was comfortable with this.
Lying in a horrible bed that night, blonde hairs criss-crossing the pillow and someone else’s toothbrush in the shower, I felt giddy. In fact, I felt I had glimpsed, for the first time, how power might become a subject of study – how the thing might be inhabited, explored from within. I believed I could start right away – I could push the two bedsteads in the room together and, by 3 a.m., have something written that would, within 24 hours, be read by influential people all over the world. But I was equally certain I wanted nothing to do with it, not if miniature Mars bars were involved, and sophistic news crews, and white handkerchiefs. I was with the president’s spokesperson: where’s the upside?
The news broke shortly after I landed in Johannesburg: Michael Sata’s Patriotic Front victorious, by a margin of 45 per cent to Banda’s 35. Donchi kubeba had triumphed over chwe, chwe, chwe. Banda, to his credit, conceded, and returned to his cattle farm outside Chipata.
Not my pick. Not in ten guesses.
◆
I returned to find a number of Please Call Me messages on my phone.
Adam, I thought.
‘Yeah big man,’ said the voice that answered my call.
Barak.
‘How you doing?’
&
nbsp; ‘Good,’ I said.
‘How’s your mummy and daddy?’
‘They’re good.’
‘How’s your wife?’
‘Good.’
Beachboy decorum. It gets me every time that I can’t reciprocate when Barak is on the other end of the line. Barak has no family. He’s unlike the other Beachboys in this respect. Most have somebody at home in Tanzania: a mother, sisters.
In fact, Barak is not from Tanzania. He was born on one of the Bajuni islands, off the coast of Somalia. His fisherman father, he’d been told, had died at sea. His memories of his mother are equally vague; she, too, had died when he was very young, leaving him in the care of relatives who had relocated to Mombasa in Kenya, and later to a desperate Dar es Salaam slum called Mburahati. His adoptive family had not applied for legal status. They had simply disappeared into the fast-growing city, kept their heads low.
Barak’s earliest memories are of being chronically hungry, and ‘not knowing what life is for’. He had known how to move, though, and at the age of 13 had run away to Mbeya in southern Tanzania. A week later he had jumped the border into Malawi, where he’d spent some time in Dzaleka Refugee Camp in the brown hills near Dowa. Life in that camp had been desperate, so Barak had pushed southwards into Mozambique, across Tete Province to the Nyamapanda border post with Zimbabwe.
Here, he had applied for asylum, claiming he was from the south of Sudan, fleeing the war. The Sudanese national who had interviewed Barak on behalf of the Zimbabwean government had quickly established that Barak could not understand Arabic – or Dinka, for that matter. Barak had explained that he had grown up in a town called Nimule, on the border of Sudan and Uganda, where Swahili is the spoken language. It was a story he had picked up in Dzaleka, and it had worked. Barak had been handed his asylum papers and transported down the country’s eastern roads to Tongogara Refugee Camp, near the town of Chipinge. Here, for two years, he had attended the camp’s primary school, learning to speak English among classmates who had been considerably younger than he was.
He had spent the next two years in Harare, hustling marijuana on a street called Rotten Row. He remembers this as a good time, though the Zimbabwean economy had been in free fall, and it was becoming difficult to find food in the shops and markets. By mid 2008, the Zimbabwean dollar was registering the highest monthly inflation rate not attributable to a war: 79 600 000 000 per cent. In all of history, only the Hungarian pengö had shed value at a faster rate, thanks to the wrack of the Great Depression and the ruin of World War II. Barak had heard on the refugee grapevine that people were starving in Tongogara, and that the governments of Canada and Australia planned to take all the children. He had bussed back to the camp and been placed in the third of three groups due for extraction. The first group had been flown to Canada, but before the second and third groups could go the Zimbabwean government, embarrassed by international media coverage of the conditions in the camp, had bussed the Tongogara refugees to Botswana. The government of Botswana had kicked them back into Zimbabwe a few days later, at which point Barak had decided to continue on to South Africa. The blue-uniformed policemen at the Beit Bridge border checkpoint had studied his refugee pass and waved him up to the Immigration Control office on the hill overlooking the Limpopo River. Here, he had been issued an asylum permit, and told to report to the Refugee Processing Centre in the nearby town of Musina. He had observed the long queues of people there, sleeping night after night in the red dust, and decided to continue his southern trek.
Six months later, at the age of 19, he had entered the Beachboy community in Cape Town.
Unlike the Tanzanian youths he lived among under the freeway bridges, Barak felt little desire to escape to sea. Compared with what he had known, Cape Town seemed a nice place. It was relatively safe, and making enough money to buy food was not difficult. He tried a few times, but quickly gave it up.
By the time Adam had arrived, Barak, although just 21 (and with no ships to his name), was already a mainstay of the local Beachboy community. His time in the refugee camps of Malawi and Zimbabwe had taught him the value of alliances, and he had been quick to recognise Adam’s strengths as a social animal. It was through Barak that Adam had been introduced to a heroin supplier called Mas Bato. Mas, Barak and Adam had soon gone into business, practically running the trade in heroin on the Grand Parade. Barak and Adam had hustled at night, sometimes all night. The only formal business open after 11 p.m. had been a small shop called Hot Chicken and Chips, and Barak would buy coffee there. On quiet nights he would talk to the cashier, who had been unfailingly nice to him. She had listened to his story, and told some of her own stories. They had become friends, then lovers.
And now they planned to marry – the reason for Barak’s many messages.
‘Morieda and me invite you to come to our wedding,’ he said, and gave me a time – 10 a.m. the next day – and a place.
A Tanzanian drug dealer’s room off Page Street in lower Woodstock.
◆
I met Sudi on Main Road an hour before the ceremony was scheduled to begin, and followed him into a squalid apartment block, the ground floor of which comprised dim, doorless rooms subdivided many times by holey blankets, grubby sheets and large pieces of plywood. We climbed two flights of stairs to the makeshift venue and helped to move the dealer’s furniture out into the stairwell, leaving a two-person couch covered in a grubby salmon-coloured material.
The original plan, Sudi explained, had been for him to officiate, but Morieda had insisted that the ceremony be led by an imam from her home suburb of Kraaifontein and for Sudi to function merely as witness to the nikah. The only other guest was Kabila, Barak’s one-time achoose; both Kabila and Sudi had gone to significant efforts to clean up for the occasion, having bathed from a bucket of icy water early that morning and borrowed decent, collared shirts and jeans from fellow Beachboys.
‘We don’t mind. We support our brother any way we can,’ said Sudi.
In due course, we heard voices on the stairs and stood in anticipation of the couple’s arrival. Barak entered first, dressed in a flowing white kanzu, his closely shaven head topped with a white kofia, the traditional brimless hat of the Swahili coast.
He was followed by the imam, a greybeard in a button-down khaki robe, and a woman in a turquoise hijab, who took Barak’s hand. The ceremony began with Barak proposing marriage to her in front of his friends. From his jeans pocket, Sudi took out a ring and handed it to Barak, who raised his partner’s left hand and worked the ring up her little finger above the knuckle, over the mehndi designs that snaked across her brown, wrinkled skin into the cuff of her dress. Her fingernails had been chewed back into the soft shelves of her fingers, and what was left had been painted orange.
‘Barak was supposed to give his wife a proper gift but she knows he got fokol to give her and she don’t mind,’ whispered Sudi.
Without further ado, the imam recited from the Qur’an and blessed the couple. A minute afterwards, the little wedding party was out on the balcony, congratulating Barak with shoulder hugs and shaking his new wife’s hands solemnly. The imam left; we watched him limp up the pavement to the Main Road. A box of cigarettes went around and everyone took one and lit up.
‘This is Morieda,’ said Barak.
‘Nice to meet you,’ his wife said softly, smoke pouring from her nose and hazing over her green eyes, which were all the more striking for the thick stripes of black eyeliner she had applied to her lower lids.
The newlyweds returned indoors to sit together on the pink couch.
Sudi grinned at me. ‘Sean-y, I can see you can’t believe it,’ he said.
I mouthed the question that had occurred to me the moment Morieda had appeared in the doorway: How old is she?
‘We don’t know. Kabila thinks around fifty but I think fifty-five at least. She got no teeth of her own, you know, just fake teeth. Sometimes, when she
talks fast-y, it looks like they will fly out of her mouth. I try to tell her, mummy, please, slow down.’
I was eager to stick around for the makeshift walimah Sudi and Kabila had planned for their friend, but I was late for a meeting. I pressed a few hundred-rand notes into Barak’s hand and ran down the stairs, passing the open rooms again.
Candles flickered here and there in the gloom. It seemed as if the rooms just went on and on, one false wall after another, sliding away under Main Road, under upper Woodstock, running deep into the darkness of the mountain.
◆
The issue of asylum permits is enigmatic: some Beachboys have them, whereas others do not. In an attempt to get to the bottom of this, at Barak’s request – Morieda has advised him to seek asylum – Dave and I ventured down to the Legal Resources Centre off Greenmarket Square, where migrant traders have, for years, attracted tourists with a multiplicity of African cultural artefacts ranging from Congolese face masks to polished tanzanite.
The LRC foyer, smelling faintly of paraffin, was crowded with foreign nationals, too, though in contrast with the market hubbub, nobody spoke. At the reception desk, the secretary stared at us for quite a time without saying a word.
‘We’ve had a bad week,’ she said eventually. ‘The state is closing down the asylum centres in the cities and moving them to the borders. There’s a protest happening right now outside the Cape Town Refugee Centre on the Foreshore.’ We had passed it on the way over, a group of discouraged-looking people gathered outside a locked building.
‘This means genuine asylum seekers from Somalia, Burundi and the DR Congo, after risking their lives to get here, are now expected to reverse thousands of kilometres northwards, without resources, just to fill in forms. It’s positively Kafkaesque,’ the secretary spat.
The fancy term figured in several laminated clippings pinned to the wall next to her desk.
Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 9
