‘We are here to see Mr Kerfoot,’ we said.
‘He’s swamped, as always,’ said the secretary, though Kerfoot – an LRC lawyer – stepped out just then, wearing the beatific smile of a doctor seeking the day’s last patients. In appearance he reminded me of Marlon Brando’s character in A Dry White Season, or possibly his office did, with its topographies of documents, its wooden fixtures and its metal wastepaper basket. He took his chair and rubbed his eyes and face dramatically as he said, ‘I suppose you know the story of modern immigration to this country.’
When we hesitated he embarked on a summary, reminding us that, under apartheid, the Aliens Control Act had made it nearly impossible for foreign-born Africans to enter South Africa in any capacity other than as migrant labourers contracted to the mines.
Perhaps the most powerful embodiment of the apartheid government’s attitude to black foreigners, he said, was the three-hundred-odd kilometres of fencing it had erected along parts of South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe and Mozambique in the mid eighties. The fence – three coils of electrified razor wire stacked in a pyramid – had been nicknamed the snake of fire by border-dwelling Mozambicans.
‘If you touched it, chances were you would be electrocuted to death.’
When the voltage was cut in 1990, holes began to appear. With the country’s leadership preoccupied with the transfer of political power from white to black hands, the holes widened until eventually entire sections of fence were being carted off by metal thieves. Drawn by the relative wealth of South Africa’s cities and pushed by war, repression and poverty, northerly Africans poured into the country in great numbers, some through the border posts on tourist visas, which they overstayed, with many more bypassing the entry points altogether.
Attempts to address the situation had, by the early 2000s, led to the entrenchment of an ugly detention and deportation system, said Kerfoot. In no time at all it had become corrupt to the core. Foreign nationals detained for not being in possession of the correct documentation found that they could bribe their way back onto the streets with ease. Those who were deported had little difficulty re-entering the country within days. The consequence was universal frustration. African migrants found themselves caught up in a bureaucratic limbo – ‘a Kafkaesque state’ – whereas working-class South Africans increasingly felt that the government was failing to prevent foreigners from taking jobs and pressurising welfare systems. The outbreak of xenophobic violence in 2008 left nobody in any doubt as to the stakes.
‘Which brings us to the question of your stowaways’ asylum permits,’ said Kerfoot. ‘Most of the undocumented migrants who have entered the country since the nineties have not qualified for asylum under the Refugee Act, but many of them applied anyway and received asylum seekers’ permits, otherwise known as Section 22 permits, which allowed them to remain in the country legally pending the outcome of their application process. I’d warrant that the Tanzanians you mentioned are Section 22 holders, and the reason some have them and others do not is easily explained by the fact that the Home Affairs department no longer dishes them out like it used to. It makes little difference either way,’ he continued, ‘because Tanzania is a peaceful country, and any Tanzanian who applies for asylum is almost certain to have his application rejected. To be frank, it is hard for me to imagine a group of foreigners being more at odds with the current dispensation, given what little you’ve told me about their habits and intentions.
‘And just out of personal interest,’ he said, changing tack, ‘how do you envisage presenting your research, ultimately? If, as you say, this community values little more than secrecy and anonymity, surely anything you intend to publish about them will be deleterious to their cause?’
Kerfoot gave his face another long rub and thanked us for stopping by. In the waiting room, the worried asylum seekers glanced up momentarily before returning their gaze to the ends of their shoes. It had been our intention to join the protest outside the Foreshore asylum centre, but we passed it without discussion now, our mouths possibly over-filled with difficult syllables.
Kafkaesque: having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.
Deleterious: from the Ancient Greek dēlētḗr, ‘a destroyer’.
◆
I suspect our LRC visit could mark the end of our collaboration.
Dave’s visits to the Foreshore have become infrequent of late, as other work projects keep him out of Cape Town for half of every month. He has also said, on more than one occasion, that he was aware of certain limitations at the start – that there would always be a point beyond which his camera would not be able to follow.
More than this, something appears to have shifted in his relationships with the Beachboys. Possibly I am understanding, for the first time, what a burden a camera can be in contexts of fragile trust. A few weeks ago, for example, we were with a group of Beachboys when a waxy-faced man with a broad nose and short dreads hauled off his jacket and hoodie, and any number of subsidiary layers, and turned away from us to show off a dolphin tattoo on a shoulder blade. It was, he said, his protection against drowning. He introduced himself as Juma, a name as common in Dar es Salaam as David is elsewhere; when Dave asked whether he would mind posing for a photograph, Juma nodded, pulled his layers back on, removed his grubby Peruvian beanie, and posed. After taking his portrait, Dave asked Juma if he could photograph the protective charm – which, of course, is what he’d meant initially. Without hesitation, Juma asked for money; just as reflexively, Dave refused. Dave and Juma have bumped into each other two or three times since. Each time Dave asks Juma if he wouldn’t mind taking his shirt off, and just as reliably Juma grins and asks for money. For R50, possibly even R20, Juma would happily expose his shoulder to the lens, but Rhodes will return to govern the Cape before either man – the seaman from Dar es Salaam or the photographer from Pietermaritzburg – backs off from a principle.
◆
Some months back, Sudi had fallen from the port’s fence and cracked a couple of his ribs.
Adam had called for an ambulance and, with Barak’s help, had walked Sudi to the place beneath the elevated freeways where the state paramedics know to meet the sick and wounded of the lower city. The ambulance had traversed the line of skyscrapers that overlook the harbour and entered the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront precinct, an ever-tightening crush of business schools, five-star hotels and shopping malls.
The Somerset Hospital squats stubbornly in the centre of this district, a monument, in many ways, to the city’s finer inclinations. A doctor named Samuel Bailey had used his own money to establish the place – the region’s first civil hospital – after the city’s governor at the time, Lord Charles Somerset, had refused him funding.
From its opening day – 1 August 1818 – the old Somerset Hospital and Lunatic Asylum had been open to both civilian burghers and slaves. This basic humanitarian principle had been carried over to the new Somerset Hospital, built in the 1860s, and has survived intact until today. In fact, free hospital treatment for all is a policy of the South African government. Patients are supposed to provide proof of South African citizenship, but in practice state doctors treat all comers. As a consequence, the Somerset Hospital, along with every other state-run medical facility, is overstretched at most hours to the point of barely contained chaos.
When I had arrived, Sudi and Adam had been in the processing queue for three hours. Another three passed before any doctor could get around to assessing Sudi, and in that time two gunshot victims had come in, escorted by the policeman who had shot them. A drug-addled teen with a strikingly deep tan had walked around and around the casualty ward, her feet bare and her forehead ever so slightly creased in confusion. One the far side of the ward, a middle-aged woman with arms like biltong sticks had addressed nurses with a yellow fan in front of her face, saying, ‘No black doctors please, I’m warning you.’
Sudi had eventually b
een seen by a female intern from Athens, Texas, a smiling sylph in bright-pink scrubs. She had helped Sudi to remove his shirt and praised his tattoos while examining him. They are some of the better Beachboy markings I’ve seen. A container ship sails over his bulging pectorals, faded to a ghostly pentimento. A pirate grins off a muscular shoulder, complete with tricorn hat.
X-rays had revealed hairline cracks in two of Sudi’s ribs. By the time the doctor had written a prescription for Tramadol and signed Sudi’s discharge chit, the sun had been setting beyond the kelp beds off nearby Mouille Point.
Today, Sudi called to say that his chest was swollen in the same area.
‘My blood,’ he said, ‘bad blood,’ and went on to explain about a dreadlocked Beachboy called Juma who had used one of the communal kisus at The Kitchen to pick at the thick papules on his forehead. It is widely suspected that Juma has Aids – ‘H’ in Beachboy parlance – and Sudi had inadvertently used the same kisu to lance a boil on his back. He is now convinced that the swelling around his ribcage is not a coincidence – that he is, in fact, infected.
To avoid spending another day in hospital waiting rooms, I took Sudi to see Dr Deon Cabano, who has a small private practice off the Marine Drive service road in the industrial precinct of Paarden Eiland, overlooking the port’s breakwater. In recent years the South African-Italian doctor, whose sleek waterfall of sandy blonde hair would not be out of place in a cosmetic plastic surgeon’s rooms, has seen and treated (at no charge) several Beachboys among his regular paying stream of dockworkers, seafarers and machinists. This has earned him the Beachboy moniker Dr Sea.
Sudi’s chest, when Cabano lifted his shirt, looked far more gruesome than I had expected. Where the inside of his left bicep would have touched his ribs a small volcano of swollen skin jutted out, ending in a bloody point. The lump looked worse for whatever cream Sudi had applied to it, which was now flaking off in little black and white clumps.
‘It’s one of two things,’ said Cabano, writing a script for antibiotics. ‘It’s either a dermal or a bone infection – let’s pray it’s the former. If the problem is in the bone, then I’m afraid, Mr Brando, that you will have to return to Somerset Hospital, where the orthopaedists will probably run a mile because bone infections are a nightmare to treat.’
Armed with penicillin we returned to the car, where Barak sat smoking a joint. I asked where to.
‘Can you drop us at the Beachboy sick house?’ Sudi asked.
I had heard the place described before – a rustic shack in a place called Blikkiesdorp, where sick and injured Beachboys can stay until they are strong enough to return to the bridges. Quite who the structure belongs to, or what the terms of residence might be, I had no idea. I did know that Blikkiesdorp was an unlikely site for a sanctuary. Formally called Symphony Way Temporary Relocation Area (TRA), Blikkiesdorp (Tin Can Town) has been notorious since its inception. The TRAs – there are several of them scattered around the poorest parts of the Cape Flats – were developed to house surplus people: victims of natural disasters, private property squatters, foreigners displaced by xenophobic violence and, in the case of Blikkiesdorp, men and women who were living rough on the streets of Cape Town ahead of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The fact that Blikkiesdorp was used in this way, as the back end of a city’s touristic makeover, had turned the place into a cause célèbre; any follower of the local news is likely to know one or all of the following facts:
That Blikkiesdorp is twenty kilometres outside the city, in the dunes behind the Cape Town International Airport;
That the settlement comprises one thousand six hundred or so single-room structures – steel cubes (blikkies) wrapped in zinc sheets, divided into alphabetical blocks running from west to east and A to Q;
That nothing grows from the dune sands on which the camp is built;
That temperatures inside the structures soar into the fifties in summer;
That movement in and out of the camp was initially controlled by a barbed-wire fence and a police presence; and
That drug abuse and violent crime are daily realities.
With Table Mountain receding in the rear-view mirror, I asked how the Beachboy sick house had come about.
‘In 2006,’ said Sudi, ‘there was a big maskani at Culemborg, under the bridges, maybe one hundred, two hundred people. We were Bongomen and coloureds living together, but mainly Bongomen. I was staying in a small mchondolo with three other guys. One day, some white people came and took our names. They said they were going to give us a bigger house in another place. They didn’t ask us where we were from, or if we had permits. In 2009, they came back to the bridge and called out the names. If you were still living there in the Beachboy areas, they took you to your new house in Blikkiesdorp. This is why there are so many Bongomen in Blikkiesdorp. Some are married to South African women now, others have become big drug dealers.’
We peeled off the N2 onto the R300, took the Blue Downs exit and doubled back through Delft, an epicentre of violent crime on the Cape Flats with an annual murder rate three times the national average.
‘Turn left here,’ said Sudi, as we approached the Golden Crust bakery.
We made our way on rock-strewn streets through rows of newly constructed tenements, crossed the M171 and entered Blikkiesdorp through a wetland suffocating under trash. We followed the perimeter road around the eastern end of the camp and stopped at a place where several concrete bars had been knocked out of the boundary palisade, creating a body-sized exit into the surrounding forest of Port Jackson willow. To our side, a path led away from the aperture to a narrow, puddled alleyway between the shanties. We followed it, counting off the unit numbers, which were spray-painted in orange on the zinc walls of each shack. The original structures had been free-standing, but the spaces between them had subsequently been claimed with makeshift walls, ceilings and fences, turning each block of units into a virtual fortress.
‘Oya vipi,’ said Sudi, knocking on the pine door of the only free-standing shack in sight.
‘Mambo vipi,’ came a muffled voice from inside and we heard a key being turned, a deadbolt shifting.
‘It’s dangerous here, especially at night, so the brothers keep the doors locked if their numbers are only a few,’ Sudi explained.
A slight man with a long and sallow face – a human version of the central African masks on sale on Greenmarket Square – opened the door.
‘Mege!’ Sudi shouted, looping an arm around the man’s neck and hugging him side-on. ‘This is Mege JoJo, he got TB.’
The sick Beachboy smiled sheepishly, as if Sudi had exposed a personal failing. He was alone in the structure, which was furnished with a single armchair, a decent carpet and two double mattresses on good bases. WWE wrestlers were body-slamming each other on the screen of a television, which rested atop a low table. Next to this, a pot of ugali bubbled away on an electric hob and, although the atmosphere was dense with steam, the place was clean and otherwise dry – a true haven, measured against the dank Beachboy middens of the Foreshore.
‘Is this your place?’ I asked.
Mege shook his head vigorously from side to side.
‘Who owns it?’
‘All Beachboys.’
Sudi picked up the story. ‘It used to belong to this guy called Juto, but Juto caught a ship and after that he stayed home in Ubungo in Dar es Salaam. He phoned to tell us that this house could be used by any Beachboy, so we made it our place for the sick. Every week someone walks around the Beachboy areas with the book. That’s what we call it: the book. He takes a small donation from the Beachboys he meets. It can be anything, as small as fifty cents, and he writes it down. When he has the money, this person buys things for the house: food, medicine, even electricity, so that the boys can watch TV. Everyone is happy to pay something because they know that their turn for sick will come.’
It had been Barak’s intention to return
to the city with me, but he changed his mind on finding the sick house so quiet.
‘Will you find your way?’ he asked, seeing me off at the end of the sandy lane.
I glanced over the sheet-metal rooftops towards the cloudy face of Devil’s Peak.
‘I think so.’
◆
Back to Blikkiesdorp to check on Sudi and Barak, only to discover that the pair had returned to the bridges the day before, Sudi’s chest having healed. It’s just as well, because the sick house has become crowded and filthy.
‘The boy with the gashes on his face got hit by a car near The Freezer,’ Mege explained. ‘He’s lucky. He’s the first one to survive something like that.’
Another youngster, face-down on a pillow, had untreated TB. Mege clearly resented his presence.
‘It’s dangerous; he’s putting everyone else at risk. He should be in hospital but he won’t go.’
On the far side of the structure, alone on the second double bed, a skin-and-bone Beachboy was lying with his hand over his eyes, tears running from under his fingers into a patchy beard. A freshly stitched cut ran across his lower abdomen.
‘This boy was operated on yesterday, and they discharged him this morning,’ said Mege. ‘Maybe you can read his letter, so that you can help him to understand what has been done to him. He doesn’t know, not really.’
I opened the envelope embossed with the Western Cape Department of Health’s coat of arms, and read the Relevant History notes.
24 YEAR OLD FRED GIDION MNGINI PREVIOUSLY WELL 1 YEAR HISTORY OF LEFT SCROTAL SWELLING BECOMING PROGRESSIVELY MORE OMENTUM HERNIATING LEFT WITH COMPLICATED LEFT HYDROCELE PLUS FIRM THICKENING/MASS CORD SWELLING TAKEN FOR HISTOLOGY
The medical language and absence of punctuation made this locked prose. I shrugged my shoulders.
Mege put it more simply. ‘He used to have balls like an elephant.’
‘Who, Fred?’
Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 10
