Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  Edna explained that the shelter was full for the weekend, and that the Tanzanians would have to wait until Monday before registering as clients. Feisal outlined the seriousness of their situation and Edna made some more calls, eventually returning to say that Moira Henderson House on Chapel Street in Woodstock still had free beds.

  ‘It’s a halfway house for people who have some form of employment already, but speak to Laetitia. If you tell her that this mzungu is your employer for the next two weeks, she might be able to help.’

  ‘This mzungu could kiss you,’ I said.

  Edna laughed and looked a little embarrassed. ‘No, you’re most welcome. Speak to Laetitia. She will work something out.’

  Within minutes of arriving at Moira Henderson, Feisal and Diddy were handed clean towels rolled around pairs of hessian slippers. When I returned later in the afternoon to pay their board and lodging, they had both showered and were standing outside on the pavement in fresh clothes, smelling of soap. They excitedly showed me around their separate dormitories (the house policy being to separate friends), and also the shower block, which smelled of drain cleaner.

  When I made to leave, Feisal drew me away from Diddy.

  ‘Diddy had a dream about his home,’ he said. ‘Actually, it was more like a bad dream. He felt that something was wrong. What I want to tell you now is that Diddy’s parents are both dead already. They died at least six months ago, but he doesn’t know this. I did not know how to tell him, because life is already so difficult, you know. What do you think I should do?’

  ‘What do you think is best?’

  ‘I think he needs to return home.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I will stay. I came here to work, not to be a Beachboy.’

  Eager to be done with this difficult situation, I withdrew and handed over R4 000, half of my earnings for the month.

  ‘It’s all I can afford,’ I said, ‘so you and Diddy must decide how to split it.’

  ◆

  Feisal called from the Moira Henderson call box this morning with a sorry tale. Diddy, he said, had borrowed his cellphone at 6 a.m., saying he wanted to call his family in Dar es Salaam.

  ‘I’m sorry, I lied to you,’ Feisal confessed. ‘Diddy’s parents are alive, actually, but he was very homesick, so he told me to tell you that his parents are dead.’

  Feisal had handed Diddy the phone and gone back to bed. He had woken to find Diddy gone with the money and the phone.

  Surprisingly, Diddy picked up when I called Feisal’s number. He complained that he had skipped out because Feisal had betrayed their friendship. It had to do with the only other Tanzanian client in Moira Henderson – a young man called Anwar, who shared Feisal’s dormitory. When Anwar had learnt that Diddy intended returning to Dar es Salaam, he had proposed giving Diddy R1 000 so that Diddy could buy a stack of brightly coloured khangas, which he said they would be able to sell on Greenmarket Square for three times the original purchase price. Feisal knew that Diddy had no intention of returning to Cape Town. When he had secretly tipped Anwar off, the deal had collapsed. Diddy had guessed at the reasons.

  ‘It was a mistake to warn Anwar,’ said Feisal, ‘so actually I am happy he took the money. But he was wrong to take my phone. Diddy knows that my brother’s number is on that phone. Without it I can never talk to him.’

  As bad is the fact that Diddy took the phone knowing that it contained the number of a man who had offered Feisal a job in his barbershop in the township of Nyanga. The offer had stemmed from a chance encounter, and Feisal will almost certainly never see this person again.

  ◆

  Only a couple of days, now, before Barack Obama and his family are due in Cape Town, and what with the shuddering of Chinook rotors on test runs to the city from the US destroyer at anchor in False Bay, and the constant wailing of VIP cavalcades on the city’s highways, even documented, paid-up citizens are starting to feel a little hunted, ring-fenced.

  I ventured down to the Grand Parade and found it unusually devoid of Beachboys, no doubt because the place was crawling with cops and security guards. At the Golden Arrow bus shelters at the northern end I spied a young friend of Daniel Peter’s, a Dar es Salaam Beachboy called Ditto. He was hurrying away from the fixed food stalls, looking concerned.

  ‘The police are arresting everybody. There are fifty or sixty boys in Cape Town Central already,’ he said, not stopping to talk.

  I walked with him to the Foreshore underpasses, but they were deserted, too. The charcoal from the cooking fires had been swept away and all clothes had been removed from the trees, leaving behind a hundred eerie, home-made, string-and-stick hangers.

  ‘The bridges are no good, the police have been here already. I’m going to The Kitchen, nobody comes there.’

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ I offered. We took Table Bay Boulevard outbound and doubled back over the R27 bridge to the Beachboy Office, where we left the vehicle and continued on foot alongside the railway lines. Rounding the wall of the marble and granite business we confronted the railway tunnels under the N1, running to the Duncan Dock. The graffiti on the tunnel walls was so dense it looked several inches thick. Smoke was billowing out of the nearest mouth.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Ditto when we were twenty metres out. He went on alone as a Chinook thundered overhead, followed by another. When my eyes refocused, Ditto was walking towards me with a slender, lighter-skinned man, who raised a hand in greeting.

  ‘Haiyo Sean,’ he said, grinning his golden grin.

  ‘Haiyo Adam,’ I yelled back.

  ◆

  When Adam had worked out from overheard conversations that the Blue Sky was bound for Cameroon, he had turned himself in to the first crew member he’d encountered and, later, begged the captain to put him off at the next port, Walvis Bay in Namibia. The captain, said Adam, had taken a shine to him. He’d been given his own cabin and had breakfasts delivered every morning, although he had eaten very little since his body had been wracked by the ‘shitting, sweating and feeling cold’ that comes of sudden heroin withdrawal.

  In the evenings, he had been permitted to watch movies with the Filipino crew.

  ‘If there was a scene where a woman takes her clothes off the crew would say to me, “Spanana,” and make like they were wanking, and I’d say, “Oh yeah, spanana,” and do the same thing and everyone would laugh and then go back to watching the movie,’ he said.

  The microtactics of cross-cultural endearment.

  Before he’d been disembarked on Namibian soil, Adam claimed the captain had handed him a gift of US$1 600, which he had duly wrapped in plastic and stowed in his ‘Beachboy wallet’, being his arse. He had spent some days in a police station with some other Tanzanians who had been disembarked from another ship some time earlier. The week before, this group had embarked upon a hunger strike, and a story about it had appeared in the pages of The Namibian.

  ‘They were dirty and hungry and it looked like they were dragged through a greasy machine’, the journalist had reported. ‘The seven are sharing a cell at the Narraville Police Station. According to Chief Inspector Johannes Hamman […] “They refused to eat the food that we gave them, swearing at us and saying that it was not even fit for a dog to eat”’.

  Pushed on the subject of the captain’s ‘gift’, Adam admitted that it had, in fact, been a bribe.

  It used to be, he explained, that the primary Beachboy objective was to leave the African continent for good. Success had depended on the willingness of the captain and the crew to allow stowaways to slip off unseen at the next port of call, and for decades this had happened more often than not. Now, said Adam, the consequences for seafarers who were caught aiding and abetting stowaways were serious – instant dismissal, in most cases. This had changed the game, and shipmasters had begun adhering to the International Maritime Organization guidelines on dealing with stowaways. Th
ese stipulate that a stowaway be returned either to his home country or to his port of embarkation in cases where nationality cannot be established. In reality, though, few countries will take a stowaway back, putting all responsibility for the handling of stowaways on the ship’s crew and its agents.

  ‘It is not as simple as them just buying us a ticket,’ said Adam. ‘The agent must first get the stowaway’s name and then check that this is correct with the Tanzanian embassy in Pretoria. This is where we start to play our game.’

  The hustle is fairly straightforward. The stowaways understand that time costs a great deal of money in the world of shipping, and that their chances of being offered a bribe rise if they drag out the processes of deportation.

  ‘We lie and say we are from Somalia or Burundi, anywhere where there is bad suffering, and then we pretend we understand nothing else and keep quiet. If we do that, the ship company has to make an asylum application for us, and this takes a long time.’

  The shipping agent will take pictures of the stowaway for sending on to the Tanzanian embassy in Pretoria, because, although the South African government tries to insist otherwise, it is generally presumed that any stowaway originating from a South African port is likely to be Tanzanian by birth.

  ‘The agent hopes the embassy will recognise us from their computers, because if that happens they can send us home. If the embassy does not know us, or if the ship is in a big hurry, the captain will start offering money for us to say, “Yes, my name is Adam Bashili, and I am from Tanzania.”’

  Adam said he has worked the bribe up as high as US$3 000 in the past, though he usually settles for a lower amount, mindful of the fact that his details have been archived in a number of official databases and that it is only ever a matter of time before his true identity is uncovered.

  ‘If that happens you get nothing,’ he said, and explained that he had settled for a particularly low amount from the Blue Sky out of respect for the friendly Greek captain.

  Back in Dar es Salaam, Adam had been charged with leaving the country illegally and taken to a holding cell at Julius Nyerere Airport, only to be released an hour later after payment of a TSh200 000 (approximately US$100) fine. He had stayed for five days with his delighted mother (who’d cried when he had handed her five somewhat worn US$100 notes), in her house on the south shore of the harbour. On day six, he’d struck out for South Africa for the fifth time in his life.

  Adam related this account of modern stowaway dynamics casually, like it was nothing – just the way things are for Beachboys now. But I sensed some negativity in the background.

  ‘It’s not really the Sea Power way,’ he admitted. ‘If I’m honest, these days some of the younger boys only stow away so that they can take money and go home. Others have no hope of getting anywhere different, so they have dedicated their lives to unga and tik. It’s sad, man. I try to remind them that every day a new baby is born – you never know what is going to happen tomorrow, and you will never know if you don’t try.’

  I recently purchased Karel Schoeman’s Early Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1717 and, last night, read his contention that the first slave in the Cape was a stowaway, a man known only as Abraham, who had boarded a ship named the Malacca in Batavia. The ship was Europe-bound but Abraham had been discovered, and on 2 March 1653 he was disembarked at the Cape of Good Hope with orders that he be sent back to his master. Three years passed before this happened, during which time Abraham was put to work by Jan van Riebeeck, who recorded that ‘in consequence of ill health the man was unable to earn half his food’. In 1655, two more runaway slaves were disembarked at the Cape. Thereafter, the trend in stowaway traffic was of slaves attempting to leave Africa’s southernmost port, usually in the VOC fleet bound for Europe. In 1685, records Schoeman, nine slaves who went missing were immediately suspected of having taken refuge on a French ship then at anchor in the bay.

  ‘This may have occurred quite frequently without being detected’, he writes, and reproduces the following note from Cape of Good Hope archivist HCV Leibbrandt:

  Slaves often missed. Supposed that they escape in the return fleet. Two again gone. Fugitives write to the slaves here about the vast difference between liberty and slavery, and about the Fatherland, making them also anxious to escape. This should be stopped; and we therefore beg you to have all the ships examined before the men leave them, and also to see whether the two runaways are on board and send them back in irons to be punished, to deter others. This is a matter seriously affecting the Company and the people.

  Since my first encounters with the Beachboys, I have resisted making connections with Cape history, although they occur to me all the time. When I lifted up that ship-shaped rock on the highway ledge, for example – the one under which Kham’si Swaleh Kigomba had hidden his emergency travel papers – I was instantly reminded of the padrão (stone cross) that the Portuguese mariner Bartolomeu Dias had erected on these shores on 12 March 1488 to mark his ‘discovery’ of the Cape of Good Hope. It seemed a nice echo, but what was the connection, really? The one functioned as an imperial land claim, the other as nothing more than a homeless immigrant’s valuables locker.

  I have also felt tempted to connect the desires of the early Cape slaves with those of the Tanzanian Beachboys.

  Escape the cape. Today Africa tomorrow yurope

  Abraham, Adam – Abram. It seemed too neat, too clever.

  But Adam, of course, found these details fascinating.

  ‘Yow, what you telling me?’ he said when I read out Schoeman’s assertion that the earliest stowaways tended to be lighter-coloured slaves, because they were able to engage the sympathies of the coloured seamen working aboard the VOC ships. Slaves looking to escape the continent also tended to favour the first three months of the year, because this was the busiest time in the harbour, with ships coming and going in great numbers ahead of the Indian Ocean monsoons.

  ‘It is the same for us,’ said Adam. ‘We mostly stow ships in winter, because the bad weather makes the guards go inside. When the weather is worst here in Cape Town we don’t mind, we like it.’

  I suppose the continuum is real enough. Desperation, discovery, oppression, emancipation, entrapment.

  The weather, and its infinite effects.

  ◆

  Usually, when he wants to meet or talk, Adam sends a Please Call Me and I call back as soon as I can, knowing that his phone battery may not last long and that it could be days before he recharges it. A month or so ago, he broke with tradition and called three times while I was occupied. I knew it meant that something unusual had happened.

  When I called back, he said, ‘I have something to show you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Something beautiful.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll meet you after work, 5 p.m. outside the KFC on Darling.’

  (After a lengthy period of unemployment, I have taken a job as a copywriter with an advertising agency, based in Paarden Eiland. I work on the supermarket accounts, mainly, but was recently entrusted with a pilot campaign for Snus, a Swedish smokeless tobacco product. The only upside is the view from my desk of the breakwater, and the fact that my route to work goes through the Beachboy areas, allowing me to take my lunches with Adam at The Kitchen, or to meet him on the Grand Parade on my way home.)

  At 5 p.m., with me double-parked in the usual place, Adam managed to make it to the passenger door before I spotted him. He jumped in. I wound down the windows.

  ‘Do I smell bad?’

  ‘Like a dead dog.’

  He giggled. ‘Go around the corner,’ he said, glancing left and right. I slipped up Plein Street, came to a stop outside the display windows of Fashion Express. Adam fished a tall, narrow paper bag out of his pants, the kind dispensed in pharmacies. It was all scrunched up, but the necklace he extracted from it hung neat as a snake from his fingers.

  ‘White gol
d,’ said Adam.

  I glanced left and right. ‘It’s a nice-looking chain.’

  ‘You want it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you keep it for me?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to send it to Aniya. It’s her birthday soon.’

  Since being deported from England, Adam has remained in contact with Rochelle and Aniya, albeit erratically. Whenever he takes a ship, months of no contact pass. The same lapses occur when he’s in Cape Town and smoking particularly hard, from morning till night. In the grip of these binges, he divests himself of all responsibility, sells his phone, stops washing. Since returning to Cape Town this last time, however, he has been both dissolute and determinedly in touch with his daughter.

  ‘She has her own phone now,’ he tells me. ‘I can call her anytime I want.’

  In this way, he is, for the first time, establishing a relationship with Aniya.

  ‘She talks to me like I’m there with her,’ he says. ‘She talks until my airtime runs out.’

  A day after he showed me the necklace, and in spite my misgivings about its provenance (a tourist’s handbag on a Long Street pavement), I helped Adam to post the gift to Birmingham. We tucked it inside a small leather bag he had bought on Greenmarket Square, and added a postcard of Robben Island, which he did not write on. He called Rochelle ten days later, on Aniya’s birthday, expecting to hear how delighted they both were with the chain. We were seated in the Conquest, and I couldn’t help noticing his wince of disappointment on learning that his plan had misfired. I pointed out the window at a Cape Times news poster tied to a streetlight. Post Office Strike Deepens.

  ‘Yow, Rochelle, you know what, fucking post office is on strike here. I think that is why Aniya’s present is late.’

  The conversation moved on to other things – Rochelle had just watched Iron Man 3, and thought Adam might enjoy it – but he was distracted now, crestfallen. He told Rochelle I needed my phone back, shouted mwah mwah mwah into the device, and ended the call.