Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  Daniel Peter knows nothing of the Cape’s social history, precolonial or otherwise, and scarcely acknowledges the presence of the mountain, except when a ship chugs left out of the harbour and disappears in a southerly direction. If a Beachboy happens to have stowed away on a south-bound ship he is said to have gone nyuma mlima, behind the mountain. It is considered something of a disaster, since the ship will soon round Cape Point and set course either for one of the East African ports (of no interest to Tanzanian stowaways), or for the positively dreaded ports of the Far East.

  Aisha and Daniel Peter are also twins in some ways, the Romulus and Remus of the Cape underworld. They both live at odds with the law (wild harvesting on the slopes of Table Mountain is illegal), and enjoy smoking marijuana and drawing pictures. Both come from broken homes in impoverished communities, which they have been able to escape by taking on new identities.

  After weeks of deflection, Aisha told me today that he grew up in gang-ruled Lavender Hill, on the southern side of the Cape Flats. His mother still lives there; when he visits, which is not so often any more, he dresses in normal clothes, stays indoors and goes by his birth name, which is Brandon.

  ◆

  Memories of my first encounter with another notable ‘sea tramp’, whose time in the Cape changed the course of this country’s history. It took place in the early 2000s, when I had little better to do with my time than haunt the old city library, which was housed on the second floor of the City Hall, overlooking the Grand Parade. It was among the shrieking children who used the place as an after-school playroom that I first read A Mouthful of Glass, Henk van Woerden’s story about the life of Dimitri Tsafendas, the Mozambique-born drifter who fatally stabbed Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966.

  Rereading certain passages now, I am struck by the parallels with Adam’s story. Tsafendas, like Adam, was born of a Greek father and an African mother. Being of mixed blood, writes Van Woerden, Tsafendas was unable to follow his Cretan father legally when he moved to supremacist South Africa in the thirties, but decided to follow him anyway: ‘He knew the borders were porous and poorly controlled. In the autumn […] he concealed himself among some machinery packed in a railway goods-wagon, and crossed the border at Komatipoort with no difficulty. Then on to Pretoria.’

  It was the first of many border crossings, literal and otherwise. The documentary trail left by Tsafendas at the time of his arrest stretched across 25 countries, 13 ships and 12 hospitals. On his travel permits and deportation orders, he was referred to variously as Tsafendas, Tsafendis, Tsafandis, Tsafendos, Tsafandakis, Tsafantakis, Tsafendikas, Stifanos and Chipendis. Adam, who goes by Bashili, Brazili, Chazili and Swalehe, could similarly be tracked via a series of charge sheets stretching from Cape Town to Birmingham and from Walvis Bay to St Petersburg.

  Tsafendas spent so much time away from the country of his birth, and made so much trouble wherever he went, that his home government ultimately adjudged him persona non grata.

  ‘He was a rogue que tem una vida sempre instavel e de aventuras – “constantly drawn to an unstable and adventurous way of life”’, writes Van Woerden, words that would not be out of place on any Beachboy headstone.

  Above all else, Tsafendas loved the sea.

  ‘During the two decades Tsafendas spent outside South Africa, the sea was the only constant presence in his life’, Van Woerden writes. ‘He remained almost exclusively on the coastline of the countries he lived in, in cities where the docks beckoned him and where the sounds of winches, seagulls and engines rose above the hiss and roar of the ocean. Piraeus, Oporto, Lisbon, Marseilles, London, Hamburg – he was most himself amid the restless, provisional lives of people who did not know where they might be the next day or the day after it.’

  In the weeks before he stabbed Verwoerd four times – with a knife bought on Cape Town’s Long Street and at the urging, he later told state psychiatrists, of a talking tapeworm inside his own gut – Tsafendas had spent most of his free time aboard ships berthed in the port, sharing the crews’ meals and generally hanging out. It is tempting to imagine that, had his life continued to follow this course, he may have lived out his winter years under Nelson Mandela Boulevard, or Eastern Boulevard as it would have been called then.

  ◆

  For all of Adam’s talents and achievements, if the local Beachboy community has a superstar, he would have to be David Mndolwa.

  Mndolwa was born in Dar es Salaam in 1988, in Magomeni, Sudi’s home district. In 2009 he had travelled to South Africa, making it to Cape Town in 2010. Not long afterwards, Mndolwa and a Beachboy called Jocktan Kobelo had boarded a reefer named the Dona Liberta. They had hidden in the ship’s engine room and remained there for nine days before being discovered and set adrift on a raft off the coast of Liberia. Kobelo, who could not swim, had drowned after slipping into the stormy ocean, but Mndolwa had managed to hang on and was washed ashore. He had reported the incident: the Dona Liberta’s predominantly Filipino crew had been arrested and ultimately convicted of murder, entirely on the strength of Mndolwa’s testimony.

  After his ordeal, Mndolwa had been returned to Dar es Salaam, only to find that he was not welcome back in his mother’s house. His survival tale had travelled the Beachboy networks, though, and doors were opened for him all over the city. Sudi, recently deported from South Africa, had hosted him for weeks, and the two had become friends. They had travelled back to Cape Town before the end of that year, and today Mndolwa lives in a makeshift den built among the drooping fronds of a portside palm tree.

  It is to this bivouac that some well-known international journalists have recently beaten a path. Some months ago, Adam called to inform me that a man with a noticeable limp had been wandering the Foreshore, asking about Mndolwa’s whereabouts. This person claimed to have been on the spoor of the Dona Liberta incident for months, even travelling to Dar es Salaam to visit the grave of Jocktan Kobelo.

  ‘He gave me this,’ Adam said, producing a simple business card embossed with contact details for João Silva, the legendary South African war photographer who lost both his legs in 2010 when he stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan.

  More recently, Mndolwa had been visited by an investigative team from the New York Times. In the first of several features about lawlessness at sea, the journalists exposed a litany of crimes committed by various crews of the Dona Liberta over a period of several years. Finding Mndolwa, one of the authors said in an online podcast, ‘was a huge coup. We didn’t know his name and we certainly didn’t know where he was [but] through lots of scramble and gum-shoe and luck we found that guy, and amazingly he was in a stowaway shanty town twenty feet from where he had originally boarded the ship’.

  The Times team got bogged down, however, when two videographers named Ed Ou and Ben Solomon travelled to Cape Town to chronicle Mndolwa’s life.

  ‘One afternoon’, the story ran, ‘Ed went alone to meet some of these stowaways, and several of them jumped him. After punching and kicking him, they made off with thousands of dollars worth of film equipment. Ed was left with a black eye and bruised ribs.’

  When I mentioned this to Sudi and Adam, they became very angry. The alleged attack, they said, could never have happened.

  ‘How can we beat and rob an international journalist, and still be here today?’ Sudi asked.

  It is a reasonable question. The Beachboys remain in their living areas under tenuous licence, constantly monitored by the railway police unit and dozens of CCID guards. For quite a time, SAPS Woodstock has been under pressure from the business community to ‘do something’ about the Beachboy encampments in the railway reserve. The Beachboys are well aware of these dynamics, and practise a degree of self-regulation. It is forbidden, for example, for any Beachboy to commit serious crime in the Beachboy living areas. Contravention of this code is punishable with violence, said Adam, and offered an example. Three weeks ago, two young Beachboys thought it would
be a good idea, after a night of drinking in the Seaman Bar off Draklow Street, to rob the Burundian night guard who works for the AfriSam cement plant on Beach Road. The AfriSam factory overlooks The Kitchen, and when Adam, Sudi and Barak heard of the robbery they found and severely beat the young perpetrators. The guard’s phone was returned to him with a community apology, in the hope that he would take the matter no further.

  The Kitchen would not exist, in fact, were it not for the verbal deal between the Beachboys and the owner of WOMAG, the adjoining marble and granite business. Before the Beachboys settled outside the walls of this property, the business had experienced a terrific problem with theft. When the Beachboy tents started appearing, CEO Oren Sachs told the Beachboys that he would leave them be as long as they saw to it that his property was not touched. His business has not experienced a single case of theft since.

  There is also the story of a young Cape Town journalist called Kimon de Greef, who sat down on the steps of Edward VII one afternoon. While he listened to a series of stowaway tales, Adam rifled his bag, stealing what felt like a cellphone. Back under Nelson Mandela Boulevard, Adam was surprised to find that he had, in fact, stolen the journalist’s digital recorder. Stored on this, to Adam’s delight, was an interview that De Greef had just completed with the US rapper formerly known as Mos Def. A group of Beachboys had gathered around to listen, and used the device afterwards to record a series of spirited Swahili raps. Meanwhile De Greef, who had not yet written up his interview, returned to the Parade to try to recoup his device, offering rewards willy-nilly. Adam came to hear of this and invited the journalist down to the flyovers, where he returned the recorder. This story was corroborated in all its details by De Greef, who has since become a friend.

  What, then, to make of the Times’s accusations?

  The issue has bugged me for days, to the extent that I called Ed Ou, the Canadian videographer from the story, and begged him for a more detailed account of the mugging. He surprised me by saying that the attack had not, in fact, occurred in the Beachboy living areas, but on a street in lower Woodstock. This is territory controlled by the Hard Livings gang, and Ou’s description of the attack (his attackers made off in a car seconds after robbing him) makes it almost certain that his attackers were not Beachboys.

  ‘I guess we don’t know who attacked me and we’ll never know,’ said Ou.

  The editorial error was acknowledged and the online version of the story was duly altered.

  ‘Tha’s good,’ said Adam when I told him, practically radiating smug satisfaction. ‘But you know, Sean, I since heard that David is working with a housebreaking gang in Woodstock. Local guys. HL [Hard Livings], I think.’

  ◆

  At a point last night, sitting around the cooking fire at The Kitchen, Adam ran out of weed. We duly collected my car, which was parked under the nearby Integrated Rapid Transit flyover, and drove around to the pedestrian bridge that leads to Maskani.

  Adam went up the staircase to the pedestrian bridge alone, leaving me in the panhandle, watching junkies spill out of a bank of nearby rushes. I heard the engine of a sports car fire up outside eKapa Tavern. Seconds later, a black Chrysler Crossfire had boxed my Conquest in. The driver looked the archetypal tycoon with his silver hair, crisp white shirt, and jacket. He was talking on his phone and gesturing furiously. He showed no intention of wanting to leave his vehicle, so I walked over.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘He’s here now, Commissioner. Come quickly, please,’ the man said into his phone, and then pressed it to his chest and looked up angrily.

  ‘What’s your name? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m dropping off some friends.’

  ‘Oh, so you condone this,’ he said and, putting the phone back to his ear, yelled, ‘Commissioner, he says he’s dropping off some friends. Come quickly, please.’

  ‘Condone what?’

  ‘I saw someone leave your car and go over the bridge.’ He put the phone back against his chest.

  ‘It isn’t any of your business,’ I said.

  ‘He says it’s none of my business, Commissioner, come quick, come quick.’

  I presented one of my impressive foreign policy correspondent cards. ‘Here, take my details if you like.’

  The Crossfire’s window scrolled down an inch and I smelled the booze.

  ‘What’s your name, mister?’

  ‘He’s asking me for my name, Commissioner. Come quick please.’

  Adam, who had returned and was watching the exchange with some amusement, shouted encouragement in a mocking falsetto: ‘Come quick, Commissioner, come quick.’

  ‘Now hang on,’ the man said, changing tack, ‘let’s try to work together. It’s terrible to be on the streets, I know that. I am someone who cares for the homeless, even to the extent of providing some of them with temporary shelter in my residence. We all need to try to be more understanding. But do you know that there are two kinds of homeless people? There are those who are homeless because they have nothing in the world, and nobody to support them, and there are those who are homeless by choice. Do you know that? Because most people don’t.’

  We left the businessman like that, his phony phone call quite forgotten, though he kept his phone pressed to his chest like a sapphire amulet.

  To my surprise I received an e-mail this morning from one André Pienaar, the director of a company that operates several new hospitality businesses in Woodstock – eKapa Tavern being one. He apologised for confronting me and explained that his reaction had been fuelled by months of complaints from his customers, who often returned to their vehicles to find that their hubcaps had been stolen or their windows smashed. He went on to propose ‘an exchange of Letters on the Homeless between Sean and André’, which he said he would publish in the monthly magazine of the Woodstock Improvement District.

  ‘I envision something similar to the letters between George Orwell and CS Lewis’, he wrote, ‘not a pro- or anti-homeless debate, but a frank exchange of views. Please consider it favourably.’

  I have considered it all morning, and can’t keep from grinning. Just imagine, in this decolonising milieu: Letters on Homelessness, by Sean and André.

  ◆

  In the late nineties, an elderly relative had spent a great deal of time inside the Port of Cape Town sketching oil rigs. She used to arrive with her charcoal sticks and set up her easel on the lip of A Berth without encountering any resistance. The rather impressive results hang in frames on the walls of her retirement village cottage, huge black-and-red semi-submersibles from up the west coast crested with cranes and drill towers.

  ‘Then those terrorists flew those planes into the Twin Towers and it was suddenly impossible to get anywhere near the rigs,’ she explained, when asked to recap her experiences.

  After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US government fast-tracked the finalisation of the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code, which had been in development for years. The international ratification of the code was expedited by a US stipulation that ships docking in countries that were not signatories would be denied access to US ports. All ships dock in America sooner or later; so, everyone signed, and set about meeting, the new security provisions, which included the establishment of perimeter fencing, CCTV surveillance, 24-hour security patrols, and so forth.

  For a deeper sense of the impact that the ISPS Code has had on life in and around Cape Town harbour, I went in search of the Ship Society building in Duncan Road, where the road markings are rendered irrational by security cones, randomly scattered dolosse and railway tracks. Previously housed in the much roomier Clock Tower in the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, the society’s maritime artefacts practically swarm on the walls of the new premises: framed photographs and posters depicting bygone vessels, medallions and model ships, a life ring from the Reina del Mar. In the sagging library, which
was furnace hot, a man called George was meddling with a curtain rod, grasping it between his knees with the wooden finial jutting outwards in a suggestive manner.

  ‘When I was a boy, I could cycle around the docks without a problem. I went on countless ships,’ he said. ‘Bill, there you are, just the man,’ he said when a gent of similar age hobbled in. ‘You’ll back me up. We’d walk right up the gangplanks and introduce ourselves to the crew, wouldn’t we?’

  Bill, hair as white as guano, put down the pile of donated books he’d been carrying. He held a copy of Andrew Feinstein’s After the Party aloft and said, ‘Make no mistake, George, the ANC is rotten to the core,’ then launched into a series of jokes about the electrical power outages that had been occurring countrywide.

  ‘President Jacob Zuma wants to bring back the death penalty,’ said Bill, ‘but advises that use of the electric chair would result in unmanageable backlogs.’

  George had meanwhile become absorbed in his cellphone.

  ‘Ah, it’s deigned to work,’ he said, and then, ‘No! No, what’s happening now?’

  ‘The red button cancels your call,’ said Bill, looking over George’s shoulder.

  A woman wearing bright-red lipstick came in with a plate of sausage rolls. ‘Thanks, Sally,’ said the men. Pastry flakes on their lips, they started again on issues of access.

  ‘My gripe with the present security set-up has to do with the anomalies,’ said George, drawing the last word out in a gravid way. ‘The breakwater, for example – why restrict access to the breakwater? It’s still possible to access the breakwater in Durban and, if you allow it there, why not here? And then there’s the Royal Cape Yacht Club and the fisherman’s dock, smack bang among all the shipping. These little boats can come and go as they please. A fisherman can pick his pal up in Saldanha Bay and drop him at the Cape Town docks, no problem.’