Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  ‘Don’t forget about the cruise ships that enter the V&A,’ added Bill. ‘Their noses loom over the concrete, almost near enough to touch. Anybody can gain access to the hulls of these ships.’

  Coincidentally, the early edition of the Cape Times had carried a story about two Tanzanian teens who had been discovered in Port Elizabeth on the small platform above the rudder of a bulk carrier. The paper said the youths had stowed away in the port of Cape Town.

  ‘The funny thing about that article was the response those boys gave the journalist. After being rescued from almost certain death, they claimed they were bitterly disappointed. They had been trying for Europe!’ exclaimed Bill.

  The short article was eclipsed on the front page by a far bigger and bolder story about a near-disastrous Boeing 777 landing. The landing gear had come off, requiring all passengers to evacuate via the emergency exit slides.

  ‘It’s a sign of the times,’ said George. ‘Shipping matters simply do not capture the public imagination the way they once did. Like when the Apollo Sea went down near Dassen Island in ’94. The first sign that anything was wrong was when the public started complaining about oil washing up on Camps Bay beach. When the oil was analysed it was found to be engine oil, and word went out to shipping companies that were expecting one of their fleet in port. Sure enough, the Apollo was missing. The entire crew of 34 drowned, but all the public could think about were the fucking penguins.’

  ‘George!’ gasped Sally.

  ‘It’s true. The Port of Cape Town is here, an enormous physical reality at the foot of the city, yet as far as most Capetonians are concerned it might as well not exist.’

  ‘It’s all back to front,’ Bill agreed.

  Our conversation was interrupted by a cabin bell signalling the start of the evening’s screening: a documentary about the Union-Castle Line, which had ferried passengers between Europe and Africa for much of the 20th century before being discontinued in 1977.

  ‘You should stay and watch,’ said George. ‘It’s narrated by Laurens van der Post.’

  ◆

  Surprisingly little has been written about stowaways. The term elicits no pings from the world’s major online research databases, and hardly any in the physical libraries I visit.

  Then again, I have never been much of a sleuth. I was employed as a researcher by an internationally renowned academic, once, and given her latest edited version of Olive Schreiner’s Dream Life and Real Life to proofread and set. ‘Do not introduce any new errors,’ she had warned at the outset. Evidently I had introduced a bunch, and thereafter had found myself transporting boxes of her academic papers between her office and her home, or on secondment to her colleagues as a box lifter.

  I was excited, therefore, to receive a call a month or so back from Amaha Senu, an Ethiopian PhD candidate at the Seafarers International Research Centre at the University of Cardiff. In a gentle voice, Senu explained that he had been looking into seafarers’ experiences of stowaways for some time and was now keen to meet some real-life stowaways to get a sense of their experiences of captains and crews.

  ‘It appears that we have been exploring the same territory, but from different angles,’ he said, and proposed an exchange of favours. If I could facilitate introductions to a few stowaways, he would happily share his textual resources with me. Amaha arrived and spent more than a month interacting with Adam, Barak, Sudi and others. Once a week during this time we would meet for lunch, usually at Addis restaurant on the corner of Long and Church streets and, over injera and doro wot, we’d compare notes. As promised, Amaha presented me with a succession of his resources.

  The first out of his briefcase was Robert Louis Stevenson’s travel memoir, The Amateur Emigrant, which includes a chapter describing Stevenson’s encounter at sea with an experienced stowaway called Alick, who impresses with his storytelling abilities. ‘I wish you could have heard him tell his own stories,’ he writes. ‘They were so swingingly set forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated here and there by such luminous bits of acting, that they could only lose in any reproduction.’

  For Stevenson, stowaways are ‘sea-tramps’, drawn to an adventurous path through life and likely as not to be ‘poisoned by coal-gas, or die by starvation in their places of concealment; or when found they may be clapped at once and ignominiously into irons, thus to be carried to their promised land, the port of their destination, and alas! brought back in the same way to that from which they started, and there delivered over to the magistrates and the seclusion of a county jail.’ The neo-romantic writer’s instinctive sympathy for this way of life is tempered by his actual experience of meeting and interacting with Alick, who, he decides, is lazy, ‘his character […] degenerated like his face, and become pulpy and pretentious’. The chapter ends on a compensatory note, though, with a description of a woman he deems ‘remarkable among her fellows for a pleasing and interesting air’. As the journey progresses, a rumour circulates among the passengers that she, too, is a stowaway.

  ‘The ship’s officers discouraged the story’, he writes, ‘but it was believed in the steerage, and the poor girl had to encounter many curious eyes from that day forth.’

  During a subsequent exchange Amaha wanted to know, ‘Are there female stowaways among the Beachboys?’ I started to reply that there were not, but realised that this was an assumption. I put the question to Adam, who surprised me by saying that yes, there had been several female Beachboys. The best known of these, he said, is a woman called Mwatum, the aunt of Ayoub Omary, a friend of his. Mwatum had travelled to Durban in the mid nineties and stowed away with several others on a ship bound for Brazil. She had ended up ‘being’ with the captain, who said he would drop the others off in Brazil, but would take Mwatum and her brother Mwamotto to Italy. Adam says that the two now live in Italy’s Caserta province, where she apparently makes a living as a drug dealer. He added, though, that female stowaways are ‘very rare’ and that they would have to be ‘pure ghetto’ to survive in the Beachboy areas. They would have to be brought in by a male Beachboy – and not just anyone, but a big, respected character.

  Next out of Amaha’s library was The Stowaways and Other Sea Sketches by John Donald. The setting is again the Scottish coastline, though Donald’s stowaways are Scots boys from the port and harbour towns on the River Clyde who grow up in thrall to the ‘beauty and mystery of ships and the magic of the sea’. The objective, more often than not, is less to get somewhere different than to win over the captain, be put to work aboard his ship and, in this way, enter manhood and earn a living. The book is a trove of mid-19th-century seafarer diction (‘if I can mak’ my wye to the fo’c’scle, an’ thaers naebody aboot I’ll lift the hatch an’ ye can come up’) and reveals much about the strategies of 19th-century stowaways:

  The stowaways’ modus operandi was to conceal themselves onboard (often with the connivance of one or more members of the crew) before the vessel hauled out of the harbour, and remain in hiding until the tugboat, after towing her charge sufficiently far down the channel, had left for home, when they would crawl up on deck and be hauled before the ‘old man’ (the captain), who, according to his disposition, would give them either a ‘lecture’, or a ‘rope’s ending’, or both, and send them forward to work.

  In a note, Amaha explained that the practice of putting stowaways to work faded out in the mid 20th century, and went hand in hand with the modernisation and corporatisation of shipping (the first shipping containers were loaded onto a ship in Newark in 1956) and the increasing attention paid to human rights. The distance between stowaways and seamen has been widening ever since, amplified by the often-stark cultural differences between crew members on the one hand, and crew members and stowaways on the other. In one sense, a rationale that had applied for centuries has fallen away: the chance of a life at sea. It has been replaced by another: the chance to get somewhere different, away from home, out of poverty. But
this, too, has more or less fallen away as port and ship security tightens.

  The business of stowing away, once considered reckless in a romantic sort of way, has been rendered desperate, irrational.

  The last book that Amaha lent me makes the difference very clear. Titled Benyam, the book recounts the experiences of a young Ethiopian stowaway called Benyam Bouyalew, as told to the Spanish writer Fernando Sorribes. Unlike that of Stevenson and Donald, there is no romantic tint to this tale, which begins with the death of Bouyalew’s father, a relatively well-to-do businessman from the Ethiopian town of Dese. When the family’s fortunes begin to slide, Bouyalew leaves home for the port of Djibouti, intending to stow away on a ship bound for Europe.

  He soon discovers, however, that the port is ‘a world apart, a world unto itself’. In a city filled with starving people, including tens of thousands of Somali and Ethiopian refugees, only the most desperate filter down to the water’s edge, where port authorities resort to vicious tactics to keep them from reaching the ships.

  ‘The French had recently been given operative control, which put an end to loose security’, recounts Bouyalew. ‘At night a battery of lights looking out to sea would sweep the coast in search of swimmers heading for their boat and freedom. The entire port was surrounded by walls and fences with extra-sharp razor wire of a particularly terrifying French design.’

  Bouyalew sneaks in all the same, and finds no fewer than two hundred men living among the bric-a-brac of the harbour. He recalls that ‘[a]lmost all were covered in scars or had limbs missing, from fights amongst themselves with machetes, from beatings by the guards or from injuries sustained in their failed attempts to get to sea’.

  Two rival gangs dominate the scene: the Aseb boys, hailing from the Eritrean port city of Aseb, and the Oromos, comprising Oromo Ethiopians. Many of the Aseb boys, says Bouyalew, ‘were toughened fighters with no compassion’ – veterans of the last war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which redrew the region’s borders. These men controlled the supply of khat into the port, which ensured a measure of influence with security guards and police.

  ‘Around one o’clock in the afternoon was when the khat was handed out’, writes Bouyalew. ‘It has an effect similar to that of amphetamines; chewing khat leaves produces a euphoric high and feelings of mental sharpness. Everyone used it in the port, particularly the security guards and patrolmen. At that point, everything would come to a standstill. People would sit down, begin chewing together and talk endlessly. After a few hours they would be out of control, or on a come-down.’

  The Aseb boys were cruel; the Oromos could be just as vicious, though they were not nearly as organised or well trained in violence. Bouyalew spends his first months in the port being bullied, first by the Oromos and later by the Aseb boys. He is seen as unwanted competition for the boats, his inexperience viewed as a threat to all, since failed stowaway attempts tended to focus the attentions of the port’s security forces. One afternoon, seemingly without reason, Bouyalew is stabbed by a well-known stowaway and left for dead. He is rescued by some passing Ethiopians, who encourage him to take his life in a new direction. Bouyalew’s mind is made up, however, and he returns to the port. Again and again he makes it onto ships, only to be caught and deported back to Ethiopia, usually after being viciously beaten by crew members; as if in a trance, Bouyalew returns to Djibouti three, four, five times, where he finds the Aseb boys and the Oromos waiting with new tortures. The life of a stowaway, Bouyalew realises, is ‘like a board game, where you always land on the square that sends you to jail’.

  As the months grow into years, the young Ethiopian comes to understand that ‘time as a measurement is a concept that gets lost in this place. Days pass, and more days pass, and yet more days pass. The khat has a lot to do with it, that damned drug that has people completely hooked.’

  After ‘two long years’, Bouyalew finally goes free. He swims out to a container ship, climbs aboard using the anchor chain as his ladder and, ultimately, hides in the cabin of a luxury yacht that is being transported atop a stack of containers. In this surreal eyrie he makes it to the port of Valencia in Spain, and here slips out into Europe, black with grime and so starved that he imagines he looks ‘like an eel with human features’.

  Today Bouyalew lives in Madrid, where he sells a device that captures the ‘signature-wave information’ of fresh human hair samples and automatically sends this information to Germany for an analysis that takes fifteen minutes to come back. ‘This information’, Bouyalew explained in the course of our short correspondence, ‘assists professionals of the nutritional, dietary and supplement industry to advise customers about making changes in their environment and lifestyle that would be suitable, from a health perspective.’

  E-mail has little in the way of tone, but I like to think that Bouyalew, the former stowaway from Dese in the north-east of Ethiopia, was grinning while he wrote this.

  ◆

  Benyam Bouyalew’s top stowaway tips

  1. Drinking water is everything for a stowaway. It will give you strength when you think you can no longer carry on. Make sure you have a good supply of it.

  2. It pays to work out when the port’s surveillance is at its weakest. In the port of Djibouti, this was after the khat was handed out at 1 p.m. For most of the afternoon, the guards would be sitting down, talking madly or coming down.

  3. Ships flying the Panamanian flag are likely to be from anywhere except Panama. Panamanians pay fewer taxes and a lot of ships use their flag to save port fees. A ship with a Panamanian flag is a good option for getting to Europe or America.

  4. Do not take a Chinese ship. Even a Russian ship is dangerous. The Koreans can be cruel but Filipinos are mostly kind.

  5. Hide your possessions well and never reveal what you have with you. In port and aboard ships, you can trust nobody.

  6. It is important to have faith. There are eternal laws in this life, and one of them is this: if you wish for something strongly enough, the effect will occur.

  7. Look for ships that sit high in the water. Ships that sit low in the water are full of cargo, and can sit in port for a long time. If you stow away on a ship like this, your food and water might run out before you leave shore. A ship that sits high has already offloaded and is likely to leave at any moment. [The opposite is true in Cape Town, and other ports from which goods are exported.]

  8. Try to learn from the stowaways who have already made it overseas. They can teach you what you want to know. Unfortunately, the experienced stowaways are often the cruellest, and the ones most likely to betray you if they feel you are holding them back.

  9. The anchor chain locker is the most dangerous place on the ship. You can hide there when it is empty but when the anchor comes up the room fills very quickly, and you could be crushed. If the anchor is already in, and it goes out, you could be pulled apart.

  10. A big ship is like a small city. It is very easy to get lost. At night, you may be able to move around, but to find your way back to your hiding place it is a good idea to find something with which you can mark the places you pass.

  11. If a crew of a ship are Muslims, they will not allow the ship to be searched by dogs. So, study the crew carefully, if you can, because dogs will locate your smell and you will be found.

  12. Do not cross your legs when talking to Asian seamen, especially Koreans. They see it a sign of disrespect.

  13. The anchor chain is a good way to access a ship. The links are huge, and provide excellent footholds for climbing.

  14. On board you must be methodical and calculating, swift and efficient. These are the true qualities of a stowaway.

  15. Try not to eat anything with salt in it, as this will just make you thirsty. Do not drink Coca-Cola: it will drive you crazy with thirst.

  16. Learn the flags of the nations. This way, you will be able to tell where the ship you are boarding is from. You will al
so be able to tell which port you are coming to.

  17. You must try not to think about your family at home. You may be trying to help them, but you must not think of them. This will disturb your mind, and a stowaway with a disturbed mind is not likely to succeed.

  18. Be prepared to suffer great disappointment. Being a stowaway can feel like a game in which you always land on the square that sends you back to the start.

  19. You need to view your life as an adventure. That will help you to remain detached from the terrible things through which stowaways all suffer. It will help to keep you hopeful.

  ◆

  Although winter is generally held to be the best season for boarding ships, Adam and Sudi have been plotting to do something that the Beachboys call ‘going the Stones’. It’s a strategy that entails hiking out to the northern end of the breakwater and then crawling back through the dolosse towards the container terminal. The breakwater’s giant concrete knuckles lock together in such a way that they leave spaces large enough for a body to scramble through, enabling Beachboys to get within thirty metres of certain ships without once having to surface.

  To progress through this maze, however, the human body must constantly bridge bulbous shapes that are permanently slick with seaspray. If a foot or hand slips, you clatter down to the next level of concrete limbs – and sometimes all the way down to the roiling sea. Feet and ankles can become wedged in unyielding joins and, in the icy waters of Table Bay, hypothermia can set in within minutes. The breakwater being entirely unguarded, it would be some time before help could be fetched.