‘You need to be strong for this one,’ Sudi said this evening. We were sitting on camping chairs outside Barak’s mchondolo, and he wanted to be sure I understood that many Beachboys younger than me had hurt themselves badly doing what we were about to do. I nodded.
‘Hand me the Green Eagle,’ I demanded, using the Beachboy term for Gleneagles whisky (R95 a bottle). We set off across Table Bay Boulevard after dark and joined the R27, which follows the curve of Table Bay into the Paarden Eiland industrial zone. Within a kilometre we reached the Salt River canal, which slips under the port fence on its way out to sea.
Adam went through a hole in the roadside fence.
‘Your shoes are going to get wet,’ he said, lowering himself over the edge of the canal wall. He let go and landed with a splash. ‘Shit, the water is high.’
I lowered my body over the edge and felt the sucking of water on my ankles. By the time I felt the concrete beneath my feet I was up to my thighs in icy water, which was flowing up the canal instead of down, and with a force that pulled our pants tight around our shins.
‘Bad conditions,’ said Sudi as the water deepened. At low tide, he explained, the ocean often withdrew from the dolosse, making it possible to walk towards the container terminal on the far side, on beach sand. Now, simply to reach the mouth of the canal, we were having to swim.
‘Watch out for the stones under the water,’ Adam hissed, as we reached the mouth. ‘You can’t see them but they’re there, and you can bump yourself badly when the waves come in.’
Our bodies were numb by the time we struck the line of submerged dolosse and slowly pulled ourselves out of the foamy water. Being this cold so early on in the mission had not been part of the plan. It was a hot, windless night, though, and our blood quickly warmed when we started through the hard, rimy maze. We kept as high above the churning sea as we could, trying our best to dodge the chutes of spray that exploded all down the line when the bigger swells came rolling in. Light from the railway fixtures penetrated here and there, illuminating inscriptions on the vast concrete knuckles.
‘Do you understand what we mean when we say tunnel life?’ Adam whispered, pointing to where TANAL LIFE had been written in permanent marker on a flat bit of dolos. ‘It means this life of small, dark places. On the ships we move in the tunnels, crawling in the dark like worms. This is also the tunnel life right here, what we are doing now. I dream about tunnels, I swear, it doesn’t matter where I am.’
I had the oddest recollection, then, of standing with an intellectual aunt in some woods outside London many years ago, in early adolescence. The property, a small farm, belonged to her aunt, who had lived in the farmhouse alone since her husband’s death in the nineties. She was the loveliest woman, apple-cheeked and gentle, like a Disney godmother, though sadly her own children had stopped speaking to her not long after her husband’s death. This was their way of punishing their mother, my aunt speculated, for her failure to stand up to her husband’s brutality in life. Her son still lived on the property, in a cabin to which no road led. We had come upon it on a rambling walk. We stood staring at it.
‘Curious,’ she said. ‘When you look at his chalet, what do you see?’
‘An A shape,’ I said confidently.
‘It’s a womb,’ said my aunt, turning to leave.
I laughed out loud at the memory, and wondered what my aunt would make of this scene: three men in their thirties, crawling about in a forbidden, uterine maze.
Sudi put a finger to my lips.
‘Sorry. I’m thinking crazy thoughts.’
‘Drink some of this,’ said Adam, passing me a two-litre bottle of Jive Orange.
Over the waters of Table Bay, we could see the signal lights of several ships – reds, greens and whites in different combinations. The water seemed oddly luminescent, so much so that Adam risked a look over the top of the breakwater.
‘No way!’
Sudi and I scrambled up to join him. To the north, rising above the Tygerberg Hills, was the upper dome of a full moon. It was a third revealed, but already projecting vivid shadows in the rail yard.
‘Not good,’ said Sudi.
Shivering, and with the cover of darkness now lost, the Beachboys decided to backtrack. We walked openly in the port, confident that we could make it back to the canal if it came to a chase. The black hull of a container ship reared up behind us, mocking.
‘We’re going to try again for that ship tomorrow,’ said Adam, when we parted ways in the parking area of the Beachboy Office.
‘You want to come again?’
‘No.’
SUMMER
And should you follow these footpaths really not
that much further, they soon become streets,
granite kerbs, electric lights. These streets soon
grow to highways, to dockyards, shipping-lanes.
You’ll see how it is—how these paths were only
an older version of streets; that the latter, in turn,
continue the highways, and the quays of the harbour,
and even, eventually, the whale-roads of the sea.
You’ll see how it is—it’s still that kind of city—
here where one thing leads, shades into another;
where footpath becomes road, road a roadstead,
where the stone of the mountain runs to street-stone,
and you’d almost believe the one were the other,
and that where it all leads, the sole place it could end,
over refinery, cooling towers, a freeway in the sunset,
is where it ends now—in that other freeway overhead:
The skies of these evenings, and their clear foreheads.
– Stephen Watson, ‘Definitions of a City’
‘See you in Africa.’
These words have been turning around inside me since my return from a six-week stay in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands where, having left my job at the ad agency, I reported on a story about a triple homicide on a dairy farm outside Rosetta. Three of those weeks were spent in the Pietermaritzburg High Court, covering the trial of Mzwandile Magubane and Nhlanhla Dladla, two young Zulu men charged with the murders. I have reported on violent crimes before, but this one was different, strangely personal. A friend, Brian Jones, had been among the first respondents; as a policeman turned private security specialist, he continued providing support to the victims’ families, working closely with the investigators assigned to the case. The families trusted him because they needed to trust someone and, since I was with Brian at all times, I was accepted into their circle of pain, confusion and fury.
When the trial started we were all seated in the same row, holding hands as the farm owner, Neville Karg, gave his testimony.
‘It was an ordinary day on the farm,’ he began. ‘We had just begun supper when I received a telephone call from my son, saying the manager had reported a fire in the corner of the property, amongst the new hay bales. I told my son I would investigate and then called him back and asked him to send more workers to help extinguish the fire. I also phoned my wife and asked her to bring some workers. A few minutes later I phoned back to ask her to bring bush knives so the beaters could cut branches to fight the fire.’
When his wife, Lorraine, failed to arrive, Neville had returned to the farmhouse to see what the problem was. He entered the yard and parked his bakkie next to the house. When he opened the laundry door, he saw two people on the floor. One was motionless, and the other indicated with hand movements that he should leave, as there were many strange men about. The farmer waited for the police to arrive before re-entering the yard, and when he did he found his wife’s car with its doors open. Next to a tree in the yard he found his wife’s body. According to the forensic pathologist who conducted the post-mortem, Lorraine Karg had a large laceration from centre to right of her neck, which ha
d severed the carotid artery and jugular vein. He estimated that she had bled to death over a period of fifteen to twenty minutes. A few metres away the police found the body of Zakeue Mhlongo, an elderly Zulu man who had tended the farmhouse garden. His throat had also been cut. The third victim was the still figure from the laundry, Hilda Linyane – a Zimbabwean woman in her thirties who had been working as a domestic servant. She had been shot.
The victims had all been good, peaceful people – there was no doubt about this. They had interrupted a robbery in progress. Wrong time, wrong place. But why had the robbers killed them, and so viciously? The families were in court to hear the answers to these questions. More than justice, they wanted understanding. By the end of the first day, however, it was clear that there would be no satisfaction. The state witness – the brother of Mzwandile Magubane – had recanted on the stand, claiming that his testimony had been beaten out of him. Since this was the only evidence connecting the second accused to the crime, the state prosecutor was left with no choice but to drop the charges against Nhlanhla Dladla.
As he left the dock, Dladla – who had a broad nose, drooping eyes and buttery skin criss-crossed with small scars – had flashed Neville Karg and his adult children a winning smile. To the children of Hilda Linyane and Zakeue Mhlongo he had whispered: ‘See you in Africa.’
There was no doubt about his intended meaning. The heads of the Linyane kids immediately went down into their arms, while the Mhlongo boys stared daggers. Dladla’s Africa was not the courthouse, the Nando’s up the road, or even the sprawling farm near Rosetta. It was in the distances between, the walk from the Mooi River taxi rank to the Absa ATM, the stretch of district road between the farm school and the farm gate. Africa was the region’s latticework of pedestrian paths, and the entire world outdoors after nightfall. You are enisled by Africa, is what Dladla effectively told the children of his victims, and your islands will not sustain you forever. You must, at some point, venture out.
A week before the start of the trial I had travelled to Bulawayo in Zimbabwe, to Pumula township off to the east of the city. I had stopped outside a box-shaped house, the façade of which was almost entirely covered by the branches of a large avocado tree. This was the home that Hilda Linyane, the Zimbabwean victim, had built with the money she had earned in South Africa. Her son, Innocent, had returned with her remains to Pumula, and he was now preparing to go back for the trial, to take the stand and add his testimony to the prosecution’s case. He had not mentioned to the prosecutor the fact that he was not in possession of a valid passport, because he did not want this to stand in the way of his contribution.
To get around border control, his plan was to wade across the crocodile-infested Limpopo River, then hitchhike the thousand or so kilometres to the farm to reunite with his sister, Priscilla, before facing their mother’s killers. I had become emotional when I had seen him sitting in court on the first morning, knowing what he had gone through to be there; when Dladla had uttered those words, reducing Priscilla Linyane to tears, I had experienced a strange loss of self-control. Like a robot I had followed Dladla out of the courtroom, through the ante-chamber and into the streets. He had been wearing a white windbreaker and, the moment he had got outside, he had flipped the hood over his head, turning himself into a beacon on the busy pavements of Pietermaritzburg. Having no better weapon, I had grasped my car’s key like a shank. I had known exactly what I was going to do, but before I could catch up with him two members of the murder and robbery unit had overtaken me and grabbed his arms.
‘You’re under arrest,’ said the one. ‘Possession of a firearm.’
I had wished Innocent had been there to see the Dladla’s face, how his mouth had popped open in abject shock. One of the officers had jerked back the hood of his windbreaker. I had walked over and stood next to the policemen, picturing my fist slamming into his gut, again and again, while they held him upright.
Once I had calmed down, I turned to face some difficult questions.
Have I been guilty of overlooking the fact that many of the Beachboys I call friends were once the Magubanes and Dladlas of their home communities? I know there is blood in Sudi’s past, and that certain others are only in South Africa because the alternative was life in a Dar es Salaam prison for the worst crime there is.
See you in Africa: it is exactly the sort of pointed threat I can imagine Adam addressing to a CCID guard, or a policeman.
And yet, I sit around the fire at The Kitchen, fascinated by their tales and impressed by their ingenuity, their forbearance. I don’t see their crimes stacked up behind them, the motherless and fatherless children of Magomeni and Mburahati. I don’t think: if all people were Beachboys, the world would be hell.
I have been grappling with these questions, and I am still grappling with them.
◆
Maskani is an unsettling corner of the city – a place where people pass through fences and walls like ghosts, and touch hands instead of speaking. When they do this it is almost always to transfer a quarter gram of heroin, or katte, and receive the required R20 in notes that are more often than not veined and scaled like moth wings.
Martingale gambling areas abound between drifts of litter and small hills of discarded railway ties. The principal gamblers squat, forming an inner circle over which a secondary ring of punters nod in and out to place their bets. Enterprising traders display oranges at the foot of the railway bridge, and the junkies stand about, peeling the skins off with their sharp kisus. It is not a safe place, by any standard. There are as many coloured gangsters here as Beachboys, as many prostitutes as drug dealers, as many tik users as unga smokers. More than anything, it is this – the intermingling of these two very different highs, the opiate and the methamphetamine – that gives this place its jumpy air.
Today, Adam, Sudi and Barak were smoking cocktails in one of the area’s many ruined buildings when the air was suddenly ionised with the word polisi polisi polisi, not yelled but whispered. The gambling circles unravelled at the sound of four pairs of boots on the pedestrian bridge. In the smokehouse there was a general break for the doorway – Sudi up and away first, as always, followed by Barak and a young but unusually rotund Beachboy called Juma.
By the time the policemen reached ground level, most of the Maskani wide boys had made it to the far side of the railway reserve and were heading for the innumerable exits onto Table Bay Boulevard. Sudi was haring off in the direction of The Kitchen, followed by Barak and the fat youngster. Adam was not with them, though; as soon as they realised this, they turned to see whether he had been caught.
He had not even left the ruin. When Juma realised this, he began declaiming loudly. In his panic he had abandoned a pharmaceutical bag containing 120 kattes, and was now convinced that Adam had seen him do this and stayed behind to steal the stash. Sudi warned the young dealer to shut his mouth, but six or seven of Juma’s allies had gathered around. When the policemen moved off, they all rushed towards the ruin, Sudi and Barak in hot pursuit. Adam emerged nonchalantly from the building to face his accusers, telling them that the police must have found the drugs.
‘What did you think would happen? You shouldn’t throw things away if you don’t want them to disappear.’
Juma pulled a kisu from his pocket and called Adam a liar.
‘You showing me a knife? Come then, and your friends. You can kill me but I will take one of you with me today I swear.’
Sudi tried to calm the situation, but there was no stopping Adam now: ‘You young boys don’t know anything. You dropped your stash, R3 000 of unga, and you ran away. Now you show me a fucking knife and call me a thief! If I had wanted to take your drugs I would have taken them, but I didn’t, I took the risk and buried them before the police came. If they caught me with that much unga I would get three years in Pollsmoor. I took the risk. You ran away.’
Heads nodded in understanding as Juma rushed into the ruin to
dig up the bag. The contents were counted and Barak, ever the diplomat, stepped in to recommend that Adam be given a quantity of unga for saving the stash and for having endured the accusations and threats. Juma grudgingly counted out seven kattes and walked off with his friends, his arms swinging around his thick hips.
‘Mwiba mwitu fuckers,’ Adam called after them, though not so loudly that they could hear. Sudi and Barak chuckled nervously.
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means wild dogs. That’s what these Mbagala boys call themselves.’
Seated around the fire at The Kitchen, they explained how the Beachboy scene was changing again, and not in a good way. From the start, said Adam, Cape Town’s Beachboys had been divided along lines of origin. The largest number of Beachboys had always been from Dar es Salaam – Bongomen – with the balance made up of men from Tanga, Tanzania’s most northerly seaport. Being in the minority, the Tanga Boys had always been more tightly knit and, over time, they had drifted away from the main Beachboy living area under Nelson Mandela Boulevard into the Woodstock railway reserve, where they had become integrated into Woodstock’s underworld.
‘The Tanga guys hardly try for the ships any more. Many of them work with South Africans in Woodstock, selling scrap metal or breaking into houses. If you closed your eyes and listened to some of them speaking Afrikaans, you would think they were coloureds,’ said Adam.
In 2009, the Bongomen and the Tanga Boys had gone to war. The spark had been the rape, by several Beachboys, of a young Tanga Boy called Mohammed, after he had been accused of stealing a single katte. The Tanga Boys were outraged, as were many of the Bongomen, but the rapists had been part of a sub-group of men from Mburahati, a particularly lawless part of Dar es Salaam, and had refused to acknowledge the will of the broader community.
Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 16
