‘They had a gang in Dar es Salaam called Komando Yosso, which used to go out at night to other areas, like Magomeni and Temeke,’ said Adam. ‘If they found a party they would surround it with their pangas, and make everyone empty their pockets. If they killed someone, they took the body back to Mburahati, because they knew that even the police would not come looking there.’
To end Komando Yosso’s reign of terror the police had unleashed their own, arresting all known members and killing any who resisted. Most of those who escaped the dragnets fled to South Africa.
‘The ones who came to Cape Town formed another gang called Al-Qaeda, and they started bullying other Beachboys. Three guys died after they raped that Tanga Boy, and eventually the older Beachboys from both sides came together and broke Al-Qaeda together. They made a rule that there must be no more gangs,’ said Adam.
The Bongomen had also needed the Tanga Boys at this time. With the bridges being cleared in anticipation of the World Cup, the only safe territory had been in the railway reserve, which was Tanga territory. Permission to enter was granted only to older, established Beachboys, like Barak, Sudi and Adam, who founded The Kitchen. Maskani also falls within Tanga territory, and access to this area is also conditional.
‘I can’t go to Maskani and say anything I like. It’s their place and we have to respect that,’ said Adam.
For three years the peace between the two major Beachboy factions has held, but trouble is back in the air. The problem, again, is of Bongo provenance.
‘At the moment there are too many Dar es Salaam guys coming to Cape Town, a different generation. They have no respect, not even for each other. Our generation came from old Dar es Salaam communities like Sinza, Magomeni and Temeke. In these places you must show respect, or the police will kill you. These new boys come from a place called Mbagala, outside the city on the road to Mtwara. Ten years ago it was just bush and rivers, but now there are thousands of people living there in mchondolos, without any electricity, without any proper toilets and no police station.’
Sudi, who is better acquainted with Dar es Salaam’s social undercurrents than Adam, said that the youth of Mbagala had earned a reputation for pack violence. ‘They do something called ten-in-ten-out,’ he said. ‘This is when twenty boys come to a street carrying pangas. Ten guard the street while the other ten rob the houses. If anyone tries to leave or fight he will be killed. That is why they are called mwiba mwitu, because they move together like wild dogs.’
When it came, the police response had been savage; for months, now, the scatterlings of the Mbagala underworld have been crossing into South Africa and bleeding into the Beachboy communities. Use of the term mwiba mwitu has been outlawed in Cape Town’s Beachboy areas, which was why Adam had uttered it under his breath earlier. But this has not stopped the mwiba mwitu from reforming in sub-groups. Their refusal to acknowledge the Sea Power code has set them at odds with the older generation of Bongo Beachboys, and has pushed the Bongo–Tanga peace accord to the limits.
‘We’re thinking of getting out, y’know, me and Sudi,’ said Adam. ‘Summer’s a bad time for stowing ships but me and Sudi are gonna stop smoking unga and try anyway.’
◆
A series of Please Call Me messages from Adam late at night. I clambered out of bed, walked to the most distant point of the house and called back, fearing the worst.
‘Haiyo Sean, we’re going to meet the prophet tomorrow.’
‘Eh?’
‘The prophet in the cave above Woodstock. You heard of ’im?’
I have often heard singing from the mountain crags above Woodstock, especially when the fog rolls in. I had tried to get nearer once or twice, but could never find the trailhead that might lead me to the source. The voices have remained disembodied, eerily beyond reach.
‘Sudi heard about the prophet in Pollsmoor. Some of the prisoners have gone to see him after serving their time, and they say he has big power, this guy. People come all the way from the Congo to visit him in that cave, that’s what I hear. Sudi wants to pray with the prophet tomorrow, so that we can have good luck and take a ship.’
At 9 a.m. I found the two friends smoking a cocktail around The Kitchen’s near-dead fire. Smoking heroin is not a thing Beachboys like to rush, and Adam slowed the process further by winding loops of spittle behind the cherry of the joint.
‘The unga burns slower than the weed, so we wet the ganja this way and everything burns at the same speed.’
When the last of the vinegary smoke had been exhaled, we crossed the railway tracks into Woodstock and walked directly upslope on Mountain Road, passing under Nelson Mandela Boulevard. From the edge of De Waal Drive, which divides the city from the Table Mountain National Park, we caught our first sight of the Woodstock Cave: a broad, thin-lipped mouth halfway up Devil’s Peak. The speeding traffic proved a perceptual challenge for the stoned Beachboys, but we made it safely across and clumped through the mountain fynbos to a eucalyptus copse that enclosed an abandoned quarry. Metal cutouts of rams, turkeys, pigs and chickens had been set up at different distances within the quarry, targets in a shooting range.
Sudi turned to Adam. ‘There’s a lot of metal here.’
‘About R500,’ Adam agreed, and I felt a little sad knowing the members of this silhouette shooting club would arrive at their next meet to find that their animals had all been poached for scrap metal.
Zigzagging up on Fire Services roads we reached the highest point of the ridge, where a contour path leads below the cliffs of Devil’s Peak. We could not see the cave, the gradient being too steep, but adjudged it directly upslope, where a stream crossed the path. Turning up the narrow watercourse we began to push through dense, combustible scrub, red-winged starlings whistling at us from rocky ledges. Pushing through a last thicket we came to a spill of boulders below the cave, on which several containers had been positioned to catch the water wafting over the mouth. Aside from the tok, tok, tok of water into tin, the kloof was silent. We approached quietly, and slowly pulled our bodies up over the lip.
There was no doubt that this was the place. The cave floor had been worn glassy by feet, and parts of it had been carpeted with mountain grasses. In one corner, a grid of low stone walls had been built, from which mattresses protruded. On one of the walls, a small clock – the type that folds into its own casement – rested on a book. The dorsal end of the book was afforested with torn strips of magazine paper, almost one to a page, as if this was the only book ever written and every page was equally important.
‘The prophet’s not in,’ said Adam, lying back in one of the little cells and staring up at the ‘Jesus is Lord’ graffiti on the cave ceiling.
‘Maybe he went to buy airtime,’ said Sudi, who had pulled a packed bin liner from a cranny and was rifling through the twist of blankets and shirts inside. He tossed a green woollen beanie over to Adam.
‘Some Beachboy will enjoy this.’
‘It could mean bad luck to steal something from the prophet.’
‘It’s just clothes,’ said Sudi.
He pulled one of the mattresses out onto the ledge and we sat on it and worked the cityscape with our fingers, identifying the Grand Parade, the Foreshore flyovers, The Freezer, The Kitchen, Wa Tony, Maskani.
‘Look how many metal poles there are,’ said Adam, passing a hand over the Foreshore’s streetlights, cranes and railway semaphores. In the container dock, an MCC ship was being tugged away from its berth; we wondered which of the ships out in Table Bay would be coming in to replace it.
‘There could be some Beachboys inside that ship right now, going to England, Italy or Brazil. You never know,’ said Adam. ‘I don’t think so, but they could be there, inside the life raft, or maybe locked inside the storage hatches. Strange to think.’
‘You boys still going make du’a?’
Sudi shook his head and stood up. ‘We can make du’a any
where, anytime.’
His disappointment verged on anger. Even if the prophet had been in, this was clearly a place of Christian worship. He exited the cave on a well-trodden path at the southern edge – the path I’d never been able to find. Adam was last out. Looking back, I saw him pull the prophet’s green beanie out of his pants and toss it back towards the mattresses and blankets.
◆
A call from Adam to say that the police were preparing a major raid of the railway reserve.
When I arrived at the Lower Church Street bridge I could see that the policemen, alongside officials from the city’s land unit, had already swept into the railway reserve, where they were overseeing the destruction of Beachboy mchondolos. When this happens, and it happens a few times a year, the officers occupy the high ground at the top of the highway embankment and watch others of the city’s homeless do the dirty work of pulling the tents apart. The lackeys – coloured people, mostly – work on the understanding that they will be allowed to take ownership of anything they find inside the tents, be it money, drugs or shoes. It is an explosive underworld dynamic, especially since the lackeys tend to abuse the Beachboys both physically and verbally while going about their work, knowing that the police will arrest anyone who fights back.
Adam shouted a single statement of defiance – ‘You will find our houses here tomorrow again’ – and took out his phone to call Barak, whose tent was just then being pulled apart. Barak came running down the railway service road from the direction of Maskani.
‘We must quickly go to the shipyard,’ he panted, ‘before the plastic is all gone.’
Groups of Beachboys were already crossing the railway tracks, heading for the Robertson and Caine catamaran factory on the corner of Beach and Railway. The dumpsters behind this facility are always stuffed with sail offcuts and large sheets of plastic, which make excellent roofing materials. By the time we made it over, approximately thirty Beachboys were jostling for the last materials, shouting abuse at each other and pulling their fists back in mock punches. Two men pulled at opposite ends of a blue blow-up mattress, eventually ripping it in two. Adam shook his head and said he would try again in the week, when the dumpsters would be full and uncontested. Until then, he would bunk in a friend’s tent beside the Christiaan Barnard bridge.
Barak, who values his privacy, waded into the fray.
◆
A stabbing last night outside the Seaman Bar. By the time I arrived there was no body, just a shiny disc of blood on the tarmac. A police cruiser parked outside the pool hall’s entrance washed the walls with its blue lights. Adam was listening in on the conversation between the bar owner and the police officers. I’d never seen him so animated.
‘They already take him to Somerset Hospital, guy by the name of Aubadeeleh Juma Saloum. He was a real Cape Town Beachboy, an’ he been stabbed by a young boy of just four months in the city. I think this means war y’know Sean. Somebody gonna die for this, I’m telling you.’
Adam said he had been in the bar earlier, watching the CAF Super Cup Final between Al-Ahly and AC Léopards. He had put R150 on the Congolese team, but Egyptian winger Mohamed Barakat had scored in the 71st minute to put the game out of reach and Adam had wandered back to The Kitchen to sleep before the final whistle. Sudi had stayed behind, and had intervened when the fight had broken out between Aubadeeleh and the young Beachboy, whom everyone calls Chawa Suga. When the fighters had been parted, the owner had kicked them both out. Sudi had returned to his bar stool, feeling that this was the end of it. Only some time later, when he had heard the ambulance siren, had he realised that something terrible must have happened out on the streets. He had grown up with Aubadeeleh, playing countless football matches with him in Magomeni East.
‘To be honest I’m nervous,’ said Adam. ‘That guy was like Sudi’s brother and now Sudi has to step forward or people will think he is a coward. Me and Barak can’t let him step alone because he is our brother, too, but that guy Chawa Suga is a Mbagala boy – mwiba mwitu – and he got his own boys who will step for him. Anything can happen now. I can’t tell you if it will finish this way or another.’
We drove to Somerset Hospital where we found Sudi on the entrance stairs, punching his left hand with his right.
‘Wafu.’ Dead.
Adam clapped his hand over his mouth.
‘No fucking way. Sudi, sorry man. We gonna get that boy I swear. Come, we must start looking now, before he has time to run too far.’
The V&A Waterfront sidewalks were still fairly busy with revellers as we exited, the faux-vintage streetlights illuminating Sudi in the back seat where he was still punching his hands like some sort of cinematic menace. In furious bursts of Swahili, he told what he knew of the incident.
Chawa Suga and his friends had been drinking Klipdrift brandy all day, and had arrived at the Seaman Bar very drunk. Aubadeeleh had been there, watching the football, sober as always.
‘Aubadeeleh only smoke weed, he never drinks,’ Adam explained.
Chawa Suga had taunted Aubadeeleh for much of the first half, and the older Beachboy had finally snapped and knocked Chawa Suga to the floor. Chawa Suga’s friends had pounced on Aubadeeleh, punching and kicking him until Sudi had intervened, pushing Aubadeeleh’s attackers back. He had been joined by the owner and a well-known Nigerian drug dealer, who had also been in for the football. The young Beachboys had launched a verbal attack on Sudi. Why was he getting involved in somebody else’s fight? Was he looking for trouble, too? Sudi had countered that it was not their fight, either, and that the two men should be left to sort the matter out between themselves. ‘A fair fight, Bongo to Bongo.’
At that point, Aubadeeleh had made for the door. The bar owner had ordered the young Beachboys down the stairs as well, and as they had jostled through the exit a Beachboy called Temba, who had not been involved in the fight, had handed Chawa Suga a kisu. Sudi was told as much by the Nigerian, who had seen it happen.
‘Allah never gave me the idea to follow them,’ he said, over and over.
When he heard the ambulance, he had run out into the road, where he’d found Aubadeeleh moaning on the ground, the lower half of his shirt soaked with blood.
Adam knew more about the stabbing, having talked to several of the witnesses who had hung around the scene after the ambulance had left.
‘Aubadeeleh was walking away when Chawa Suga came out. Someone shouted that he had a knife, so Aubadeeleh started to run away but he fell. He was shouting [falsetto], “Sorry, I’m really sorry, please, I’ll never fight with you again,” but Chawa Suga said [forte], “You didn’t know me, now you know me,” and he started stabbing him in the back. The Nigerian guy tried to push Chawa Suga. He said, “Why you want to kill your brother, eh? Why?” But one of Chawa Suga’s friends pushed the Nigerian, and the Nigerian said, “Okay, if you want to kill your brother, then kill your brother.” Chawa Suga stabbed Aubadeeleh three more times before running away, followed by his friends.’
‘The doctor told me that if Aubadeeleh had survived he could never have walked again,’ said Sudi. ‘The knife cut his mgongo, somewhere at the back here.’
To get the car as close to The Kitchen as possible, I parked on the traffic island formed by the Lower Church Street on-ramp and the outer lanes of the Table Bay Boulevard incoming. Leaving it with the hazards flashing, we skirted the highway on foot for a few hundred metres before dropping down the highway embankment to the tents. Barak emerged from the dark beside his mchondolo. He held a rusty fence pole with a lump of concrete fixed to one end. He had been waiting like this, he said, since hearing the news.
The friends began talking – quietly at first, and then in angry voices as the disagreements racked up. Sudi was in favour of immediate retribution, whereas Barak argued that it would be better to call a meeting of all Beachboys in the morning, to hit on a group solution and prevent the Beachboy community from splitting int
o factions. Adam seemed to be in two minds.
‘What would you do if it was me or Sudi?’ he asked Barak. To Sudi, he made the point that they could not be certain how much support Chawa Suga had under the flyovers. If they went there now, they might find themselves greatly outnumbered.
I left when it seemed they would wait out the night and take stock in the morning. Adam walked me back to the car, which had attracted the attention of a fat tow-truck driver, who said he had just called the cops.
‘I saw a bag inside the car, and I know the area is bad for crime,’ he said, eyeing Adam.
‘There’s no problem.’
‘We must still wait for the cops, man.’
‘You just waiting because you want to tow this car,’ Adam said.
The policeman who arrived wanted nothing to do with the curious situation. We were together for just a minute – the constable, the tow-truck driver, the writer and the stowaway – before engines were fired up again and, one by one, the vehicles slipped back onto the highway, leaving Adam behind in a pool of street light.
◆
The fight that led to the death of Aubadeeleh Saloum had its origins two weeks ago, in a Maskani gambling circle. This is unsurprising. The only game going in Maskani is simple but open to abuse, and easily the biggest cause of fights between Beachboys. It works like this.
Punters buy in for R10 and squat around a dealer, each nominating a card – five of diamonds, jack of spades, whichever. Behind them a row of secondary punters choose a bet to double up on, and add their R10 to the pot, taking it to between R100 and R200 a round, depending on the size of the game. The person whose card comes out of the deck first scoops up all the money, dividing it between his seconds. The trouble usually starts in the late afternoon, when a high percentage of the punters is likely to be stoned. A dealer could gradually increase the speed at which he slaps cards down, knowing that it will be difficult for pie-eyed betters to follow the action in the fading light. In this way, a friend’s bet could be favoured and the spoils shared that night. Chawa Suga had accused Aubadeeleh of exactly this trickery two weeks before he had murdered him. Aubadeeleh had been dealing and, when Chawa Suga asked to be shown through the dealt cards, the older Beachboy refused. The ensuing scuffle ended quickly because Aubadeeleh had been in the company of friends.
Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 17
