Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  And, she knows Adam. They have met a handful of times, and although his gangster appearance and street stink initially repelled her, his politeness and charm (How are you today, mama? How is the business? Amazing what you done, mama, amazing ...) soon won through. She cried the first time he told her about Aniya and, although I’ve repeatedly explained that Adam’s motivations for stowing away are manifold and complex, her mind is made up: he does what he does because it’s the only way he will be reunited with his daughter.

  She has never questioned my trust in Adam. She understands enough of the Cape Town’s underworld dynamics to know what Adam has done for me, already – that, without him, the bridges, the railway reserve, this extraordinary world at the foot of the city would be closed to me.

  But now, stuck in what the airport taxi driver described as a foleni (a traffic jam comprising four unmoving lanes of traffic on a two-lane road), I wondered about the limits of the friendship I have claimed. Would it survive the transposition to a new environment, and the added dynamic of my total dependence? If not, what then? In the short term, I’d be stuck with the problem of how to get home. In the longer term I would have to re-evaluate an array of personal and professional suppositions, and that was likely to be shattering. I felt a little queasy as the taxi turned into the Camel Oil Petrol Station off Sheikilango Road. Adam appeared at the passenger window as I was paying the driver. He was wearing baggy jeans, with a tail of red bandana hanging from a back pocket. He peered in from under a Chicago Bulls cap.

  ‘Wha’s he charging?’

  ‘TSh100 000.’

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ said Adam, and blasted the driver until he threw up his hands and said, ‘Okay, thirty thousand, thirty thousand.’

  ‘That’s the last car you gonna take in Dar es Salaam. From now we only take buses, maybe some trucks. How are you anyway, Sean? Mambo vipi? It’s hot, innit? You don’t need to worry about nothing any more, this is our place.’

  Shouldering my backpack he headed down a lane of light-coloured dirt, flanked by seamless rows of single-storey houses. By and large these were plastered with concrete and unpainted and, although most seemed to be homes, every third structure accommodated a service hatch of chicken wire behind which life’s essentials were on sale: soap, candles, soft oils, cigarettes and airtime. A buzz saw whined in one structure, sawdust billowing out of the doorway.

  The only multistorey building on the block was still under construction, and being watched over by a group of young Maasai askaris, proud in their National Geographic reds, blues and purples. They greeted me – ‘Karibu, Mzungu’ – but did not acknowledge Adam.

  ‘Bush-y people,’ he said, as we passed by. ‘In the rural areas they used to stand around all day looking after cows, but now they stand around all day looking after rich people’s houses.’ There was no scorn in his tone. ‘Everyone needs to eat,’ he said, ducking off the lane into a doorless building split down the middle by a passage leading to a small, barren yard in which a few chickens pecked at rice grains. There were three small rooms on either side of the passage, the doorways covered by lengths of fabric. Only one of the rooms had a lockable wooden door. Adam banged his fist on it.

  ‘Vipi Baba Esau,’ Adam called out, like he owned the place. The door was opened by a grinning and shirtless Sudi Brando, a white, diamond-patterned kofia on his head. He grabbed my hand and gave it the thumb-snap shake.

  ‘Mr Sean-y, we have been waiting for you, brother.’

  I peered into the room, an eggshell-green box with a single window in the facing wall, small and situated peculiarly near to the ceiling.

  ‘In Dar es Salaam we build our windows up there because there’s too much stealing,’ Sudi explained.

  A mattress with pink roses on it occupied a third of the floor space, with much of the rest of the room taken up by shoeboxes, packets and plastic laundry baskets crammed with clothes. These were Sudi’s possessions, which remained in the room no matter who happened to be renting it. In Cape Town everything Sudi had owned – his kisu, his kofia and a few items of clothing – had fitted into a small, navy backpack. It was strangely reassuring to know that that he’d had this material anchorage all along, in a room six thousand kilometres away.

  When Sudi left to buy beer from a nearby tavern, Adam said, ‘You won’t believe it, but Sudi owns this whole building. He’s had it since his daddy died in the nineties, ’im and his sister.’

  We dragged some beer crates out into the yard and made a three-legged plastic chair usable by propping the problematic corner up on the steps. Sudi returned with five Safari quarts and, as per Adam’s ritual, we all poured a libation into the yard dust. Sudi took up the story of the building.

  ‘My uncle built it for my father a long time ago. It was 1991 I think. Or 1992 … no, wait, I need to fetch somebody who can tell this story nicely. I was too young, I don’t remember.’

  He ran down the corridor and out into the street, and we could hear him asking after someone a few doors down. When he returned it was with a fit-looking greybeard, shirtless under the straps of his dungarees. His forearms were covered in sawdust, and it struck me that the neighbourhood buzz saw had fallen silent. Adam rose deferentially and shook the man’s hand.

  ‘This man is a Beachboy,’ he whispered. ‘Early generation. He worked overseas with Sudi’s daddy in Switzerland.’

  ‘Sweden,’ the man corrected, and introduced himself. ‘Kidagaa.’

  Sudi directed him to the three-legged chair.

  In unfaltering English, Kidagaa explained that Sudi’s father Kabiru (whom everyone had called Marlon Brando) had sneaked aboard a freighter moored in Dar es Salaam harbour in 1977. This quite possibly made him the first of the Beachboys.

  ‘No way,’ said Adam.

  ‘It’s true. We heard that some people used to stow away on ships after the Second World War, because things were very difficult then. But these stowaways found the ships in places like Mombasa, or Djibouti. Dar es Salaam was still a small port at this time, not many ships called here.’

  The harbour had been expanded in the post-war years, and the city’s population had started to grow very rapidly.

  ‘You know who the real father of all Beachboys is?’ Kidagaa asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Julius Nyerere.’

  Adam and Sudi nodded, the statement requiring no explanation for them. I was lost and only made the ground up much later. In Kidagaa’s view, the growth of Dar es Salaam had gone hand in hand with a Nyerere-era act of social engineering called Operation Vijiji, which aimed to relocate – forcibly, in the end – all rural Tanzanians to collective villages, supposedly to facilitate agricultural production and make it easier for the government to supply communal services. The relocations began in 1973, but agricultural production soon declined to the point of mass starvation.

  ‘Many rural families migrated to the cities, where things were not much better,’ said Kidagaa. ‘Marlon Brando’s parents settled in Magomeni, which at the time was on the edge of the city. There were no schools, no churches, no dukas [shops].’

  As youths, said Kidagaa, he and Marlon Brando had worked as machingas, hawking cigarettes and sweets around the newly opened Kariakoo market. ‘Sometimes, if it was too hot, we used to walk to the harbour for a swim. We became very good swimmers. Me and your father could go across the harbour mouth to Kigamboni and back without thinking about it.’

  ‘Yooo,’ Sudi and Adam interjected, ‘that’s too far, daddy.’

  ‘All the stevedores who worked in the harbour used to know us. They used to call us the beachboys because we were always out on Posta beach, or in the water. The younger generation doesn’t know about stevedores, I don’t think.’

  ‘We know about stevedores, daddy,’ Sudi insisted.

  ‘Well, we used to always ask the stevedores, “Where is this ship coming from? Where is that one going? Wh
at is this one transporting?” And they would tell us. Every time a nice ship came in we would say, “I’m going to take this one to Europe, I’m going to take that one to America,” but we never did it.

  ‘One day this big ship came in, a really nice ship. Kabiru told us he was going to stow away on that ship. Nobody believed he could do it but he walked into the port and disappeared. A few hours later the tug came around for the ship and pulled it out to sea. We could not believe that your daddy was inside, but we knew he must be. I was not happy, because I thought I would never see him again. I knew that his mother – your grandmother – was going to ask me: “Where is Kabiru?” I did not want to tell her the truth, so I told your uncle, and he told your grandmother. For maybe a year we heard nothing, and then one day a stevedore came to find us on Posta beach. “Your friend Marlon Brando is in Sweden,” he said. I asked him, “Who is this Marlon Brando?” and the man said, “He is your friend, the one who took the ship. Now he calls himself Marlon Brando. Come, he has sent something for his family.” I went with him to the docks and I met this sailor. He gave me a small package, and told me that Marlon Brando was working on a construction site in Sweden. Inside were some things for his family.

  ‘He told me that Marlon Brando wanted me to join him. I said, “No, how is this possible?” And he said that the ship was sailing that night. He said if I came back to the harbour he would try to hide me. I ran all the way back to Magomeni, straight to your grandmother’s house, and I gave her the package. Inside was money, Swedish krona, about two hundred. In Tanzanian shillings this was about four hundred, which was a lot for that time. Your grandmother could not believe this luck. After that I ran back to the harbour and waited by that ship. That sailor came down and said I must wait until night, when he would give one sound’ – the old Beachboy gave a low catcall – ‘and that was my sign to run up the plank. When I was up, he said he would show me a good place to hide. After two days I was supposed to come out to meet the captain. He said the captain would ask me if any of the crew helped me to hide, and I must say no. If I kept quiet like that, the captain would take me to Sweden.’

  ‘Big story, daddy. Respect,’ said Adam.

  ‘We stayed in Sweden for the whole of the 1980s. The government gave us a residence permit, but we did not want to leave because we did not trust that we could make it back. Your father used to send money to your uncle from time to time with instructions for him to build a house. This is the house that your uncle built for your father.’

  ‘My uncle stole my father’s money,’ Sudi interjected furiously. ‘He was supposed to build a big house with that money.’

  Kidagaa tried to reason with him in paternal Swahili, which Adam translated for my benefit.

  ‘He says that Sudi’s daddy was dreaming of a very big house of many levels, near to the sea in one of the rich areas, like Mikocheni, or even Oyster Bay. He’s trying to tell Sudi that the money was never enough for that. He says that Marlon Brando did not understand how expensive it was to build a house in Dar es Salaam at this time. Everything for building a big house had to come from overseas – roof, pipes, tiles, everything. So the cost was too much.’

  Sudi refused to accept this. Turning to me he said, ‘This man was a friend of my uncle, so he can’t say anything bad about him. But I know what really happened. When my father came back from Europe and saw this little place – this small shit place – he became sick, and after just a few months he died. My mother told me it was because he was too shocked. He never recovered himself. I was just a small boy, but I wanted to kill that uncle. If he was alive today, I would kill him.’

  The old Beachboy shrugged, drained his Safari and left. A minute later, the buzz saw’s whine resumed.

  Sudi conceded that Marlon Brando had not been a good father. He had missed much of Sudi’s childhood and, when back home, he had regularly beaten Sudi, his sister and their mother. He had not mourned his father’s death for too long, particularly since the rent from the rooms now came directly to him and his sister.

  This sister, he said, had recently betrayed him. Their long-standing agreement was that, whenever he was away chasing ships – and he had been away for seven of the last ten years – his share should go to Sauda. The last payment had not been made, however.

  ‘That is a big deal,’ said Adam, ‘because, here in Dar es Salaam, tenants pay for six months at a time, and they pay before, not after. So Sudi’s sister stole six months’ rent, and for this whole time Sudi’s boy could not attend school because his mummy had no money. It was driving Sudi crazy in Cape Town, he never showed it but it was. Now his sister is hiding because she is scared what will happen if Sudi finds her. She moved house, and never told anyone where she moved to.’

  For all this time, a neighbour had been busy with the evening meal, which was brought over by her daughter, sagging in two black rubbish bags: rice (wali) and red kidney beans (maharage). Sudi placed the bags on the ground and tore at the sides until the rice and the beans were accessible. He fetched a container of water and a bucket to pour it into, and helped us to wash our hands. When the last glutinous fistful had been eaten we retired to the room, and lay down in the stuffy darkness on the double mattress on the floor.

  ‘Sleep nicely,’ said Adam. ‘Tomorrow we have a full programme.’

  ◆

  To get to Adam’s mother’s place – the first objective of our programme – we walked to where the auto-rickshaw taxis clustered like bright sheep under the flame trees at the corner of Sheikilango and Morogoro Connect.

  Adam played tour guide as we weaved through the morning traffic jam, riding mostly among the pedestrians on the pavements.

  ‘You see that street vendor, we call ’im a machinga. This one is selling peanut toffee. We call it kashata.’ Auto-rickshaws like the one we were in were called Bajajis, motorbike taxis were bodabodas and minibus taxis were daladalas. The little shops set well back from the road were dukas, and the tricycle carts being pushed in the space between the dukas and the road were mkokotenis.

  As someone who has become accustomed to navigating his home city by its iconic mountain, I sensed that I would leave Dar es Salaam with a poor sense of how I had moved from one place to the next. The coastline, I had noted from the air, is very flat for dozens of kilometres inland and, rather than climb upwards, the city has sprawled outwards along eventless radials, all of which feature potholed, two-lane road surfaces flanked by open stormwater drains and facing lines of dukas. There is no dominant architectural vernacular, just endlessly recurring shapes and textures: waves of corrugated roofing, gritty breeze blocks, metal doors. Here and there the verges looked lush, but the plants always turned out to be potted rather than rooted: roadside nurseries. If you peered through the fronds, you could almost always spot the business owner asleep in a wheelbarrow. There were no street names, and all depressions in the earth were choked with litter – so much so that it seemed as if plastic was welling up from the ground instead of collecting in it. There seemed to be several open-air beer halls to every block, advertising beer brands drawn from the lexicon of the colonial safari: Tusker, Savannah, Kilimanjaro, Serengeti. The all-purpose dukas, elsewhere in Africa fronted with Coca-Cola signage, were here wrapped in cellular network branding: Airtel, Vodacom, M-Pesa. Billboard advertising was clearly at a zenith.

  On Morogoro, the city’s major arterial, we pushed our way onto a daladala, coloured red for Kariakoo.

  ‘Kariakoo was where all the black people lived back in the day,’ said Adam. ‘Any place where just black people live we call Uswahilini. The places where the white people live, like Sea View and Masaki, we call Uzunguni, and the places where the Indian people stay we call Uhindini.’

  The road was in the process of being widened, so the line of daladalas bound for the city centre careened on and off a broad shoulder of earthen detours, the vehicles ahead of us dipping and cresting like ships on a stormy sea. In the dist
ance, the city skyscrapers stuck up against dark clouds.

  ‘We gonna introduce you to another maskani now,’ said Adam, stepping off the bus onto Bibi Titi Mohamed Street and then setting off at pace through a crush of pedestrians and vehicles, slipping between the high-rise buildings until we reached Kivukoni Road, which runs along the northern edge of the harbour. Large holes in the port’s perimeter fence provided access to grey dunes leading down to the beach. Adam and Sudi slipped through without any problems but when I tried to follow a polyphonic cry went up from the fruit traders lining the road. Then came a hard blast on a whistle.

  ‘Police. They think we are going to rob you.’

  ‘Talk to that man,’ Adam shouted up to me. ‘Tell him that everything is all right.’

  A policeman in a white US navy-style uniform called me over to the coconut palm he was leaning against, one shiny boot up underneath his behind, heel hooked on the bole.

  ‘If something happens down there I can’t help you. Those are not good people. Is he really your friend? And that other one?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, but the policeman wasn’t interested. He had blown his whistle and calmed the fruit sellers. Whatever happened next would be my own fault.