Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  I had difficulty keeping up with August, who had led the way on overgrown tracks to Bindura’s new homestead on what had once been the neighbouring farm. We had passed the empty silage pits and the deserted pigsties, which had once debouched bright afterbirth into a rancid marsh. We had come to a clearing at a small dam, where three or four huts had been founded alongside an enclosure for goats. A figure in a large green hat had been hoeing an area on the enclosure’s margins. He had frozen in his stoop when we had approached, before coming forward with his arms open.

  Bindura had become emaciated, his temples scooped-out bowls and his chest quite fleshless. My friend in Harare had given me some salted pork; that night, August had cooked a memorable stew, using curry powder salvaged from the old farmhouse. At one point Bindura had stood up. With his hands flapping deep in the pockets of his oversized coat, he had asked, ‘Who am I?’ For the tenth time that day we had all been reduced to tears and laughter. My grandfather had never liked the cold. In winter, the short walk from the farmhouse to his farmyard office became a gauntlet across which he had shuffled rapidly in outsized coats. Invariably, he would be intercepted by one, or several, of his employees. As he would listen to their news, he would stamp and flap his coat like an unhappy bull elephant. Bindura’s exact and loving caricature had seemed to bring him back to life.

  The only dissonance in the evening had resulted from my asking the two to pose for a photograph.

  They had glanced nervously at each other. ‘We’re afraid,’ Bindura had said. ‘Somebody might see the light from your camera. If the wrong people find you here, there will be trouble. New people are arriving all the time. We don’t know each other any more in this place, so everybody lies in his hut at night fearing his neighbour.’

  On a grass mat in Bindura’s pantry that night, I had remembered the fear I had often felt at night in the farmhouse, especially on Saturday nights when the sounds of drumming and singing had drifted across from the workers’ village. My sense of our vulnerability, in that big house, had been underscored by the two shotguns in the gun cabinet, and the fact that the entire house had been rigged with dynamite during the war years. The wooden boxes that had housed the explosives had remained beneath the windows for two decades after independence, as if on standby. I wondered whether this paranoia had transferred to the new residents, who had more to fear, perhaps, because their mismanagement of the property had destroyed the livelihoods of the dozens of men and women now starving in the nearby village. I fantasised about sneaking over to the old house, throwing rocks at the windows in the darkness. Knowing the garden like no other, I could have moved from structure to structure unseen, hooting like a witch.

  But my vengeful side had soon disappeared, along with my anger. Unlike Adam’s, my rural childhood had been a happy one, and I had found, against expectations, two of the constituents of that happiness alive and well.

  ◆

  Adam took off on his own when we returned from Kiparang’anda, saying he needed to procure emergency travel documents for our coming journey. He did not return the next day, but called to say that Sudi and I should join him in the district of Temeke.

  A fine misting rain was falling when we left, just heavy enough to bring down dead leaves all along Morogoro Connect, turning the pavements into mosaics of bright-yellow spearheads. In the low light I could appreciate the colourful khangas and headscarves worn by the female pedestrians, who seemed like creatures misplaced in this world of oily puddles and smoking braziers. The billboards called out to them in pinks, purples and reds: Konyago Whisky, Yebo Yebo Braids, Tusker Lite. Hot Deal. Feel Beautiful. Taste the Difference.

  On Kigogo Road the second-hand clothes traders (mitumbas) were rolling desiccated pairs of Nikes and All Stars up in the plastic sheets on which they had carefully laid them out earlier that morning. The rain came down harder, and the lines of dukas on either side of the road became choked with street merchandise hastily stacked under the tiled awnings. There was little of interest in these scenes for Sudi, who stared at the fingernails of the female hand clasping the seatback in front of him.

  ‘You know, Sean, people from Kenya can’t understand the Swahili we speak in Dar es Salaam. Even people from Tanga cannot understand us. We have too many names for things – names that you can only know if you live in Dar es Salaam. And even if you are a man from Dar es Salaam, you still cannot understand a woman, if she doesn’t want you to. They have their own words for things that men do not know. They have women’s words, not really Swahili at all.’

  We crossed the railway lines – moisture-bright strips sliding beneath the sea mist to the harbour – and skirted the long wall of the railway reserve, which offered a feast of chalked slogans: Problems are the fart of life. Disability is not unability. Mr Mphoto, the king of local rhymes. I wondered about the use of English on these East African walls, and I wondered why Sudi had not, since my arrival in the city nearly two weeks before, stayed a single night with Sauda, the woman he referred to as his wife.

  ‘Is everything all right with Mama Esau?’

  ‘Everything’s all right, but she is angry that I am going to South Africa again. She says Esau is growing up without his father but I tell her there is no better life for us without a ship. If I stay I must feed myself, I must buy myself clothes. Where will that money come from? The money from the rent is already not enough for them. Mama Esau understands this, I think, but she says I must not stay with them in Magomeni East, otherwise Esau will think his daddy is home to stay, and it will be difficult when we go.’

  As our daladala approached Dar es Salaam University, we veered right onto Nelson Mandela Road and then right again onto Mbagala Road. Midway down, we hopped off and crossed the street to the tavern in which Adam had said he would meet us. Like most taverns in the city it was shed-like, with kitchen fires at the back alongside a concrete block of pit latrines. The tables, a hundred or so, were covered in pink plastic sheets and had blue plastic chairs clustered around them. It being nearly noon, the air was acrid with the smell of nyama choma and pilipili maluzi.

  We found Adam at a table littered with empty Safari lager bottles, sitting across from a man in his early twenties whose fake diamond earring complemented the TSh10 000 notes spread out before him. Adam was wearing the partner earring and an oversized black T-shirt printed with the phrase ‘Don’t fuck with family’. He had tucked his red bandana under his Chicago Bulls cap, so that it flowed down to his shoulders. Sudi had warned me that Adam had a reputation to keep up in Temeke. This was the community in which Suna had left her son after it became obvious that the village could no longer hold him. With nothing better to do, he had spent his teenage years roaming the streets, befriending the area’s toughest strays. The character he had honed in order to do this was bombastic and dangerous. He could still inhabit it.

  ‘This is Gerrard,’ he said, introducing his friend. ‘I just convinced him to come back to South Africa with us. If he stays here he’s going to get in trouble.’

  Sudi’s eyes had fixed on the notes, which amounted to about half a million Tanzanian shillings.

  ‘Gerrard stole this money from a woman last night. I feel sorry for her, knowing what happened.’

  The biggest challenge facing street muggers like Gerrard, he explained, was the local propensity for concealing cash down brassieres, inside knickers and under shoe soles – anywhere but in the obvious bag, purse or wallet. Since very few criminals in Dar es Salaam carry firearms, most victims are happy to empty their bags and invert their pockets in theatrical displays of poverty, the hope being that their attacker will soon run away, knowing that no street is deserted for very long.

  Gerrard, however, had hit on a strategy for getting beyond this impasse. It was simple, and quite brutal. He would wait in the shadows and, when his victim passed, he would swing his panga with all his might. The pedestrians would see the broad blade flash – the stuff of nightmares –
and feel a clap of shocking pain from their back, neck or skull area. In that moment they knew only one thing: that they had been split open to the bone, and would probably die. Faced with the raised blade once more, they would make their money miraculously appear in outstretched hands – the day’s takings, the children’s school fees, the contribution to a relative’s funeral. Only later, after Gerrard was long gone, would the victim realise that the panga had been turned flat before impact, causing nothing worse than a bad welt.

  Our waitress brought a round of perspiring beers and a plastic basket of mishkaki, which was followed through from the cooking fires by several blue-bottomed flies. Gerrard grinned broadly, clearly enjoying the attention his temporary wealth had drawn from surrounding tables. Sudi clucked his tongue in disapproval. As a former gangster he could appreciate the brutal logic of Gerrard’s methods, but flaunting ill-gotten gains was pure stupidity, and it put us all at risk. I sensed it was only a matter of time before he would challenge Adam over his decision to invite Gerrard to return with us to South Africa. Adam must have sensed the same thing: he pre-emptively laid out his case.

  ‘I warned him this is how you get caught but the boy doesn’t want to listen. I can see he has stopped caring what happens to ’imself. That is why I want him to come to South Africa. Gerrard could be me, or you, Sudi. He deserves a chance but nobody ever give him one.’

  Gerrard sipped his beer and uncomprehendingly pulled chunks of beef off kebab sticks. I was with Sudi – the guy was trouble. It was hard to say what it was about Gerrard that I found repellent (the details of his methods only emerged later). He had a nice face, a nice smile. If I had been able to speak with him I might have felt differently, but in the absence of shared language anything I chose to say had to go through Adam, and he was in no mood to play interlocutor. In fact, it seemed that, having led me this far into his life, he now wanted to hurry through to the conclusion of his story, to be rid of the burden of constant explication and translation. He spoke fast, drank fast, ate nothing.

  Once Gerrard had paid the table’s bill, Adam went dancing down the street, throwing his hands up, rapping, cursing, greeting people on the go, walking backwards, stumbling forwards. He led a long trail down a series of dirt roads, cutting through taverns and crossing open sewers until we came to a dirt panhandle dominated by a large white daladala up on stocks. It was a Japanese Hino, a thirty-seater with lime, apple and olive stripes going around the middle. Two shirtless men were sitting on blue water drums outside the passenger door, sipping black coffee from teacups. There were several more young men inside the bus, leaning against the dashboard or lounging on the front benches. Adam stepped in to cries of ‘KiPaka … KiPaka Memory!’

  ‘This is the clubhouse, where me and my friends used to chill back in the day.’

  The bus had belonged to a Chinese woman, he said, but it had broken down and stayed put because she did not have the money to fix it. Adam and his teenage friends had offered to protect it in exchange for a small fee, and they had done this by using it as a base for smoking weed and plotting their juvenile heists. The bus had become a way of life; for many of the original gang members, it remained exactly this. Their clothes and cooking utensils filled the baggage shelf above the seats. A mattress rested atop the white pleather seats, its green sheet embroidered with the image of a peacock rising upwards from a rose.

  Adam was instantly offered the driver’s seat, where he sat pouring ganja smoke out of his mouth and nose: KiPaka Memory, back at the wheel.

  The name had a history, having initially belonged to a famous house robber in Temeke.

  ‘That guy had the skills of a cat, a paka,’ said Adam. ‘This guy would never forget it if you crossed ’im, which is why they added Memory to his name. KiPaka Memory. But in the end someone put witches on that guy and he died, and people started calling me KiPaka Memory because I was now the best house robber in Temeke. In Cape Town the boys took that name and changed it to Memory Card.’

  Leaving Adam to his friends I retreated to the back of the bus. Here, unexpectedly comfortable and suddenly exhausted, I closed my eyes and played an old game, in which I imagine myself turned back into my adolescent self and, from this place of innocence and inexperience, try to make sense of the surrounding sounds and conversations. I was relishing my younger self’s abject confusion when the words Chawa Suga stood out from the torrent of Swahili issuing from the front of the bus. I opened my eyes to see Sudi slamming his palms on the dashboard.

  ‘You know what?’ Adam shouted down to me. ‘These guys say that Chawa Suga was here just a couple of weeks ago. Here in this bus. Can you imagine? We just missed him. He was staying with some guys down the way. If we knew this he would be finished, but these boys say he already left Dar es Salaam. They don’t know where he is now.’

  For ten days it had been possible to forget about Cape Town and the tensions that had washed through the Foreshore following Aubadeeleh’s murder, but Sudi was now back to punching his palm with his fist. The hazing marijuana smoke aside, the bus suddenly felt small and cloying.

  Adam’s phone rang, and he put his hand up for silence. His voice instantly modulated, losing its fierce edge. He put his shirt back on.

  ‘That was my adoption mama. She says we must meet at her friend’s party. We have to go now.’

  To save time, we hailed a Bajaji and went speeding down Taifa Road. Adam took the opportunity to fill me in on the missing months between his departure from Kiparang’anda and his arrival in Temeke.

  ‘When I was 14 Suna took me to live in a small village on Mafia Island. I was going to take you there, and Suna even bought two mosquito nets for us to sleep under, but we ran out of time.’

  Mafia, or Chole Shamba, is the southernmost island of the Zanzibar Archipelago and, of the inhabited islands, easily the least touristic. Suna’s only other brother had settled there in the seventies, in a traditional fishing community on the shoreline of Chole Bay. He owned two buildings, and made one available to his sister.

  ‘Suna used to make me carry water every day in these big fucking containers,’ Adam continued. ‘I used to feel my neck crushing. I used to think I was never going to grow, because the water was always pushing me down.’

  Feeling little but hate for his mother, Adam plotted his escape. The plan had come to him some weeks before, when he had watched the village coconut traders pushing their mashuas and ngalawas out into the bay in the early evening before climbing aboard and unfurling the sea-stained sails. It always amazed him that such wreck-like things could suddenly come to life and move out over the ocean, eventually disappearing into darkness. He knew from listening to the talk around the village that the boats set course for Dar es Salaam, travelling through the night to deliver their cargo to market in the early morning. They would sail into the mouth of the harbour and tie up in the small inlet at the fish market, where the traders would be waiting with their baskets. Adam had studied these boats, and had found only one place where he might be able to hide himself: the wet, dark aperture beneath the bow deck.

  ‘It’s where the pwesa go,’ he said. ‘The octopuses. If someone catches one of those things, and it disappears, he knows he will always find it right at the front of the boat, in the furthest, darkest place. They put a piece of wood in there to stop this happening but an octopus as big as a football can fit through a space like this,’ he said, isolating the thumbnail of one hand with the fingers of his other. ‘I don’t know how they do that.’

  On the appointed afternoon Adam had waded out to his chosen boat and, after clambering aboard, had worked his way into the prow cavity, pulling the octopus barrier into place behind him. When his presence had been discovered it was well after dark, and the vessel was hours from the shore.

  ‘They told me they were going to throw me in the sea when we reached a place where the sharks are, but they were just joking. Actually, they were amazed. They said they never he
ard of nobody stowing a fishing boat before.’

  The traders had made Adam sit out the night on the gunwale. By the time the boat had slipped into the neck of Dar es Salaam harbour, he was as tired as he had ever been. He had taken in the east-facing cityscape for the first time, the morning light caught in the palms on Sokoine Drive, and behind these a series of large white buildings with red roofs: St Joseph’s Cathedral, Azania Front Lutheran Church, the rectangular face of the Kilimanjaro Hotel. More impressive, though, were the ships lined up against the long port wall. A container ship with three cranes on its vast deck was just then being tugged out into the channel: an entire city block detaching from the shoreline and sliding out to sea, the wake lifting the ngalawas up as if they were sticks, before crashing onto the stone walls of the fish market.

  Adam had known the traders would not let him off the boat, even to take a piss, so he had waited until nobody was looking his way before slipping into the water. He had walked down the beach towards the docks, half-expecting to feel a hand on his shoulder at any second. When he had made it into the food market, he’d known he was free. And, just like the boy who had lost his parents over the Eid weekend, Adam had fallen in with the Posta Beachboys. During the day, he’d helped market shoppers to carry their bags to the bus station. At night, he’d smoked joints and slept on the beach.

  ‘It felt better, you know. My family didn’t care about me so I stopped caring about them.’

  One of the market regulars he used to help was called Rehema. She was younger than Suna, but twice her size. She always looked for Adam and tipped him more than she needed to.

  ‘One day Rehema said she needed me to help her to take the bags to Temeke. I said, “Fine, let’s go,” and we caught the bus. When we came to her house she showed me an empty room and said, “This one is yours if you want it. You can stay here for as long as you want.”’