Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  Adam had lived with Rehema for three years. During the day he would be on the streets but there would always be a hot meal and a bed waiting for him at night, if he wanted it. It was from Rehema’s house that he had departed for South Africa for the first time. Eight years had passed before they had spoken again, but when Adam had returned to Dar es Salaam after being deported from England he had made a beeline for Rehema’s house.

  ‘She greeted me like I had just gone out to the tavern for a beer. She said, “Your room is there. Will you be in for dinner tonight?” I started crying, man. That woman was pure kindness.’

  Adam had not yet seen Rehema since his arrival in Dar es Salaam, though he had spoken with her on the phone several times. Now, as we approached the meeting place, he looked a little nervous. Mama Rehema was sitting in a Bajaji of her own, her body filling the carriage from end to end. She was wearing a pink skirt with a lime-green top that mustered her ample chest into tight bulges. Her eyes had been made up with parabolic mauve strikes and her lips shone purple.

  ‘I love this woman,’ said Adam, offering Rehema his hand. ‘She understood me at a time when nobody understood me, not even my own mother. Tha’s why I call her my adoption mother.’

  A woman as narrow as Rehema was wide rushed down from the line of dukas and shepherded our party into a small street restaurant, in which we were all served bowls of rice and coconut chicken curry. Sudi and Gerrard were both tinga: the condition of being too stoned to talk or keep one’s eyes open. Rehema roughly poked their ribs with her spoon whenever their heads slumped, and cackled when their eyes opened in red surprise.

  On the other side of the road a DJ was playing to a small crowd of children. Adam wanted to join in but Rehema put a hand on his arm and produced four A4 pages from her handbag, each of which had a passport-sized photograph stuck in a corner. I recognised Sudi, Adam, Gerrard.

  ‘Emergency travel papers,’ Adam announced. ‘Rehema works for the government, so Gerrard paid her TSh120 000 this morning and she already done it, amazing.’

  He started reading from his own document: ‘Temporary Travel Permit … Adam Chazili … Central and East Africa. That means we can use these to go through the border into Malawi. It should say Mozambique as well but we will just write it in later. That means we only have to jump one border, from Mozambique into South Africa.’

  Adam stowed the documents in my bag and led Rehema across the street to the dance floor, which was now dominated by women of similar dimensions wearing identical pink skirts and lime-green tops.

  Sudi, who had sobered up some, explained that the women in Dar es Salaam tend to throw weekly parties, usually on a Sunday. ‘They have many different kinds of parties, they can party for any excuse. They even have something called a Kitchen Party, where they dance naked inside a house, no men allowed.’

  He followed Adam across the road and joined in, caricaturing the ladies’ limited range of movements, pushing his backside out and lifting his elbows to shoulder height. The women encircled him and he threw his hands up in surrender, still dancing from the hips. Gerrard was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Maybe he felt guilty,’ Adam wondered aloud, back at the table for a second course of doughnut-like mandazi. ‘Maybe all these women remind him of the thing he do last night. Or maybe he’s scared to come to South Africa. In Temeke he is somebody, at least, people know ’im. In South Africa nobody knows Gerrard.’

  With our benefactor gone we walked the few kilometres to Rehema’s place, eventually stopping at a long wall of connected homes. The metal door opened on a large, tiled living room of orange walls and green couches. A large television stared out from an uncluttered console.

  ‘When I first came here I was amazed,’ said Adam. ‘The toilet outside had a door and it flushed. Up until then I had never seen a toilet like that. I just shit in it and leave, until somebody explained what you must do.’

  We sank into the couch and watched music videos while Rehema prepared the evening meal. At a point Gerrard called to say he was at the local unga house. He had smoked his remaining money and more, and wanted us to join him, bringing cash to settle his debts. Adam said this was not possible and Gerrard cut the call.

  ‘Fuck him. He know I never go out after dark, not since I was arrested for stabbing that guy. The police know me too well here. If anything happens they come looking for KiPaka Memory, to this day.’

  Adam had left Rehema’s house for South Africa on his 17th birthday. Now, 14 years on, he was back where he had started, watching Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds’ music video with tired eyes. The situational irony did not seem to bother him. Marlon Brando’s generation of Beachboys had stowed away and lived and worked abroad with relative ease, but that was before the Maastricht Treaty integrated the European Union’s common migration policy. It was before the worm on population growth charts reared up, especially in poor countries, before 9/11 and the fast-tracked ratification of the ISPS.

  I am now more convinced than ever that, for Adam, stowing away has become an end in itself, a form of extreme sport, like base-jumping, or kayaking over waterfalls. He doesn’t need to do it – it is far from rational – but it marshals his energies and gives him a purpose that would otherwise be lacking. It is the thing that separates him from the man his uncle Mageni expected him to become: a toiler in a field. The thing that separates him from the man he would have become: a man like Gerrard, who, incidentally, we never saw again.

  ◆

  Back at Sudi’s place, I was woken just after sunrise by the sound of Adam’s voice in the yard. He was speaking in Swahili at an explosive rate, only switching to English at the end of the conversation.

  ‘I’m showing my friend around Dar es Salaam first, then I’ll take care of fucking business.’

  When he returned to the room he went straight for one of the clothes piles and retrieved the Lenovo laptop hidden within.

  ‘Come, we need to make some paper today. Bring your bags, you never know what is gonna ’appen. Maybe we gonna leave tonight already.’

  His mood relaxed on the bus to Magomeni East and, stepping out on Morogoro Road, he handed some money to a shopkeeper, who fed three sticks of sugar cane through a grinder and produced three glasses of juice ya miwa, with lemon.

  Adam winced as the sweet and sour liquid hit his gills.

  ‘Drink it, we need energy today.’

  Magomeni was Sudi’s territory, and he led the way to a duka that sold pirated DVDs and assorted electronics. Adam produced the laptop and a negotiation ensued. He asked for TSh300 000. The burly store owner offered TSh70 000. Adam dropped his price to TSh200 000 but the store owner flicked his fingers to indicate we might as well leave. A triangular yelling match ensued, with Sudi berating Adam passionately for behaving in an offensive manner on his turf. This caused Adam to stalk out of the shop, leaving Sudi to do the deal for TSh70 000.

  ‘Memory is under too much pressure,’ said Sudi, allowing Adam to get ahead some distance before explaining the source of his frustration. It had to do with unga, as I suspected. Sudi confirmed that the electronic goods I had brought to Dar es Salaam had been given to me by a drug dealer. The plan had been for Adam to sell the items and put the cash towards the purchase of a quantity of heroin, which he and Sudi would take back to Cape Town. Adam had promised the dealer half a kilogram, but this was unrealistic in the current environment. The last time Adam had moved through Dar es Salaam, the price for ten grams of heroin – one ndonga – had been TSh150 000, roughly US$100. This time, the lowest quote the Beachboys had sourced for a ndonga was TSh300 000. The price hike was a consequence of constrained supply, which the local newspapers, quoting government officials, had ascribed to the good work being done by a task force set up by President Jakaya Kikwete some years before.

  On the streets, though, the traffickers were saying the shortage was attributable to the president’s son, Ridhiwani Kikwete, widely bel
ieved to be one of the nation’s biggest importers of heroin. He had been caught – again, street rumours – trying to move a large shipment of the stuff out of China. Ordinarily this would have meant a short stay on death row in a Chinese prison, but Kikwete Jnr, or so ran the allegations, had returned home safe and sound, at about the time that a large gas prospecting concession was mysteriously plucked from the cradle of advanced tender processes and handed to a Chinese company.

  Whatever the true causes, the increase in prices had landed Adam in a difficult position. In the days before I had arrived, said Sudi, he and Adam had visited several suppliers known to the Cape Town dealer. They had promised certain of these suppliers that they would be in touch when they had the money together, but it had been nearly a month. This morning one of the suppliers had called Adam’s buyer in Cape Town to say he believed Adam was a phony, lacking both the money and the backbone to complete a serious deal. It was this information, relayed by the Cape Town dealer over the phone, which had sent Adam into this morning’s defiant rage.

  Still, the problem of money remained. Between them, Sudi and Adam had saved R5 000 of the bribe monies paid to them by the agent of the ship on which they had stowed away. The electrical hardware had collectively fetched TSh450 000, a portion of which had already been spent. By leaning on his tenants for their next rent instalments (a request so irregular it had nearly ended in violence), Sudi had manufactured a further TSh1 000 000, bringing the pot to almost TSh2 000 000. In unga terms, this equated to 60 grams, or six ndongas.

  Even before Sudi had concluded his explanation I could feel myself being drawn inwards towards the problem. I braced for the inevitable.

  ‘If you can maybe lend Memory TSh3 000 000,’ said Sudi, ‘we can buy nine more ndongas. I think everyone will be happy then, and we can leave Dar es Salaam.’ Back in Cape Town, he said, we would cut the heroin with Panado and the leavened gear would fetch approximately four times the purchasing price, even at the current prices. I would, he assured me, double my investment.

  I shook my head regretfully and told him that, as things stood, the amount required was ten times what I had in my bank account, and there was the journey back to South Africa to consider. He cut me off.

  ‘It’s okay, Sean, no problem.’

  He never asked again.

  With the question of my complicity resolved, the air cleared and Adam made his peace with the fact that they would only be able to afford six ndongas. After a short discussion with Sudi to determine a preferred seller, we set out in an easterly direction through Magomeni, stopping outside a small house with a red metal door. Sudi entered the house alone, leaving us in the shade of the buildings on the far side of the road. After half an hour he emerged in the company of a man with very dark skin.

  ‘Tha’s Senegal,’ said Adam. ‘He’s a proper gangster, proper. The police know ’im. They want ’im.’

  The heroin supplier was wearing an unbuttoned jeans vest, and jeans printed with a paint-spatter pattern. Multiple chains swung forwards off his chest when he leaned in to punch our fists.

  ‘We got a deal?’ Adam asked.

  Sudi and Senegal nodded.

  ‘Unbelievable, boys, unbelievable.’ Adam knocked his fist around again, and danced off to fetch three Safari quarts from a nearby duka. We clinked the bottles and poured the cold beer into our mouths.

  ‘I think we’re ready to go to South Africa now.’

  Senegal downed his beer and returned to his house. Adam waited until the red door had shut before saying, ‘That nigger has the most expensive unga in Dar es Salaam I think, but we chose ’im because his brother lives in Cape Town. He knows that if he sells us shit, we got his brother. It’s not really nice but we will be far away when we find out the quality of the drugs, so we must have insurance.’

  Sudi stared off at three young girls climbing out of a Bajaji. They looked at us and giggled. He stood up, grabbed a sandalled foot, and stretched his thigh. This was a bittersweet moment for him. He would be leaving his wife and child again for an indeterminate period, and wanted to go directly to them now.

  Adam downed his beer. ‘Let’s go.’

  We followed Sudi into a quarter of Magomeni called Mwembechai, crossed a sandy football pitch and descended a long flight of cracked steps, stopping at a house that verged on the milky blue stream, overlooking a dumpsite.

  ‘Nice, innit,’ said Adam, jumping up to grab some green bananas from one of the plants flourishing by the water’s edge. We found Sauda playing a game of bau indoors with Esau and her sister. They remained indoors, shy, but in due course spread their reed mats on the ground outside. The afternoon passed in quiet conversation and games of bau, and later Mama Esau served a meal of ugali and beans. Esau sat on his haunches, watching his father sitting shirtless against the wall of their home, balling pap and beans. When the meal was over he went to him with water and a dish. Sudi washed and dried his hands, and asked me for a piece of paper and a pen. Using my journal as a backboard he wrote a four-line note, which he handed back to Esau. The boy folded it and went scampering up the stairs, which had grown gloomy in the fading light.

  ‘Time for us to take a walk too,’ said Adam.

  Two teams were going at it on the football pitch, kicking up dust. The mouths of the surrounding dukas were bright with hurricane lamps, and the chairs put out by the owners were all occupied by spectators. Adam bought two beers, handing over more than the required amount.

  ‘I bet on the team with no shirts on. There’s a game here every evening, and betting on it is the big entertainment in Magomeni. The team that wins gets some of the money, so if you’re in a good team you don’t need a job, you can just play. Sudi used to be in a good team back in the day. He’s a big guy here in Magomeni East, people respect ’im, and if they don’t respect ’im, they fear him at least.’

  Esau approached, skirting the crowd at the edge of the pitch. Adam took three strips of paper off him, each covered in Arabic sentences, written in red koki.

  ‘The imam made a du’a for each of us and blessed it, so that we can have good luck on our journey.’ Adam pocketed the precious slips. He made Esau stand beside us.

  ‘Sudi need some more time alone with Sauda.’

  The players played until the only light left was burning in the dukas. We remained, nursing our Serengetis until the shop owner came for his chairs. At Sauda’s place we found Sudi packing his bag by the light of a paraffin lamp while his wife wound tape around the ndongas, increasing the girth of each until they resembled small grenades.

  ‘Yow,’ Adam gulped.

  In Cape Town I had given Sudi an old pair of trainers, roughly five sizes too big for his feet, and it was these clown shoes that he laced up now before shouldering his pack and leaving the house. He and his wife walked hand in hand. At the top of the stairs they kissed and hugged, and then she turned and went back down into darkness. Esau continued walking, and would have followed us to the ends of the earth if Sudi hadn’t stopped and told him to go home. He shook the boy’s hand formally and cuffed his head. The boy ran off without a word.

  With the aim of acquiring a small store of unga for travel purposes, Sudi led a route down narrow alleyways flooded with sewage into which bricks had been dropped at regular intervals. He picked these out with his cellphone’s torch beam, and we proceeded carefully from one brick to the next, hands on the walls on either side, until we reached the Magomeni maskani. Heroin had been the great constant of our days in Dar es Salaam, and wherever we happened to travel – Sinza, Kigamboni, Posta, Magomeni, Temeke – part of the day or night had been spent in the local unga house. In Temeke, this had been a yard between three houses, accessible at the front from the road and at the back through the house in which the dealer and his family lived (although as a rule this was only used as an escape route in case of police raids). In Posta, it had been tents on the beach.

  The maska
ni we turned into now comprised a series of lean-tos at the back of a double-storey building. Panels of plywood propped on tyres served as tables; around each of these, thirty to forty men sat smoking. It was all they were doing. There was no gongo, no beer, only smouldering cocktails and the detritus of cocktail production: marijuana stalks and pips, broken tiles, bits of metal, burned-up matches and twisted boxes of Sportsman cigarettes, which the smokers call Sports. Strips of kattes were being passed around, long as the tails of kites. Sealed into every inch was a grain of heroin no bigger than the Imodium tablets I’d been taking for my chronically unsettled stomach. Each table seemed to have its own psychic weather. At some, the men said nothing at all, and seemed not to notice what was happening beyond their own hands. At others, conversation burned like boiler fire, rising in anabatic walls.

  I mentioned this observation to Adam, who said it was quite normal. ‘People sit here for hours, days even. When they are high, everyone is high together. When one person is tinga, all the others at his table will soon be tinga, too.’

  Just occasionally, he said, the tables fell into step.

  ‘When this happens you get what we call a beach fire, a party you have to see with your own eyes to believe it is possible.’

  We joined the table of euphorics, Adam scuttling around with TSh10 000 notes, posing for photographs with his face alongside long, humpy lines of heroin. I was given a prime seat and offered a line to sniff. For perhaps half an hour the air became hot and the volume of conversations increased dramatically. Then quite suddenly everyone fell silent, closed their eyes and turned their palms upwards in front of their chests. Sudi began chanting a well-known supplication for travel.

  Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Subhanalazi Sakharalanaa haza wa ma kunna lahu muqrineena wa innaa ilaa rabbinaa lamunqalibun, Allahuma nina nas’aluka fi safarina hazal Biraa wal Taqwa, wa minal Amali ma tardha, Allahumma hawwin alayna safarana haza watwiannaa bu’dah Allahumma anta as-Sahibu fi safar, wal khalifatu fil ahl, Allahumma inni auzubika min wa’thaa’i as-safar, wa kaabati al mandhar wa soow’i al munqalab fil maali wal Ahl.