Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  ‘Amin,’ the smokers all said at once, ‘Amin’, and they came in search of our hands, shaking them meaningfully and saying good luck, good luck, Allah be with you. Then we were off, once again picking out bricks in sewage.

  I wanted to throw up when we reached the hitchhiking point on the side of Morogoro Road, a place called Kimala. I started stumbling off towards the banks of a small river but Adam called after me.

  ‘Yow Sean, we going.’

  I looked back to see a newspaper delivery truck idling in the road. One at a time we clambered over the tailgate into a dark Tetris-scape of newspaper parcels.

  ‘Chukua safari ki,’ said Sudi, and giggled.

  Our small, dark capsule travelled southwards at high speeds, and each bump in the road caused our bodies to sink deeper into the freight. Blind and covered in parcels we passed through or skirted some of the places tourists come to Tanzania to see – Kitulanghalo Forest Reserve, Mikumi National Park, Udzungwa Mountains National Park. We saw nothing, only the shut-up dukas in the deserted towns we stopped in to make newspaper drops: Kibaha, Mlandizi, Morogoro, Mikumi, Iringa. Every stop was a blow to our comfort, as more and more of the relatively soft parcels disappeared until we were left sitting on the bones of the truck bed.

  By the time we reached Makambako, it was light. We had covered 655 kilometres in six hours with six stops. Allah, said Sudi, was watching over us. We all sat up on the last stretch to Mbeya, light shafting through the partially open door, catching the swirling smoke from the morning joints. Adam opened one of the brown-paper packages and studied the front page of The Citizen newspaper.

  ‘It say here that the government has been kicking thousands of foreigners out of the country. Malawians are being beaten and raped in Iringa Province.’

  ‘Not good,’ said Sudi. ‘The Malawian police are going to be angry.’

  At the Mbeya bus terminus, the driver shooed us out of the cab lest anyone from his company cotton on to his racket. Minutes later we were rolling again, standing in the aisle of a packed daladala. The vehicle climbed slowly through the tea-covered hills around Ipinda, and descended much more quickly to the Tanzania–Malawi border post on the Songwe River. We clambered out at the main intersection of Kasumulu town and headed for the market, where Adam and Sudi bought a few cobs of weed and three yellow fever certificates. They took turns entering the dealer’s long drop to stow their ndongas. Then they called for bottles of water. When these arrived they removed the Qur’anic prayer papers from their pockets and fed them down the necks of the bottles. We watched the paper relax and slowly sink, the red ink drifting free in hazy trails. I followed their example and we all took several sips while Sudi led us in another du’a.

  Tension filled our bodies on the short walk to the border. I went into the immigration office first. When I exited, a large-bodied man in slacks and a polo shirt was pointing at Sudi’s kofia.

  ‘Are you a holy man?’ he asked. ‘Are you going to say a du’a for us?’

  Sudi said, ‘No, why do you need a du’a? You don’t need a du’a?’

  The man flashed an identity card.

  ‘Tanzanian intelligence, come with me.’

  Adam was exiting the office as they passed. ‘You too, beach-y boy,’ the officer said.

  I positioned myself on the loading wall of the truck bay, feigning calm under the gaze of interested officials. Half an hour passed before the friends reappeared. Adam signalled that I should follow. We walked in silence to the bridge over the Songwe.

  When we were closer to the Malawian post than the Tanzanian, Adam said, ‘I was honest with ’im. I said we are going to South Africa to look for ships, hoping for a better life. I told him you were with us, to tell our story. He took TSh20 000 and told us to go.’

  On the other side we were swarmed by money traders, and I realised I was sick. I had put my chronically sore throat down to smoking too many Sports in Dar es Salaam’s unga houses, but now my head hurt and my skin felt clammy. I thought, Please, just not malaria.

  We had our documents stamped by Malawian officials, who could not have seemed less interested in our travel plans.

  ‘I know a place where you can rest,’ said Adam. ‘The bus to Lilongwe is only leaving tonight, in any case.’

  The traders fell away as we turned off the road and started to climb into the hills above the river. Our path bisected a small village of adobe huts and continued towards a line of trees growing alongside a dry riverbed. On the far bank, under a canopy of knitted branches, a dozen young men were sitting around on tyres and paint drums, playing bau or filling shopping bags from an enormous pile of dried marijuana plants.

  They greeted Adam warmly.

  ‘Back so soon!’

  Taking a bucket, Adam walked down to the riverbed and began to dig. Sudi joined him and soon the hole they had scooped out was full of water. Adam ladled it into the bucket with a sawn-off Coca-Cola bottle.

  ‘Have a wash,’ he said. ‘Nobody will mind.’

  The water was cold – earth water. I brushed my teeth with it, rinsed my mouth and felt better. Sudi stripped off his pants a few metres down the course and had a shit.

  ‘There are good places on this road,’ said Adam. ‘Some good people, too, like these guys. They never go nowhere, just sit here every day and smoke weed, but they’re good guys. You can come back to this maskani anytime now and you will be welcomed.’

  Taking a different path back to the road, Adam ran ahead to see about buying tickets for the evening bus to Lilongwe. Sudi and I passed a group of teenagers sitting in the grass, who pointed at us and said some things I did not catch. Sudi evidently did, because he walked over and punched the first of them to stand and face him. The youth fell to the ground and put his knees up in surrender. Sudi was not done. He stood over them and gave a short lecture, emphasising his points with shakes of a crooked finger. When he was done the boys stood and shook my hand, saying, ‘Sorry, sorry.’

  ‘They said a bad thing about us,’ said Sudi. ‘They saw us walking out of the bushes and thought we must be doing something there. This one,’ he pointed to the boy with the swollen cheek, ‘said it must be that we are gay, because I am wearing an earring in my right ear. I told them I am a seaman, and seamen are allowed to wear an earring in this ear. Now they understand.’

  Adam came running up the path.

  ‘Hurry, the bus is leaving.’

  We sprinted after him and clambered aboard, taking seats in different rows. The prospect of progressing all night without incident was delicious, but the bus had hardly hit its cruising speed when we struck a roadblock, outside Kaporo. Three policemen in white uniforms boarded the bus and did the you, you and you thing, unerringly picking out all the Tanzanian passengers without having to ask for their travel documents. A collective grumble went up from the Malawians.

  ‘Why do they stop these people?’ asked the man sitting next to me, an apple and orange salesman from Mzuzu. ‘Do they think they will find something wrong with their documentation that the immigration officials did not?’

  In time the Tanzanians were permitted to return to the bus, all except Adam and Sudi. Then they appeared too, and the bus started moving.

  ‘They locked us up,’ said Adam. ‘They read about the Tanzanians killing Malawians in Iringa. They said we were going to have to take a punishment for this violence. They just wanted money, really, but when they could see that we were going to give them fokol they let us go.’

  A roadblock outside Mwenitete was a copy of the earlier experience and in Karonga, where the bus stopped in the transport terminal for an hour, an off-duty policeman sidled up to Sudi and began questioning him. I tried to intervene by asking why he and his associates were so hard on travellers with legitimate, stamped documents. The ploy worked, and the policeman became philosophical.

  ‘When you have something it is easier to accept that ev
eryone has a struggle, and you don’t need to make life more difficult than it has to be. But sometimes you have nothing, and then you must look for opportunity.’

  The bus pulled into Lilongwe’s Old Town precinct at about noon the next day and by mid afternoon we were on a taxi bound for the border with Mozambique, just beyond the town of Dedza. The officials on the Mozambican side knew all about opportunity. They wanted a bribe each from the Beachboys for stamping their emergency papers, and MT3 000 on top of this because their names and addresses weren’t inscribed on the inside of their yellow fever certificates (they were written on the outside). Their ploy with me was to claim that I would not be able to enter the country on a transit visa, as their transit visa stamp was malfunctioning. Instead, I would have to pay three times the amount for a holiday visa. Adam and Sudi were nowhere to be seen when I emerged from the post, virtually broke. A young woman approached me to say that they would be back soon and, if I would follow her, she would take me to the lift she had negotiated on our behalf.

  ‘Yolanda,’ she said, shaking my hand firmly.

  The ride was a yellow, long-nose truck joined to an empty trailer.

  ‘We must wait for your friends before getting in,’ Yolanda said, as taxi touts began to gather around, shouting at us in Nyanja. The problem, she whispered, was that the taxi criers did not appreciate truckers taking their business.

  She became restless. ‘Where are your friends? We need to move.’ When Adam and Sudi finally appeared at a run, the threat of violence was in the air. The truck driver took off at speed, rocks clattering on his trailer.

  The Beachboys clambered onto the back bunk alongside Yolanda and the trucker’s turn boy. Her face was waxy with travel, but her eyes were alert. She looked to be in her mid thirties.

  ‘Sister, you really helped us,’ said Adam. ‘You are our first angel of the road.’

  The three of them hit it off instantly. The Beachboys had travelled these roads a dozen times each, but Yolanda lived on them. She explained that she had been married to a good man, the man of a lifetime, but he had been murdered in 2008 in South Africa, a victim of the xenophobic violence that had exploded in the country’s townships in the month of May. To keep ahead of her grief she had focused on business, using the region’s trucks as transport to fetch goods that were scarce in her home city of Beira.

  Her stories lifted the mood in the cab, though Sudi had fallen sick with withdrawal. When darkness fell, the smell of burning unga wafted through from the back bunks. ‘Nime pona [I feel better],’ he cried, in a shrill falsetto. We had a problem with money, though. Between us we were MT200 short of the fare that Yolanda had negotiated with the driver. When we made this known on the outskirts of Tete, the driver promptly pulled over and dumped us on the side of the road – Yolanda, too. This was no minor inconvenience, because the discovery of the nearby Moatize coalfields had pushed the city limits out by ten kilometres in under a decade. And since this was a boomtown, with all the criminal issues that come with rapid expansion, nobody in their right mind would stop to pick up a group of men after dark. To get around this, Yolanda took off her jacket, rolled her shirt up beneath her breasts and put out her thumb, telling us to hang back in the shadows.

  It wasn’t long before a pickup stopped. The driver, appreciating the ruse, invited us to clamber aboard. With the wind in our clothes we felt cooler than we had in days. Samora Machel Bridge was lit up, the Zambezi River a dark abyss below.

  Our ride dropped us beside the night market at the riverside. This, Yolanda said, was the place for catching southbound trucks. She doubted any would be leaving in the night but promised to ask around. We sat in the dust beside the road. Adam bought a beer and a friendly Mozambican businessman bought one for me. Prostitutes paraded among us but left when it became clear that we had no money. I was still not feeling particularly well; since the Beachboys seemed in no hurry to resolve our transport problem, I joined Yolanda, who was drinking with two truckers – one an elderly mestizo, moustachioed and wearing a red vest, and the other a Somali who looked to be in his early forties.

  ‘You have a lift to Inchope tomorrow, I think. This Somali man will take two, and his friend will take one. They will sleep here tonight and leave at about 3 a.m. You can relax on the back of the trucks tonight, because they are carrying no loads. In the morning you can sleep in the cabs on the road. I’ll be going with.’

  We had spent all our meticais, however, and although Sudi had R800 stowed up his backside the truckers doubted they would be able to convert this to local currency along their route, and refused to take payment in rands. I produced my BlackBerry. ‘That will work,’ said Yolanda. She thought for a minute, made a phone call, and then proposed buying the phone off me herself for the price of three fares to Inchope, with dinner thrown in. Satisfied with the arrangement, the truckers drained their Laurentina Blacks and walked over to their rigs.

  Yolanda opened her luggage and produced two colourful khangas, which she said we could spread on the cold metal of the trailer, humping our shoes under the edges to make pillows. The Saturday night revelry in the riverside bars continued until after midnight; when the music dimmed and then ended, the sound of mosquitoes came up. Light broke over the Zambezi at about 4.30 a.m. and, at six, the drivers cracked open their doors, pissed at the roadside and washed their faces with bottled water. At about seven, the Somali invited us up into his cab, and then walked a little way down the road, trying to call Yolanda, who was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Did you already give the girl the phone?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then she’s gone, man. We’re fucked.’

  Preoccupied with this new predicament, I hardly noticed Adam’s hand whistling past my head. He burrowed into the storage space in the upper console porthole and came away with the trucker’s fat wallet.

  ‘Nah man, put it back,’ I hissed.

  ‘Chill,’ said Adam. ‘This man has too much money. Is he coming?’

  ‘Uh –’ I glanced at the trucker, still with his phone to his ear, ‘– no.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘No.’

  When the Somali turned to face the cab, the wallet was back in its place.

  ‘It’s all right, Sean,’ said Adam, stowing his takings under the inner sole of his right shoe. ‘We don’t take everything, just a little. This trucker was drunk last night, and I know he hasn’t counted his money this morning. Trust me, this is how we do it.’

  Adam had taken MT1 200, about R300. If Yolanda had run off with my phone, it was possibly just enough to get us to Inchope, as planned. Yolanda did appear, though, at a run. She arrived out of breath and smelling of spirits.

  ‘I overslept, I’m so sorry. I was drinking till 5 a.m., then I went to this other place to sleep.’

  With Sudi installed in the second cab, the truckers pressurised their brakes and started off. Yolanda and Adam were soon snoring away on the bottom and top bunks, leaving me to undergo the mortification of the Somali’s first stop alone. He grabbed his wallet, went through his money slowly and pulled some notes out. When he clambered back in with a haul of potatoes and charcoal, his expression was untroubled. Steering the truck down the 102, he asked what our business was. I explained that the other two were full-time stowaways, and I was planning to tell their stories.

  ‘Lot of stories on this road,’ he said.

  His own story eclipsed most for interest. He said he had lived the life of a trucker since the late eighties, first as a turn boy in Somalia, fagging for older truckers on the increasingly fraught Mogadishu–Addis and Mogadishu–Nairobi routes, and then as a licensed driver of super rigs in Kenya. He had worked out of Mombasa first and then Dar es Salaam, moving goods inland to Kigali, Lusaka, Lilongwe, even as far west as Kinshasa, along the delta of roads known collectively as the Trans-African Highway.

  In 2003, he started to hear of opportunities
to the south.

  ‘Everyone knew that you can sell anything in Zimbabwe at this time – clothes, food, even soap, you could sell it, because in the shops there was nothing.’

  There was also, of course, the diamond game – the opportunity to mule rough stones from Zimbabwe’s Chiadzwa diamond fields over the Machipanda border, taking them on to Chimoio, which has an airport.

  ‘That was a good time,’ said Yolanda, now awake and sitting on the bunk. ‘If you are interested in diamonds, I can still get them for you.’ Or, if I knew the right people, she offered to show me where she had buried a sizeable rhino horn in a field on the outskirts of Beira. The Somali smiled. The two, clearly, were old confederates.

  We made several more stops for provisions, which included a chicken, two pigeons in a reed cage, several more sacks of charcoal, a goat and a large bunch of sugar-cane stalks. The pigeons were layered one on top of the other in the tiny reed cage, and whenever the cab jounced they pecked at each other’s heads for a few seconds before falling still again. The chicken hid itself behind my seat and merely panted, if chickens can be said to pant. Yolanda clambered out in Chimoio and met her brother, who gave her money for the BlackBerry, enough for our passage and an additional MT200 for good measure. We thanked her profusely.

  ‘God bless you, sister,’ said Adam.

  Inchope was the end of the line for the two truckers, but, before they continued eastwards to Beira, Adam insisted they both sit down for a chicken lunch, which he paid for with the stolen notes. I wanted a wash, and struck it lucky at the Estalagem Bambamba, a trucker’s lodge, restaurant and bar. The proprietor handed me a full bucket of well water and a begrimed plastic cup, and pointed in the direction of the toilet. Like so many bathrooms on Africa’s east coast, the sheet-metal room comprised a large keyhole of porcelain above a pit latrine. Elevated slightly above this was the bathing slab, designed to drain directly into the pit. The stench was bad but the water was cool and the road dirt came off with my shampoo and disappeared into the dark latrine.