Daniel Peter returned to Cape Town in late 2013, and has been in and out of Pollsmoor Prison since. He is no longer the clear-featured boy I met in 2011. His fighting abilities, repeatedly tested in the prison environment, have made him bold to the point of recklessness. In 2015 he ripped a gold chain from the neck of a male tourist on Darling Street, and later pawned it for R12 000. He sent much of this back to his sister in Dar es Salaam, and used the remainder to buy a considerable stash of marijuana from Swaziland, in this way setting himself up as a major dealer under the Foreshore bridges. In January 2016, he was openly smoking a joint on his corner near the Grand Parade toilet blocks when two cops he did not recognise came for him. They demanded he hand over the joint. He refused, and swallowed it. The officers arrested him anyway, claiming on the charge sheet that he had swallowed hard drugs. The judge accepted this version of events and, taking into account the young Tanzanian’s 11 previous convictions, sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment. I have neither seen nor heard from him since.
Mege JoJo was cured of TB in 2014, although he remains living in the Blikkiesdorp sick house, where he has appointed himself chief medical adviser and housemaster, overseeing the convalescence of the seriously ill and injured. His efforts have earned him the deepest respect in Beachboy circles.
I’ve heard from several people that P Diddy is alive and well and living in Pretoria, where he bought an old scooter with the money I gave him for the journey back to Dar es Salaam. He still harbours hopes of returning to Dar es Salaam a rich man, apparently, so that he can reclaim the affections of his childhood sweetheart.
Feisal’s run of bad luck continued. He called from Pollsmoor in late 2013 after being arrested for possession and, in 2014, a nurse called from Somerset Hospital to say that he had been found walking down Long Street naked in the middle of the night. When the CCID guards picked him up, he was jabbering and in a highly distressed state.
‘He says you are going to send him home,’ the nurse said.
While resting in hospital he sent me a series of reflective SMSs, all in characteristic upper-case script.
BEING IN SOUTH AFRICA I LEARNED A LOT OF THINGS. EVERYONE HAS GOT HIS OWN WAY OF HOW TO SURVIVE AND ON MY SIDE I AM AN UNTALKETIVE PERSON. AINT BOASTING MYSELF BUT AM TRULY THE NON TALKATIVE ONE. I DON’T LIKE A LUXURY LIFE ALTHOUGH I HAD WHEN I WAS BORN BUT I AINT REALLY PASSED THROUGH THAT WAY FOR A LONG TIME NOW.
WHAT I CAN SAY TO U IS THAT MY LIFE IS NOT COMFORTABLE.
WHAT I HATE IS GOSSPING AND HATERS. THOSE ARE MOST WHAT I HATE ALTHOUGH THERE’S A LOT THAT I DO HATE.
BEACHES LIFE NEEDS HEART AND NOT JUST HEART BUT A REALLY STRONG HEART, OTHERWISE YOU WONT SURVIVE. THAT IS WHAT I GRASP ON MY SIDE, ALTHOUGH THERE ARE MANY STAGES – STEPS LIKE BECOMING A DRUG DEALER AND ROBING PEOPLE, WHICH CAN MAKE YOU AFFORD A BETER LIFE ON THE BEACH.
WHAT I MISS SINCE BEING HERE IS TO GO HOME FIRST FOR A WHILE THEN TO COME BACK FOR ANOTHER PURPOSE, NOTHING ELSE. I BELIEVE WHEN I REACH HOME AND BEFORE I COME BACK EVERYTHING IS GONNA BE ALRIGHT AND MY LIFE GONNA BE CHANGED HERE IN SOUTH AFRICA.
BUT WHAT IS NECESSARY FOR ME IS TO GO HOME FIRST.
On being discharged from hospital, Feisal walked directly to Cape Town Central Police Station, just up from the Grand Parade. He stood in the queue for an hour. When he reached the front, he confessed to the duty officer that he was an undocumented foreigner and should be deported. The officer laughed at him.
‘You’re not the first one to try to get a free ticket home,’ she said, before ordering him out onto Buitenkant Street.
To try to establish which avenues an undocumented and penniless African like Feisal could pursue to leave the country legally, I wrote to Corey Johnson on the advocacy desk at the Scalabrini Centre.
‘The media narrative in this country is all about foreigners fighting to get in’, he replied, ‘but I can think of more than a few people who are desperate to find a way back out, who have sickened of or become disillusioned by the economic opportunities, or who have endured community hatred, violence, harassment, detention and so forth. The list goes on and on.’
He suggested I check out the International Organization for Migration’s Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration programme, but warned that it was a long shot: ‘I’m aware of only a handful of cases that have ever been approved in South Africa. The logistics are breathtaking. Contact needs to be established with the applicant’s family in their home country, and they must express willingness to take this person back. Once this has been established an escort with medical qualifications needs to be booked to accompany the migrant in question on the flight, and then onwards to their living environment, where the escort needs to provide reintegration assistance. This might extend to vocational training, education, further medical assistance, and so forth, depending on the donor funding the IOM is able to access.’
At the time of our exchange, the global news stations were running daily footage of boats wallowing in the Mediterranean’s waters, hopelessly overloaded with Syrian families fleeing war. They were washing up, dead and alive, on European shores – not just Syrians but Kosovans, Afghans, Eritreans, Nigerians, Somalians, Ukrainians, Gambians … ‘the greatest trans-national human migration seen since the start of the Second World War’, the newspapers decreed. In the face of such a crisis, the IOM’s AVRR programme seemed akin to walking a single grain of sand from the bottom to the top of a mighty sand dune in the middle of the Sahara.
In the end, I walked with Feisal to Cape Town station, and booked him a seat on a bus leaving for Johannesburg that night, and another from Johannesburg to Lilongwe, Malawi, leaving three days later. I gave him R2 000 towards managing the remainder of the journey and said goodbye. More than a year later, on 25 September 2015, he sent the following SMS:
HELO SEAN. LONGTIME. HW Z EVRYTIN? THIS MONTH AM GETTING MARRIED TO ANOTHER WOMAN COUSE I DEVORCE MY FIRST WIFE. PLIZ WOULD U CONTIBUTE 5,000 RAND 4MY CELEBRATION. ITS ME FEISAL, TANZANIA.
I am happy to hear you made it home, I replied, and left it at that.
In 2014, Dave Southwood exhibited his extraordinary photographs of Cape Town’s stowaways at the University of the South, Tennessee. In the same year, he published them in broadsheet newspaper format, under the title MEMORY CARD SEA POWER. Often, since, I have passed under bridges in Cape Town and spotted pages of the newspaper pasted to the walls, the images stained by rainwater and stripped by the wind, just as he intended. I will forever be indebted to him for introducing me to Adam and the others all the way back in 2011.
On 13 August 2014, my wife gave birth to a healthy boy. We decided to call him Ruwa, which means ‘water’ in Hausa and ‘the land’ in archaic Shona. This met with Adam’s approval: ‘Your boy can travel either way, cross-country and in the sea.’
Ruwa’s arrival in the world changed everything, not least the way I interacted with the Beachboys. Tanzanian etiquette is based on the acknowledgement of family, so the time taken over greetings has increased markedly. How is Ruwa? I am asked. Then, How is Mama Ruwa? And finally, How are you, Baba Ruwa? As my relationships with certain Beachboys have deepened I have increasingly been able to hold up my end, asking about individual sisters, mothers and grandmothers at home in Tanzania. I never ask after the fathers, though. Of all the Beachboys I have come to know, not a single one knows where his father is. In fact, most have never met their fathers. As a consequence, my Beachboy friends are constantly exhorting me: look after Ruwa. Teach him. Do anything you can. Never forget about him.
I nod. Thank you, I will try.
Adam returned to Cape Town in early 2014. The ship he had stowed away on ended up in Santos, Brazil, where he was put up for a month in a portside hotel while the details of his deportation were worked out. He caught another ship in mid 2015, and ended up back in Dar es Salaam during the lead-up to the general elections. It was a tense time, he said – soldiers everywhere, dispersing public gathe
rings of any description. The government had even warned politicians to refrain from engaging in witchcraft, admitting for the first time that killings of people with albinism tended to rise discernibly during election periods.
The mood infected the whole city. Adam stopped visiting the maskanis in Posta, Temeke and Magomeni, because he encountered too much fighting. He wanted to leave for South Africa immediately, but was told the Iringa highway had become a gauntlet of roadblocks run by violent and grasping policemen. In the end, he sat out the election at Mama Suna’s place on the Kigamboni Peninsula. This allowed him to reconnect with his half-brother Mohamed, who had just completed his matric exams and was selling peanuts down at the ferry terminal while waiting for his results. Once a day the brothers would both walk to the shoreline, and watch the workmen hammering away on the long-overdue Kigamboni Bridge. Dar es Salaam, Adam felt, was changing – had already changed. Some of the changes were clearly for the best, but it was no longer his city. He understood for the first time why older Beachboys in places like Maputo and Richards Bay feared being forced to return to Tanzania, a country they he had spent more time out of than in.
The moment the election results were in, giving the Chama Cha Mapinduzi party yet another term (the CCM has been in power since 1977, making it Africa’s longest-reigning ruling party), Adam returned to Kiparang’anda, the village in which he had spent his childhood. His grandmother, Halima, who had been born in Mbwera before the First World War, had died in her sleep in 2014, almost a year to the day after our visit. She had been buried under the stand of cashew trees growing at the bottom of his uncle’s small farm. Adam said that village parents now warned their children to avoid the place, and especially to avoid picking Uncle Mageni’s cashew fruit.
‘Even in death she got power,’ he said.
To her grave he brought a picture of himself, taken when he was a teen. Suna had showed it to me: a grainy print of a shy, good-looking boy in a blue tracksuit top. He placed it on the grave, and put a sizeable rock on top, to prevent it from blowing away. When he walked away, hand in hand with Mama Suna, he said he felt a strange peace. He had known love as a child, thanks to Halima. His mother had been absent, but she was with him now, and he knew she would love him until her own death, or his.
Back in Dar es Salaam, Adam had one more stop to make before continuing on to South Africa. Rehema had died, too, just a few months before his deportation. ‘It was her heart I think, she was a big woman,’ he said. When he returned to Rehema’s place on Yombo Street in Temeke, an old local called Sekhota informed him that the family had already sold up. Adam stared hard at the familiar blue door in its long concrete wall, and tried to recall every detail that lay behind it: What the tiles had looked like, which ones had cracked and why. What the kitchen curtains had looked like the night they caught fire.
It was all there. The closest thing he had ever known to a happy home may now be closed to him, but he knew he would carry it in his mind forever. Rehema’s body had been buried in Kisutu Cemetery, said Sekhota, but he did not know in which quadrant, and Adam was not about to wander aimlessly around a place of death. Instead, he knocked on the blue door and asked the new owners, ‘Do you have beer, whisky? Anything. I need to pour one drink for my adoption mama, who lived here before you.’ A glass of warm Tusker was duly produced, and Adam tipped some on the house steps before draining the rest. From here he proceeded directly to Morogoro Road and, ten days later, stepped out of a minibus taxi on the deck above Cape Town Station.
As he has done so many times before, Adam landed on his feet. When a young mwiba mwitu called Suleiman Issa was shot and killed by a Woodstock policeman right up against the port fence, Adam took control of the funeral collection, winning the respect of Issa’s many friends. But Cape Town, like Dar es Salaam, is no longer a city he wants to live in. The physical environment of the Foreshore has changed significantly since his arrival in 2011. The traffic islands around Hertzog Boulevard have been fenced off, and a large part of the Nelson Mandela Boulevard underpass has been turned into a boomed parking lot. The dock-facing perimeter of the Culemborg industrial park has also been re-fenced, and hundreds of millions of rands has been spent on new Foreshore skyscrapers and building upgrades. The gentrification of lower Woodstock and Salt River has continued apace; as the local business community has grown in strength, the Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa, which owns the rail yards, has come under significant pressure to clear out the tents and keep them from being re-established.
Already, many of the encampments described in this book are no more. The Beachboys are slowly being pushed northwards, out of the old city suburbs and away from the port. When the physical connection to the port is lost, Adam believes the Sea Power code will die out. ‘When the boys move away from the sea they are not Beachboys any more. They become more like South Africans. Away from the sea all you have is the streets. When you’re in the streets you play by street rules. You can’t bring your own rules there.’
Port and ship security measures have tightened. Captains have become increasingly wise to stowaway techniques. ‘For example,’ says Adam, ‘they used to tie up with just one big rope, which we knew how to climb, but now they tie with two smaller ropes next to each other. Not even Sudi can climb something like this.’
Squeezed between the city and the sea, the Beachboys increasingly take their frustrations out in internecine fashion, stabbing each other and gouging out eyes with broken bottles. ‘Violence is all the young ones know,’ says Adam, no longer hopeful that the situation can be solved from within. ‘Soon we will start seeing bodies, same as what happened in 2009, except this time it will go on and on.’
His escape plan is simple. He seeks one more ship. If it takes him somewhere new, so be it – he will consider this divine direction, and live the experience through. If it results in his being flown back to Dar es Salaam, he intends applying for a Tanzanian passport so that he can enrol in the Merchant Marine Institute on Zanzibar Island. Once he has his ‘seaman book’ (Able Seaman certification), he plans to head north, to seek work not on ships but on fishing trawlers. Ultimately, he hopes to reach and explore the ports of the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.
I have repeatedly offered to look into his prospects of being allowed to return to England, but he has always put me off.
‘I need to do something in the sea first, before I go back. My father was a seaman, and I have his blood. I don’t belong in Africa and I don’t belong in England. I belong in the sea, so this is where I must go.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe thanks to David Southwood for introducing me to the Beachboys, and for encouraging me to go ahead when our collaborative work came to an end. I am also grateful to Dave for permitting me to use his powerful images in this book at no cost.
I have Ingeborg Pelser to thank for convincing me there was a book to be written, and for making this a contractual reality. When Ingeborg departed Jonathan Ball Publishers Ester Levinrad drove this project with care and enthusiasm, and her valuable insights helped transform a dossier into a work of crafted non-fiction. Hedley Twidle and Anna Hartford also provided excellent feedback on the manuscript, twice. Thanks also to Kerri von Geusau and Tammy Joubert, who read and reported back on early drafts. I would also like to mention Angela Voges, who edited the manuscript with great skill and feeling.
Able Seaman-turned-academic Amaha Senu, who heard many of these Beachboys tales from the Beachboys themselves, answered many questions about the seafarers’ experiences of stowaways, in addition to providing me with valuable source materials. I am also thankful to Benyam Bouyalew for allowing me to summarise his published life story, Benyam, and to use his ‘stowaway tips’.
The idea to divide the book into the seasons of a year came from Tom Devriendt, who organised an early article of mine this way. I also owe thanks to Tanya Pampalone, Billy Kahora, Carlos Amato, the team at African Cities Reader and Anton Harber for publ
ishing and supporting my early articles about the Beachboys.
In Tanzania, thanks to Ian Boyd, and also Tania and Hamish Hamilton, for beds and meals and other forms of support.
Final thanks must go to my parents, Brian and Shirley Christie, who helped in so many ways, and most of all to my wife, Andret, whose support for this project kept me going.
Beneath the Nelson Mandela Boulevard flyover on Cape Town’s foreshore live a community of stowaways, young Tanzanian men from the slums of Dar es Salaam. When journalist Sean Christie meets Adam Bashili, he comes to know the extraordinary world of the Beachboys, a multi-port, fourth-generation subculture that lives to stow away and stows away to survive. But as Sean starts to accompany the Beachboys on trips around their everyday Cape Town, he becomes more than a casual observer, serving as sometime moneylender, driver, confidant and scribe, and eventually joining Adam on an unprecedented tour of Dar es Salaam’s underworld and a reckless run down Africa’s east coast. Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard remaps both city and continent, introducing us to the places and people we so frequently overlook.
Sean Christie was born in Zimbabwe in 1980.In 2015, he was awarded a special Taco Kuiper prize for his journalism on the Tanzanian stowaways whose world this book explores, and in 2014 he was a category winner at the CNN MultiChoice African Journalist of the Year Awards. He lives in Cape Town.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission from the publisher or copyright holder.
© Text Sean Christie 2016
Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 28
