‘Any other time you will find them at the Grand Parade,’ he said.
◆
For most Beachboys the day starts at about 6 a.m., often under the cover of fog reaching over from Table Bay. Those who sleep under the Foreshore bridges roll out of their middens beside the concrete pillars and wander over to the irrigation spray heads on the Hertzog Boulevard traffic island, which have been jimmied so that they leak constantly – just enough to keep the depressions in the ground full of drinkable water. Those who have chosen to make their camps directly across from the port, alongside Table Bay Boulevard, clamber out of their home-made tents, or mchondolos, and wander into the railway reserve to empty their bowels beside the tracks before joining the bridge-dwelling Beachboys on the walk into town.
Up Oswald Pirow they go, over the top of Old Marine Drive and on, tracing the perimeter of the Castle of Good Hope in the direction of the city centre. Breaking left up Harrington Street, they arrive at the warehouses in which Cape Town’s informal traders store their wares overnight. The trolleys in which the goods are stowed are taller than a man and half as long as a car, and their four tiny wheels make them extremely hard to manoeuvre on the city’s cracked and congested streets. For a R10 fee, the Beachboys will wrestle the trolleys down to the daily market on the Grand Parade. For another R10, they will erect the traders’ stalls, cover them with green shade net and arrange the wares on tables and hangers. In the evenings, for the same fees, they will do it all in reverse.
This was explained to me by Adam’s friend Barak, who has extremely long eyelashes and, today, a cut to the bone across the knuckle of his right index finger.
‘Bullshit thing this, pushing trolleys. Just look what it done to me,’ he said, wiggling the wound so that it opened and closed like a fish’s mouth. ‘But what else must I do? If I don’t push trolleys I have to pick pockets, or sell drugs.’
We wandered down Buitenkant Street together, passing a string of hooting sedans held up by a caravan of slow-moving trolleys. Barak wanted a smoke so we bought a few singles from a Somali tuck shop outside Mavericks, the city’s most notorious strip club. A fashion model came mincing out of a nearby salon in pedicurist’s slippers, cotton wool between her delicate toes, and further along a stout woman yelled ‘Marthinus, Marthinus, Marthinus!’ at the bomb-catching grates over the holding-cell windows of the Magistrate’s Court. Just before the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God we turned left down Longmarket Street and stepped onto the Grand Parade at its southern corner, passing Chapmac Traders and AB’s Fast Foods.
If Cape Town has a crucible of cultures, then the Grand Parade is it. Here, the Italianate City Hall overlooks a market in which francophone immigrants display knock-off handbags alongside Rastafarians in sackcloth clothes, who put out tubers harvested from the slopes of Table Mountain for the interest of commuters between the railway station and the inner city. After serving as the city’s social heart for centuries, the Parade, like much of the CBD, had started to deteriorate by the late eighties. In the early nineties it was possibly the most dangerous block in the city, described by a contributor to local history as ‘somewhere you would have expected to be in downtown Beirut’. In an attempt to regain control of the area, the South African Police Service erected a scaffold tower at one end of the square so that information about crimes in progress could be relayed to ground-level policemen via radio. Today, the Parade is no longer the gauntlet of violent crime it once was, but it remains the perfect place to hide in plain sight if you happen to be foreign-born and undocumented.
‘See that stone? That is where you will always find Beachboys,’ said Barak, pointing at the large statue of Edward VII, which rises out of the encampment of market stalls like a smoker’s finger. On the plinth’s granite steps, some twenty Beachboys were lounging in the weak winter sun, some betting on a card game with R1 coins, others sleeping, their faces puckered inside tightly drawn hoodies. We took a seat among them, directly across from the balcony from which Nelson Mandela had addressed a crowd of approximately two hundred thousand people just hours after being released from prison on 11 February 1990. On that day, the elevation of the statue steps had provided the best views of the iconic leader. The Beachboys, Barak explained, were drawn to Edward VII’s feet by the same logic.
‘From here it is easy to see where the police are moving, in case we need to warn some of our brothers, you know.’
Most of the Beachboys on the steps were wearing overalls, the pants and sleeves turgid with underclothes. There were blue overalls and green ones, white and red and orange ones, but all so filthy it was the grime you noticed first. The ubiquity of this uniform intrigued me. I assumed the Beachboys favoured the overall for the same reason it was created: to stop dirt from entering the lower half of one’s clothing through the gap in the middle. Their living environments are, after all, extremely grubby.
Barak set me straight.
‘These clothes come from inside the ships, from the stores. About five years ago the captains started using dogs to search their ships before they left the harbour. This made it very difficult for us. It is easy to stow a ship, but most of us are found before the ship can leave the dock. But even if he finds us, the captain still has a problem, because the South African government will not believe him when he says, This stowaway came on board this ship in Cape Town. The government says, No, this person must have come on at another port. The government tells the captain, This stowaway is actually your problem, you must find out what country he comes from and send him back there. Some captains don’t like to take this responsibility because they know the South African government is lying. Instead, they take us to the storeroom and give us an overall and some work boots, sometimes even a helmet and protection glasses, so that we look like a dockworker. The crew makes us wait for the change in the security shift and then they walk with us off the ship. On the ground they turn one way, and we must turn another way. If we get caught on the ground, they will say they have never seen us before.’
The stink of foul cotton intensified as, one by one, the Beachboys gathered around us.
Barak started to describe his journey to Cape Town but the chatter became angry. He clucked his tongue. ‘Some of these brothers have a small mind, they don’t want me to tell you anything about the Beachboy life,’ he said.
I was about to leave when I felt it, faint but unmistakable: the stirring of fingers in the pocket of my coat. Barak looked away and wiggled his forefinger nervously.
‘Everything all right?’ I asked the Beachboy seated above me, whose hand I had trapped in my pocket with an elbow.
‘Everything all right,’ he said, retrieving his fingers slowly.
In the sullen moments that followed I noticed, for the first time, the crude skull-and-crossbones drawings on the granite steps, dozens of them, somewhat lost in the dark stains left by greasy pants.
◆
Dull light pours into the city in advance of cold fronts, displacing, at a certain pitch, all human activity from the Grand Parade. It sweeps up everything from the perimeter bollards to the massive rectangular form of the civic centre and, while the traders tie down their wares, commuters hurry into the mouths of the tunnels leading down into the Golden Acre.
Even the Edward VII steps were deserted today, though I found Adam at the toilet block at the Parade’s northern end, under the Golden Arrow bus shelters.
‘Careful, tha’s not water,’ he said, pointing out the stream of fluid coursing across the grey paving. ‘The city keeps the toilet locked, you see, so we have to piss against the wall.’
He was wearing an orange overall and, with his caramel skin, gold-plated incisors and home-made tattoos, looked like a prison-gang general. The policeman frisking him completed the image quite nicely.
‘He’s searching me for drugs,’ Adam explained matter-of-factly as the policeman finished patting him down.
‘I take
it you’re not carrying?’
Adam opened his mouth, rolled a white plastic cube around with his tongue, and winked. The policeman wandered off.
‘Coke?’
‘Heroin.’
‘Don’t swallow.’
‘It’s no problem. I’ll just throw it up later.’
Not for Adam the arduous pushing of trolleys. Between ships, he hustles quarter grams of heroin behind the Parade’s chip and salomie stalls – kattes, he calls them. He’ll shift buttons or tik, too, but heroin is what he knows best.
‘Heroin is the Beachboy drug,’ he said. ‘We call it unga, which means flour, because that is what heroin looks like.’ He pronounced ‘heroin’ softly, with an almost Gaelic delicacy: nÉirinn. His pronunciation of unga, by contrast, was deep and round, a sound not unlike the lowing of a lion.
‘In Dar es Salaam you can get unga anywhere. It comes by boat, mainly from Karachi in Pakistan. The boats dock at the island of Zanzibar, and from here the unga is split into smaller boats and brought to the city.’
Adam felt like a smoke, so we headed for The Freezer via the chaotic taxi deck above the train station, where he spent more time walking backwards than forwards, cursing people at the top of his voice and making enquiries about their narcotic wares. ‘You got Swazi? No, don’t talk to me about Swazi, don’t ever talk to me about fucking Swazi!’ Everyone seemed to be on something, or looking to get on. I’d been up on the deck a hundred times and the people around me had always seemed like ordinary folk, on their way to or from jobs at Edgars, Foschini or Shoprite. In Adam’s company it was an entirely different relational dimension, alive with criminal opportunity.
‘Sean, watch out for your balaza, I heard one of the brothers tried to pick it the other day.’
‘What’s a balaza?’
‘It’s Swahili for living room, the place where people keep their TV and DVD player. If you break into a house it’s the easiest room to hit. Beachboys use this word for the outside pocket of your jacket, because it’s the easiest to pick.’
Adam demonstrated how, by using his one hand to hold up my jacket pocket, he could imperceptibly remove my cellphone.
‘Impressive.’
‘That brother who tried to rob you got a beating, by the way.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it is too easy to pick the balaza. The others were ashamed that you caught ’im so they cuffed ’im a few times.’
We descended to the Foreshore, aiming for the port, and came once more below the Nelson Mandela Boulevard flyover, where Adam lifted a metal lid in the pavement and revealed a washing-machine tumble of rags.
‘Tha’s my bed folded up in there. Tha’s my wardrobe.’
Up on the ledge at The Freezer, we ran into young Daniel Peter, who pointed to a vessel moored in the Duncan Dock, a Jamaican flag painted on the smokestack. He said something to Adam in Swahili.
‘The boy says it’s a good ship because it is low in the water. That means it’s loaded and ready to go. We’re going to try to stow that ship tonight, me and this boy.’
Notebook against a knee, pen poised, I asked Adam for a short summary of his career as a stowaway. He finished mulling his weed and quickly rolled a cocktail – marijuana laced with heroin. He lit up and puffed a few times before beginning theatrically in the third person.
‘Adam is a poor outcast boy from Tanzania. His daddy, who he never knew, is from Greece. His mummy is a black girl from a place in the south called Mbwera. One day some witches cast a spell on her and she went totally chizi, so this boy had to run away, and he ran all the way to Cape Town. Tha’s the end of my story.’
I took the hint and closed the notebook.
‘Daniel, show Sean what is in your bag.’
The youngster did as he was told, reaching into a small blue rucksack and pulling out a large blue faux-leather 2010 diary, the corners of which had swollen and burst. This he opened first at the pastel-coloured continental maps that large diaries have at front and back, where he pointed out Dakar, Jakarta, Singapore, Dubai – some of the cities to which, he said, he had already travelled. On almost every other page he had drawn cargo and container ships in pencil and pen. He began jabbing at them with his callused fighters’ fingers, pointing out the engine room, the lifeboats, the tonnage hatches and even the bulbed area above the rudder – all established Beachboy hiding places. Lastly, he pointed out the portal to the anchor chain locker, and cut his hand across his throat to indicate danger.
‘Fire.’
‘Fire?’
‘Anchor out, fire in,’ he clarified and, to demonstrate what a gigantic anchor chain would do to a human body as it went sparking out through its portal, he scooped up a handful of dirt from between his feet and threw it out over Table Bay Boulevard.
◆
Walking along the port’s perimeter fence, I noticed a tarpaulin snagged between the stanchions that separate the incoming lanes of Table Bay Boulevard from the outgoing ones. Crossing between traffic to this concrete seam, I realised that it was, in fact, a home-made tent, not much bigger than an airstrip windsock. The mouth of the tube had been tied to the base of a gigantic floodlight, #HMCT102, which no doubt afforded some protection from the icy Atlantic air. The other end had been attached by strips of denim to the trunk of a short palm, the fronds of which had been split and stripped by the snapping of the cords in the winter north-wester. Shattered glass, pools of oil and buckled sections of crash barrier all up and down the freeway spelled out the risks of sleeping in such a structure, which in its way was every bit as extreme as the doss platforms that rock climbers affix to cliff faces.
Continuing out of town I came to the Lower Church Street overpass, passing articles of clothing that had been left out to dry in the wind. From the elevation of the bridge the neatly arranged laundry items constituted a perfect exploded view of Beachboy attire in winter: tasselled beanie, hoodie, overshirt, second overshirt, undershirt, second undershirt, a pair of baggy jeans and the ubiquitous overall. Strains of reggae were audible in the sonic lulls between passing vehicles, and I followed these beneath the bridge to find Rashidi Omari and his friend Ngaribo Masters wedged like overgrown pigeons up where the abutment wall meets the bridge’s belly. They were in good spirits, having just smoked a joint, the smell of which temporarily overpowered the acrid highway gases. I opened my notebook on some mystifying Beachboy graffiti I had seen on the retaining wall.
TMK
CTR/018729/03
Junior No More
‘TMK is for Temeke in Dar es Salaam, where we are both from,’ Rashidi began. ‘This number – CTR/018729/03 – is an asylum permit number. Some of us write out permit numbers on the walls in case we go to sea, or prison, and lose our papers.’
‘Who is Junior?’
‘Junior no more,’ Ngaribo whispered.
‘He means Junior is dead,’ Rashidi clarified. ‘He was crushed last year by a truck, crossing the highway. He was Ngaribo’s main man.’
Ngaribo looked away and I noticed the three tattoo tears that spilled from the corner of his right eye.
‘Some lost, some win, some die. It’s no fucking joke,’ said Rashidi.
◆
Graffiti of the Beachboy areas
Grand Parade
Wa Beach
Waa hop 2 Sea
God Yucken Bless Mi
Don’t West Your Time
BALTI MORE
Sad boy say time will tell
Nelson Mandela Boulevard bridge
The power of sea forever and ever
Fuck you dog stowaway
Life goes on
Easy to die tuff to get Beter to die young.
Some win Some lost Some die
Seaman life no story only action
Who to trust now?
In god we trust
In thug we trust
Days goes on
No way to escape my life without ship
More time to get catch me if can fine
The Freezer
Aver theang isgoabe orite
Don’t trust a woman because a woman is a snake and a snake is a dangerous animal
Things never be the same
IM TWO AMECA
Time will tell life is going on
God Bless my people we pray for you to get good time
Jesus fails
Thuff to get easy to die One time you gonna die
Push life to sea
Sherney TMK hate all wizard
Stiff necked fools
Woodstock railway reserve
Die or save Seamanlife is not story. Action
Nothing is tough Accept tough is yourself
Try to make friend not enemy you never no
Memory Card
Corder Sailor Never big Up
Opportunity Never Come Twise
One day 2c
Kacho Lee I’m 2 the ROP
Bremen
To Stavanga
Ohio States Miami New York City
◆
Being so heavily overlaid with transport infrastructure, Cape Town’s Foreshore is light on formal identity. The very definition of ‘foreshore’ – the part of any seashore between the high- and low-water marks – suggests an area constantly sliding between different states, a place unfit for human settlement, too liminal to name. The few designations that the area had been given were, without exception, dull or directional: Boulevard East, Table Bay Boulevard, Beach Road, Ocean Road. Tide Road. Dock Road. Portside.
In recent months, however, some of these had been changed to reflect a more digestible heritage for the city. In addition to Eastern Boulevard having become Nelson Mandela Boulevard, Oswald Pirow Drive, named for an apartheid-era admirer of Adolf Hitler, had been renamed Christiaan Barnard Street, after the local surgeon who performed the first human-to-human heart transplant surgery in 1967.
Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 3