The path I took led through the grey dunes to a series of makeshift tents, ranging in shape from gazebo to yurt and constructed from driftwood and multiple layers of plastic sheeting. In another context – a rubbish dump, say – these may easily have been mistaken for polymer outcrops, built by the prevailing wind. A smell of burning heroin wafted out of the nearest of them.
‘Karibu.’
A large man whose red underpants reared clear of his frayed shorts appeared behind me. Adam made the introductions.
‘His name is Hansopy, or Ans, The Bulldog. Ans sells the drugs down here – ’im and his beach wife, Ana.’
‘We have been waiting for you. Sit here,’ said Ans, kneeling at the tent opening and shouting at the ten or so men sitting inside. They shifted closer together, and a seat cushion was passed from hand to hand and put down in the space cleared for me. I sat and said my Jambo, sijambos, bumping fists with all but Ana, the only woman in the tent. If The Bulldog was in his early thirties, Ana was over forty, and as sober and modest in her light-blue denim dress and multiple head wraps as her partner was drunk and naked. She was seated with her legs crossed, her knees brushing a plastic crate that had been placed over a paraffin lamp. A hole had been cut in the top of the crate and a large tile had been placed on top of this. Ana was using it as a mortar to crush a succession of kattes, grinding the hard pips of heroin down to dust with a short, thin piece of metal.
‘This metal is used to tie things down inside ship containers,’ said Adam, ‘but, whenever you see it in Dar es Salaam, you will know that there are boys nearby smoking unga.’
Ana had pre-rolled several marijuana joints, leaving them open at the top. Now, taking these in her fingers one at a time, she sucked in the floury heroin, twisted the joints closed and left them cocked on a box of Puff matches, like miniature cannons. She offered one to me but Adam intercepted it.
‘He never smoke before. He not gonna start now I don’t think.’
Sudi nodded agreement. ‘When you smoke for the first time you feel sick and vomit everywhere. Sometimes this happens the second time, too.’
‘Drink,’ said Ans, thrusting forward an unlabelled half-jack with clear liquid in it. I accepted the bottle and sipped. The taste wasn’t unpleasant, like rice wine with hints of mango.
‘Gongo,’ he said, putting his shirt over the mouth of the bottle and downing the contents through it.
‘Why did you cover the top?’
‘It’s dirty.’
‘Usually it’s made with fruit, but the worst gongo is made with old clothes,’ added Adam.
‘Oh. Okay.’
Smoking unga and drinking home-brewed gongo had long ago replaced stowing away as the daily aim of the Posta Beachboys. There was no consensus about why this had happened. Some took the view that too few ships entered the harbour these days, and that the shipping that did merely plied the continent’s east coast or went to and from the ports of South East Asia or the Far East. Others said the practice had come to an end in the nineties, when courts started putting harbour trespassers into Keko Prison for six months.
‘Keko is no joke,’ said Adam. ‘It makes Pollsmoor seem like a hotel. People die in there all the time.’
In his view, the men in the tent were not true Beachboys. ‘Most of these are not even from Dar es Salaam, they’re from the bush. They ran away from their families and ended up here because it is the only place they can stay.’
He pointed at a young man with a cheerful face. ‘This boy here came to Dar es Salaam in 2010, for Eid. The city is packed at this time, and everyone dresses the same, so a lot of children lose their parents. That is what ’appened to this boy. He was young, 13 I think. He was walking around the streets crying because he didn’t know anyone.’
Adam paused to make a few abject crying noises, rubbing his eyes to the delight of the others. ‘He came to the beach, crying, crying, and some of these boys asked him, “What’s wrong?” and he said, “Hooo, hooo, I lost mummy, I lost my daddy,” and so they said, “Come with us, we gonna find your mummy and daddy,” and when he got to the beach they took all his clothes and said, “Stupid boy, why do you believe anything anyone say?” and the boy walked away crying, but then he came back because he had no clothes and he knew nobody, and they let him sleep here.
‘The next day he still couldn’t find his family, and it went like that for the whole year. One day he was walking by the ferry terminal and someone recognised him and called his family. His family told that person to put the boy on a bus to the village but this boy ran away. You see, he had a new family now. He had already seen another life. I can understand his mind, to be honest. I grew up in the bush, just like ’im. Bullshit place that, full of stupid people.’
Adam wanted pictures taken, and strutted up and down the waterline in a proprietorial fashion, stopping occasionally to gaze out at the dhows sliding past container ships and gas carriers like olden-day toys. Beachboys spilled from a distant tent to howl abuse at me. Adam shouted back furiously and the objectors put their hands up in contrition.
‘Nobody can tell me anything here. This is my place, I was born here. My daddy came on one of these ships. My mummy lives across there.’ Adam pointed across the harbour waters at the palm-fringed shoreline of the Kigamboni Peninsula. In all the time we’d known one other, he had said very little about his mother or father. Now, stoned on unga, his mother waiting with lunch on the other side of the bay, he performed the story of his beginnings for the smokers who had spilled out onto the beach with us.
‘My daddy was a Greek sailor, you know. He came here in 1981 and made my mummy pregnant, then he left. I never seen him till this day.’
‘Unajua nini kuhusu baba yako [what do you know about your father]?’ asked a man with pointy ears and good teeth. I had made the same mistake before, and braced for the inevitable.
‘You know what is Greek style?’ Adam asked pointy ears. ‘When a Greek sailor comes home from the sea he fucks his woman’s front, you know, the pussy. When it is time to go he fucks the arse. That is Greek style. My daddy must have been a confused Greek sailor, because he did it the wrong way round. That’s all I know about my daddy – he made my mummy pregnant with me, an’ then he left.’
Sudi was not impressed by the characterisation.
‘Memory, you can’t talk about your mother like that.’
‘You right Sudi, sorry mwanagwu. I love my mother. She made me. She left me in the bush with fucked-up people but she made me. Everything’s okay between us now, we made peace a long time ago. I love my daddy, too, even though I never met him. It’s because of ’im that I love the sea.’
To quell the spreading concern about my presence on the beach, Ans took me between the tents, making introductions. While this was happening, a deal was being struck between Adam and a man fetched down from Kivukoni Road. The Sony camera and the Nokia phone I had brought from Cape Town went into his rucksack, and he handed over a fan of pink 10 000-shilling notes. After this Adam signalled it was time to leave, and moved off along the grey shoreline in the direction of the Kigamboni Ferry Terminal, cutting up through the food market below the Kilimanjaro Hotel.
Adam had been energised by the heroin and, in a switch I knew all too well, he became rowdy – first in the fish market that abuts the ferry terminal, then among the taxis at the head of Barack Obama Drive, which had been renamed from Ocean Road a few months previously. As always, it began with truly bad rapping. ‘Yo, yo, fucken Dar es Salaam, city of peace, city of peace but ghetto youth never know no peace, mother fucka!’ We progressed past the ticket booth, paid TSh30 each and entered the terminal’s open-air waiting area just as the ferry was churning out into open water. It hardly mattered that we’d missed it, though, because another was already halfway across the narrow harbour mouth.
‘This country is fucked up, you know. Look how close it is to the other side, less than five
hundred metres, but the government never built any bridge like they promised so long ago, because the ferry owners are powerful people, and they want everyone to keep paying.’
Beggars with horrendous deformities worked the gathering crowd, jangling tins slung from their necks. An adolescent with hypermobility syndrome removed his hat from his head with his toes, his leg up along the side of his body.
‘No fucking way,’ said Adam.
Sudi took my backpack from me and wore it over his chest to ensure that no hands snaked in when the gates were lowered, which they soon were, causing the crowd to surge forwards down the slipway and up the ferry’s tail ramp. Cars, Bajajis and bodabodas streamed out of a separate lane, wing mirrors duelling as they hooted their way aboard. Adam made for the prow, where he hopped over a boundary chain and took a roomy seat on the gunwale. The engines turned and the Kigamboni shoreline swung into view, an even line of palms broken here and there by single-storey houses, the beaches and shallows thick with small fishing boats.
‘Soon everything gonna change,’ said Adam. ‘The government wants to build a new city on this land. They got a lot of money from rich countries to buy the houses of the people who ’ave lived in Kigamboni their whole lives, but people been stealing that money and what they ended up giving the people was not enough. When the government comes to make them move there is going to be a big fight, trust me.’
He stood and yelled out at the press of passengers.
‘Fuck the government. Fuck the president.’
Sudi grabbed his arm. ‘Nyamaza Memory Card. Kijinga!’
‘Sorry Sud, you’re right. We don’t need to worry about this government where we going.’
The ferry docked minutes later and we ran down the front ramp to avoid being trampled, ducking right into the village at the first opportunity. Adam hailed three young men he recognised and bought a cigar-shaped package of weed from them.
‘I think my mother is the poorest person in the whole village. She got six other children, and some of her children got children, and she tries to support them all.’
Mama Suna’s place, which was not far from the scrimmage of tourist stalls around the ferry terminal, was notable for the absence of a roof. Bright sheets of fabric covered the window apertures and a plastic sheet served as a front door. As we approached, the sheet was lifted and a woman in a red dress burst out and came running towards us. She planted several kisses on my cheeks. ‘Sean-y, Sean-y, karibu,’ she sang, taking my hand.
Adam laughed merrily. ‘She says you’re the first white man she’s touched since my daddy.’
The brown scarf tied around Suna’s head framed skin that was somehow both unlined and lived in. She hustled us inside the ruin of a home, where her daughters sat on reed mats with their legs out in front of them. They rose to their feet and shook hands while chiding their children, who were climbing on the crumbling interior walls. A smartly dressed teenage boy exited the only room in the building that had a roof on it, as if he had been awaiting his moment. He walked up to Adam and shook his hand solemnly, then turned to me and, just as solemnly, said, ‘I am very pleased to meet you. You are welcome. My name is Mohamed. I love you.’
Adam laughed in delight. ‘This is Suna’s youngest child, Hamidi. He’s still in school. A good boy. These are my younger half-sisters,’ he said, indicating the three brightly dressed women who had retaken their places on the mats. ‘There is an older brother and an older sister, but they are not here. I have not seen the older sister since 1998.’
Suna dashed into the room and came out with our lunch of squid tentacles and fish, which had been fried away from its bones. We ate quickly and, afterwards, Adam and Sudi smoked a procession of joints while Suna pressed Mohamed’s Grade 7 English into the service of her life story.
She had been born, she said, in Mbeya, the youngest of eight children. She had married a man of her village at the age of 16, and had two daughters with him, the elder of whom had died at the age of five. She believed that she had been cursed – that one of her sisters-in-law had taken the child’s faeces and buried them at the entrance to the house, and that the child had died as a result of this witchcraft.
Adam put his hand up. ‘You need to understand something, Sean. The place my mother comes from is deep bush, they don’t even speak Swahili there. It is a place of witches. In fact my grandmother, Halima, was one of the most powerful witches in Mbeya. That power passes from mother to daughter, so my mother’s sisters got it, and the sisters of her husband also had it. She didn’t stand a chance. When her baby died she never knew who cursed her but she knew it was witches that took the baby.’
Suna’s husband was a successful trader in coconuts. To take care of his accommodation needs on his frequent trips to Dar es Salaam, he had bought a house in Temeke. After the death of their child Suna had insisted they move to the city, but they had quarrelled so incessantly in their cramped city quarters that she had left, and was soon living with a police officer, with whom she had had a son, Adam’s older half-brother. While living under the police officer’s roof, Suna had met a Greek fire watchman in a portside bar. His ship, the name of which she could not recall, had docked for just a week. When she gave birth on 1 March 1982, her policeman boyfriend had seen that the child was coloured and promptly barred Suna from returning to his home.
‘Ask me mum about me dad,’ Adam prompted.
‘Ask her what?’
‘Ask her how did they meet.’
‘She said they met in a bar.’
‘Ask her what he said to her.’
‘You will have to ask her for me.’
Adam asked the question.
‘She says my daddy couldn’t speak any Swahili, and as you can see my mum speaks only Swahili, so they couldn’t understand each other. But my daddy had an idea. He pointed at her and asked, “Are you Amina, or are you Anna?” She said Anna. He said, “Good, good.”’
Are you Christian or Muslim? A pick-up line for the ages.
Mama Suna didn’t have much more to add. Adam’s father had been kind to her, she said. He had not been young: in his fifties, most likely, and quite fat, so there was little chance he was still alive. He had asked her to return with him to Greece, and the proposal had caused her to flee to Mafia Island, several hundred kilometres to the south-east, where she remained until well after the ship’s departure. Unable to read or write, she only had the sound of her lover’s name to go on when she registered her child’s birth a year later. The first name was easy enough, but the second had been an unusual sound; so, it is perhaps unsurprising that on all of the Internet, Adam’s patronymic connects only to a mountain range on an island in the South China Sea.
Suna stroked Adam’s head as he smoked, and said he had been the clever one; that, had his education not been nixed by certain spiteful relatives, she would not be living in a home without a roof. Adam nodded slowly, deeply stoned. We picked the fishbones clean and tossed the skeletons into the empty ugali bowl. Afterwards, Suna walked us through the village to the edge of the main road, calling ‘Sean-y, Sean-y, mwah, mwah,’ as we moved away from her. Mohamed led us on to Mikadi Beach, following a litter-strewn path through some neem trees. A young Maasai askari had been posted on the invisible line between the free and the paying parts of the shoreline, but he knew better than to challenge Adam and Sudi, who looked particularly exotic with their shirts off, red bandanas trailing from their back pockets. The friends sat down and rolled up near a group of flak-jacketed tourists, who pretended not to notice the smell of burning ganja as they sipped their complimentary sundowners.
I stripped down and asked if I needed to worry about sharks.
‘No,’ said Adam.
‘Yes, there are sharks,’ Mohamed insisted, though he said they would not harm me if I kept my shoes on.
‘Feet look like fish,’ he explained, with youthful authority.
T
he sea was a sun-warmed bath for the entire five hundred metres of the beach shelf, beyond which I was swallowed by the Indian Ocean’s blue chill. The coastline looked idyllic from this distance, the city centre and the harbour hidden by the peninsula’s curve. I couldn’t keep my imagination from raising skyscrapers above the palms – the skyline of New City – but only had to dive down a few feet to reset the current reality of evening strollers and pulled-up ngalawas.
◆
Adam’s plan is for me to meet people in the order in which they had featured in his life, and to do this he has enlisted Suna’s help, a process that could not have been easy for either of them.
Adam had only lived with Suna until the age of five, when she had dropped him in the village of Kiparang’anda, a day’s journey from the city on the roads as they were then. Adam had never seen this village before, or any village, for that matter. He does not recall his mother leaving him there, only that she had, and that there had not been a single light to see by that first night in a house filled with people he had only met for the first time that day: his grandmother, three of his mother’s older sisters and her brother, Uncle Mageni, the headmaster of the local primary school. He had seen his mother again at the age of ten, when she had returned for just a few days before taking off again, only returning when he was 14. She had taken him away with her then, and he had not returned to the village since.
When we boarded the bus for Mbagala at 8 a.m., Adam merely said that we were going to meet his grandmother in a district called Pwani (‘which means near to the sea’), and that it would be a long day. When the daladala skirted the National Sports Stadium in Keko he added, ‘She’s old, you know, over one hundred years I think. You can work it out, because Suna is nearly sixty years now, and she’s the youngest child out of eight my nanny had. People say she has survived so long because of her powers. She can’t walk no more but you can be sure that she still flies around at night when everyone else is sleeping.’
Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 20