Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

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Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 25

by Sean Christie


  I returned to find Sudi in an agitated state. He knew that Adam had been arrested in Inchope in 2010, so he considered the place cursed. Nothing Adam said could convince him to walk with us along the EN1 highway to the hitchhiking spot. Instead, he went snaking between the roadside huts and houses, and across a ploughed field.

  ‘Sudi spent six months in a prison in Senegal,’ Adam explained. ‘It was the worst experience of his life. He went in with three other Beachboys, and the other prisoners told them straight that they would all die there, in that prison. The other three guys did die. Sudi was the only one who made it out. He said it was kill or be killed in there. He doesn’t really talk about it, but now he takes no chances.’

  We arrived at the hitchhiking place, which was also the local maskani. Several Inchope youths lounged around on reed mats, spread next to a stall at which you could charge your cellphone, if need be.

  ‘Oya,’ said Adam.

  ‘Oya vipi,’ replied one of the sitters, who was wearing a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the face of Jacob Zuma.

  Adam and the youth carried on a conversation in halting Swahili. Sudi translated.

  ‘This brother learnt to speak Swahili from a Beachboy called Kacho Lee. Kacho came here in 2001, and he stayed in Inchope for 11 years. He still got a child here, with a Mozambique woman. They say this brother went to South Africa last year but Memory told him we haven’t seen him yet. They want us to tell Kacho that his girlfriend already gave her pussy to another man.’

  The man in the Zuma shirt remembered Adam from a previous trip, and invited us to sit on the mat while he ran off to rustle up some marijuana. Set back from the road a hundred metres or so was a small army camp, outside which off-duty soldiers went to and fro carrying large containers of water. Sudi couldn’t take his eyes off it.

  ‘It’s okay, Sudi,’ said Adam. ‘These boys told me the army don’t care about smoking. They’re here because terrorists have been attacking some trucks on the road.’

  I’d read about this. A month before I had flown to Dar es Salaam, a militant wing of Mozambique’s opposition party, Renamo, had attacked a passenger bus and a truck on the EN1 in Sofala Province, not far south of where we were. The ambush had sparked fears of a bloody afterword to the civil war of the seventies, but the Frelimo-controlled army had been quick to react, overrunning the provincial base of the Renamo leader, Afonso Dhlakama. But the threat of hit-and-run ambushes by the retreating militants remained very real – at least, that had been the situation before I had left Cape Town.

  Adam confirmed that little had changed. ‘These boys say we gonna struggle to pick a truck on this road because it’s already late in the day, and the drivers are too scared to drive at night. They say there’s a bus coming, though, from Nacala. It was supposed to pass this way already but it had a breakdown, so the company sent another bus from Nampula to pick up the passengers.’

  The lads asked how much money we had.

  Sudi produced his R800, and put it together with Adam’s remaining meticais.

  ‘Hmm, dogo [little].’

  Nevertheless, when the bus arrived the wide boys crowded around the door and thrust our money at the conductor, imploring him to take it. ‘Come,’ the conductor grunted, waving us in with a beefy arm. It was just after 5 p.m., and before long the thorn scrub of the north had ceded to forests of palms. An hour later the bus stopped in a small roadside village, and the passengers began disembarking.

  ‘The bus is stoppin’ for the night,’ said Adam. ‘The driver is too scared to carry on.’

  We took up residence on the porch of a small shop, and the Beachboys wasted no time placing some unga on a piece of broken glass, which they heated with burning corn husks. They smoked a cocktail in plain sight and began jabbering away. I was having difficulty keeping up, and when my head started nodding Sudi went off and found me a sack to lie on, Culemborg-style. I found the gesture deeply moving. Both Sudi and Adam had, for weeks now, put my comfort and safety ahead of their own – I who had left a comfortable life just for a time, and would soon be comfortable again. Their behaviour towards me had been a requirement of my ignorance and helplessness initially, but now something else was going on. I had been steadily growing into the role of the group moderator, cautioning against behaviour that might disrupt our progress and anticipating crises that we may steer clear of disaster. In Dar es Salaam I had merely functioned, at times, as a patron. Here, under the palms of this anonymous village in Mozambique, all of us virtually penniless, I felt I was being recognised, by Sudi’s gesture, for other values. We were, finally, a team of friends on a journey, quite equal.

  Not long after I bedded down, Sudi made his own bed on the porch of the neighbouring shop, wrapping the strap of my bag around one of his arms. The village became very quiet, save for the occasional growling of dogs and, deep in the night, a horrific wail from Sudi. By the light of a slender moon I saw him leave his sleeping place and kneel on the ground, where he mumbled to himself for several minutes, beating his chest with a fist. When the bus driver turned the ignition on at 3 a.m., we woke up and clambered aboard. Sudi explained that he’d had a nightmare. Someone without a face had put hands around his throat, and he had been unable to break the grip.

  The journey onwards was a long one, with many stops. Passing through the village of Muxungue the bus went over a dog, and from my seat at the back I saw the poor creature rolling down the road behind us. Remarkably, it ended upright, and limped off the road, mouth open in a howl I could not hear over the roar of the engine. At Xai-Xai, where the Limpopo River meets the Indian Ocean, a young policeman boarded the bus and looked hard at Adam and Sudi’s papers, but became distracted by the kid sitting next to Sudi, who had no identification documents of any kind.

  ‘Off the bus,’ the officer ordered.

  The boy did not understand, so the officer pulled him out of his seat. Several surrounding passengers implored him to stop, saying that the boy belonged to a group of northern Mozambicans scattered around the bus who could vouch for his nationality. The officer put this to the boy’s travel companions and they nodded, which won them a rebuke for being too cowardly to speak up for their brother.

  The distances between police stops shortened as we neared the capital city, and the mood in the bus became correspondingly tense. At a stop near Maputo International Airport, Adam said, ‘Let’s go,’ and unexpectedly left the bus. Sudi grabbed my bag and followed.

  I had to jog to catch up with them. Our sudden disembarkation made no sense. The skyscrapers of the city centre were matchboxes in the distance.

  ‘Why are we getting out here?’

  Adam retrieved a red Nokia phone from his pants.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Sudi took this from the boy sitting next to him, the one with no papers.’

  I winced. The phone was almost certainly the most valuable thing the boy had owned, his connection, perhaps, to the rural home he was clearly leaving for the first time. Adam caught my expression.

  ‘Sean, remember when I said there’s always a way? Well, this is the way. Come, we need to move if we gonna make it to the city centre by night.’

  There was no talk as we crossed the bridge over Avenida Joaquim Chissano, going down the on-ramp to the lanes coming out from the city. We slipped under Rua Carlos Morgada and Adam said, ‘We’re back in bridge country, brothers.’

  Sudi kept on at a punishing pace, reiterating Adam’s point about the importance of finding lodgings before sunset. I required no further encouragement, and broke into a jog. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Sudi, leading us right at a run down Avenida Angola. We entered Mafalala, the city’s oldest township, on the unpaved Rua Da Guine, coming to a halt under a large flame tree, the roots of which had broken through the pavement.

  ‘Sudi reminded me now that we need to explain something. You must not talk about chakula here,’ Adam whispered, using the Cape code for
heroin. ‘There are many Tanzanians living in Maputo, many Beachboys, but they are not all good. The ones who have killed in South Africa, the big criminals, they run to Maputo, and they stay around this area, which we call Strela Market. If the wrong people hear we have stuff, they will rob us, maybe even kill us. Or they will call the police to arrest us, and then share the chakula with them. That is how it works here.’

  A queue had formed outside a nearby bakery, and one of the men standing there raised his hand as we passed.

  ‘Vipi Memory!’

  ‘Ah, Moshe, respect man.’

  Adam and Sudi took turns hugging the man, who had shed all vestiges of youth. His front teeth were missing from his broad smile and, like most of the men going about the street, he was dressed in shorts, a vest and sandals.

  ‘Moshe’s a Beachboy from Richards Bay community,’ Adam explained. ‘He was nineties generation, with Dullah Macho Mzungu and the boys, but he had to run away a few years ago.’

  The reason for this was simple. Positioned midway between the Mozambican border and the city of Durban, the Richards Bay Beachboys had been able to establish a degree of control over the heroin flow into South Africa from Africa’s east coast. They would either buy or steal the stuff from the independent mules who stopped in, or they would travel to Maputo to fetch it from the Tanzanian suppliers there. To protect their patch, the controlling clique of Richards Bay Beachboys had been in the habit of giving new arrivals the taxi fare to Durban, and suggesting that they leave while they were still able to walk. But even these measures failed to prevent chronic infighting – ‘Bad unga politics’ – and Richards Bay had developed a reputation for ‘bongo-to-bongo’ killings. The last murder had occurred in 2012: a denizen of the Richards Bay community had been accused of stealing another dealer’s stash, and a group of Beachboys had beaten the suspect to death and buried his body in the forest. Not only had it come to light that the victim had been innocent, but the police had found the body, and practically the whole community had fled over the border to Maputo – Moshe included.

  ‘He’s been in Maputo a year and a half now,’ said Adam. ‘I feel sorry for him. He can’t go back to Dar es Salaam because he has spent more time out of Tanzania than in. He can’t go back to South Africa, because the police want him. He has no choice but to stay here, where he is nobody, really. So he just smokes unga and drinks. That’s why he looks so old.’

  Adam tried to break the end off the small baguette Moshe had just bought but the older man knocked his hand away with a smile.

  ‘See what I mean about Maputo? Every Beachboy just thinks about hisself here.’

  With light draining from the street, Sudi pushed the issue of accommodation.

  ‘Come,’ said the veteran Beachboy, leading us down a series of narrow alleyways. The houses had the grey, drowned look of all mature slums, the stained, windowless walls suggesting that another Mafalala – the real Mafalala – lay on the other side. At the end of a cul-de-sac Moshe rapped lightly on a door, which opened an inch. An eye appeared through the slat and at ground level I could see a foot in a sandal, running up into a brown shin covered in light hair. The door opened wider and a wiry mestizo in red-and-green plus fours slipped out. Moshe introduced him as Tony Moto. He did not look pleased to see us. He shouted at Moshe in Portuguese. Adam had already turned to leave when Moshe said, ‘Tony says you can stay, MT20 each, but you must leave early tomorrow, as soon as the sun comes up.’

  The room we entered was lit by a single halogen strip light, the casement hanging free of the ceiling on one side. Three men on plastic chairs craned their heads towards a small battery-powered radio, listening to an animated Portuguese newscast. We crossed into the next room, where a hi-fi system wired up to a car battery blasted scratchy Marrabenta tunes. On the opposite side of the room, a dented pot bubbled away on a blackened coal stove.

  Tony Moto took up the head of a grass broom and lightly swept the area next to the stove.

  ‘Can’t expect no more for MT20,’ said Adam.

  Outside in the back yard, two old drunkards were nursing a half-jack of kachasu, their backs against the breeze-block perimeter wall. There was a door in the wall, and every few minutes someone knocked on it. If nobody came to lift the latch, a piece of metal would appear between the wall and the door and the latch would be knocked upwards from the outside. The world beyond that door, said Moshe, was dangerous, a slum within the slum, dense with rickety mchondolos. It was feared by women especially. A woman or a girl could be walking one of its many narrow paths, he said, and an arm might shoot out from a hovel. They could scream, but nobody would come looking for them. The only ones who could walk the labyrinth unmolested at night were sinewy old mestizo drunkards, like the two men before us.

  Tony came out, shirtless, a white towel around his waist. Before disappearing around the corner for his evening wash he hung a blanket up on the wash line, and said it was ours for sleeping on. The moon rose and showed up the holes in the blanket.

  Adam produced the red Nokia from his pants. ‘Sudi, go make paper please,’ he said, handing it over. Sudi left with Moshe, returning after half an hour with MT350.

  Adam made no effort to hide his disappointment. ‘Sudi, this is fuck-all man, you bin robbed.’

  He stood and motioned Moshe to follow him, and the pair returned an hour later with a plastic bag full of fried rice and two bottles of Laurentina Black. To pay for our dinner Adam had pawned a silver medallion he had bought in England, the only physical thing he had left from this time. We moved inside and sat on the floor around the bag, balling rice, eating in silence. Adam said something out of the side of a full mouth, and Sudi grew visibly tense.

  ‘You know who I just saw, outside in the street? You’ll never believe it.’

  I didn’t have to be told. For the first time in weeks I felt my cheeks go cold with worry. Sudi, grim-faced, set about sweeping the fallen rice grains together with a piece of cardboard, pinching up the strays with his fingers.

  ‘Did he see you?’ Sudi asked.

  ‘Nah, he never saw me.’

  When he was done cleaning up Sudi poured Swahili into our small circle at an incredible rate. I could not understand a word, but it was quite clear what he was proposing.

  ‘Chill, Sudi,’ said Adam. ‘Let’s discuss.’

  Out on the bench in the yard, the Beachboys conferred with Moshe, who pointed at the steel door in the yard wall. Adam jumped up and put his hands to his head.

  ‘No way. What you telling me, Mosh?’

  He turned to me.

  ‘Moshe say our boy stays in there, less than fifty metres away. He even comes in here sometime, to buy his drink. I don’t know what we gonna do now. Sudi say it’s like Allah has led us to ’im, or maybe Aubadeeleh is leading us – Aubadeeleh’s ghost.’

  The conference resumed in low tones. Sudi was out for vengeance, that much was clear. Tonight, he said. It had to be tonight.

  ‘If we do something we gonna have to run,’ said Adam. ‘In this place we not gonna have the support of the other Beachboys. Too many of them have killed before. If we do something against ’im, it’s like we attack them all.’

  Tony Moto came out into the yard and looked at the moon.

  ‘You got a Rizla, bra?’ Adam asked.

  ‘No,’ said Tony, and walked back inside.

  Sudi asked Moshe where he could get his hands on a small container of petrol. The old Beachboy became angry, flipping over to English to limit the potential for eavesdropping.

  ‘If you put a fire in this place it will go to other houses. Everything is touching in this place.’

  Adam and I both agreed: burning Chawa Suga alive in his mchondolo was a very bad idea.

  The mood became less awful the longer the Beachboys talked. Sudi seemed to take some comfort in Moshe’s description of the murderer’s arrival in Maputo. From day one he
had smoked unga, said Moshe, starting early in the morning and going until he could hardly stand. One night he had passed out in an unga house in the neighbouring slum of Malhangalene. A group of middle-aged Tanzanians had taken turns raping him. Since that time, he had been like a dead man in a living body. He was hard, though, Moshe admitted. He never cried. He still smoked in the same unga house. The men who had raped him no longer did.

  ‘Allah judge him already,’ Sudi mumbled, and that seemed to be the end of it. The conversation turned to the next leg of our journey.

  ‘Where are you going to jump the border?’ Moshe wanted to know.

  Adam explained the plan. We would head east to Namaacha on the border with Swaziland. After jumping the border we would catch a truck or taxi north-east to the Jeppes Reef border post with South Africa, near Driekoppies Dam, where we would jump again, and take a taxi directly to Malelane, alongside the N4. From Malelane we would proceed directly to Johannesburg.

  ‘We will be there tomorrow tonight,’ Adam reckoned.

  Moshe did not think so. Things were not what they once were on the eastern borders, he said. The South African government had deployed soldiers, and the Swazis were cracking down, too. The better strategy, he felt, would be to cross the mouth of Maputo harbour and head for the southernmost border with South Africa, just beyond Ponta do Ouro. Moshe said he smuggled cigarettes through that portion of the border all the time. Sudi nodded vigorously. He said it was true: he had crossed that way five times himself without experiencing any hassles.

  ‘Okay, we trust you Moshe. Sea Power.’ Adam took MT50 from his shoe and handed it over. The middle-aged Beachboy’s face brightened, and he hurried out of the yard through the metal door. We moved into the kitchen.

  ‘Do you trust Moshe?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, we’re safe tonight,’ Adam assured me, spreading the holey blanket on the floor.

 

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