Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard

by Sean Christie

  Sudi said a du’a for good measure and wrapped the straps of my rucksack around his feet. We lay back and closed our eyes against the light and the music. I sat up in the dark much later, woken by the sound of the latch in the yard being knocked up. Footsteps approached the kitchen door and stopped. Sudi, up on one elbow, had his kisu gripped tightly in his left hand. In the moonlight we could both see the silver door handle moving up and down, a thing swimming in the gloom.

  ‘Oya, who there?’ he growled.

  ‘Me, Moshe.’

  The door banged open and the old Beachboy stumbled in carrying an old car seat, which he set down alongside our blanket. The backrest had been snapped to make a mattress of sorts. After some grunting he lay back on it and pulled some plastic sheets over his body, to keep off the mosquitoes. He passed out within seconds, the alcohol on his breath infecting the room.

  ◆

  The house was up and in the back yard at about 6 a.m., enjoying the cool while it lasted.

  Three moustachioed mestizos came through the metal door and took up their regular seats. They were neatly dressed in chinos and collared shirts, but their faces were parched and the one’s feet and ankles were messes of peeling skin, dense with flies in no time at all. Tony Moto produced a half-jack of Big Boss whisky and a fluted pewter cup, which was filled, downed and passed on. More people joined the group of boozers and by 7 a.m. they were through a second bottle of Boss. Tony, who seemed to have decided we were not such bad guys after all, came over with some marijuana and a section of toilet-roll wrapper, which he tore up into make-do rolling papers. Adam thanked him at length and the two smoked together and talked about their children. Tony said he had two under school age. The mother was not around so he was raising them. He wouldn’t have turned his place into a doss house and shebeen otherwise, he said. He worried about their safety, quite frankly, what with all the people coming and going. Adam said he thanked Allah every day that his daughter was in England, and that her mother was a strong woman.

  Moshe came back from his morning wash and pulled his socks and shoes on in the yard.

  ‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘The border is near but the road is bad.’

  By 9 a.m. we were in the labyrinthine central market off Avenida 25 de Setembro, eating bloody chicken legs off a bed of doughy noodles and salad. As we entered downtown Maputo, Adam and Sudi fell behind. This irritated Moshe.

  ‘What do they think? That they are on holiday?’

  We walked onto the jetty of the Vodacom Ferry Dock as the main ferry was pulling off. Moshe cursed.

  ‘Fuck, man. Fuck. The police stopped your friends. I knew this was going to happen. They’re so slow today. What do they think this is? Where are their heads, really?’

  He backtracked and deliberated with the police. When I approached he waved me away. After a few minutes the two Beachboys came walking down the jetty, passing me without acknowledgement. Moshe came behind, wiping his sweating brow with a blue bandana.

  ‘Mozambique police are no good. These boys have their documents, but the police still want MT150 to let them pass. I don’t have papers. I haven’t had papers for twenty years. Nobody stops me.’

  Small cuddy boats picked up travellers between ferries, and one of these was about to leave. We clambered on and squeezed into the hot cabin, where we were ordered to sit down. Adam was sullen. ‘Same thing gon’ happen to us on the other side. This is not my style. There’s no way to run.’

  I was concerned that events had been several seconds ahead of us today, and that the Beachboys had not had the time to stow their ndongas. If this was the case, the heroin would be in their underpants, perhaps even in my bag. And just as Adam had feared, several officers were waiting for us on the other side.

  In the south bank police station, Moshe ranted at the officers until two of them forcibly ejected him from the room. A female officer studied the Beachboys’ emergency travel documents.

  ‘We are going to search you, one by one.’

  Sudi stood and emptied his pockets of lint and wrappers. He took off his kofia, and poured the meagre contents of his drawstring bag onto the table: a single T-shirt and a toothbrush. The only male officer left in the room made him loosen his pants, and was busy folding over the top of his belt, feeling the stitching of his trousers for lumps, when Sudi unexpectedly dropped his pants to his ankles, eliciting a grunt of surprise from the female officer.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m helping this man. I can see he is struggling here.’

  The insolence was reassuring. Adam went next and was one step ahead of the officer all the way, turning out every pocket and cranny they might have wanted to search before being asked to do so. He took off his shirt.

  ‘Put it back on,’ said the female officer.

  ‘It’s hot,’ said Adam. ‘I’ll keep it off.’

  By the time I was searched, the game of cat and mouse was over. Now it was just a case of paying a bribe. I saw Moshe hand some notes to the officers outside. ‘Come, come,’ he said, ushering us out. An argument broke out between the officers inside and those who had been outside.

  ‘How much did you pay them?’ the female officer demanded.

  ‘One hundred.’

  ‘What about us?’

  Adam handed her another hundred, an overpayment that upset Moshe to such a degree that Sudi had to escort him outdoors by an elbow before he gave the officers cause to re-arrest us.

  ‘It’s okay, Mosh. We spent more on breakfast. Let’s go.’

  In the taxi rank Moshe talked with his hand on Adam’s head, as if he were about to deliver a benediction. Adam let him keep it there. He bought us a strip of Big Boss whisky sachets and some peanuts, and only reluctantly said goodbye when it became clear that our taxi would not be leaving anytime soon.

  ‘Second angel of the road,’ said Adam. ‘Salut-eh!’

  The taxi was a VW Syncro, a 4×4 version of the minibus taxis that rule South Africa’s roads. It had just gone midday and the taxi was half-full. We were no more than one hundred and sixty kilometres from the border, but already the passengers were lobbying the driver to cut his losses and leave immediately, arguing that we were already in danger of arriving at the border after its closure at 6 p.m. The driver pretended not to hear them. The seats filled up in half-hour increments. An old man with nodule-covered hands. A woman with a baby strapped to her back, a wet spot on her shoulder where its sleeping mouth had been. When all the seats had been taken, we still did not move.

  ‘He’s waiting for the roof to be full,’ a passenger explained. A woman arrived with a sealed cardboard box, paid the driver, and left. He lifted it to the roof.

  Eventually, at about 1.30 p.m., the driver slung his body into the vehicle and fired up the engine. The dirt road traced the coastline, passing huts beneath palms overlooking deserted beaches. The views of Maputo across the bay were spectacular. I could appreciate the scenes particularly well from my seat next to the driver, who seemed to know what he was doing even though the vehicle was too heavily loaded on my side, causing the tyres to whirr against the chassis whenever we plunged into a pothole. The smell of burning rubber came up from the footwell.

  After eighty kilometres the road became much sandier. Red-tinged at first, it gradually turned powder white. Twenty kilometres from the border, it was as if someone had cut a narrow corridor through the coastal bush and set about creating the world’s longest sandpit. To keep going, the driver kept his foot flat on the accelerator, cooking the driveshaft. We crested several deep drifts this way, but he was no longer in control. As we careened crazily from one hummock to the next, the driver’s foot inevitably slipped off the accelerator, causing the vehicle to stall. The doors opened and, without needing to be told, the male passengers took up positions at the rear. Um, dois, três, the driver shouted, and we all heaved. The minibus started moving, gradually at fi
rst and then so rapidly that Adam fell to the ground and stayed there. I ran over to find his face wet with tears.

  ‘Hooo,’ he cried. ‘Sudi just told me he pushed so hard a ndonga shot out his backside.’

  The final section of road was littered with marooned minibuses. In fact, it was no longer a road – more a delta of tyre tracks weaving on the flat coastal plain. Our driver navigated these with supreme ability, too absorbed in his work even to acknowledge the stricken drivers we were passing. With ten kilometres to go the engine overheated, but we were moving again within fifteen minutes. Adam and Sudi were seated on the back bench, sealed in by bodies and bags, and they only noticed how near we were to the border when we were one kilometre out.

  ‘Sean, get him to stop,’ Adam shouted. The driver slowed, but with minutes to go before the post was due to shut the other passengers overruled the request and we surged forward again. In another minute we had arrived beside a line of rammed-earth buildings. A handful of minibuses faced the way we had just come; one by one they took off, loaded with the last of the day’s border crossers. Our fellow passengers stripped their bags from the roof and sprinted for the immigration office, outside which a soldier stood lowering the Mozambican flag from a flagpole. The driver made a three-point turn, quickly filled his seats, and took off.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Adam, breaking right from the road into ankle-high coastal scrub. It was five hundred metres to the border fence, and there was no cover whatsoever. We were fifty metres in when a soldier wandering down the road from the Maputo side ordered us to stop.

  ‘In here,’ said Adam, crossing to a solitary reed outhouse a few feet away. One after the other we pretended to use it, before walking back to the road.

  ‘Passports,’ the soldier demanded. The Beachboys reluctantly produced their much-folded, now entirely irrelevant Central and East Africa emergency travel papers. He looked them over and ordered us to accompany him to a nearby bar, where soldiers in civilian clothes were playing pool. Several more men studied the travel delineations, but they must not have been able to read in English or Swahili, because they refolded the documents and handed them back.

  ‘The border is closed. It opens again at eight,’ said one.

  ‘Is there somewhere we can go to sleep?’

  My question provoked a discussion. Fingers were pointed at the line of shops at the roadside.

  ‘You’re not going to try and jump the border or anything? No? Then you can sleep there.’

  We chose one that was painted washing-powder blue, and slumped down on the porch with our backs to the wall. Sudi put his hands to his head and prayed fervently. Adam gazed across at the border fence.

  ‘Nah man, I can’t handle this. We need to go.’

  The soldiers clearly had eyes on us, though, and we agreed that it was essential to wait for total darkness, at the very least. Privately, I was preparing to say goodbye. I was in possession of a perfectly valid passport, with a dozen empty pages left to fill. I could sit out the night and cross the next morning, perhaps even link up with Adam and Sudi in the nearby town of Manguzi, if they made it across. I felt a very strong urge to call my wife, to let her know where I was and that all was well. But, since pawning my BlackBerry, I had been using a steel-body Nokia that Adam had lifted from a pocket on the Grand Parade months before. The battery was weak and had not held any charge for days. I walked over to the soldiers’ bar and asked the barman if he would mind plugging it in.

  ‘Five rands.’

  ‘Fine.’ I handed over the R5 coin that had been swimming around in my documents wallet since Cape Town. I was now completely without cash of any kind.

  Back on the porch, the Beachboys watched the sun set in lavender tones. Adam cursed Moshe’s intervention. ‘I knew we should have gone through Swaziland. I know that way, there are no problems. I should have said something. We were supposed to be in Johannesburg some time tonight already.’

  There was nothing to do but smoke and wait. Nobody felt like talking. I heard my ringtone go in the bar and went to fetch my phone. It was the first of six weeks’ worth of South African SMSs coming through, a response to an advertisement I had placed on OLX months before.

  Do you still have the dog kennel? Thanks. Chrystal.

  Being too nerve-wracked to think straight, I started to respond, but the phone battery died before I could send the message. I handed the phone back to the barman. No point denying it now: I wanted to be home. Returning to the porch, I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. I stopped, breathed in. The moment I started off again my stomach twisted. I doubled over, then staggered back over to the soldiers’ bar.

  ‘Where will I find a toilet?’

  ‘Big or small?’

  ‘Big.’

  I realised I hadn’t gone ‘big’ since leaving Dar es Salaam.

  ‘You’ll have to go out there,’ the barman advised, pointing at the area of scrubland between the shops and the borderline, now lost in darkness.

  He fished around behind the bar and came up with a half-depleted toilet roll.

  ‘Nobody going to shoot me?’

  ‘It’s fine. Go.’

  I clumped through the scrub until I came to a bush a little taller than I am. I squatted, facing the buildings. Each shop had a lamp above its entrance, angled upwards on a short length of pipe, like the lure of a deep-sea anglerfish waiting for its quarry to emerge from the darkness. Behind the haze of insects around our lamp I could make out Sudi’s kofia, but couldn’t see Adam. I refocused my eyes on the dark plain and immediately noticed movement nearby: a human shape, low to the ground and moving towards me so slowly I wondered if it wasn’t simply a trick of exhaustion. The shape rose, however, and closed the distance between us in one surge.

  ‘Yow Sean, you had a good idea. I brought your things.’ In his hands Adam had my rucksack and camera bag.

  ‘I’m taking a shit, man.’

  ‘Finish quickly, it’s time to go.’

  ‘The phone is still charging.’

  ‘Leave it.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Come back quickly, then, and bring Sudi, he didn’t see us go.’

  I returned to the bar with the toilet roll and collected the Nokia without meeting the barman’s eyes. Sudi was looking out at the dark when I reached him. He seemed to read everything from my face.

  ‘Come, this way,’ he said, and we walked off in the opposite direction from the border, circling around the soldiers’ living quarters to get beyond the portion of the road that was illuminated by the shop lights. Once we were across, we crawled towards the silhouette of the bush where I had left Adam. Sudi made some kissing sounds and received a series back in response. Adam scrambled over. We all lay flat for a bit watching a soldier progress down the border fence, his presence betrayed by the cherry of his cigarette. Off in the direction of Maputo the trees wore a penumbral headdress of moonshine. ‘Fucking moon,’ said Sudi. In a matter of minutes, the thing would be up and the scrub would turn silver.

  Adam led off at a crouching run, with periodic drops into the bushes. We halted one last time at the fence, which was about eight feet tall and laddered with taut, barbed strands, each no more than ten centimetres below the next. Adam again led the way, taking hold of a shaky post. He made it up and over. Sudi went next, and was over in no time. I made it over, too, but for the first time since leaving the buildings I patted my money belt and realised my ID and passport were missing. The others groaned in sympathy but there was nothing to be done about it. We were in South Africa, and making a lot of noise on the fallen leaves and branches in the eucalyptus forest that verged on the border. It was time to run.

  We headed upslope, fanning out. When torches appeared in the distance our speed increased. The torch beams wriggled crazily in pursuit. I could no longer see the others but followed the sound of snapping branches downslope and, after a few minutes
, broke out of the forest to find the Beachboys walking comfortably at the side of the Kosi Bay road. They removed their travel documents from their trousers, ripped them to shreds and threw the pieces up in the air.

  ‘We don’t need these any more. We’re South Africans now.’

  A lone jogger went by, a soldier most likely. The Beachboys called out to him in their best Zulu, gleaned from the prisons of Durban and Johannesburg.

  ‘Sawubona.’

  ‘Unjani?’

  ‘Ngikhona, ngiyabonga. Wena unjani?’

  ‘Ngikhona.’

  ‘Wosh.’

  ‘How far is Manguzi?’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘No way!’

  Since the road ended at the closed border post, no vehicles came or went. Adrenalin turned into fatigue. We stopped talking.

  Finally, with Manguzi’s skyglow visible above some low hills, a set of headlights approached. As Yolanda had done outside Tete, I ordered the Beachboys down into the culvert, and tried to look as white as possible. The pickup came to a stop ten metres beyond us, and the driver shuddered visibly when the two Beachboys appeared at my side. He quickly regained his composure, though, and quoted R20 each for the lift. He said the Engen Service Station on the town’s main road doubled as an after-hours taxi rank, and dropped us there. It looked promising – all the parking bays were occupied by minibus taxis – but a short, muscular Zulu soon informed us that the last ride to Johannesburg had left an hour before. ‘I can take you in my car,’ he offered. ‘If you pay me R4 000 we can leave right now.’

  I could practically see the cat’s eyes on those eastern roads disappearing under the bonnet of his Jetta as we sailed through the night at high speed, stopping for KFC in Ermelo before continuing on to Johannesburg with dawn breaking in the rear window. But, of course, we were broke. Sudi set about securing accommodation. He had recognised a Bongoman from previous journeys, a man called Musa, who had a mchondolo on the nearby Gesiza River. It was this man’s business to approach late-night border crossers like us with offers of shelter and supper; although the fee he quoted was reasonable, Adam took against him, calling him a poes to his face. This left us with two options: we could loiter on the main road in the hope of flagging down an insomniac trucker, or we could seek out the Manguzi maskani, where we would at least be beyond the attention of police cruisers.