CAPE TOWN. DUSK.
The fabled flat-spined mountain is a giant stone dragon rimmed with an orange haze.
Jake’s Kombi heads past the harbour of cranes and ship funnels and yacht masts jousting haphazardly. Sea tang, dockyard din and gull yells gust in through the wound-down windows. And out flow the jiving tones of Bafo Bafo at full volume.
Sails drift to and fro on the sea. Jabulani’s eyes are agape at the wonder of this duned, inverted sky.
And that flipped copper coin gone all verdigris is Robben Island, where they jailed Mandela for so long.
They hum along Strand Street, under tall palms dancing in the wind. Barefoot street boys laugh and whistle at the crazy-coloured Kombi singing by.
At robots they are hustled by boys jockeying to hawk things crafted from wire and men yelling the headlines or wanting to wipe dust-filmed windows.
Jabulani sees a white man begging amid diesel fumes and dud dreams.
Now zero on this earth can amaze Jabulani.
He feels lucky to ride high – however fleetingly – in a world where folk are begging, burning out, being shot at.
In Sea Point Jake finds a free bay on the seafront. They pick up fish and chips from a van and a few beers from a bottle store. They dodge skaters and joggers on the seafront path and hop over the railings and perch on rocks rimed with salt and seagull guano. Jabulani slides his good foot out of a rubber hospital clog and into the cool of a rock pool. Seagulls bicker and beg for chips. Jabulani’s beer can tips and beer froths out over the rocks like sea foam. He thinks of the blood spilt so he has the freedom to sit cooling his feet and filling his gut: Poor Othello. Poor Nina. That man in the kiosk? The policeman in the hospital?
Jabulani reads the news his fish and chips is wrapped in:
Nigerian pub ransacked
‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ This has become the war cry of the young men roving the townships, armed to the teeth with hoes, stones and guns. Their mission is to root out foreigners, to loot their shacks, to rape their women. The targeted come from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Congo and beyond. Such foreigners, often in the country without a visa, are accused of taking locals’ jobs. It seems that apartheid is far from dead. It has resurfaced as xenophobia: the fear of foreigners. Police are slow to deal with attacks such as this one on an unlicensed Nigerian-run pub in Langa.
A police captain said: ‘Illegal foreigners have a penchant for crime. They don’t pay tax and they try to be clever by producing fake papers.’
The Nigerian pub keeper, who was formerly a journalist in Lagos, said: ‘I came to South Africa to escape persecution. I never thought this would happen in the country of Mandela.’
In downtown Cape Town, Bishop Tutu called for calm.
The sea flings white foam at the sky and the foam sticks like wet paper to form clouds.
Jabulani thinks of how this cockroachy thing called racism will always survive, somehow, in one form or another. He fears this rancour towards African foreigners they call makwerekwere ... towards him: job-pincher, tax-dodger, would-be thief and paper-faker. The fear of this racist venom is as biting as the bullet wound in his hand. He shakes his head and focuses on the waves.
Their mad, macho fervour followed by a sighing, ebbing lull echoes the universal rhythm of wanting and sating. For now his hunger is stilled, but he wants an end to the throb of pain in his hand. And he has other wants. He wants to love his wife under a free sky. He wants to go on holiday to the seaside with Panganai and Tendai, for them to see this vista of shifting blue dunes and a diving sun. He wants to teach again, in a world where headmasters are not puppets of evil men and where boys and girls have the freedom to question the things they are taught. And where will a man find such a world if outsiders are hunted and shops burnt in this paradise called Cape Town?
Perhaps there’s a place overseas somewhere where a man may live out his life fearlessly. But perhaps there, where they have no fear of guns and stones and evil men, they learn to fear other things.
– Beautiful, hey? chirps Jake.
– Beautiful. I wish they could see this.
– Your wife and kids? One day they will.
Jabulani shakes his head and laughs a hissing laugh.
– Hey. It may be a pipe dream now, but you were born under a lucky star. I feel it in my bones.
How, Jabulani wonders, will this pipe dream convert to reality? Another man has put fish and chips in his hands. He wears this man’s shirt and jeans. He has no good shoes and not a cent to his name.
He flicks chips to the fussing, flapping seagulls. They swoop and catch midair.
To him the seagulls look like white crows. He imagines Panganai plucking his guitar and the seagulls diving to catch fragments of Marley.
And Jabulani dreams: There’ll be sunshine and wine and jokes and he’ll put his hands over Tendai’s eyes and she’ll peek through his fingers.
– Hey, Jabulani. A mate has a gig tonight. I said I’d go. You can come along and I’ll foot the bill for a few beers. And maybe I can find you a room with one of my mates. You see, my flat’s just a box. And my girlfriend’s writing her thesis and ...
Jabulani bends his head.
– She’s funny that way. She needs her karmic space.
Jabulani sees how naive it was of him to imagine this guy would wave a magic wand and conjure a roof and a job for him.
– It’s not that you’re black. She’d just get weirded out by my pitching up with a refugee. I’m sorry.
– Hey, you have ferried me to Cape Town for no money. You have risked your life for me. You have revived my hope. I will never forget you.
– I’ll just call in at the flat and then pick you up again. Stay where you are. Ja? I won’t be long. And I’ll lend you shoes. You look like a palooka in those things.
Now he’s back-pedalling to the van.
– You just stay put. Ja?
When Jake pitches up with a gift of rugby jersey and white Havaianas flip-flops, Jabulani has vanished.
Jake parks off on the rocks, rolls a jay, and hangs his head and smokes that jay dead.
The frangipani-sweet fragrance of the marijuana drifts to where Jabulani hides.
Then Jake flicks the jay stub away and gets down from the rocks. He hangs the jersey over the railing, puts the flip-flops down. Then he yells:
– Good luck, Freedom!
Then he’s gone.
Jabulani unwinds the bandage from his hand. He strips down to his jeans and wades into the sea. The jaggy pink bullet wound in his hand stings like blazes. It feels as if he’s rubbing a chilli into it. Yet he holds his hand under, so the salt can heal. It stings so sore he hardly notices the footnote sting of the cut in his foot. Then the cold numbs the pain and he yields to the giddy high of having made it to Cape Town.
Now he’s a boy in the sea, laughing as the waves flip over him.
He stays on the bench in the waning light till the wind blows his skin dry. Then he tugs on the rugby jersey. The dry salt on his skin catches slightly on the fabric. It smells of jasmine.
So subtly had their life become pared down to the bone over that last half-year in Zim. No flowery-smelling liquid to follow the Omo into the spinning drum, no sugar to sweeten the cheap coffee, no Johnnie Walker to dull the white noise of worry in his head.
He tears his old shirt and binds a strip of the cloth around his hand. He ties off the cloth with his teeth. He hoop-shoots a rubber clog at a wire bin on a lamp post. He scores. Then the other. This one dances on the rim before falling in. He interprets this as another good omen and smiles.