Unexpected guests trapped in a jail of time and space
“It’s me, Phillip,” he will say. Mostly he phones just to say hello.
Once, in 2008, he called to express fear. They — meaning us, South Africans — were killing people. He was afraid. He said he loved me. I didn’t know what to do with those words.
Normally, though, our conversations are more benign. Phillip will ask how I am and then, on occasion, press me for money or some form of assistance, a job even. I am writer, I tell him: I don’t employ people.
Phillip believes I have the power to help him. I doubt his faith. A while ago he sent me a handwritten note. His autobiography-in-progress is transcribed in neat capital letters on 13 loose sheets.
“When we are born,” it begins, “everybody’s thought is to be free and happy during our term of living. We expect to enjoy the so-called fruits of [life].”
Frustrated by the lack of opportunity in Zimbabwe and the routine beatings administered by Zanu-PF thugs in the “rural area” where he spent his adolescence, Phillip decided to head for South Africa sometime in 2002.
Along the way he met a group of six other young travellers, four of them women.
Arriving at Beitbridge, they hired a guide to lead them across the border.
“We couldn’t suspect something might be wrong with the guy who was supposed to take us into South Africa,” writes Phillip.
After a 3km walk, which included his first river crossing, Phillip heard a loud whistle. Two men suddenly joined the group.
“We kept on going and not far from us appeared what seems to be about 20-something men wearing junk clothes and holding sharp pangas and sjamboks. We could feel we were in danger. We were told to strip everything we were wearing and surrender everything we were in possession of. Guma guma they were.”
Phillip is describing his first encounter with the confidence tricksters, thieves and outlaws who operate in this liminal zone.
“They took everything we had and told us to go and work in South Africa and buy other clothes and cellphones. That was really bad experience, even to notice the girls we were with being raped in full view of ourselves.”
Not long after this harrowing ordeal, South African police arrested the group of ragged travellers. This was before I met Phillip.
Phillip is not alone in his aspiration to find a better marketplace for his youth. In 2007, I met a 52-year-old truck driver named Cheick Osman Coulibaly in Kayes, a market town in eastern Mali.
Fluent in English, Spanish and French, Coulibaly told me about his first love, a tall teenager named Fatoumata Dembélé. We also spoke about his two wives and eight children, as well as his three clandestine trips to Europe, first in 1978 and again in 1982 and 1983.
“I hid in the caves of the ship,” he said of his first trip from Dakar. It was aboard a Greek ship bound for Le Havre. He lived off caffeine-rich kola nuts during the passage.
He liked Germany and Spain, but hated France. Despite his proficiency in French, he said, he was unable to find work. “I was really surprised.” Surprise soon matured into wisdom. “The French are racists,” said Coulibaly without bitterness.
Around this time I also met some of the young Senegalese men who had braved the watery passage to the Canary Islands. They included Assane Fall, a fisherman born in 1982. In 2006 he made two attempts to reach Spain’s island territory. A hurricane thwarted his first attempt and Spanish authorities detained him on arrival on his second. Fall spent a month and half in a military camp in Las Palmas before being flown back to Dakar. He met other men like himself, from Morocco, Mauritania, Gambia and Mali.
“I know they don’t want me,” he said. “I’ll do whatever I have to do — harvest grapes, whatever.”
These stories, recounted i n a jocular fashion and filled with bravado, do not in any way chime with London-born artist Isaac Julien’s film Western Union: Small Boats (2007). The final instalment of a trilogy of audiovisual film installations, Western Union employs metaphor and ellipsis to tell the story of a fictional boat journey from Africa to Europe. It eschews documentary description in favour of an operatic imagination of the bare life. The film is partly a conversation with Italian director Luchino Visconti’s Sicilian landscapes and implicitly critiques what Julien has described as the “stereotypical mode of exploring these questions of migration”.
The film’s baroque pageantry however, is counterbalanced by Julien’s acute sense of landscape and setting. His film includes documentary footage of abandoned wooden boats used by African migrants to reach Europe.
Julien has also photographed these boating graveyards. He views these leftover husks as a kind of sculptural archetype for the new millennium. It is a potent idea, one that supplants Vladimir Tatlin’s unrealised Bolshevik monument from 1919 as a metaphor of unfulfilled potential.
But the Mediterranean’s shipping graveyards are far away from Cape Town, where I live. I only know Phillip’s story; know it in a sense that it possesses the rectitude of truth.
I have told Phillip’s story countless times, in various versions, to different people. It is never a resolved telling, in part because his biography lacks a sustained trajectory or narrative arc. Phillip’s story is one of perpetual beginnings, of taking on new jobs with erratic bosses in various parts of South Africa. His biography is one of perpetual reset.
As a result, my own telling of his story tends towards randomness. I met Phillip, and then … I met his younger brother, Wellington, who fell out a tree and died. It was a risk. Wellington felled suburban trees, which is one of those mysterious occupations announced in hand-lettered signage by young men at traffic intersections in Gauteng’s prosperous suburbs.
Phillip once mentioned that his family had read the article I had written about him in this paper in 2003. It had been republished in Zimbabwe. “It’s very obvious: I can’t live in that place of Mugabe any more,” I quoted Phillip.
His father had been hurt and angered, he later learned. I only discovered this much later, in between the fear elicited by the xenophobic violence of 2008 and the death of his brother in late 2011.
Phillip said he would never return home. But Phillip has gone home. He has visited his parents on a number of occasions. South Africa is home, or something approaching a version of home. Phillip is still suspended between a past that’s been obliterated and a future that is perpetually starting.
He remains a man on the cusp of becoming a demobilised civilian, a citizen, a human in a land increasingly frightened and angered by strangers from elsewhere.
Until he achieves that end, which isn’t really an end but a moment in his life journey, all I can reasonably do is describe the milestones of his interminable journey.