LITMIR.BIZ

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lie adjacent to each other, connected to cookhouses on remote smallholdings and gang strongholds on the Cape Flats. The Chinese restaurants of Sea Point bump against abalone warehouses in Paarden Island, with Port Elizabeth’s poaching subculture off to the side. My own orbit through Cape Town had once had no contact with these landmarks.

      It is a shuttered perspective of the city I will never get back.

      *

      After making off with tonnes of abalone and being punished with only minor fines, Shuhood’s luck, finally, had run out. For a moment he thought of rushing back into the water to swim for safety, but he barely even knew where he was.

      ‘Had I known the area I would have taken my chances,’ he wrote, but instead he allowed the police to shackle him and lead him to the van. The ranger he recognised was standing at the back door, watching police photographers document the arrest.

      ‘Here comes my favourite customer,’ he said as Shuhood was thrown inside. ‘You never learn, do you?’ The ranger had driven up from Cape Town that evening when the boat had been spotted launching. Now, catching a poacher he had been chasing for years, he could scarcely contain his delight. Three times he had seen Shuhood get away, most recently less than a year ago; this time, with more than 100 kg of abalone in his possession, it was almost certain that Shuhood would be locked up.

      The men were taken to the police station and transferred, a few days later, to the Hopefield court, a single room with a small holding cell at the back. The evening before the trial, after days of silence, Clayton, the fisherman, spoke up.

      ‘There were people at the slipway. They watched us launch,’ he said. When Shuhood heard this, he ‘really moered that motherfucker,’ he told me. ‘He knew the whole time we were in trouble and didn’t say a word.’

      From the start the trial went badly. The investigating officers had found out, from the bokkies, that Shuhood and Shawn were each out on bail for two poaching cases, meaning there was little chance of them getting out until the verdict. The prosecutor was pushing to charge the men as a poaching syndicate, pointing to the involvement of the merchant.

      Within fifteen years the abalone trade had grown into an integrated black-market industry, with smuggling networks extending right across the country. Now the authorities were looking to impose tougher penalties. All four men were denied bail and remanded to Malmesbury prison while the case dragged on.

      Shuhood had been in jail a decade before for a different crime, in the process becoming a member of the 26s gang. That, and the merchant’s status as a drug lord, protected the men against ‘the nastiness you read about in the papers,’ Shuhood wrote. The prisoners in the crowded cells left them well alone.

      Soon enough, the merchant got out on R50 000 bail, swearing to ‘perform miracles’ and have the case withdrawn, but six months later the men were still before the magistrate. ‘Deep in the back of my mind, I knew the game was over for me,’ Shuhood wrote. In early 2007, he was found guilty of poaching and sentenced to 16 months.

      He was 32, with five young children. Both his wives had given birth during the trial, their daughters separated in age by just a month. His first wife, Nuraan,3 had come to visit him in prison, lifting the baby behind the ventilation glass. ‘I thought to myself that no man should see his newborn children for the first time under such conditions,’ Shuhood wrote. His second wife, Fatima, had been forbidden from visiting by her father, and it was only after being driven to Cape Town one day—he had to appear for an older poaching court case—that Shuhood got permission to see her at home.

      The wardens escorted him to the Ocean View apartment they shared, refusing to remove his handcuffs. Fatima cried as she placed their daughter against his chest. ‘I choked back the tears and I knew it was time for me to throw in the towel,’ Shuhood wrote, though it would be years until he finally did.

      By the time he was found guilty for the Langebaan bust, his old cases had been struck off the roll, leaving him eligible for bail again. Before starting his sentence, he wanted to visit his family—unshackled this time—to say goodbye. The magistrate, known to the poachers as ‘Oom Jan,’ appeared to give his consent, asking Shuhood’s lawyer if he would pay bail that same day.

      ‘I used the lawyer’s phone in court to phone my wives and tell them the good news,’ Shuhood wrote. ‘They were very excited and started making plans for the homecoming.’

      Putatively behind the scenes to fix the bail fee, the magistrate walked in again. He had changed his mind, he said: Shuhood was to remain in custody and start serving his sentence immediately.

      ‘I’ve been shot and stabbed more than once, but a more cruel thing than that no one has ever made me go through,’ Shuhood wrote. ‘I just sank down on the bench, dumbstruck.’

      He began writing about his poaching life later that year at the suggestion of someone he met during visiting hours. A frans inmate,4 not part of the Number, had people coming to see him one day. Without protection he would have his besoek stolen—gifts like cigarettes or sweets—on his journey back to the cells. For a share Shuhood accompanied him. A middle-aged coloured woman was waiting for them behind the glass barrier.

      They got talking and she asked Shuhood what he’d been locked up for. With nothing to lose, he told her about the bust. She happened to work at a local publishing house; people would be interested in his story, she said. Hearing that there might be money involved, Shuhood began working, but it was impossible to focus in his crowded cell.

      It was the start of Ramadan and the Muslim inmates had been grouped together; Shuhood held the position of amir, or leader. Over a perceived slight towards Islam, a fight had broken out with the wardens. When the Muslims were split up again Shuhood asked to be transferred to the isolation ward, usually reserved as punishment for more severe misbehaviour. His request was granted. A warden found him an ancient black Olivetti typewriter to work on. Then all he had to do was write.

      It was a project for which he had no frame of reference. He had never kept a journal nor paid close attention to the words he used. The last proper writing he had done was at school. Now, in a cell measuring two metres by two, he found the task extremely difficult, sometimes reworking single paragraphs for hours at a time. He tore up his mistakes and threw scrunched pages across the room. When the typewriter ribbons ran dry he broke pens to re-soak them, staining his hands and the concrete floor. His progress was slow but he kept writing, studying tafsir, or critical interpretations of the Qur’an, in between. ‘It was my best experience in prison,’ he told me. In the end, he wrote every day for seven months.

      The book took form: two parts, with a prologue and epilogue, totalling more than 70 000 words; by the time we met he had begun working on a sequel. Book One began and ended with the bust at Langebaan, enclosing a circular narrative that spanned Shuhood’s rise and fall as a poacher. (I have attempted to follow his structure in this book.) From the prologue: ‘I wrote every word of this book from within the walls of prison, and this is not a book about prison and neither is it my life story, I’d rather say it’s a chapter of my life as a man who chose abalone poaching as a means to provide for his family.’

      It ends: ‘Almost every day the media is rife with stories of “abalone bust” or issues related to it, and if you have ever wondered about this booming black market business and the type of people who supplied it, I suggest you continue reading. This is my story.’

      *

      In 2008 Shuhood was released on parole after spending more than 18 months in prison. On the outside, he contacted the publisher to show her what he had written. But she had quit the industry following a family bereavement, and was no longer interested in manuscripts. Undeterred, Shuhood ran a Google search of publishing houses in Cape Town and contacted Tafelberg, the first result that came up.

      An employee read his manuscript and promptly rejected it. Shuhood was unrepentant about his crimes, the reviewer wrote. Without major revisions, there would be no prospect of bringing it to market. Crushed, Shuhood shoved his carefully typed pages with handwritten corrections in the back of a closet, where they would sit for nearly ten years.

      Early

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