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Poacher. Kimon de Greef
Читать онлайн.Название Poacher
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780795708688
Автор произведения Kimon de Greef
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Completely by chance, Shuhood walked back into the Tafelberg offices less than a month after I requested to switch projects, carrying his manuscript in a plastic packet. My editor mentioned to him that another writer was interested in abalone. He looked me up and sent me an email that same week.
This is what I received, unedited, on 13 April:
Hi my name is Shuhood I have not heard about you until today, I am a abalone poacher since 1996 and in 2007 during my imprisonment I wrote my story is it possible that you could contact me regarding my manuscript that is due for review at the publishes I would highly appreciate any kind of your professional input/assistance. My contact no is ********** or email me at this address. Regards Shuhood
We met at Kenilworth Centre, a grim mall on the outer rim of the southern suburbs, facing across the M5 to the Cape Flats. It is a different node of consumer culture to the Cape Town malls of my youth. Muslim men in flowing thobes push laden trolleys from Game. The freestanding stalls in the corridors sell fidget spinners and vape accessories, not tourist curios (the Waterfront) or manicures and jewellery (Cavendish Square). White shoppers are in lower proportion. The facilities are plainer and more utilitarian, designed less for leisure than channelling people through.
Shuhood was waiting for me in the food court, wearing Aviator-style sunglasses and a black fez. The manuscript was in a backpack at his feet. We spoke for more than two hours. Keeping track of what he said was like drinking from a fire hydrant. Stories rushed from him, rendered with a precision I had never encountered in a subject. He remembered how the sky had changed colours sixteen years before as he drove a haul of abalone into Hout Bay; how the first time he had seen abalone harvested at night the shells had glowed with phosphorescence.
But he did not want me to write about him. Rather, he wanted help rewriting a conclusion for his book, working in the remorse his original reviewer had requested. Remorse, to me, seemed beside the point, with an inside view of the abalone black market on offer, but I asked to read the manuscript.
Its raw detail was astonishing. Missing from the sketches—boat chases, near-drownings, shark scares—were two elements, I thought: Shuhood as a character and a contextual frame for understanding the trade from which he made a living. I made a case for working together and gave him as many reasons as possible to refuse it. The royalties would be less than he had hoped for.5 The project would take months to complete. I would need to interview him, meet his family, rummage around in his past.
To my surprise and alarm, he said yes.
The neighbourhood where Shuhood’s family lived for generations was destroyed a few years after he was born. He still visits sometimes, an interloper among the retirees and tourists and uniformed naval staff who vanish through the harbour gates.
Simon’s Town was until the late 1960s home to more than 7 000 people designated ‘coloured’ by the apartheid government and then forcibly removed, under the Group Areas Act, to dormitory suburbs in Ocean View and across the Cape Flats. A close-knit Muslim community with roots stretching back to the slave trade was pulled apart, their homes knocked down or sold to white buyers and the mosque they worshipped at, spared demolition by the authorities, rendered into a visual anomaly: green minarets and cornices rising among bland seaside houses, as if deposited there by a strange tide.
As a young man, Shuhood used to pray at that mosque before poaching abalone in False Bay. When he finished, he would eat fish and chips on the jetty where his father had swum as a child. Much of his life has threaded through Simon’s Town, but the roots binding him there, if not fully erased, have been smudged out.
‘White people look at me here like: “What the fuck are you doing? You don’t belong,” he told me. ‘I think to myself: “No, you don’t fucking belong here. I’ve got a lot more right to be here than you. My birth certificate says Simon’s Town, place of birth”.’
By genealogy he has a stronger claim than most residents today. His great-grandfather, a stonemason, moved to Simon’s Town from Claremont in the late 1800s, marrying into an old Muslim family and by extension all the families connected to it—the fabric of what became known, over the decades, as the Malay Quarter. His great-grandfather’s surviving handiwork includes the moulded gates of Admiralty House, a naval residence that later became a national monument and, much later, a landmark for Shuhood to orientate by while diving abalone offshore.
Shuhood’s grandfather was also a builder—‘all my uncles and them were tradesmen’—and member of the Labour Party who once travelled to the Soviet Union on a worker’s delegation. ‘He looked like a white man,’ Shuhood said. ‘I’m dark, but my father and them are like you: green eyes or blue eyes, with fair skin. They say my great-great-great grandmother was Irish, O’Malley or something, but I can’t remember her name.’
Shuhood’s family had become moderately prosperous by the time of his birth, establishing in the Malay middle class. Among Shuhood’s uncles are lawyers and academics, stern Muslims all, who look down on him for becoming a poacher; one of them still refuses to speak to him at family gatherings. But instead of growing up in Simon’s Town with his relatives next door, Shuhood came of age in Grassy Park, where on the streets children from rougher backgrounds picked on him for being soft.
‘I was a good-looking laaitie, coming out of a middle-class family,’ he said. ‘With these underprivileged kids, I always had to prove myself.’
To hold his ground in the aftermath of apartheid’s urban purges, he acquired a new persona: unafraid of fighting anybody, quick with a knife. How much did this determine who and what he became? It is an impossible question to answer, even for him. ‘I’m where I am now because of decisions I made,’ he once told me. ‘I’m from a good family and could have done more with my life. This didn’t happen just because we were evicted.’
Another time, he said: ‘If we stayed in Simon’s Town I’d be in the navy or working in the docks now, like my people before me. I’d never have gotten mixed up with the gangs. Poaching? Maybe, maybe not.’
*
The Malay Quarter rose above the harbour in Simon’s Town, a cluster of whitewashed homes and cobbled lanes overlooking False Bay. Even before Shuhood was born, its final days were drawing near. The Group Areas Act, passed in 1950, forbade the existence of racially mixed neighbourhoods in South Africa, and it was only a matter of time before Simon’s Town became a target.
From its origins as a winter anchorage for the Dutch East India Company in 1743, the settlement had always been racially diverse, with slaves from China, Indonesia, India and across the African continent, including Khoisan people, living at close quarters with settlers from Europe. The town grew rapidly in the 1800s after Britain took control of the Cape and began building a naval base there, drawing an even wider mix of people. By the 1950s, the area had become a creolised port town, home to overlapping communities of white, black, coloured and Indian people—all four categories of the apartheid racial scheme.
This presented the National Party, elected just a few years earlier, with a microcosm of a bigger challenge: how to unstitch centuries of natural drift between different racial groups and forge homogenous, geographically distinct neighbourhoods in the country that they had come to rule. Their solution wrested Cape Town from being South Africa’s most integrated city in 1950 to its most segregated less than thirty years later—a condition that has largely persisted since the end of apartheid, locked in place by the highways and railways laid down