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      ‘A senior official helped, together with the Simon’s Town housing supervisor, and worked late into the night,’ Willis wrote. Families with chickens ‘were allowed to take them provided they killed one a week until all were consumed’.

      *

      Shuhood’s life as a poacher would wind through both Simon’s Town and Port Elizabeth. His first dives for abalone took place a few kilometres from his parents’ demolished cottage. The first time that he was caught poaching, he spent the night in the Simon’s Town cells.

      Years later, diving behind the naval harbour one afternoon, he stashed his abalone to retrieve after dark and was walking back to the parking lot when he saw a man watching him with a strange expression. As usual, his response was to play it cool. ‘I greeted the guy like I had nothing to worry about, but he didn’t stop staring,’ he told me. ‘So I look down and there’s this fucking shucked perlie stuck to my wetsuit! Right in the middle of my chest! Broe, I got out of there quick.’

      It is possible to detach an abalone from its shell without killing it, severing the muscle, but the shell never grows back. Shuhood had missed a step and the creature had clung onto him. It was, for him, an uncharacteristic mistake. He was known for delivering clean fish to his buyers: ‘Die Kaap se skoonste duiker,’ or Cape Town’s cleanest diver, they called him.

      ‘Some people work downright mossag. Messy, man,’ he told me. ‘Fish with guts in, and everything is just slimy. You can’t go to the buyer like that. Now you must pay someone to clean your shit properly. Some of the carriers do this—’ he bit the air with the side of his mouth. ‘Bite that guts, rip it, spit it out.’

      Many times he returned to the same spot to poach. Penguins from the Boulders colony plunged through the water or watched him from shore. Further out, beyond the shallows, Shuhood knew, were great white sharks, but in the beginning there was no need to risk swimming there. Abalone plastered the reefs close to land, enclosed by thickets of kelp. Over time, as poaching grew worse, the abalone thinned, empty shells littering the seafloor. Shuhood was among a minority of divers prepared to go deeper.

      ‘If you swim out, that’s when you worry,’ he told me. ‘You try not to think. You’re always being aware, but if you think shark shark shark you’re not gonna get any work done.’

      Using his dive lever as a kind of ice pick—stabbing it into the sand, pulling himself forward—he would crawl along the bottom, protected against being struck from below. On the deeper reefs were massive abalone that he called ‘buckets’.

      ‘There’s a prayer I said every day,’ he said. ‘Oh, Allah, protect me from the sea and the dangers of the sea.’

      On a recent Saturday morning, Shuhood and I took a drive to Simon’s Town, cutting through the council flats near his house (‘the ghetto,’ he said) and merging onto the M5, one of the apartheid barriers separating the white suburbs from the Cape Flats. The highway passes Grassy Park, Lotus River and Lavender Hill—a very different approach to Muizenberg than the M3, the route via Constantia I have taken most of my life. Our paths through the city have been circumscribed and separate; without abalone, there would have been no reason for them to intersect.

      On the way down the peninsula we stopped at some of Shuhood’s old poaching spots. We arrived in Simon’s Town at noon. A parking attendant waved us into a space opposite Jubilee Square, where sellers of African crafts waited for business. In the harbour there were a few small tour groups milling about, with adverts for kayak rentals and whale-watching trips strung up along the quay. Simon’s Town felt empty in spite of all the people there: a naval port crossed with a dour holiday town at the end of the railway tracks.

      It was a mood that I had felt there long before learning about its Group Areas history—a strange vacancy. Blank.

      We ate at the fish and chips shop. Shuhood told me a story about his father, as a child, bunking school to go swimming. ‘He was in the water alone when he saw this massive shark come into the harbour. He just made it up the stairs, then he sat here and watched the shark.’

      After lunch, we crossed the road and climbed the stairs to the mosque. ‘One of my aunts used to live here; an uncle lived there,’ Shuhood said, pointing up and down the lane. ‘Some people stayed longer than us.’

      With his parents he would visit the Malay Quarter each year for Eid, driving through to other family in Ocean View afterwards. Before leaving, they would go to where their old home had once stood.

      ‘My father would tell me, “This is where we lived,” and I didn’t understand what he meant. I was like, “But why don’t we live here anymore?” And he’d say, “I’ll tell you another time.”’

      We walked down Thomas Street, a narrow road with views of the harbour. A car slowed and the driver turned to look at us. At another stairway, Shuhood stopped.

      ‘We lived somewhere here,’ he said, ‘but the houses have all changed.’

      *

      Rosa lives today on the Cape Flats train line in one of the middle-class coloured suburbs that hug the outer edge of the M5. She is in her seventies and hard of hearing. Shuhood would often visit her before going diving, and when he left she’d watch his WhatsApp profile until he was back online. ‘Oh, but I used to worry! That’s when I knew he was safe.’

      Her house is small, with a peeling fence and covered stoep. She rents rooms in a backyard Wendy house to Zimbabwean lodgers who enter and leave through a side gate. Her youngest son, a heroin addict who stays clean for months before relapsing, sleeps in the second bedroom sometimes; recently Shuhood was threatening to throw him out.

      The first time I visited, a week after meeting Shuhood, I was expecting a more distressing set of circumstances. Shuhood had told me by WhatsApp that he was ‘tikking’ at his mother’s house, but he meant typing the sequel to his manuscript—on a borrowed typewriter, hunched over in the kitchen—not getting high.

      On a December weekend in 2017, Rosa went for a drive down the peninsula with two friends. By chance they ended up in Simon’s Town just before the noonday prayer, and at Rosa’s suggestion they parked on Main Road and climbed the concrete steps. It was her first time inside the building in more than 20 years. ‘It brought back so many memories,’ she said. ‘You get that sad feeling, you know? I thought to myself: “I should have still been here. I should have still enjoyed coming to this mosque.”’

      On the way out she looked at the square where their car once stood and the harbour where children from the neighbourhood used to swim. It was as if she was switching between two views of the same place.

      ‘I wish my grandchildren could have grown up there. I wish that my own children could have enjoyed what those other children did,’ she told me. ‘When I go to Simon’s Town now, I could cry.’

      *

      It is in South Africa’s chinks and fissures that the illicit abalone trade has taken hold. Forced removals took place less than two generations ago. Legacies of dispossession that began long before apartheid are still playing out. Not everyone who inherits this history turns to a life of crime, but by any measure the likelihood is far greater.

      As a teenager in Grassy Park, Shuhood wore his hair spiked and dressed sharply: Pringle shirts, Navada slacks, Crockett & Jones leather shoes. The black market was not an abstract concept but operated in front of him on the street. The Americans fought for turf with the Junky Funky Kids, extorting local businesses and peddling buttons (mandrax) and dagga. It was the mid-1980s and South Africa’s criminal economy was still parochial, hemmed in by trade sanctions and the hard borders of the apartheid state. A decade later it would spring open to the global underworld, with the same gangs at war with each other. Abalone, among the Cape’s most valuable commodities, had become embedded at the system’s nexus. The preceding steps, meanwhile—the systemic dislocation of millions of people—were blurred from view, absorbed into the city’s built environment. Blancville conformed to the white city. If you type into Google’s search box ‘Simon’s Town Group Ar—’ today the auto-fill

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