Vagabond Read online

  VAGABOND

  VAGABOND

  Lerato Mogoatlhe

  First published by BlackBird Books, an imprint of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd, in 2019

  10 Orange Street

  Sunnyside

  Auckland Park 2092

  South Africa

  +2711 628 3200

  www.jacana.co.za

  © Lerato Mogoatlhe, 2019

  All rights reserved.

  d-PDF ISBN 978-1-928337-70-6

  ePUB ISBN 978-1-928337-71-3

  mobi file ISBN 978-1-928337-72-0

  Cover design by Palesa Motsomi

  Cover image: Hamid El Nil shrine in Omdurman, Sudan

  Editing by Megan Mance

  Proofreading by Nkhensani Manabe

  Set in Minion Pro 11/15.5pt

  Job no. 003426

  See a complete list of BlackBird Books titles at www.jacana.co.za

  The freedom to wander from place to place and the possibility of knowing the world beyond what’s around my corner is a seed planted by my maternal grandmother, Basetsana Mary Malebane, and my paternal grandfather, Rantswai Gabriel Mogoatlhe, who could only travel in their dreams. I dedicate Vagabond to them.

  Contents

  You are Home

  Train to Bamako

  Magic Town

  Sun, Sand and Sex

  Young, Black and Wasted

  Timbuktu

  Number

  Losing Myself

  Aisha

  A Gift for My Soul

  Leaving West Africa

  Vagabond

  Going to Uganda

  Hang Them

  Johari

  A New Sudan

  Hearing Voices

  Losing My Mind

  Bravehearts

  Small Country, Big Heart

  Weird Privilege

  Egypt

  Sudan

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  I

  YOU ARE HOME

  24 June 2008

  THERE ARE WAYS OF ARRIVING in a new country: You should know where you are going, have your first few nights’ accommodation booked, be able to converse in the lingua franca and have a bottomless bank account – or enough savings to make cash the least of your problems. This is the way of the well-organised and the cash-savvy. I’m not this person. I arrive in Dakar at 3.30am on a ‘dental floss’ budget; I don’t know anyone, and my seven-word French vocabulary doesn’t include ‘please help me’.

  Go ahead and tell me I’m an idiot. I aim stronger words at myself as I leave the plane at Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport. I fill in my customs forms as if my hands have never held a pen. An official comes over to help me with the daunting task of tackling page two, where I need to answer the horrific question of where in Dakar I will be staying.

  The first plan I come up with is to head to a nightclub, but then I realise I’m yet to see a club taking in revellers with backpacks the size of Mount Kilimanjaro. I anxiously watch it going around the conveyor belt until a guard comes over to ask if I have lost my bag. I put the backpack on a trolley and push it like I’ve never walked before, panicking with every step taking me closer to the exit, fending off touts and cab drivers. Dakar comes with two warnings: It’s infamously expensive and brimming with conmen. Getting into a taxi to nowhere is not an option. The only thing I know about Dakar is that it’s the capital city of Senegal, and that the country is home to Youssou N’Dour, Baaba Maal, Ismael Lo, and one of my favourite writers, Sembene Ousmane. I also know about President Senghor’s concept of Negritude and that Gerard Sekoto spent some time in Dakar and Casamance.

  I have no idea what I’m doing, only that I refuse to accept the image of Africa as the home of doom and gloom. I come up with my Plan B as soon as I spot a uniformed gentleman holding a sign board with the words ‘Novotel Hotel’. I straighten my back – to appear confident – and hand him the backpack, warning that it’s rather heavy. I’m the only passenger in the Coaster minibus. I plonk into my seat and wonder if a colleague who suggested going to Hillbrow when I told her about my plans to travel around West Africa wasn’t onto something. Before Dakar, I had been out of South Africa for thirteen days on work trips to Swaziland, Zanzibar and Ghana.

  ‘No money, no experience, no social connections,’ I mumble to myself, ‘and apparently no common sense too because who abandons their life and career for something they don’t know?’

  Just when my heart starts sinking, the radio plays Youssou N’Dour’s ‘Birima’. It’s one of the most important songs of my life; the one I’d listen to and daydream about West Africa when I was still a student in 2003 – I know I’ll be just fine.

  Dakar has a great get-up-and-go energy even just before dawn. There’s music from clubs and cafés wafting through the air. Cab drivers hang out topless on car bonnets or pavements. On some street corners there are already women setting up shop for their street cafés; firing up pots and unloading plates from trolleys pushed by young men.

  ‘And you are?’ The manager at Novotel asks with a smile that sparkles as much as the chandeliers hanging over us.

  ‘L-e-r-a-t-o M-o-g-o-a-t-l-h-e. Lerato Mogoatlhe,’ I reply.

  ‘You’re not on the system, miss,’ he says after a few minutes.

  ‘But my travel agent confirmed my booking,’ I lie, hoping he’ll let me hang out at reception until sunrise as the realisation that I have no idea what I am doing starts to sink in. Standing in that reception area and pretending to be a guest provides me with some momentary comfort while I collect my wits. He calls another ‘good hotel’ and asks the driver to give me a lift there. This hotel is several stars below Novotel’s five, but at US$100 a night, it’s still unaffordable. The night manager, Jean, makes more calls and sends me off to another hotel, promising to collect me there after his shift so we can look for an even cheaper place. My reasonable room turns out to be dingy with a sagging bed. The bedding looks like it used to be white. Now it’s worn out and faded. The chair and table are solid but old and scratched and the roomy bathroom has a toilet that shifts with my body.

  An upbeat Jean and our 10am appointment find me pacing around reception. I’m excited and anxious. I’m still frazzled by my disorganised arrival and the fact that I have no idea what I’m actually doing, but everyone I meet is friendly and kind. They greet me with wide smiles that make me feel welcome. It makes me believe that I’ll be okay.

  We find the promised cheaper place six kilometres away from the city centre in Yoff. Via Via guesthouse is set in a small courtyard. It’s quiet, save for the Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté’s ‘Debe’, another favourite, playing on Radio Pan Afrique. There’s a hammock on the way to the five rooms named after tourist attractions like Gorée and Lac Rose. At the bar-restaurant, a middle-aged black woman sits alone, reading newspapers and drinking beer from a glass she covers with a coaster to keep the everpresent flies out. Some European travellers pore over guidebooks.

  Via Via is on Rue La Fayette. At the top of the street, off the main road, is a bank where three boys look on with smiles, waiting to sell me fake Louis Vuitton bags, Chanel and Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses. An eye-level poster behind the bank sells dreams of instant riches showing a man leaping with joy, a lottery ticket in his hand. There’s an apartment hotel and an office building with medical specialists. There are small shacks selling everything from car tyres to packets of Nescafé with a teaspoon’s worth of coffee, one laundry basket’s worth of washing powder, flip flops, newspapers, cooking oil, rice and powdered milk.

  Like most of Senegal, Yoff is predominantly Muslim. Dakar is a party town but there are no night clubs and bottle stores in Yoff. The beach is the centre for relaxation. Mornings feature tourists frolicking in plastic-bag-infested wa
ters, in between reading and tanning at the beach cafés. The cafés are compounds with bamboo umbrellas that you pay to use. The better-off cafés offer plastic mats and have restaurants and open-air kitchens where meals are cooked in large pots on fires made on the ground. In the afternoons, the beach is a sea of blackness, with swimmers, runners, a pair of girls working on their taekwondo and groups of soccer players with sensationally chiselled bodies. I can see why Dakar is famous for holiday flings.

  My two weeks in Dakar are uneasy. I’m working as a freelance journalist – a first for me – and discovering that those cheques only show up in my bank account at the will and whim of the people who sign off invoices; I am also struggling to fit in. Other than my black skin, everything is foreign to me – especially the food culture. I’ve seen and heard about trays of food shared by many hands. I encounter one on my third day when musician Didier Awadi invites me to share a meal of white rice and a creamy peanut butter stew called mafé. I pass on lunch.

  The biggest shock is the relentless sales pitch from the endless stream of entrepreneurs selling everything from cloth, jewellery and CDs to pans and coal. It follows me inside the colourful public buses called car rapide and finds me at restaurants and internet cafés. It joins me at tea invitations, usually at the third cup, when my hosts and I have talked long enough to count as friends. In the Sahel, tea is not just a hot drink, it is a social tradition that is brewed and served accordingly in three stages. The bitter first cup is likened to death; the second cup is mintier, lighter in colour and just sweet enough, like life. The final cup, like love, is the sweetest. Sometimes people just skip to the third.

  I’m also struggling because I’m living according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, a manual which warns me to always watch my back. I go to the sites it suggests, visiting Lac Rose – thirty kilometres outside Dakar – and find the water dark brown instead of the vivid pink on tourism brochures. I explore the noisy and overcrowded Médina where Youssou N’Dour was born, go window shopping at the Grand Marché, spend an afternoon at Ngor island and go to Gorée island, where slaves were kept before being shipped across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Gorée is a twenty-minute ferry ride from the city. Windswept, with coral-coloured buildings and baobab trees, it’s beautiful. There are no cars, only boats bobbing on the beachfront as young boys play soccer or splash in the sea. Goats park themselves on a soccer field, and artists work in open-air studios painting sunsets, boats, village huts, women and children balancing water pails or logs on their heads. Some artists use glue and sand instead of paint and brush to create their work.

  At the House of Slaves, a clay-coloured two-storey building, the guide raises and lowers his voice for effect while recounting history. The holding cells are dungeons where only slivers of sunlight come in through small openings. ‘This is where our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers were made to spend their last days in Africa. Can you imagine their pain and humiliation?’ he yells at our group of mostly white tourists. He shakes his head and sucks his teeth. I roll my eyes at the theatrics. The white lady next to me is not the only person sniffling. This only makes the historian more emotional.

  ‘After they were brought here, our people were shackled in ball-and-chain, and our women raped. I come here every day, and the pain is always the same,’ he continues.

  The sniffles get louder at the Door of No Return, where slaves last touched African soil. I ditch the group when their whimpers turn to tears. Nothing puts me off as much as white guilt about the past when the present is still racist.

  The first time I feel like I’m creating my own experience is on a Tuesday afternoon when Fatuma and the rest of the female staff at Via Via invite me to a wedding. Everyone is caked in makeup and decked out in grand boubous, chiffon, silk and lace dresses, and towering doeks. The only men in the tent are the drummers, photographer and videographer. The bride is dressed in a body-hugging gold satin and organza ensemble that looks like it’s inspired by TV dance competitions. Her already light complexion is painted in a lighter shade of foundation; her eyes shimmering with blue eye shadow. Her smile reveals gold-decked teeth. We dance to the beat of the sabar, the bride distributes cloth to her guests, and then we head inside where the scruffily dressed groom oversees feeding guests. We leave with a round tray of rice and mafé to share. I pretend that I’m tired to get out of eating from the communal plate.

  November 2007

  It’s pay-day Friday night in Newtown, Johannesburg, and a department store is pouring cash as it does at the end of every month in the name of a music series. Tonight’s party celebrates local hip-hop and its stars are performing to a frenzied public in between mingling in a VIP room that’s crowded with mostly young, hip, party animals, media and marketing types, D-list celebrities, a kwaito legend, people who are famous for being famous, a handful of radio personalities and people who know people on the guest list. I’m paid to party as a music and entertainment journalist. My life should be fabulous. I meet stars and icons. I’m guaranteed VIP access to top music events. I’ve met Beyoncé and partied with John Legend in his suite. Yet I can’t deny that this is just another insignificant moment in a life that’s fast becoming a series of inane events.

  My friend Siki walks back to our table with flat lukewarm ciders.

  ‘Friend, you have your look,’ she says.

  The look is blank and distant. It’s the look I have at most events lately. Whatever the occasion, I’m bored out of my mind being there. I have my look tonight because my mind burns with one question: Is this really all there is to my life, so predictable that I have been sleepwalking through it for months?

  ‘I’m so sick of this,’ I tell Siki. I’m tired of pretending to care about people’s new albums and TV shows. I honestly don’t give a damn who is dressed by whom and I’m over writing about other people’s lives and dreams coming true.

  I leave the party knowing what needs to happen. I need to listen carefully to the thoughts that have not left me since December 2006 when a media trip took me to Accra.

  A few days after the party, I write on Facebook that I’m hearing voices.

  ‘Make them stop,’ I say.

  ‘What are the voices saying?’ another friend, intrepid traveller Adam Levine, asks in a direct message.

  ‘They’re telling me Africa – now,’ I tell him. ‘Then go. Now,’ he writes back.

  I leave South Africa seven months later, telling everyone I will be back after three months in West Africa. I start in Dakar.

  My life in Senegal takes a turn towards the authentic when I run out of money two weeks after my arrival. I’m waiting for a cheque that’s late by a week. It’s not a problem as long as I can stay at Via Via, where payments are made at checkout. When I return to Via Via one evening, Fatuma tells me I have a day to move out – a group of diligent Germans booked out the guesthouse months ago. I go to the rooftop to cook up a plan. I’m buddies with a crew of four Liberian guys that I meet around Yoff – Jim, Ousmane, Eric and Solou, who says AIDS stands for ‘America’s Idea to Discourage Sex’. There’s also Jean, the night manager I meet on the day I arrive here, but I’m not in the mood to live with a family and have to follow their rules. I go back to the restaurant and wait until only myself and Mustafa are left. He’s a waiter and tour guide.

  ‘Mustafa, I need a favour, and you can’t say no,’ I start. ‘I don’t have enough money to pay my bill tomorrow. Can I leave my laptop here until I can pay?’

  He refuses. ‘Do you remember what I tell you when we first meet?’ It was on my second morning in the city. When I ask him how I can get to Gorée using a car rapide, he tells me that he is also a tour guide and offers me his services, which I find too expensive for someone who should be living on US$20 a day. He gives up on trying to be my tour guide and tells me to stop worrying about money.

  ‘Here, you’re home; you’ll be taken care of.’

  He says I can pay my bill when I have money without leaving my laptop at Via Via.


  A thin guy who has been sitting alone all night comes over. His name is Amadou – black as coal with yellowish buck teeth that have gaps between them, a shaved head with a long, thick braid that hangs to just below his neck. His rib cage is visible under his yellow shirt. He’s a tour guide and owns a beachfront café called Chez Amadou. He also has a white stallion he uses to transport goods around Yoff. He tells me I can stay at his house for free and for as long as I need to. I can’t afford to refuse his offer.

  His house turns out to be a bedroom at his mother’s. The house has three bedrooms, a lounge with peach Gomma Gomma sofas, white lace-and-voile curtains with peach trimmings, and a well-polished room divider with a tea and glass set for guests. Amadou’s bedroom has one wooden window facing the street. The bed is a thin double-bed-sized sponge. Décor is two souvenir art paintings. There’s a small cooler box in which he happens to have two cold beers. The en suite bathroom has no shower or plumbing; I have to use the shared bathroom. To shower, I fill a bucket with cold water, wet my washing cloth and soap it; to rinse, I use a plastic jug to scoop water from the bucket and splash it over my body.

  Our side of the beach has a view with piles of plastic bags and a well. But it’s still a house at the beach; something I’ve never experienced. I move around the house like a ghost, afraid to run into Amadou’s mother after I overhear them in a screaming match about what I’m doing at her house. Amadou moves to a back room in Chez Amadou. While other cafés have a lot of tourists, the only people at Chez Amadou are Amadou and his three friends. One room is a lounging area where they hang out eating peanuts, playing drums and drinking tea. The next is his bedroom. It’s smaller than the one that has become my home. With three broken chairs, a hard mattress and no door, his generosity moves me to tears. Visiting Chez Amadou becomes my new daily ritual. We meet there just before sunset for drumming sessions with his neighbour, Africa, and his buddies. Dakar starts feeling like home.