Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard by Sean Christie

Author:Sean Christie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard, Nelson Mandela Boulevard, Sean Christie, Tanzania, Stowaways, Cape Town, Foreshore, Jonathan Ball, Jonathan Ball Publishers, Beachboys
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Published: 2016-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

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Surprisingly little has been written about stowaways. The term elicits no pings from the world’s major online research databases, and hardly any in the physical libraries I visit.

Then again, I have never been much of a sleuth. I was employed as a researcher by an internationally renowned academic, once, and given her latest edited version of Olive Schreiner’s Dream Life and Real Life to proofread and set. ‘Do not introduce any new errors,’ she had warned at the outset. Evidently I had introduced a bunch, and thereafter had found myself transporting boxes of her academic papers between her office and her home, or on secondment to her colleagues as a box lifter.

I was excited, therefore, to receive a call a month or so back from Amaha Senu, an Ethiopian PhD candidate at the Seafarers International Research Centre at the University of Cardiff. In a gentle voice, Senu explained that he had been looking into seafarers’ experiences of stowaways for some time and was now keen to meet some real-life stowaways to get a sense of their experiences of captains and crews.

‘It appears that we have been exploring the same territory, but from different angles,’ he said, and proposed an exchange of favours. If I could facilitate introductions to a few stowaways, he would happily share his textual resources with me. Amaha arrived and spent more than a month interacting with Adam, Barak, Sudi and others. Once a week during this time we would meet for lunch, usually at Addis restaurant on the corner of Long and Church streets and, over injera and doro wot, we’d compare notes. As promised, Amaha presented me with a succession of his resources.

The first out of his briefcase was Robert Louis Stevenson’s travel memoir, The Amateur Emigrant, which includes a chapter describing Stevenson’s encounter at sea with an experienced stowaway called Alick, who impresses with his storytelling abilities. ‘I wish you could have heard him tell his own stories,’ he writes. ‘They were so swingingly set forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated here and there by such luminous bits of acting, that they could only lose in any reproduction.’

For Stevenson, stowaways are ‘sea-tramps’, drawn to an adventurous path through life and likely as not to be ‘poisoned by coal-gas, or die by starvation in their places of concealment; or when found they may be clapped at once and ignominiously into irons, thus to be carried to their promised land, the port of their destination, and alas! brought back in the same way to that from which they started, and there delivered over to the magistrates and the seclusion of a county jail.’ The neo-romantic writer’s instinctive sympathy for this way of life is tempered by his actual experience of meeting and interacting with Alick, who, he decides, is lazy, ‘his character […] degenerated like his face, and become pulpy and pretentious’. The chapter ends on a compensatory note, though, with a description of a woman he deems ‘remarkable among her fellows for a pleasing and interesting air’.

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