Tuhafeni looked down at the bracelets on his arm. The reassuring clack they made when they knocked together reminded him of home, of Namibia. The coast, the dunes, the desert meeting the sea, everything. Their delicate geometric design spoke of world-renowned Namibian artistry. The way the patterns were etched onto sections of PVC pipe, employed by craftspeople after the supply of ivory ran out, symbolised for him the ingenuity of his people.
He ran his fingers up and down his dreadlocks remembering far-away places as he walked down the beach. Everything about Namibia, about Africa, about its people and its diaspora, made Tuhafeni incredibly proud. It was a balmy day. The sun was warm—as a soft blanket, not a burning fire.
Tuhafeni raised his head and squinted at the distant molten shapes of resort buildings on the horizon. Seawater glistened against his bare chest, against a faded tattoo outlining a map of Africa on his bicep, against toned pectoral and abdominal muscles.
Tuhafeni may have looked athletic, but he was no athlete. He was, well, he did what he did. Part-time tour guide, full-time insurer, procurer and enforcer who saw that the wealthy European tourists in Swakopmund got everything they desired. After all, they could afford it, these wealthy foreigners, mostly living off ill-gotten gains, oftentimes in businesses exploiting Africa. Namibia needed the money. Hey, Tuhafeni needed the money. He had made lots of it. He was living his dream.
And yet.
And yet, walking down this beach seemingly transported directly from heaven to earth, Tuhafeni was struck by a twinge. A simultaneous tightness in both the chest and the head. A reminder that he knew more than he liked about what lay behind the beauty of this Namibian coastal town. Corruption, poverty, violence, racism, rape, drugs. The Namibia the tourist brochures never showed you.
Tuhafeni squared his shoulders. He linked his fingers behind his back and stretched his arms behind him. He took a deep breath. The twinge passed. He stood for a moment or two and inhaled the sweet sea air. He had made it this far. Things would be all right.
***
Almost as soon as he arrived at the party at The Beach Bar, Taimi took Tuhafeni aside. The music was loud and she had to almost scream to make herself heard over the din.
“Hey baby! I just had to meet you at this party, didn’t I?”
“Yeah?”
Tuhafeni barely met her gaze. Taimi looked like everything. Not an inch of fat on her stomach, her breasts perfectly shaped under her bikini top, her hips moving with just a hint of swag. She was always like this—glamorous, charming. But Tuhafeni felt he saw something else, whenever he saw her. Something utterly sad. Inconsolably so.
He felt the sadness was that of a genius, beautiful, brainiac woman who should have been able to do anything with her life. If you met her six years ago, when she left school, Tuhafeni said to himself, you’d have imagined she’d become a billionaire or a Nobel-prize-winning scientist. Yet here she was, depending on the very least of her talents—her looks and sex appeal—to get by.
“Tuha, babes, I have a job for you. Something one of my clients needs help with.”
Tuhafeni hated people using the shortened form of his name. The way Western tourists did when they couldn’t seemingly make the effort to pronounce a basic African name like “Tuhafeni”. Yet “Tchaikovsky” or “Michelangelo” would just roll off their tongues with ease. Almost as bad as Europeans coming up to him out of nowhere and demanding to touch his hair. Could people just not, he said in his head. But he remained silent.
Taimi took Tuhafeni by the arm, leading him onto the bar’s outdoor terrace, where the music was less loud.
“There’s a, uh, shipment arriving tomorrow at midnight. At the old jetty in Walvis Bay. Berth 12. Not an official delivery, you understand. Mr Jerry needs it. And there’ll be, let’s just say there’ll be enough left over for you to help your clients out with. I was going to send Pohamba, but he’s not been well. I thought he’d be out of hospital by now, but the doctors won’t let him leave.”
“And this, uh, shipment is paid for?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly! So you seriously want me to stand at the Old Jetty in Walvis, in the middle of the night, with, I dunno, thousands in my backpack?”
“Tuha, babe, this isn’t exactly an official shipment. I can’t just get on my banking app and eWallet, you know? As a matter of fact, the main money has been paid. I literally just need you to hand over a few US dollars to the couriers. You know, to buy some chocolates for their mothers.”
“More like to fund their own coke habits. I don’t like this. What if the police find out? Or some criminal tries to rip us off?”
“Nobody knows. I promise you. Other than Jerry and you, and me, no-one, I mean no-one, knows about this. Secrecy is of the utmost importance. You drop a backpack, pick up another backpack, you get in your car, you go. Five minutes, it’s done.”
“Uh-huh”
“Come on. Babe? Please? For me?” Taimi put her arms around Tuha, and drew him close to her. “You know we go way back, babes. I need you, just this once.”
***
As soon as Pohamba got into the taxi, it sped away from the curb. He handed the driver a crumpled banknote. No one challenged them as they drove through the police checkpoint on the edge of the hospital estate. Motionless, Pohamba gazed through the dirty cab window, as they joined the traffic on Windhoek’s Western Bypass, and the multiple concrete towers of the Central Hospital complex vanished into the distance. He wasn’t staying there.
He may have been mentally ill, probably. But he knew that fluoxetine or paroxetine or whatever else they wanted to give him wouldn’t help. Even the Xanax wasn’t making him sleep any more. Nor would keeping him there for “observation” do any good, as that South African psychiatrist was suggesting. Observation. Observing what? That his very self was less and less inhabiting his own body? That he was slowly losing not only the ability to love himself but even to act in his own best interest? That life seemed less like it once did—a glorious collection of matter, energy, atoms, and laws of physics, in which he had the immense privilege to participate as a conscious being—and more something like a tragic accident, which got worse as the hours went by and in which he’d sooner have no further part?
“Forgive me, son, but I have to ask,” the taxi driver drawled from the front seat. ‘“Where do those marks come from?”
Pohamba said nothing, and instead pulled his sleeve down over his left forearm.
“Why do you cut yourself, like that?”
Sam was his name, the first name Pohamba had come across in a random, panicked scroll through his phone. The first name he thought might be useful in getting him out. Enough of an acquaintance to take him back to Walvis at short notice for a minimal fee, but not enough of a “friend” to send him back for another round of poking and prodding. He wished Sam would now be quiet, though.
“What would it take, brother, to make you better?”
Once again Pohamba did not answer, and a soft blanket of silence returned to the vehicle interior. But Pohamba knew exactly what would make him better, and he expected Sam knew too: living in a fairer country. Living in a country where black people owned stuff.
He should know, he grew up assuming he’d be one of the owners. With one of the best sets of high school results in the country, he’d signed up for a degree in nature conservation at the Polytechnic and finished cum laude. He’d hoped to soon be owning a lodge or drafting national climate change policy. Instead, he found himself unemployed for months on end.
Two years and maybe a hundred job applications later, he met Frank. The guy who taught him to shoot.
“For fuck’s sake, don’t feel sorry for a damn springbok,” Frank had said one day as he saw Pohamba hesitating on the trigger. “You know what Europeans pay for even one of those? We gotta eat, kid. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. The frikkin’ German army killed Hereros like flies for this very land we stand on, then went to have a beer. And you’re worried about a springbok? Please.”
Life on Frank’s hunting farm had been all right for a while, if you accepted that cruelty to animals was a fact of life and you were not to talk back. But times were changing. One day Frank came to Pohamba’s room holding a letter.
“Well, that’s it, son.” Frank had said. “Covid has finished us. The bank is foreclosing. I have no choice but to sell to the Chinese. It’s a pittance, of course, and they won’t keep any of the Namibian staff, but what the fuck can we do? I need you out by Friday.”
Pohamba had hitch-hiked back to Windhoek. He’d called up his cousin Taimi and she’d directed him to a large house with a pool and tennis court. An old white man opened the door and looked at him suspiciously. Taimi and Whitey had a gruff conversation behind closed doors. Pohamba was allowed to stay for a week.
Still, he had not given up. He’d found a room—-a dingy bedsit shared with four others, but a room—and gotten a scholarship for his masters. But times were hard. The lecturers were aloof. He seemed unable to hack this thinking thing any more. After years mopping floors and killing game animals, theories about “sustainability” and “development” seemed of little relevance. The scholarship barely paid the bills. He now needed a bit of buzz to keep going through all-night study sessions.
Once, while cooking, he’d accidentally pierced his thumb with his chef’s knife. He couldn’t fully explain it, but the sight of his own blood had felt reassuring. Butchering himself, rather than some poor kudu so its head could adorn a wall in Switzerland, had a kind of purity about it.
“That doctor Steyn, the psychiatrist you told me about,” Sam said, “I think I saw her the other day. She’s cute.”
I wish he would shut up, Pohamba said to himself. Why can’t Africans handle a bit of freaking silence?
“So she isn’t cute?” the driver sent another volley of unwanted sound into the silence. Cute? Pohamba wouldn’t quite have said so. She was attractive in her way. When he had woken up in hospital after presumably being transported there unconscious by his housemates, hers was the first face he’d seen.
Although he’s said next to nothing in official therapy sessions, she’d sit at his bedside in her free moments, talking about everyday stuff. Her dogs, three Maltese poodles with a penchant for running up vet bills. How she got her ass kicked by her younger sister at the Padel Tennis Courts every Friday.
He had begun to open up about Frank and how he was dumped at the roadside like a broken fridge to balance the books. About how he, not some fat cat from Beijing, could have steered the business through a pandemic. How he deserved, after all that study, to be the one playing tennis and living in a house with a pool. If not him, who?
Rebekka seemed to understand his rantings. That was her first name; he was welcome to use it. To his housemates, he was a dangerous madman. They had not visited. To his lecturers he was a troublesome student, wasting his potential. Rebekka seemed to get him.
But did she? Did she really see past all that privilege, past her expensive hobbies, past her pets, past that she was almost the same age as him with a doctoral degree and home ownership and the opportunity to work in a foreign country and family who looked up to her and professional prestige?
Could any white person, even a white African citizen, even a “woke” one, really understand a black person?
A poor black person like himself?
No, it ran too deep. To be black in this world, unless you were lucky, was to be running all the time. Being carried on her back as your mom ran for, or from, something. Running as a young man, away from bullies, bills, responsibilities. Running as a middle aged man from relatives who assumed you held the keys to wealth. Running all the way into the grave in your old age.
Could the good, kind, Dr Rebekka Steyn ever comprehend that?
***
Tuhafeni shivered. He pulled his far-too-light coat tighter around his shoulders.
The jetty spread out beneath his feet and into the blackness. The lapping of waves against its supports, as well as the occasional ship’s horn far away in the main Walvis harbor, were the only sounds he could hear.
He waited.
He watched.
He waited some more.
His mind wandered off to another time, to another place, a carefree one. To a dry, smooth, white-sanded, sunny farmstead yard where his mother had owned a record player.
As maybe a 10- or 12-year-old, kicking a soccer ball around his sandy yard, he remembered the distinctive fizz, click, click of a vinyl record beginning its circuit on the turntable.
Let us all unite and celebrate together
The victories won for our liberation
Let us dedicate ourselves to rise together
To defend our liberty and unity.
“Ma! What’s that song?” he had asked.
“That’s the African Union anthem. You must learn to sing it. From now on, whenever we sing our national anthem, we must sing this one, too.”
“Why?”
“Because, as much as we are Namibians, we are Africans too. We owe it to Africa to work hard. To stand together. Now that we are free, we must never let ourselves be enslaved. We must be united. We must never let dictators tell us what to do. That’s what the song says.”
“Are we all Africans?
“Yes”
“Even me?”
“Yes, even you. All of us. We must be united. That is what makes people strong. We are a rainbow nation. We are one Namibian house.”
“Okay, Ma”
Ma thought he had gone back to play soccer, but Tuha had sat cross legged on the compound floor, listening to the song play out across from the kitchen. It was strange music, like a church choir, he thought: half wedding hymn, half funeral lament.
Let us all unite and sing together
To uphold the bonds that frame our destiny
Let us dedicate ourselves to fight together
For lasting peace and justice on the Earth.
“Ma? Do you believe the song?”
“What do you mean, son?”
“Do you think we will get lasting peace and justice on the earth?”
“It’s complicated, but I hope so. If we all fight for what is right, if we refuse to do what is wrong. If we remember where we come from.”
“Yes, ma.”
“Let us all unite and toil together
To give the best we have to Africa”
“Ma, what is toooooil?”
“It means, hard work”
“Oh, I see.”
Tuha sat on the white-sand floor of the farmstead, listening to the African Union anthem. The sun warmed his bare legs below his shorts like a soft blanket. The fizz, click, click of the record player could barely be heard over the bright sound of brass instruments. The singers, for whom the tune obviously was more than merely a song, warmed up to a crescendo.
As if it were yesterday, Tuhafeni the fixer remembered how Tuhafeni the farm boy sat on the sandy floor and quite literally felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as he first heard the chorus of the anthem:
O! Sons and daughters of Africa
Flesh of the sun and flesh of the sky
Let us make Africa the tree of life.
He didn’t fully appreciate it yet, but from that moment on, “make Africa the tree of life,” became Tuha’s guiding principle. He was Africa; Africa was him. He would succeed because of Africa.
In his high school years Tuha read every history book he could get hold of, taking thumb-worn copies out of the library. He’d read about General Lothar von Trotha’s butchery of the Herero, King Leopold’s brutal rule in the Congo, the cruelties of the apartheid system in South Africa. About Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Robert Mugabe, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Helen Joseph, Anton Lubowski, and other revolutionaries who fought injustice in Africa by any means necessary.
This fight would become part-and-parcel of Tuha’s thinking. His schoolwork—equations in math and prepositions in English—seemed meaningless by comparison. His Ma was surprised when he’d get into fights with the German boys at school. When he refused to be taught by US Peace Corps volunteers. His teachers worried at the almost violent way he reacted when a class was told Dr David Livingstone discovered Mosi-oa-Tunya, naming it Victoria Falls, after his Queen. They wondered why Tuha had so few friends: only him, Taimi and Pohamba always in a huddle by themselves during the first break.
It would turn out that toil, despite its place in the song, was not to be Tuha’s lot in life. With Pohamba’s coaching, Tuha managed to scrape through ‘matric’ but his results hardly promised a university career. An uncle had gotten him a position as assistant manager of a supermarket.
The business had, to everyone’s surprise, done surprisingly well with Tuha in charge of its day-to-day operations. Rumors that his girlfriend helped him with the bookkeeping or that his cousin in the advertising industry assisted with publicity were swiftly dismissed. Before her untimely passing, his Ma received a weekly delivery of bread, vegetables, chocolates, and cheeses. An unfortunate incident with the Drug Squad was hushed up when the local police superintendent, a regular customer, ordered that the promising young man be let go with a warning. Within two years, Tuha had saved enough to move to the coast and start his own business.
***
Taimi got out of the cab and half-walked, half-stumbled through her small yard to her nondescript township house. She put her key in the door, but couldn’t find the will to turn it. Defeated, she sat down on the concrete threshold, almost involuntarily placing her face in her hands as she did so.
She brushed a single tear off her face with her index finger. She licked her lips anxiously, and it seemed to her that she still felt Tuha’s kisses upon them. She took a deep breath, which transitioned into a massive sigh.
Would he be alright?
Where was all this going?
Did Tuha know what he was doing?
Did Tuha even really know who he was?
She got up, straightened the long, African wax print cloth around her waist as best she could, and with effort, turned the key. Clack! Bang! The old lock moved. The door swung open. Another sigh.
She was part of a ruthless world, Taimi knew that.
She had been using what she termed her “feminine wiles” to get what she wanted for many years. That was a cutesy term. Meaning sex, basically. And related goods. You didn’t always have to give them sex; a hint was enough. A kiss. A wink. The way you’d move your hips. Showing a bit of skin. “Companionship.” She had learned most men were of limited intelligence. Too stupid to see that she could make them money, grow their businesses, have win-win partnerships, that she had the skill to chair a meeting or draw up a balance sheet. Too stupid to see they could be in a relationship of equals with a woman like her. But just smart enough to tell she could be good at fucking them.
Yet Tuha was different from the other men. Kind. In fact, he treated her like a princess. She was never quite sure why. Deep down, she sensed a vulnerability in him. Beneath that proud, wannabe-African-king exterior, he was really just a boy.
She hoped it would be all right. But this—sending him off on a drug pick-up—was a chance she had to take. She trusted no one else. Some men would rip her off. Others would call the police. She couldn’t go herself. Those couriers didn’t respect women—she had found that out the hard way. But with the money she made from this shipment, she would be rich. At last. Financially independent.
She’d no longer be that girl who walked to school every morning, hungry and weak. She’d no longer be that youth living in a strange tourist town who could never afford to send money back to her frail parents. She’d no longer be that woman walking into corporate offices in worn out-jeans to beg for a job. She’d no longer be that woman in the corner of the bar, wearing fake diamond earrings and cheap make-up and being leered at by grimy old men.
To no longer be any of those things, to overcome the circumstances of one’s upbringing, it was worth taking a risk. Even a risk with other people’s lives. Tuha, more than anyone, would have understood that.
Taimi went in, closing the door softly behind her. She heaved against the old key and turned the lock.
Clack!
Bang!
***
Bang!
Tuha never saw it coming. He fell down instantly. He lost consciousness for a second or two, before regaining it—to the feeling of his backpack being removed from his shoulders, and the smell of his own blood. He felt an intolerable tightness, in both his chest and his head.
“Tuhafeni van der Merwe, fuck you!”
Tuhafeni looked up, trying to identify the figure of a man with a rifle, through his blurring gaze.
“Pohamba?”
“You really thought you’d take a big chance, Van der Merwe? Geez, you white men are all chance-takers. Shame, if only your mother could see you now!”
Tuhafeni said nothing.
“She was always full of fake rainbowism, that mother of yours,” said Pohamba. “Giving you an African name, as if you aren’t a coloniser like all the rest of them. Singing all those liberation songs, like you guys aren’t exactly what this place needs liberation from.”
“Even now, when the newspapers report on your death, people will imagine an evil black man shooting you. No one will think your own greed led you here.”
Tuha opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He knew it was true.
“You know I’m right, don’t you?” Pohamba said. “The very same system that made me, the academic star, a mad person—has made you, the mediocre white man, stinking rich.”
“By the way, do you think someone lied to you? Betrayed your secret rendezvous? You’re right. But it’s not who you think.”
“I know.” Tuhafeni was struggling to get words out.
“Ha! That’s a pity. I had hoped you’d think it was Taimi. It’s not. She thinks I’m still locked up in the hospital. So I’ll let you take your last moments to work out who betrayed you.”
But Tuhafeni already knew who had betrayed him, who had lied to him.
His own mother had betrayed him—although she didn’t know it. Namibia had lied to him—although it had done so with the best of intentions.
Sometimes it takes a great deal of harm, a great shock, to see your life is based on a lie.
What his mother should have told him, was that as much as Africa was the tree of life, one couldn’t just become part of Africa merely by living there.
That the same process that had enslaved Africa, that Africa had had to fight itself free of, had provided Tuhafeni van der Merwe with property, passports, guidebooks, and money.
Lying on the jetty in the moonlight, choking on his own blood, Tuhafeni knew Namibia was a lie because it promised things it couldn’t deliver. It promised transcendence. It had promised that if you tried hard enough, anyone could be anything they wanted to be. That your circumstances and ancestors didn’t matter. But that wasn’t true.
Perhaps in another life, Tuhafeni would not have concentrated so much on that sort of naive hope. Perhaps he wouldn’t have taken such joy in his fake locks, in clothes culled from other cultures, in being something he wasn’t.
Maybe he would have chosen honestly instead. Admitting who he was and where he came from. Questioning himself, and his ancestors, every day. Listening. Learning. Refusing handouts. Accepting poverty. Accepting the need to be re-educated. Handing over his late mother’s farm to poor Namibians, instead of losing it to his own poor management. Maybe he would have taken out his anger at Africa’s long mistreatment on re-educating his fellow whites—instead of taking a vicarious self-harming pleasure in beating them up, or ripping them off with fake trinkets, expired food or expensive narcotics.
But it was too late for that now.
The water lapped rhythmically against the supports of the jetty. The weathered ebony wood of the jetty floor felt soft like a new blanket—cold and welcoming. And as he lay upon what was once a grove of mighty trees in the African hinterland, Tuhafeni whisper-sung a song he had first learned from his mother many years ago:
O! Sons and daughters of Africa
Flesh of the sun and flesh of the sky
Let us make Africa the tree of life
Hugh Ellis is a Namibian poet, writer, and Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the Namibia University of Science and Technology. His collection of poems Hakahana was published by UNAM Press in 2018. He has published papers on media and public culture in several academic journals. He has been active in Spoken Word poetry in Windhoek for two decades. He earned his PhD in media studies from Wits University in 2018.