Jimfish (13 page)

C
HAPTER
27

Comoros Islands, 1993–94

The run of
luck that had been with Jimfish and Zoran promptly deserted them soon after they set sail from Dar es Salaam. Their idea had been to cruise in easy stages down the east African coast to Cape Town, but wild storms pushed their small craft much further east. When they ran out of fuel, they drifted helplessly for many days, their water almost gone.

So it was with enormous relief, early one morning, that they spotted, rising from the water, the lush forests and sugary sands of an island.

Evidently, their boat had been spotted, perhaps even expected, because a flotilla of dugout canoes paddled out to greet them and took them in tow. When their craft was brought safely through the breakers and on to the beach, crowds of islanders were waiting and broke into applause.

A man stepped forward. He identified himself as the Mayor and read a prepared speech.

‘Welcome, friends, to the Comoros, our constellation of islands. We are thrilled to have American soldiers amongst
us. Even if there are just two of you for now – no doubt whole brigades will follow soon.'

The crowd broke into song and welcomed them with several verses of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner'.

Zoran the Serb whispered to Jimfish: ‘They have seen the Stars and Stripes painted on our boat.'

‘We must correct the impression,' said Jimfish.

‘I don't think it will help,' said Zoran the Serb.

But Jimfish felt duty-bound to clear up the misunderstanding.

‘I am sorry to say, friends, that we are not Americans.'

‘I am devastated,' said the Mayor. ‘Everyone was happy to know that the legendary US marines were invading us. We've heard that they stormed ashore on the beaches of Somalia to give hope back to the Somali people and we prayed that we were next on their list, for the restoration of that precious quality. But with your help, all is not lost. The markings on your landing craft mean you must be in close touch with American fighting forces and we beg you to put in a good word for us.'

‘But why would you want the Americans to invade?' Zoran asked. ‘Their intervention in Somalia was a disaster. The United States lost more men in a single firefight in the streets of Mogadishu than at any time since their invasion of Vietnam. Their helicopters were shot out of the sky and the naked bodies of their soldiers were dragged through the streets by jeering mobs.'

‘Look at it from our point of view,' said the Mayor. ‘Over the centuries these Comoros Islands have been invaded by Arab slavers, Dutch privateers, German adven
turers, Portuguese explorers and French imperialists – not to mention any number of pirates, from Davy Jones to Edward England – and I can't imagine why the Americans would be worse than any of the others. Ours are very lovely islands, where you will find dhows and dugongs, vanilla trees and volcanoes, spices and a rich array of marine life. But what we're really famous for are military coups. In the last decade or so, since independence from France, we have averaged one army rebellion every year. The ruling regime is overthrown, only for the next one to go the same way itself a short while later. And this trend shows no signs of stopping. On the map the official name for our scattering of islands may be the Comoros, but to lots of people we are simply the “Coup-Coup” Islands. How can an American invasion be any worse than all the others?

‘Right now we are just recovering from our latest coup attempt. A group of morris dancers arrived on a regular commercial flight from South Africa, come to share with Comorans the delights of English country pursuits. But when a customs official asked one of the dancers to open his case, we found, not the usual flummery-mummery of morris dancers – bell pads, handkerchiefs, sticks and swords – but automatic weapons, grenade launchers and mortars. These so-called morris dancers packed more firepower in their rucksacks than our entire defence force. We tried to arrest them, there was a firefight, they hijacked their passenger plane, still on the tarmac, and flew back to South Africa, where, no doubt, they will be welcomed as heroes. Happily for us, we captured two of the mercenary morris men and we were about to shoot them this very
morning when your craft was spotted and we postponed their execution, which we will return to right now. You are very welcome to come along and watch the proceedings.'

Jimfish and Zoran had no great wish to watch an execution, but, having disappointed the Comorans once already, it seemed impolite to refuse the invitation.

The two captured mercenaries were being held in the small jail in the middle of town, and when the condemned men were led out into the yard to be shot, Jimfish could not believe his eyes, for there – thinner, older, but still with a fierce glint in his eye – was none other than his old teacher Soviet Malala, whom he knew to have been shot in faraway Ukraine. And, manacled to him, his beard now regrown to its old bushy bulk, was Deon Arlow, brother to Lunamiel and Commandant of Superior Solutions, whom Jimfish himself had shot through the heart. Two men he had known to be dead were being led before a firing squad to be killed all over again.

‘Stop! Stop!' Jimfish cried, pulling out his bag of rough diamonds just as the Mayor was about to give the order to fire. ‘I will pay you whatever ransom you name for these prisoners!' and he poured a heap of jewels into the outstretched palm of the Mayor, who was only too happy to accept his offer, the Comoros Islanders being amongst the poorest people in the world.

Jimfish rushed over to the prisoners, released them and hugged his old teacher Soviet Malala.

‘How can this be? You died at Chernobyl. I saw it with my own eyes when you fell to the firing squad in distant Pripyat.'

‘That is what happened, yes,' said Soviet Malala, ‘but the soldiers in the firing squad, you'll remember, were very drunk and made several botched attempts before they even hit me. Then I was taken to the city morgue, where a local doctor found me and – never having seen a black man before in the Ukraine, and thinking, as many people in the Soviet Union did, that you should never pass up a windfall that might be saleable to someone, some day, somehow – he decided he would take me to a taxidermist, have me stuffed and put on display at travelling shows; or, otherwise, he might perhaps save my hide and sell it as shoe leather, which, like soap, toilet paper, oranges, grain and bath plugs, was in very short supply across the Soviet Union. Imagine his surprise as he was examining me to see what damage the bullets of the firing squad had done, when he found I was still breathing. He was very happy, knowing I was almost certainly worth more alive than dead, and so he tended my wounds and nursed me back to health.

‘I lived with this good man when the Soviet Union was in a terrible state, after the Chernobyl disaster. The Communist Party was looking desperately for ways to salvage its reputation and, since I was a more committed believer than anyone else, I found myself a speaker at Party rallies to celebrate the Marxist cause, the Bolshevik Revolution, the triumph of the masses and the victory of the lumpenproletariat. But my efforts were doomed. The Communist Party collapsed and was officially dissolved by Gorbachev, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

‘I found myself a solitary African in the new Russia,
where skinheads assaulted me for being black, and pusillanimous politicians were too embarrassed to even mention the names of Marx and Lenin and Stalin, the heroes of the lumpenproletariat. Luckily, I knew that one of the few places left on earth where original Communist beliefs had not altered since Stalin's time, and where the Party had taken a decision to ignore the collapse of Communism around the world, was my own country of South Africa, and I decided to go home. I won't bore you with the story of my travels across Eastern Europe, but I had got as far as Sierra Leone when I met this man here' – he pointed at the Commandant – ‘who was recruiting strategic contractors for Superior Solutions.'

Jimfish, though moved by the story of his teacher's plight in Russia, was dismayed by his unseemly liaison with Deon Arlow: ‘But by joining his morris-dancer coup, you collaborated in an invasion of another African state, the islands of the Comoros. And that, surely, was completely counter to your socialist faith?'

‘Not at all,' said Soviet Malala. ‘Are you familiar with Marx's Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach?'

Jimfish was sorry to admit he had never heard of it.

‘It concludes that all individuals are elements of the social collective, and since all freedom is determined by history, this means I was predestined to join Superior Solutions and thus to invade the Comoros Islands.'

‘But you were free to refuse to do so, surely?' Jimfish cried.

‘In Marxist terms, freedom means facing the fact that we are historically determined,' said Soviet Malala, ‘and in
any event, it was of the first importance that I return to South Africa by any means possible, so as to speed the coming revolution and energize the masses.'

‘And what about you?' Jimfish turned to Deon Arlow. ‘When I last saw you, you were undisputably dead – and I should know, because I was the one who shot you through the heart.'

‘Certainly you shot me though the heart and, in other circumstances, that would have been fatal. But remember, Superior Solutions is a proudly South African enterprise and heart transplants were pioneered by South Africans, and the procedures are well tried and tested. We had in our medical team some of the best surgeons in the world. What slows down the number of transplants is the lack of heart donors, but luckily the carnage of Sierra Leone's civil war meant there was never a problem in finding me a good young heart. Better by far than the one I lost to you.'

‘Are you telling me that your transplant involved an African heart?' asked Jimfish.

‘Exactly so,' said Deon Arlow. ‘I leased my sister Lunamiel to the Zairean Minister of Mines to show that white South Africans are open to constructive business across the Mother Continent. And what better proof that old prejudices are over than the fact that, inside here' – he touched his chest – ‘beats a true, new African heart.'

C
HAPTER
28

Pretoria, South Africa, 1994

After the coup
attempt by Deon Arlow's troupe of fake morris dancers, air travel from the Comoros, always intermittent, was even more irregular than usual, and Jimfish and his party were forced to wait weeks before a flight would be available to take them back to South Africa.

It was during this time that Jimfish made a discovery. Besides vanilla, spices and military coups, for most Comorians fishing was the only way to earn a scant living. Anglers paddled their dugout canoes close to the shore and used long hand-lines of plaited cotton, cunningly baited and dropped deep. It was an uncertain, risky livelihood and earned fishermen barely enough to feed their families.

However, they told him of a particular catch so valuable that to hook one was like winning the lottery. They called this fish the ‘
gombessa
'. It was coloured a beautiful steely blue, shading into mauve, with dabs of white, sported four little legs and lived hidden in deep sea caves. The
gombessa
grew as tall as a man of average height, weighed about the same and had wonderful powers: it could stand on its
head and swim upside down or backwards, using its four little legs.

Jimfish knew instantly what this fish was. His mind went back to Port Pallid, where the old skipper had found him on the harbour wall, and to those blissful moments he had spent with Lunamiel in the orchard of Sergeant Arlow, only to be violently driven from the policeman's garden to wander the world for ten whole years, never managing to land on the right side of history. How strange to come so far, to these islands, in the Mozambique channel between Tanzania and Madagascar, only to find himself hearing of the same fish as the old trawler skipper had once caught off the Chalumna river mouth. A fossil that everyone believed dead for millions of years turned out to be alive and swimming. Here it was again, close beside him, in the waters of the Comoros, and it meant things couldn't be too bad.

‘
A fish out of water, like me
,' Jimfish repeated to himself.

The islanders suggested to Jimfish that with limitless wealth in his bag of rough diamonds he could invest in a flotilla of dugouts to comb the known coelacanth fishing grounds. They were sure to strike lucky. At present just two or three coelacanths were hooked each year, the price was steadily rising and a fisherman could earn as much as three years' income with a single sale. International aquaria, trophy hunters and marine museums vied to own a coelacanth. In Asia a market was opening up for the golden fluid from its spinal cord, which was was rumoured to add years to life.

Jimfish listened politely, but declined. For a man who
had been tortured in a shipping container in Matabeleland, confined in a Soviet penal colony, locked up in East Berlin, captured by Somali kidnappers and netted and nearly sliced to pieces in an albino auction room in Tanzania the very idea of hunting down another living creature to supply demented hypochondriacs in the Asian market with the spinal fluid of a fish said to be the elixir of life, was more than he could bear.

Besides, he had other things on his mind. From Deon Arlow he had heard alarming news of Lunamiel, who he had left to fend for herself in the terrible civil war in Liberia. Deon Arlow reported that just before he had set off to topple the government of the Comoros he had seen his sister, and it was a sad tale he had to tell.

‘My sister has not had an easy time. If you remember the recent wars in Liberia you will know that President Samuel Doe was done to death by Prince Johnson, who in turn was ousted in the race to be president by Charles Taylor, whose election promise – “I killed your ma. I killed your pa. Vote for me or I'll kill you too!” – was one of the most effective slogans in living memory. After these elections, Brigadier Bare-Butt suddenly declared himself celibate and gave up my sister. He renounced politics for religion, put aside his naked ways, threw away his AK-47 and dissolved his Small Boys Unit, in their fright wigs and wedding frocks, to go on the road, preaching the gospel of charity and forgiveness to the war-weary people of Liberia.

‘My dear sister was reduced to begging in the streets of Monrovia, and would still be there but for an amazing stroke of luck. A visiting businessman – hearing her accent
when she asked for bread – knew instantly that she was one of us. This good Samaritan turned out to be an important official in the party which will soon form the new government of South Africa. He rescued Lunamiel, flew her home and gave her a job in his Johannesburg mansion, where she works today as a cleaning maid.'

Hearing this, Jimfish had one thought in his mind: to get home and find Lunamiel – and when he heard that regular flights to South Africa had started again he was overjoyed.

The Comorians were sorry to see Jimfish and his friends leaving and a big crowd accompanied the four travellers to the airport, where the Mayor thanked each of them personally for their help and advice in showing his compatriots how things were done in the wider world. He praised Jimfish for sailing a United States warship to the Comoros Islands on a first official visit; he complimented Soviet Malala for his uplifting lectures on rage, rocket fuel and how to land on the right side of history; he commended Zoran the Serb for suggesting the Comoros Islands should splinter into a constellation of micro-states along ex-Yugoslavian lines, each with its own flag, army and dictionary; and he promised to bear in mind Deon Arlow's offer to fly in ‘conflict control contractors' by helicopter gunship at the first signs of a fresh army coup.

‘We plan to preserve your inflatable landing craft as a memento of your visit,' the Mayor said. ‘When you next meet the American military, please tell them that if ever they plan a fresh humanitarian intervention – or a short, sharp surgical strike in some distant, deserving corner of
the world – they are welcome here, whenever their busy schedule permits.'

So it was on the tenth of May 1994 – a decade after Jimfish had left for what Soviet Malala called ‘the outside world' – that the flight from the Comoros, carrying Jimfish, Soviet Malala, Zoran the Serb and Deon Arlow, touched down in Johannesburg. They found the airport teeming with presidents, kings, queens, princes, pop stars and potentates, and they very soon understood the reason for the excitement. Their timing could not have been more auspicious: Nelson Mandela was about to be inaugurated as the first freely chosen President of South Africa.

The travellers joined the cavalcade and were swept along in the human tide of tens of thousands, making their way by road and rail and on foot to the swearing-in ceremony, which was to take place in Pretoria at the Union Buildings, a ponderous, red-roofed government office which reminded Zoran of similar piles in his native ex-Yugoslavia.

‘It looks to me,' said Zoran, ‘like a cross between a giant penitentiary and a mammoth post office.'

Soviet Malala explained to Zoran that the Union Buildings had been designed by the British at the end of the Boer War, after they had destroyed the two Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Free State, thereby securing South Africa's immense gold and diamond reserves for the city of London. It was a triumphal statement in sandstone.

Deon Arlow was pleasantly surprised to hear Soviet Malala taking this view.

‘I never expected to hear you sympathizing with the suffering of Afrikaners in the Boer War,' he said.

‘But it wasn't really a war – it was more of a smash-and-grab robbery,' said Soviet Malala. ‘The British saw themselves as aristocrats, when, really, they were simply armed thieves, highwaymen hungry for loot. They saw the Boers as troglodytes, brute Neanderthals who never evolved into a higher order of humanity. They were a problem to be solved. Finally. So the British solved it by burning their farms, and then trucked their women and kids to concentration camps, where thousands died of disease, hunger and heartbreak.'

Deon Arlow was so moved to hear the fate of his people described with such sympathy by a black Communist that he could only nod vigorously as he fought back his tears.

‘Wasn't it a crying shame, then,' Soviet Malala continued, ‘once the British left and handed the country back to your lot, that Boers treated blacks in exactly the way the British had dealt with them? Now it was us who were your barbarians, troglodytes, Neanderthals, hewers of wood and drawers of water, useless appendages, monkeys, menials, miscreants or servants. Or caged pets kept for your pleasure. Or slave labour in what you liked to call a “Union” – where we did the work, while you lot prayed and picnicked in front of this triumphant erection in sandstone we see right here, always telling yourselves you were God's Chosen People.'

Anxious to calm things down on such an auspicious day, Jimfish said, ‘Well, what better place to begin the new South Africa? The old order is gone. Defeated. The British
robbed the Boers, and then they did in the blacks. Now that's all over. Finished. No one needs to be done in any more, right?'

‘It was never a defeat!' Deon Arlow shouted. ‘We got here through a negotiated settlement. It was a truce between us whites, who decided not to fight to a standstill, and you black guys, who didn't have the capacity to win. It was a compromise.'

‘It was the victory of the lumpenproletariat – fighting under the banner of the glorious liberation movements – over the neo-liberal, semi-fascist, racist, white-settler entity!' cried Soviet Malala.

‘Pretty damn useless liberation movements! You guys couldn't fight your way out of a paper bag! Or run a bath – never mind a revolution!' retorted Deon Arlow.

‘It sounds to me very like a typical stitch-up between elites,' Zoran the Serb suggested. ‘When a nasty civil war tears a neighbourhood apart, the neighbours get busy and kill each other. When it's over and the dust settles, those at the bottom of the heap find they're still there and the guys who did the deal are swigging champagne in the name of the people.'

Soviet Malala's response was lost in the jubilation as Nelson Mandela took the oath and the long-term prisoner whose name no one had been allowed to mention was transformed into a president to whom everyone pledged their love and respect.

When Mandela said, ‘Let there be justice for all. Let there be peace for all. Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all,' he spoke to the heart of the country.

When he saluted his predecessor, F. W. de Klerk, once his jailer, who had made for himself a place in history, everyone cheered.

When he promised, ‘Never, never and never again shall it be that our beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another,' strangers hugged each other.

And when he declared that neither white nor black would ever again rule over the other, but that a Rainbow Nation was to be forged from old hatreds, he summed up what the country wanted to hear more than anything in the world.

In the great amphitheatre of the Union Buildings, across its vast lawns, in the streets, suburbs and townships of the capital, and across the country, citizens danced, prayed and sang.

At last Jimfish felt he had arrived at that moment on the right side of history. But what had brought him to this point? Not the high-octane rage that is the rocket fuel of the lumpenproletariat. There was no anger in Mandela and no recrimination.

Jimfish would have liked to ask Soviet Malala for his frank opinion of just what all this meant. But his old teacher was watching Fidel Castro with intense concentration, as if hoping he would say something to inject a little revolutionary fire into the hazy delirium of rainbows and reconciliation. But El Commandante, who sat on the podium, among queens, princes, presidents, civil rights leaders, prelates, pop stars and a brace of bemedalled dictators, kept his counsel, and so did Soviet Malala.