In the rosy light of the dawn, a tall black man who carries himself with the coiled grace of a matador is mowing the beach. Well, I don’t know if mowing is the right word. The crude machine he is dragging back and forth across the sand in front of the sleeping hotel has no wheels, but the black man is dragging its rough metal barrel, punched with holes at strategic intervals, by a long handle in an action identical to that of the black men who lug mechanical mowers across the impeccable lawns of Sydenham and Rivonia. The purpose is identical: to hammer a few square metres of Africa back into order for another 24 hours.
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It is what they call “the end of the small hours” on Africa’s Atlantic coast. In a little while the tourists who have come here for a brief respite from the pollution and chaos of the capital city, or who have flown in from the deeper pollution of continents further afield, will be emerging, unashamed of their nakedness for these few days of recreation, sprawling across the beach beneath the blazing sun.
The black man with the easy grace of a matador and the handsome features of a movie star is employed to mow the beach into an image of undisturbed perfection, smoothing away the marks of the previous day’s excesses, the tracks of joggers and volleyball players and lovers rolling in the yellow sand. The man is scraping the beach into a manicured evenness that it will lose as soon as the first visitor emerges, blinking the sleep out of crumpled eye-sockets, staggering blindly on to the virgin beach and getting ready for yet another day in paradise.
I have decided that the mowing matador’s name is Amadou.
Amadou and I are reinforcing the myth created in the yarn of the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe, or rather his creator, Daniel Defoe, hypnotised us with the idea that there could be a beach, somewhere at the end of the world, that was disturbed by no footsteps other than one’s own. One day Crusoe’s idyll was shattered when a new set of footsteps appeared before him on the surface of his private planet. At the end of this impertinent trail, when he followed it to its logical conclusion, Crusoe discovered a naked black man. He gave him the unlikely name of “Friday” (because he found him on a Friday) and rapidly introduced him to the concept of domestic service.
I could just have well called my man “Tuesday”, since it is on a Tuesday that we surprise each other on this deserted beach. But “Amadou” is the private, unspoken identity that I have chosen to give him instead – an identity appropriate to the real world, rather than this unreal world in which we meet.
Amadou and I are almost alone on this privatised stretch of paradise. The sun is still low on the horizon, the sky hanging grey and hazy over the sea. The only other human presence is the silent, uniformed security guard who is eyeing us both, defending this abstract strip of real estate that looks out across the ocean.
Amadou and I do not exchange many words – a brief greeting, and then he is back to his allotted task, working against the tyranny of the clock to make the beach look unreal. He is not paid to ask himself why.
I want to stop and take a close look at the mechanics of the machine that he is dragging so carefully back and forth, making sure to keep the lines unnaturally straight in the shifting sands. There is not much to see. The machine has no moving parts. Its only purpose is to make patterns on the sand. There is not much for Amadou and me to talk about.
But we are strangely conspiratorial in the way we refuse to exchange any words about this world that for the moment is inhabited by us alone. Amadou scrapes away in silence, his head down. I make a detour round the patch of beach that he has re-virginised. I choose to let the cuffs of my trousers be soaked by the lapping waves rather than walk defiantly through the sand he has been working so hard to prepare. Together, we tacitly allow others to play out the Robinson Crusoe myth.
But whose beach is this, anyway? Why are we still playing by the rules of a bygone age? After all these years of blood and debate, to whom does Africa belong?
I walk far down the beach, till Amadou and his infernal machine, and the first of the sunblasted tourists drifting on to the beach, are far behind me. It has taken the sun an hour to rise almost halfway to its zenith, baking everything in its path.
There is a fishing village up ahead. On the beach, a knot of black bodies, lightly wrapped in a cacophony of bright colours, is gathered excitedly around a long line of fish netting writhing on the hot sands. The fishermen, a muscular, elite group at the centre of the crowd, are bent low over their nets, working systematically upwards, opening the folds and picking through the living harvest of the sea, separating the valuable queen-sized prawns, the ink-spitting squid and the flat, brainless sole from the mass of small fry. The crowd, the wretched of the Earth, are casually allowed to gather up whatever is left behind.
By tonight the prawns and the calamari will be elaborately laid out on the plates of the tourists at the luxury hotels, at prices that the fishermen could scarcely conceive of in their wildest dreams. The beach will be a dark maze of contradictory human footprints. The sun will be long gone, awaiting its moment to edge over the horizon once more and reveal the lonely figure of Amadou and his mowing machine, preparing the beach for another day in paradise.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza