My new project has to do with a natural amphitheatre which is formed by the confluence of some highways, at the start/terminus of the N1(highway), and the 40-50 men who live there. A band of Tanzanians(mainly) have set up house in the underpass. These men are waiting to stow away and there are forays by night into the dim flouros of the harbour near the pig iron heap in order to jump onto a ship. They are the hardest group of men I have ever encountered(they would never agree to play Aussie Rules) and they occupy a large and very inhospitable departure lounge.
Their domicile is adjacent to the harbour's high wall. Maybe a new ubiquitous and fragmented country should be created which can act as the domicile of men who occupy underpasses, barren shoulders and other other sooty and underdesigned bits of angular town planning. How about Accrete?
Every day the group power structure changes because the community is transient, but I think the main cat is called Kebo. He has a jaw like and anvil and loves telling me to fuck off in Swahili. Some of these men have come because their farms no longer have rain because the climate has changed. It's hard for me to comprehend.
When on the turf of the Tanzanians one feels odd: it's as if one is surrounded by sheets of one way glass whose polarity switches constantly. Sometimes one feels invasive because it's possible to observe very personal belongings, like a tiny kids hat containing a stone where the small cranium should be in order to prevent it from blowing away after it has been washed. At other times one become aware of the spectators in the millions of cars which stream around on the highways which hem the zome in.
This is Adam Bichili. He left Somalia for Kenya when he was 7 because of civil war and came to SA when he was in his late teens. Somehow he ended up in Birmingham and then was deported for fighting with a fellow human after 7 years in that city. He seems to have been in jail at all the points where he has lived. In Johannesburg he was in Sun City. Jail is fuck all he says. I don't think it is harrowing for him.
He is very unusual in that he didn't ask for anything, had a certain resigned humour to do with his predicament and was a sharp as a knife. He doesn't really mind if he dies, he said so. That's it. Maybe he has a certain sort of liberation.
He has a girl and a kid called Ayiya in Birmingham. He misses them a load. I asked him what the worst thing in his life was.
'Winter, init?'
