Story #2, Sean O‘Toole, 2012
The So-Called Fruits of Lives
I didn’t go looking for him. On 4 December 2002, Musina, a ramshackle mining town and administrative centre on South Africa’s far northern border with Zimbabwe, experienced absolute night in the middle of the morning. It was shortly after the full solar eclipse – greeted by wild cheering from people seated in camping chairs, on rocks, in trees, on the tops of vehicles – that I first saw the border fence. Fascinated by its brutal immutability, this nearly ten years after the lethal electrical current that once caused it to emit a tangible heat was switched off, I contrived an excuse to go back. I wanted to understand it. That’s how I met Phillip, more or less. Playing journalist. But like I said, I didn’t go looking for him.
THE FENCE #1: You forget the heat. I am back in Musina to look at a forgotten apartheid monument: a 330km electrified fence erected in two parts along South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe and Mozambique. To speak of the fence as a monument is hyperbolic. Unlike the wild almond hedge grown by Dutch colonists to keep Khoikhoi out of their new settlement on the Cape peninsula in the late 1650s – a barrier system still partially visible in Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden southeast of Cape Town’s city centre – South Africa’s northern border fence has not lapsed into historical fact, has not been assimilated by the landscape.
Like an amputee who learns to walk again, it continues to function, differently it’s true, but somehow the same: camouflaged troops with automatic rifles continue to patrol the tattered fence. It is not much to look at, not if you’re familiar with the six-metre high razor wire fence that separates Morocco (and the rest of Africa) from Melilla, a Spanish coastal city located on
mainland Africa. It is also far less resolute than the West Bank barrier, an eight-meter high concrete structure that prompted artist Tracey Rose to fly to Israel in 2005 and piss on it in protest.
Compared with these two illegitimate children of the Berlin Wall, the fence that Phillip and I crawled beneath is peculiarly modest.
PHILLIP #1: I first met Phillip Chikumbo on 8 September 2003. A Monday. He was wearing a blue-and-white check shirt and squatting among a tangle of roots from the wild fig that grew in the middle of the prison courtyard at the Musina police station. His dark eyes were bloodshot. “I haven’t eaten for two days,” he told me. “They do not have food for us because we are unexpected visitors.” Phillip, who was 24 at the time, had been arrested for illegally entering South Africa from Zimbabwe, where he was born and raised.
Later that day I met Phillip in Zimbabwe, outside the Beit Bridge Inn & Casino. My plan was simple: follow Phillip, first across the oily green Limpopo River into South Africa, then past the fence, which at that point still transmitted a minor electrical current that would set off an alarm at the relay stations erected every 10km along the span of the fence.
Together we walked to Dulibadzimo, a township on the outskirts of Beit Bridge, where we chartered a sky blue Datsun 120Y. We drove east. “If you are a passenger don’t be a problem,” read a sticker inside the taxi.
The landscape along the dusty road was arid and overgrazed. The sun was just setting when we stopped near a large baobab. Guided by moonlight we started walking, following the footpaths – or desire lines as architects and artists call them – carved into the earth by cigarette smugglers and locals who bypass the congested border administration at Beit Bridge.
Our destination was the bubble of light on the horizon: Musina, South Africa.