Inside track
A drug merchant deals with Joburg violence
Against the backdrop of the recent xenophobic thuggery that swept through Gauteng, Sean Christie recounts the harsh lived experience of Kabiru, a Tanzanian heroin dealer — a man under threat from landlords, gangsters and the police. He describes a deeply divided inner-city underworld of locals and foreigners and how, despite the tension and violence surrounding him, he always has an eye open for opportunity
Imet Kabiru in May, in the foyer of a Doornfontein building. I was looking into the collapse of sanitation systems in central Johannesburg and Kabiru had taken an interest, conducting me around the building where he lived, pointing out the rancid atrium “in which we throw our shit”. He primed me on the building’s social ecology — Zimbabweans on this floor, Malawians in these rooms, “and the top floor is always wall-to-wall Tanzanians”. I asked why, and he spent the next three months explaining. “On TV it looks like foreigners are together, but in these buildings where you got everyone under one roof — Bongo [a nickname for those from Dar es Salaam], Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi — nobody is together, not even people from the same country,” he says.
Kabiru believes that the deepest divisions are the ones that exist between groups from the same country. “You can’t talk about Tanzanian this and that, because in Joburg you got guys from TA [Tanga] running the heroin businesses, and you got guys from Dar es Salaam mostly working for TA bosses. Only in prison will you find TA and Dar es Salaam sleeping in the same room,” he says.
Of the “six big fish” said to be in control of the heroin trade in Johannesburg, five are men from Tanga. Kabiru has a theory about this. “In the ’80s and ’90s, a lot of TA guys moved to Dar es Salaam because their own city was broken. They had nowhere to stay so they lived on the streets. Heroin was coming in at this time and it became their business.”
It is true that, since the ’90s, Dar es Salaam has been a significant gateway for Asian heroin bound for international markets. Kabiru maintains that when Tanzanians first entered SA in the ’90s, after the fall of apartheid, men from Dar es Salaam headed for the port cities, hoping to stow away on ships, whereas men from Tanga trafficked and sold heroin. “This is why most of the Joburg mzungu [slang for heroin] bosses are TA,” he says.
War on heroin
Kabiru fled Dar es Salaam in January after seeing two young men from his neighbourhood gunned down by soldiers — casualties of the government’s increasingly vicious war on heroin. He had lived in SA on and off since 1997, spending time in all the major cities. He lived rough under bridges, slummed in highveld mnayama ndawos, and served time in several correctional centres. Though he preferred the social worlds of Durban and Cape Town, making money was easier in SA’s largest city.
In 2016, when he last passed through Joburg, heroin use had been taking off. Now the entire city seemed to be running on the stuff. Thousands needed to use it several times a day and as many depended on it for their income, directly or indirectly.
Kabiru took a bed in a six-person room in Doornfontein, not far from Ellis Park Stadium. With the aid of a bucket and a bottle of Equity-Methadone oral solution he quit using heroin in that first week, determined to take advantage of the opportunity he saw all around him. His top-floor room, shared with four other Tanzanian men, was essential to his expanding heroin business. By day it was a production facility, the area by the window given over to the heating, crushing and bagging of heroin. After dark: a smokers’ clubhouse, and it pleased him to hear some say his room reminded them of the old Dar es Salaam maskanis — pockets of urban space hidden from the public gaze, where local men congregated to gamble, socialise, smoke and drink. The maskanis fed Kabiru when he first arrived in Dar es Salaam at the age of 15, after fleeing an abusive foster home in a distant rural village. Now 40 and with money flowing in, he saw to it that food for a dozen people was cooked every night.
Until July, we spoke most days and towards the end Kabiru sensed that something bad was coming. “It’s the business,” he would say. “Soon, someone will do something — steal, snitch — and then what? I will have to kill him, or leave with nothing.”
After that, silence. I did not hear from Kabiru throughout August, including the period in which mobs hunted the highveld for foreign-born Africans to rob, beat and kill. He eventually made contact from the outskirts of Mbabane, having jumped the border between SA and Eswatini the day before. He called me because he wanted, in his words, to “finish the story”.
Mau Mau
Waking on August 1, Kabiru’s first thought was about the rent. He had a good reason to pay promptly each month, and in full: his landlord was a psychopath: “A real killer: can’t read, can’t write, knows only one way.” At about 10am, Kabiru handed R1,200 to the landlord’s security man on the bottom floor. The landlord and his enforcer both belonged to a secretive inner-city group called Mau Mau, comprising other Zulu landlords, business owners, taxi industry people and some policemen. “Mau Mau is a Joburg mafia — if you f*** with one of them you won’t be able to walk the streets between Faraday and Hillbrow.”
These affiliations were also the reason that police raids — a weekly event in most inner-city apartment blocks — tended to bypass the building. “B-O-B never been up those stairs,” Kabiru says, using a dealer codename for police — a play on local police vehicle number plates, which “start and finish with a B, and have a zero in the middle”.
With the rent Kabiru slipped the enforcer a parcel containing 300 sections — quarter grams of heroin tied up in bits of brown municipal bin liner. The enforcer had a friend who supplied heroin to Soweto dealers. Some months before, Kabiru had given him 300 sections, on trust. The man returned the next day with Kabiru’s payment, wanting more.
Working for syndicates
By 11am, Kabiru was out on End Street greeting Gambay, a 21-year-old relative who left Dar es Salaam for the first time in October 2018. Since his arrival in Doornfontein he has not ventured beyond Marshall Street. When it comes to hustling heroin, however, Gambay has proven himself a natural. According to Kabiru, “When the police find Gambay with drugs he say he a 16-years Burundi boy, no mommy no daddy, and they usually take his stuff and leave him.”
Street dealers like Gambay typically work for syndicates comprising five to 10 individuals. All start their shifts with 55 sections (nearly 14g), and if a dealer sells out he returns to his boss for another 55. Payment is in heroin — five or six sections out of every 55 — and Gambay’s strategy had been to sell his sections first and hand his R130 to Kabiru for safe keeping, which he did at 11am on the 1st.
Kabiru had worked for the same syndicate earlier in the year, but the police had not treated him as gently as they do younger dealers. “In my first week on the job I was pulled into a Quantum by three officers. They put a bag over my head until I passed out,” he says. The officers had wanted Kabiru to give up the whereabouts of his boss, a man who had rejected the common practice of paying tithes to the police. “I said I don’t know, and they suffocated me again, three times, until I thought I was going to die. Then one said this guy don’t know, and they let me out.” The incident had won Kabiru respect among heroin dealers, but after he was tortured a second time he quit working on the streets and started dealing from his room.
Gambay’s corner overlooked the entrance to “Anoited” (sic) University, being passed that morning by a constant stream of people. Gambay explained that shop owners in Jeppestown and Mayfair were tired of paying bribes to crooked police, and were getting ready to march. “I said, what day is it? Gambay say Thursday. I said, of course.” Kabiru maintains nothing good ever happens on a Thursday, and later, when rocks thrown by protesters rained down on retreating police vehicles, he felt validated.
The sun disappears early on the eastern side of the city. By 5pm on August 1 the evening trade had begun in Kabiru’s room: people arriving to buy heroin, some staying to smoke. Kabiru was kept so busy he almost neglected to check his phone after it vibrated in his pocket. The message was from his Mozambican girlfriend, and contained a single word: walk.
“I walked off that minute,” he says. On the stairway, Kabiru passed four men, two of them clasping handguns. He ran out into the night, not stopping until he reached Hillbrow. From the small park behind Ponte Tower he called his girlfriend. “I said ‘Yoh, you saved my life.’ She said, ‘I know’.” His girlfriend — “a serious gangster” — had been hanging out with some Mozambican guys, one of whom had recently come out of prison. At one point he stood up to leave, saying the Zulu landlord of a nearby building had paid him and three others to rob and kill a Tanzanian dealer. She knew it had to be Kabiru. Paying people to rob and kill drug dealer tenants is a known strategy of city landlords. Denizens of the underworld still talk about the five Tanzanian dealers who were shot in their beds in a mnyama ndawo called Cape York. “They have to kill us, because they know that Bongo don’t step back,” Kabiru says.
Kill, or leave
Lying on a park bench, Kabiru fantasised about killing both the landlord and the enforcer, who must have known about the plan to take him out. This, then, was the dilemma he had foreseen: kill, or leave. He knew that murdering a Mau Mau would unleash bedlam, and that his roommates were likely to pay with their blood. Even Gambay, who by design lived well apart from Kabiru, would not be safe. It took a while, but Kabiru had gained control of his emotions.
“I left with nothing,” he says. By 7am on August 2 he was walking the streets of Tshwane, an hour from Johannesburg. By midday he had secured a space to sleep in a ruined building solely occupied by Tanzanians from Dar es Salaam, and that evening he was back to hustling — “Swazi skunk, not heroin.”
He had felt good in Tshwane, it was not nearly as tense and violent as Johannesburg. But on August 27 everything changed again, after a South African taxi driver was shot and killed by a heroin dealer. It had been a revenge killing, and as the city centre burned Kabiru felt he was witnessing his own alternative reality — a version of what would have happened in Johannesburg if he had killed his landlord.
He thanked Allah for staying his hand, and as the flames of xenophobic violence spread he prepared to leave for Eswatini. Several Tshwane dealers had departed the city, and demand for good Swazi skunk was high, an opportunity too good to ignore.
Christie is a Zimbabwe-born journalist and the author of Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard: Life Among the Stowaways, which won the 2017 Recht Malan Prize and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. His research into Africa’s heroin trade was supported by Global Initiative.
... As the city centre burned Kabiru felt he was witnessing his own alternative reality — a version of what would have happened in Johannesburg if he had killed his landlord. He thanked Allah for staying his hand