The Bro Code
The unappointed committee
No man runs a three-week campaign like mine without a circle of other men who know exactly what he is doing and decide, for reasons of their own, to help him do it. I had that circle. They were never formally appointed. There was no meeting. But somewhere in the first week it became understood among a handful of the guys that Zulu was interested in Vanessa, and from that point on they became, by turns, my advisers, my lookouts, my hype men, and my most ruthless critics.
Jose was the most useful of them, and the most dangerous, because he spoke Portuguese. That meant he could talk to Vanessa in her own language, and that my name came up in conversations I was not present for and could not follow. He knew I liked her. He found the whole thing entertaining. When Vanessa made a point of showing him that she and I were sharing earphones, I am fairly sure she was doing it partly for his benefit and partly, through him, for mine. Jose was the channel. A great deal of what passed between Vanessa and me passed first through a grinning Angolan who found my predicament hilarious.
Then there was Denis. Denis was the operator — the one who, at Vilakazi Street, had the camera in his hand when Vanessa was posing, caught my eye, and waved me into the frame. Without Denis there is no photograph of the two of us, no balancing pose, no moment I still return to. He understood the assignment without ever being briefed on it.
Enoch came into it later, and mostly from a distance — a friend from Mozambique who, long after South Africa, would still call to ask how Vanessa was, as though she were a shared project we were all quietly invested in. And the rest of the Zimbabwe contingent — the eight of us who flew home together — were the chorus. They watched the whole thing unfold over three weeks, and at the airport, with nothing left to lose, they were the ones who said: run, go see her. They had front-row seats to a slow-motion almost, and they were rooting for it the way you root for a team you have followed all season.
What strikes me, looking back, is that the bro code was never really about Vanessa. It was about the particular closeness men build when they are far from home, thrown together for a few weeks, and given permission to care about one another’s small dramas. They teased me mercilessly — “When are you going to Mozambique, Zulu?” — but the teasing was a form of affection. They wanted it to work for me. And when it did not work, they did not gloat. They just kept asking, gently, for months afterward, how she was. That, too, is a kind of love. Not the one this book is named for, but real all the same.
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