A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (31 page)

Soetwater looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. To the south, swaths of beach and scrubland stretch away for miles. It is a beautiful place.

When the rain stopped and the clouds dissolved, the sea appeared. It was a deep blue, and it was alive and full of force, and as he walked through Soetwater, Asad felt himself splitting in two. He was in a makeshift camp of the homeless, forging alliances and selling airtime—he was falling backward into his own past.

At first, his predominant feeling was regret.

“I wished that I could have gone back in time,” he recalls. “I wished I had another chance to be in Ethiopia with Rooda. I was so close to my father. I kept asking myself: Why did I not look for him? Why did I forget myself? Why did I forget my family? It was as if my head was empty. Look at me now. I am in this terrible place because I lost myself.”

Soetwater faces due west. On the first evening after the skies cleared, he watched the sun sink into the ocean. As he remembers it now, he had found a quiet spot, somewhere outside the camp, on the rocks. He was alone—or, in any event, he had sealed himself off from the people around him. The sun scattered its orange across the water, and as he watched he thought of Foosiya.

“I remembered her saying, ‘If you stay in this country, there will come a time when there is no place to run.' ”

She was a prophetess, he thought. Truly, she was. He marveled at her wisdom. From where did such insight come? Why did she see things so clearly? He had no idea. None at all. He could not even begin to imagine what it might mean to be wise.

Was his current fate not deserved? he wondered. Yindy had contempt for him, and her father had contempt for him, and he understood their feelings. A person who forgets his family has emptied himself of his worth. He is ripe for contempt. He is the sort who gets chased from his home by a mob, his cash in one sock, his airtime in another. A human being who loses himself will be kicked around.

On their seventh morning in Soetwater, Asad and Hassan caught a bus to Mitchells Plain.

“We had no problem going there,” Asad tells me. “There are only coloreds in Mitchells Plain.”

He went to the mechanic in whose care he had left his car, paid seven hundred rand for the repairs, and drove back to Soetwater.

“I started making business with my car, brother. People at Soetwater needed to travel. I start loading the people. I charged ten rand to go to Kommetjie, twenty rand to Fish Hoek, thirty rand to Mitchells Plain or Bellville.”

In the evenings, in their tent of Daarood, Asad and Hassan spoke to people who had begun venturing back into Khayelitsha. They had encountered no hostility there, only apology and regret. They had returned to Soetwater in one piece.

Hassan suggested that they visit their shop. The very idea made Asad's limbs tingle. He was frightened, and not only at the prospect of what the people of Khayelitsha might do to him. He suspected, too, that walking on Mew Way would let loose dangerous feelings. That his thoughts were steering him at every moment back into his childhood disturbed him. It had never happened before, never with this bald insistence. Asad the man and Asad the boy were mingling, blurring. He knew that the violence of Khayelitsha had mixed this strange cocktail of adult and child, but he did not know why.

And yet as much as he feared Mew Way, he knew that he would go. He had to see. He had to know in what state the people of Khayelitsha had left his shop. It was of the utmost importance to him.

They took a taxi. It seemed safer than driving their own car; they could slip in and out anonymously, they thought.

To Asad's dismay, the taxi dropped them directly outside their landlord's house on Mew Way. He was not prepared for this. In his mind, he had it that the taxi would let them off several blocks away, that he and Hassan would approach the site of their shop gradually, on foot. To be disgorged right here, at the scene of his flight, quickened his heart.

It was a weekday morning. There were few people about.

“The first ones who came to us were our landlord's wife and her friends,” Asad recalls. “They said shame. They said sorry. One of them wanted to touch us. More people came. They also said how sorry they were. They shook their heads.

“We were polite. We greeted them. We smiled. We said thank you. From there, we went to pay our respects to the landlord. We greeted him. We shook his hand. We did not even raise any question of compensation.

“Then we went to our shop. Brother, I had not expected to see what I saw. On the way to Khayelitsha, I had thought maybe it was possible to go back, to start again. But now I stared at where our shop had been, and there was nothing. Only the cement floor remained. Brother, I did not think that they would destroy the walls.”

He took the image of this burned-out nothingness back with him to Soetwater. He resolved never again to go to Khayelitsha. In that will to destroy, that will to see an empty space where once there had been a shop, was something too personal. He lay awake that night. To sleep would have been to court trouble.

At about the time that Asad and Hassan visited the site of their old shop, Somalis began returning to the places from which they had fled. People who had owned
spaza
shops in Dunoon went back to Dunoon. People who had had businesses in Khayelitsha went back. Their South African neighbors did not attack them. Their South African neighbors said they were sorry.

Hassan was among those advocating a return.

“He said that we must go back and rebuild,” Asad recalls. “Our old neighbor in Khayelitsha was looking for a tenant. She had a structure she wanted to rent to a shopkeeper. She was a Xhosa woman.

“I did not agree. I said to Hassan, ‘It is too risky; we survived once, we will not survive again.'

“ ‘Everyone is going back,' he said. ‘You take your luck.'

“Hassan left Soetwater and went back to Khayelitsha. He rented the neighbor's place, he rebuilt, he stocked. He called me many times and asked me to join him. I said no.”

Asad sold his pickup for seventeen thousand rand. With that money he would chart a future. He was not sure yet what he wanted to do. He knew only that he did not want to return to Khayelitsha.

Besides, by the end of May there was something else keeping Asad at Soetwater.

Inside the campgrounds was a parking lot. In a lane between two rows of cars, a young woman sat on a short stool making tea over a gas flame. Each afternoon she was there, and each afternoon a small boy sat alongside her. The boy was very young, maybe three or four years old, and in his eyes was a vacancy that caught Asad's attention. Those eyes, Asad thought to himself, belong to a child who does not expect anyone to see him.

The third or fourth time he passed them, Asad felt a chill rise up the length of his spine. It struck him that this mother and child were dying. Not literally: they were not mortally ill. But in their future lay death. To be all alone here in this godforsaken camp trying to make a living selling tea was surely no way to survive. Women were being treated very badly here. Men were pouncing on single women and proposing marriage in order to get a dry place inside a tent. Most of these women had somebody to protect them, somebody to help them to say no. But a woman alone: she would be used, and she would be discarded.

“I asked myself: Why does she have nobody? She is not very pretty, it is true. But she is also not ugly. For her to be alone, there must be something wrong.”

He began to buy tea from her. As he drank, he lingered. He asked her questions.

Her name was Sadicya, pronounced “Sadia.” Her son's name was Musharaf. At first, she looked away when Asad spoke to her, and her replies to his questions were blown away by the wind. But he was insistent. He held her eyes and asked her to repeat her answers. She looked back into his eyes and spoke in a clearer voice.

When the violence came, she said, she and Musharaf had been living alone in Strand, a small town some fifty kilometers southeast of Cape Town. She made a living selling odds and ends at a table outside a supermarket. Hers was an isolated life, she told Asad. She avoided other people. She neither offered nor received news. And so the violence had flung itself upon her without warning. One moment, she was standing behind her table selling loose cigarettes and fruit and crisps. The next, a mob had descended upon her. It was only as she was fleeing, her son plastered to her back, that she understood the anger to be trained on her—she was running for her life.

As he listened, Asad remembered all the cell-phone calls he had made and received in the prelude to the violence. Being connected to other Somalis—li
stening, advising, predicting—was so much a part of his experience of what had happened. It would take a great labor of imagination to put himself in the shoes of this woman as she ran.

At some point during her flight, she told Asad, she had had to cross a storm-water drain. She lowered herself into it easily enough, the child still on her back. But when she tried to climb out the other side, she lost her footing. That is where the police found her and Musharaf, she said, in a pool of water at the floor of the drain, their clothes sodden.

“I asked her why she was alone, brother, and when she told me I felt a terrible sadness. I looked at her, and I saw myself as a child. I thought: We are the same. What is happening to her happened to me.”

“What did she tell you?” I ask.

“The name of her tribe.”

“Her tribe?”

“She is Nuuh Mahamud. But there is also a terrible name for them: Galgale.”

At first, he wants to tell me the story of the Galgale. But before he has begun speaking, he has changed his mind.

“You are good at reading about the Somalis,” he says. “Go and read about the people who are called Galgale.”

He is flagging. Throughout our association, he has sat with me in my car and with unwavering diligence has trawled his memories. But in the last few days, things have begun to change. I am giving him draft chapters of the book, and he is reading them, and the reading has drawn unexpected feelings. It is one thing to fish for memories and present them to me in my car; he can anesthetize each recollection as he speaks it, and thus go on talking forever. But to see himself on the page, from a distance, to see this boy kicked through life like a stone: the reading strips him of his guard. He stands before his childhood stark naked, clutching blindly for something with which to cover himself.

Seeing his life in this way is breaking his heart, he reports. He is afraid to read further, lest the lost boy on the page creep inside him and install himself forever.

And so he will not tell me about the people called Galgale, and, in this refusal, he is signaling a more general shutting down.

I go and I read. I read through the night, in fact. When I next see Asad, I look at him anew.

Nobody knows for certain how many Somalis fall into the category of “Saab”; even if there were peace in Somalia, it is the sort of category that would be awkward to count. Long ago, in the 1970s, scholars settled on a proportion: fewer than 1 percent of Somalis were Saab, it was said, and that is the figure that has been quoted ever since.

The Saab are outcasts of a sort, for although they speak Somali and know of no other home but Somalia, and although they are physically indistingu
ishable from their countrymen and -women, they have no place in Somali genealogy. The six Somali clan families that compose the nation—Daa
rood, Dir, Isaaq, Hawiye, Digil, and Rahanwiin—
trace their respective histories to two founding ancestors. The Saab cannot do so. They are thus a negative; they are defined by what they lack.