A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (33 page)

The most valued connection he made was with a man called Gabriel, a young American student working for the UNHCR.

“I met him after I had cried in a meeting with the UNHCR and the government,” Asad tells me. “I was a spokesperson for the joint refugee leaders. They told us at that meeting that for Somalis and Congolese there was no choice: we must reintegrate. When they said that I tried to speak, but instead I cried. I was thinking of Foosiya's prophesy, of my son crawling around in my blood. I thought that her prophecy was now going to come true, only it would be Musharaf walking in my blood.

“We were desperate, brother. Straight after that meeting, we called a press conference. We wanted to explain to the world what it meant to be a Somali in South Africa. We sat in that press conference and tried to explain. We tried to put them in our shoes.

“After the press conference, the UNHCR sent investigators to document who was being killed. They wanted to find out what was happening to us in South Africa. That is how I met Gabriel. The UNHCR employed him as an interviewer. None of the interpreters could understand his accent. I was the only one. So I spent many, many hours with Gabriel. We talked. I told him my story.”

A bond between the two men formed. They grew to like each other very much. Gabriel became his inside track, a person who both understood the inscrutable world of the law and had Asad's true interests at heart.

“Gabriel told me that there was no way, absolutely no way, ever, that I would get to America if I stayed in the camp. He said that it was a rule that would never ever be broken: ‘These people cannot be rewarded for staying here against the law.' The city was offering to move us to Blikkiesdorp. Gabriel said that if I moved, there was a very good chance I would get to America. He had spoken to UNHCR people. He had spoken to American people. He was clever. He knew how the system worked. He said that those interviews the UNHCR had done with us were enough to get us to America. My family and some others would be officially classified as ‘vulnerable' and that would get us to America. But only if we went to Blikkiesdo
rp—that was the route to America.

“Brother, I said no. I was not going to take Sadicya and Musharaf out into South Africa. Especially not a place like Blikkiesdorp. I was not leaving.”

He shut out Gabriel's words. He refused to absorb them: You can go to America if you like, but to get there you must sit it out in a shack settlement littered with guns and gangs. It will take maybe a year, maybe two or three years. If you can survive Blikkiesdorp for that long, you can go to America.

He kept fighting. He kept talking of defiance. He told all sorts of people that he would be the very last one to leave. They would have to kill him and drag his body away. Around him were dozens of assenting voices—it was their right to go to America. If the South Africans wanted them to leave, they would have to bring in soldiers to slaughter them.

Asad kept talking like this, but slowly, barely consciously, he started to wonder whether he believed what he was saying. Sometimes, it would come to him with a shock that he had been listening to his own voice as if another person were speaking, a person who was becoming less and less useful. Gabriel had authority. Gabriel knew.

Inside, two voices mingled. One spoke to the world. It was as defiant as ever. The other spoke quietly and privately. It coaxed. It explained. It was preparing Asad for what he desperately did not want.

Asad and his family arrived at Blue Waters in early September 2008. It was only on February 24, 2010, sixteen months after all services at Blue Waters had ceased, that the Cape High Court handed down judgment. The people of Blue Waters were ordered to leave by March 31. They were to receive a relocation payment as well as the option of skills training, which would include a course in life skills and another in English language instruction, and trauma counseling. If they did not take the training and the counseling, they would get additional money instead.

Thirty-four of the Blue Waters families had been classified by the UNHCR as “vulnerable.” These families, the court ordered, would be settled in Blikkiesdorp, each family in a separate abode. The homes to which they were to be moved were described as “18-square-metre insulated wooden and metal framework structures including a roof and windows, erected on a concrete slab, situated on a site serviced with electricity, water and sanitation.” They would pay no rent.

Asad, Sadicya, and Musharaf were among several families who abided by the settlement. On March 31, 2010, they looked on as their possessions were loaded onto a truck. Then they themselves climbed aboard; they made their way to their new home.

The rest of the Blue Waters people, more than four hundred of them, defied. They believed to the depths of their bones that if they made hostages of themselves they would go to America. The task of removing them was messy and prolonged. On April 15, a large contingent of police pushed them out of the campsite grounds. Most simply relocated to a parking lot across the road, where they remained for another week. The women and children among them spent each night in a public toilet next to the parking lot. The men slept under the stars.

By the end of April, thirty-seven people had been arrested for trespassing. The remainder dissolved into the townships of Cape Town.

As for Asad, he was back in a South African township with a wife and a child, precisely his situation on the eve of Foosiya's departure three and a half years earlier. Whatever choices he made, it seemed, his life went around in a circle.

I first visited Asad in Blikkiesdorp on September 24, 2010. He had been living there a week shy of six months.

It was on my third visit, I think, that I watched him watch three hooded young men approach us in my rearview mirror. His fear crossed a boundary right then and inhabited me. I saw what he saw and felt what he felt. It was a gift. In that moment he gave me the ink with which I have written this book.

Today, as I write, Christmas is approaching. It is late December 2012. I feel obliged to document, baldly and without adornment, some of what Asad has experienced in the two-and-a-bit years I have known him.

On an evening in November 2010, about three dozen people surrounded his place. They sang and danced. The lyrics to their song demanded that he close his doors and leave Blikkiesdorp. They threw stones. They sang of setting his shop alight. Sadicya and Musharaf fled to a South African community leader's place elsewhere in the settlement. Asad phoned the Delft police station. The police did not come. He then phoned Pearlie Joubert, the journalist who had introduced us; she called the provincial police spokesperson. This time, a police patrol arrived.

The crowd had a ringleader, a middle-aged South African man who ran a
spaza
shop several blocks from Asad's place. When the police came, he switched roles; with large and exaggerated gestures, he began to shield Asad from his attackers. It took the police just a few minutes to ascertain that this man had in fact mobilized the crowd. They arrested him and took him away, but he was back later that night. No docket had been opened. When Asad went to the police station the next day to lay a charge, he was told that this was not possible.

Most of Asad's neighbors came to sympathize.

“They told me the
toyi-toyiers
were full of shit,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Thanks, brother, thanks, sister.' But I have learned that people can change their minds very quickly.”

And, indeed, two weeks later, a packed community meeting in Blikkiesdorp resolved unanimously to demand that the City Council remove Somalis from Blikkiesdorp. It was said that they ran too many businesses and that they were making people poor.

The UNHCR encouraged the people they had resettled in Blikkiesdorp to leave. They offered a resettlement payment if the Somalis and Congolese would find homes for themselves elsewhere. But Asad's business was in Blikkiesdorp. It was feeding his family. He began searching the colored township of Belhar for an open space on which he might erect a shop. He could not find one. He resolved to sit it out in Blikkiesdorp.

The following month, two young men came to Asad's shop to buy. Asad knew one of them well. His name was Fayek. He lived in Blikkiesdorp Section 23, just a few hundred meters from Asad's place. He bought cigarettes, chips, and a small bag of sugar. In front of Asad, he dropped his purchases on the ground and accused Asad of having taken his money without giving him his order in return. He said he wanted cigarettes and chips and a small bag of sugar. Asad shook his head and asked Fayek to leave. Fayek and his friend began to shout. They would come back. They would kill Asad. They would kill his wife. They would kill his boy. They stepped back a few paces, and then began stoning Asad's walls. Then they turned and left.

Six weeks or so later, Asad walked past a group of young men playing dice. One of them was Fayek. When he saw Asad, he stood up, drew a gun from his waistband, crouched and aimed. As Asad bolted, he heard Fayek laugh. “Run, Somali, run!” Fayek shouted after him.

Early the following year, on January 13, 2011, Asad visited a Somali household in Blikkiesdorp in the early evening. His hosts invited him to chew
mira
with them. He accepted the invitation. Including Asad there were five men in all sitting in front of a shack chewing
mira.

Two police vans screeched to a halt outside the shack, and four cops jumped out and told the men that they were under arrest for possession of drugs. They began confiscating wallets and cell phones. They were clearly there to rob the Somalis, rather than to arrest them. Their plan was to show up in force, shout, threaten, and then leave with their loot.

Sadicya arrived with Musharaf. In her broken English, she began to shout at the police. “It is not illegal to eat
mira,
” she told them. “It is in our culture. It is what we do.”

One of the police officers smacked her across the face with an open hand. Now Asad began shouting, “She is a pregnant woman! You cannot hit her.”

A policeman stormed Asad and sprayed his eyes with pepper spray. When Asad doubled over, the cop smacked him across the face. Then he went back to his van and retrieved a rifle. He pointed it in Sadicya's face and asked her if she would like to be shot. The police officers then handcuffed the five men and took them to the police cells. The Somalis never saw their wallets or cell phones again.

The cells were full, and the Somalis soon discovered that they were run by members of South Africa's infamous Number gangs: the 26s, 27s, and 28s. The gangsters instructed the Somalis to empty their pockets. The police had taken what they had, but from a sense of pride the Somalis refused. The gangsters began pushing and punching. The Somalis fought back. It seems that the gangsters were surprised by the Somalis' resolve and were not in the mood for a fight. They backed off.

Somebody on the outside paid seven hundred and fifty rand to get the Somalis a lawyer, who applied for police bail. The cops would not release them. As they were Somalis, the lawyer was told, they were not eligible for bail. They ended up staying four days. They appeared before a magistrate and were released on bail of one thousand rand each. The case dragged on until April when the charges were dropped.

On a Saturday evening in April 2011, Asad left home to visit a friend at the other end of Blikkiesdorp. It was about quarter past six. A block from his home, he passed five young men playing dice. He knew them well; they were, indeed, among his daily customers.

Once he had turned the corner and was out of sight, they went to his home, broke the lock on the back door, and kicked it down. Musharaf was in the toilet at this time. He stayed there and hid.

The intruders ignored Sadicya, who was by now heavily pregnant. They turned their attention instead to an old Somali man Asad had asked to look after the shop in his absence. They beat him in the face with a hard object. The old man said later that it was a monkey wrench, but Asad reckoned that a monkey wrench would have left a narrow, deep wound, whereas the old man's wound was wide and shallow, suggesting that the object was a rock.

Asad called the Delft police station, but nobody came until lunchtime the following day. The shack was dusted for fingerprints and photographs were taken. Asad was driven around Blikkiesdorp in a van looking for the culprits. Then a more senior detective arrived on the scene and said that no docket could be opened until the old man had signed a witness statement. But the old man was not there; he was being treated for his wounds at a clinic. The police left without opening a docket. They never returned.

A week later, two of the culprits came to the shop to buy cigarettes. Sadicya ran to Asad to tell him. Asad called the investigating officer, the one who said that no docket could be opened without the old man's testimony. He said he would come immediately, but he did not come at all.

Blikkiesdorp's street committees, staffed and run by South Africans, were also involved in the case. When the police arrived, the street committees sent a representative who followed them around and showed great concern.

Asad smiled to himself.

“The street committees could find the culprits in a few seconds if they wanted,” he tells me. “But their job is not to snitch on people who rob Somalis.”

On July 27, 2011, there was shooting throughout the night in Blikkiesdorp. Two rival gangs were fighting it out over drug turf. The police stayed away during the hours of darkness. Once light broke, they came in numbers and swarmed Blikkiesdorp. They raided shack after shack, picking more than a dozen young men off the street and throwing them into the backs of their vans.

At the very time that the police were all over Blikkiesdorp, a Somali child, aged ten, was found hanging from the clothesline by her own jersey in her parents' yard. She had gone out in the morning to buy a cold drink. Her mother, who had begun to worry because her daughter had been gone a long time, walked out of the shack into the yard and saw her swinging.

Two detectives were called to the scene. They were there for about twenty minutes. The investigating officer opened a suicide inquest, saying that no foul play was suspected. How he could determine this after such a short investigation, especially when the parents suspected foul play, one does not know.

During the course of the afternoon, the Somalis of Blikkiesdorp began to grow hysterical with fear. They had just been through a night of gunfire, the walls of their homes thin and frail; they had watched an army of men swarm their neighborhood; and now one of them, a young child, to boot, had died in the strangest circumstances, and the police had summarily determined that there was no case to investigate. They resolved to take their children out of school. If the young ones are now being targeted, they said, we do not want them to leave home in the mornings.

The twenty-seventh of July turned out to be Musharaf's last day of school in 2011. He stayed at home the remainder of the year and resumed school only in January 2012.

On July 28, I took a radio journalist to Blikkiesdorp. She interviewed the parents of the dead girl and watched the Somalis stand around her body in a small room at the local clinic. She interviewed the investigating officer. That evening, I listened to her report. A Somali girl was found hanging in her parents' yard in a settlement on the edge of Delft, she said. The parents suspect foul play. The police disagree and have opened a suicide inquest.

As I listened, I was struck by the deep inadequacy of news. How does one convey the enormity of what had happened? Thousands of listeners, in the bubbles of their cars, made their way home in the rush-hour traffic. Somewhere on the edge of the city, locals had a go at foreigners. The police were not terribly interested. That is how it is.

This is but a sample of what Asad experienced personally. Then there are his vicarious experience
s—the stories that circulated, the funerals he attended, the burned, shot, and wounded people to whose aid he came.

In September 2010, two Somalis came under attack in their shop in Philippi. The intruders shot one of them through the heart, tied the other to a chair, poured petrol over him, and set him alight.

I went with Asad to visit him in the hospital. His face was a mummy of white bandages, his eyes staring out at us from deep sockets.

Earlier in 2010, a Somali man Asad knew who ran a shop in Khayelitsha was robbed at gunpoint by two regular customers. He filed a complaint, and they were charged with robbery with aggravating circumstances. A court date was set. On the evening before the Somali was due to testify in court, the father of one of the accused walked into the shop and asked to buy a liter of milk. The Somali told him to leave. The man pulled out a pistol and shot the Somali in the stomach. He survived, but decided that it was better not to lay charges against the father. He also told prosecutors that he would no longer give testimony in the son's trial.

In October 2010, a gang in Khayelitsha had gone from one Somali shop to another robbing and executing the owners: in a single night, they killed three people in three separate incidents. The fourth shop owner they attacked shot back, wounding one of his assailants. In response, the police raided more than a dozen Somali shops in the Khayelitsha area looking for illegal weapons. Five Somalis were picked up. They were all denied bail on the grounds that they were planning revenge.

On the last day of the Soccer World Cup in July 2010, a mob surrounded the shop of a Somali retailer in Philippi. He called the police. The officers who arrived on the scene insisted on taking his fridge and his television set for safekeeping, lest the mob come back later to loot. When the Somali went to the police station to retrieve his possessions, he was told that officers wanted to buy his electronic goods. He declined the offer and was threatened with arrest and thrown out of the police station. He hired a lawyer and pressed charges against the officers who had taken his possessions. That night, he received a death threat on his cell phone.

In February 2011, three armed men entered a Somali-owned
spaza
shop in a section of Delft about two kilometers from Asad's place. The shop was owned by two men. One was staffing the counter, the other was taking a nap upstairs. The robbers shot and killed the man behind the counter. His colleague was woken by the gunfire and jumped from the second floor of the house and ran away. The robbers doused the shop in petrol, lit a match, and watched the shop and the corpse burn.

Asad rushed to the scene along with several other Blikkiesdorp Somalis. They arrived long before the fire department and walked into the burning shop; they wanted to save their compatriot's body from the flames for his burial. Asad found the corpse and knelt down over it and touched it on the forearm. It was so hot that he flinched. When he looked at his fingers they were scalded. After he had returned home that evening he sank his hand into a bowl of ice. In the weeks that they took to heal he acquired a fascination with the burn marks. He would open his hand every so often and stare at them.