A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (29 page)

On the highway back to Pretoria, he found that his hands were shaking. At first, he was not sure why. He tilted his neck, pushed his head back into the seat, and listened to the sound of his breathing. Once it came to him, it was obvious. He was shaking because he was on his way back to Mabopane. He did not want ever to see that shop again. It was an evil place. Going back there would make him ill.

That afternoon he told Abdi that he could not work in the shop anymore. Abdi said nothing, but his eyes pleaded.

“I felt very sorry for him,” Asad tells me. “His savings were all in the shop. His life was in the shop. He felt he had to keep going. I was leaving him to face Mabopane alone.

“I told him honestly, ‘I can't stay. Those people can turn against you anytime. If one is your friend, they are all your friend. If one is your enemy, they are all your enemy. If I stay I will die.' ”

Abdi struggled on alone for a while. Asad busied himself with his taxi business, ferrying people between Pretoria and Johannesburg. He did not set foot in Mabopane or in any other township. He lived his life in Marabastad, in Mayfair, and on the highway in between.

Within a couple of weeks, Abdi lost heart. He and Asad sold the shop, together with the pickup, for eighty thousand rand. Asad sold the car he had been using as a taxi for sixteen thousand. The income from the taxi alone was not sufficient to sustain him; he would have to look for something new.

The man to whom he sold the car didn't have nearly enough money to buy it. But he was married with children and had no shop of his own and desperately needed to earn money. Asad took six thousand rand from him and deferred the remainder of the payment.

He went back to Mayfair and looked for work.

“I wanted to drive a truck. I went to the big Somali businessmen, the ones who live in very nice houses and have chains of shops and buy in bulk. If I could drive a truck, I would never have to go to a township again. You pick up your load, you take it to Mayfair, to Marabastad, to the Somali places in Cape Town, in Durban. You are a hundred percent safe.

“But it was difficult. You need a code-fourteen license to drive a truck, and you can't get one without a South African ID. I thought that maybe one of the big Somalis would give me a job anyway. But they said it was not worth their while for their drivers to keep getting caught by the police.

“I went back to Pretoria. Nobody would employ me to drive a truck if I did not have a license. So I packed my bags and went to Cape Town.”

“Why Cape Town?” I ask.

“If you are stuck in one city, you move to another,” he replies.

“Yes, but why Cape Town?”

He shifts in his seat. “We had heard rumors about Cape Town,” he says.

I wait for him to continue, but he remains silent.

“What rumors?”

He says it rapidly, as if to get it over with as soon as possible. “Cape Town was run by white people. Therefore it was safe.”

I write down what he has said in my notebook, my face quite solemn. Then I look at him and laugh. He turns his head from me, rests his chin on his elbow, and stares out into the Blikkiesdorp street.

He took a bus to Cape Town. It was June 2007. In the contacts file on his SIM card was the cell-phone number of a man called Jbene and the word “Bellville.” Jbene and Asad had played pool together in Uitenhage three years before, when Asad had first come to South Africa. They had been in touch ever since.

He took a taxi from the Cape Town railway station to Bellville Town Centre, where Jbene was waiting for him. The following morning, they hired a Somali driver to take them on a long, circular drive through the townships that fanned from the southeastern periphery of the city, an introduction for Asad.

As he took in the scenes, his heart became lead. It was a new city, to be sure: some of the faces were much lighter, the houses stubbier and flatter. The spaces seemed more open. On the sides of the streets there was beach sand. But these differences were skin deep. The underlying structure was the same.

Cape Town had two Mayfairs: Bellville Town Centre and Mitchells Plain Town Centre. These places were thick with Somalis and with commerce. There were travelers' lodges and supermarkets and cell-phone shops and shops selling contraband designer clothing. In the residential flats above the commercial areas, Somali faces stared out of the windows.

Around these oases stretched mile upon mile of township. Just like in Johannesburg, in Pretoria, in Port Elizabeth. He recalled that first bus journey from Johannesburg to his uncle Abdicuur in Uitenhage. He remembered staring out of the window as the bus passed one town after another. How peculiar they seemed at the time: each town divided into an outer and an inner world, the outer consisting of rows of identical houses, the inner full of old trees and church steeples and history. Now this geography seemed his prison. He was an able-bodied man; his two feet could carry him wherever he commanded. And yet all paths led to the outer world, to the township, where he was going to die.

Again, he plowed his energy into the quest to drive a truck. As in Johannesburg, he hit a brick wall. Without a South African identity document, he could not get a code-14 license. And without the right license, nobody would employ him to drive a truck.

He returned each night to Jbene's home in Bellville and unloaded his frustration on his friend.

“Jbene told me I was wasting my time and my money,” Asad recalls. “He said it was obvious: in this country you had to make business, and to make business you must go to the township. I told him I would die in the township. I could feel it in my bones. He said Allah had decided long ago when I was going to die. It was not for a bunch of South Africans to decide. But I knew he was wrong. If I went to live there again, I would die there.”

“You have also said that Allah wrote your future while you were in the womb,” I say.

“I know,” he replies. “I have thought about that a lot. It is a difficult question.”

He looks at me closely. “Why do you ask that question?”

He does not wait for me to reply. “Look at it this way,” he says. “If you want to have a child, you cannot say, ‘I don't need to do anything; Allah has willed that I will have a child.' You need to have sex to have a child.

“If you want to make money, you cannot say, ‘I can sit back; Allah has already decided how much money I will make.' You need to go out and make business.

“So it is the same with deciding to go to live in a township. Because of that decision, you may get paralyzed or burned alive or killed.”

But as his third week in Cape Town came and went, and the prospect of driving a truck remained as remote as ever, he realized that he was once again walking the road to the township. He was living off his savings, and that was intolerable. He had to invest, and there was nowhere to do so but in the place he most feared.

“You might have left altogether,” I say. “You could have headed north. You could have gone to Addis again.”

He says nothing; he merely sighs. As if what I have said is a barbed comment tossed from a gallery of spectators.

“I forgot to leave South Africa,” he says finally, his voice tinged with sarcasm.

In the end, he chose the biggest township of all, Khayelitsha. A settlement of more than a million people, some twenty-five kilometers from the center of Cape Town, it was a place of Xhosa-speaking migrants. Almost everyone over the age of fifteen had been born in Eastern Cape and had come to Cape Town to look for work. From the first day, Asad found himself looking for women with nine and a half fingers. Most young people from Sterkstroom went to Cape Town at one time or another. Many ended up in Khayelitsha. It was as if there were a foul-smelling creature inside him searching for the very worst of the past.

He had a new business partner, yet another AliYusuf man. His name was Hassan.

They were both old hands, Asad and Hassan, and they went about establishing a shop with methodical precision. They walked the streets of Khayelitsha, day in and day out, looking for an empty shack, a vacant prefabricated hut, or a stand on which they might construct a building themselves. Once they found something promising, they examined the surrounds. It had to be on a thoroughfare people used to get to or from work. Just a street or two away, and there would not be enough passing trade. Then they would look for the nearest Somali
spaza
shop. Did it feed off the same commuters somewhere upstream? Or did it service other people on their way to other places?

On their third day, they found an empty shack on Mew Way, one of the two arteries linking Khayelitsha to the N2 motorway. Thousands of people streamed past this point every day. The nearest Somali shop was five blocks away, far enough. They knocked on neighboring doors and asked who owned the property. Within an hour, they were negotiating with the owner, a well-off, middle-aged Xhosa man keen to do business.

The following day, they spoke to the neighbors once more, this time asking for people in the construction business. By the end of the week, they had entered into an agreement with local builders who demolished the shack and erected a prefabricated wooden structure tailored to the Somalis' needs. It was small. The two men would share a two-by-three-meter bedroom at the back.

Slowly, they began to gather stock. With their first two days' proceeds they bought more stock and then more. Business was steady on bad days, brisk on good days. Within a month, they had a full-fledged
spaza
shop. Asad was back in business.

I ask him what he thought of the people of Khayelitsha, and his answers are careful and judicious.

“Different people had different attitudes,” he says. “Some made friends with us. They looked us in the eye, and when they smiled at us you could see that they were smiling with their hearts. But most people were saying, ‘You are Somali, you don't belong. You are
makwerekwere.
You are making money in our country. We will kill you.'

“Some of the people who said these things were our customers. They bought bread from us, they bought cigarettes from us. And they said they were going to kill us. I got used to it. Maybe it is because we were making good money. Maybe it is that we prayed five times a day. Five times is a lot, brother. You turn your back on these people, and you face your God. It fills you. It makes you strong.

“But then something happens and suddenly you realize you are not okay. One day, my colleague arrived at the shop with stock. The door was open. Two guys wanted to help unload. We said no. We knew, if they just touch our stuff, they will want a lot of money. Whether it is a man, a woman, or a child, they must not touch our stuff. It will cause a problem. We said: We don't want your help.

“One of them went to pick up our box. I pushed him. He said, ‘Why are you pushing me?' He took a gun from his waistband. I ran behind a car. He shot at me twice. Some taxi drivers were standing in front of the shop. They shouted, ‘Hey, put your gun away, for fuck's sake, this is a public road, there are people walking past.'

“These two young guys just walked away. Slowly. Taking their time. Down the street.

“When you lie in bed on the night after something like that has happened you start to think: I could have been dead. One of those bullets could have hit me and killed me, and those boys would still have just walked down the street. Maybe they would have been arrested. But they would not be in jail for long. No witness would come forward. The case would die.

“So you lie in bed and you think: This is crazy; I can't live like this. But the next morning you open your shop and everything is normal and the money is coming in. You forget.”

Now, he says, when he looks back he sees such obvious signs.

“Like what?” I ask.

“There were some schoolgirls who'd come to us every day asking for sweets. They were little: maybe six years old, seven years old. They would hold out their hands and say, ‘Sweets. Sweets. Sweets.' We would say: ‘Tomorrow.' What we meant was that every day was tomorrow.

“Once, I think maybe it was in March or April 2008, I said to a little girl, ‘Tomorrow.' And she said, ‘Tomorrow
uzohamba
[you will be leaving].' She knew what the adults had been talking about. She knew what they wanted to do.”

On a Sunday evening in the early winter of 2008, an old man stumbled up to the counter and asked for a loose cigarette. His breath reeked of brandy, and his eyes were shot with blood. He had clearly been drinking all weekend.

“Somali,” he said as Asad passed him his cigarette. “Have you seen what they are doing to your brothers in Alexandra?”

“What are they doing to my brothers?”

“They are slaughtering them, Somali. There is
makwerekwere
blood flowing on the streets.”

Asad watched the old man stagger back into the street and wondered whether what he had offered was a drunken hallucination or a rumor he had picked up from a drinking partner. But the words stayed with him. He made a mental note to watch the seven o'clock news.

It was the first item. A mob in Alexandra, a densely populated township of several hundred thousand people in Johannesburg, had marauded through the streets chasing foreigners from their homes. Many hundreds of shacks had been looted. Many hundreds more had been burned to the ground. It was believed that thousands of foreign nationals had fled their homes.

The news did not surprise Asad. But it also shocked him to his core. These were precisely the scenes he kept sweeping from his mind. Such sweeping was the daily labor that made life in South Africa possible. A tremor worked its way through his body, a faint echo of the convulsions that had gripped him on the night of Uncle Abdicuur's murder. It was as if a thin facsimile of that time had returned.

He did not know anybody who lived in Alexandra. He felt pity for these souls who had lost their homes. And then he went to sleep.

Over the following two days, what had happened in Alexandra settled into the recesses of his skull and began tapping away, softly, as if a tiny sponge-headed hammer was at work in his head. Occasionally, customers would mention it, an ominous excitement in their voices. He asked Hassan if he knew anyone who lived in Alexandra. He did not.

Two nights later, there was another news story. The violence had spread. There had been incidents around the Jeppe Hostel in central Johannesburg and in one or two townships on the East Rand. More people had fled their homes.

“Now, the seven o'clock news was a daily terror,” Asad tells me. “All of the next day, it would sit in our minds: What are we going to find out at seven o'clock?

“Each night, the news was worse. The violence was spreading, spreading, spreading. They were calling it ‘the xenophobic violence.' We watched, brother. There is this place on the East Rand in Johannesburg called Ramaphosa. In Ramaphosa, a Mozambican man burned. They put a tire around his head and burned him to death.

“We phoned people in Mayfair. They said Mayfair is safe. The blacks will not dare to come there. But the townships. All the Somalis in the townships. We need to do something for them. People in Mayfair were spending the whole day on the phone talking to people in their tribes who were living out there. People were making space in their homes. ‘Pack up your stock,' they'd say. ‘Leave behind what will not fit into your car. Your stock will be useless to you if you are dead.'