A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (37 page)

On my fourth day in Kansas City, a sudden burst of communication from Sadicya.

“I must find work,” she says. “It is a very big something. That I get money.”

She is sitting in the backseat of my car with her daughters. I have just taken her to an appointment at the other end of the city. We are almost home. I eye her in the rearview mirror.

“Why?” I ask.

“My grandmother. She in refugee camp in Kenya. I must bring her. My sister. My sister in Kismayo. She suffer. I must bring her.”

“What work will you do?” I ask.

“Any work. Any. Whatever. Cleaning. Whatever.”

Neither of us says anything more. We get home, and I watch her and her children make their way indoors. She turns and waves from the front door, her cheeks bulging from under her head scarf. I have glanced for no more than an instant through a tiny crack in the door to her world. That is enough to have learned a great deal. It will cost Asad all his worth to track down his children, to bring them here, to settle them. It may take him the rest of his life. Her family, I surmise, is far from his thoughts. She is powerless to enforce her will upon this world. Between her and Asad lies a chasm.

“Why are you unable to read the book?” I ask.

He glances at me briefly, on his face a look of apology, I think. I am not sure.

It is early evening. Although the whole family is home there is a stillness about the house. He is staring out of the window. Rahma has fallen asleep in his lap, and he cups her head in his open palm.

“I am not demanding that you read it,” I continue. “If it is too upsetting, then of course you mustn't. But I worry. What if I've said things that will hurt you or offend you? What if I've said things that are just wrong?”

“When you said a book,” he begins, “I thought you would ask ten questions and then go and write. I never thought…” He throws his head back and laughs. “You came back and back and back. You went deeper and deeper and deeper.”

“I went to Ethiopia—”

“That was fine. I was happy for you to go there, to see for yourself. But when you said you want to come here to Kansas City and it was for
more book.
Man!”

I smile to myself. Right at the beginning, a few weeks after I began interviewing him, he asked to see a book I had written about South Africa's prison gangs. He had just spent a weekend in the cells of a police station, and had had his first rude encounter with the fearsome 28s. He had wanted to know more.

I gave him the book, and when we saw each other next he told me that he'd spent several days dipping in and out of it. From then on, during the sessions in my car, I thought I detected a change in the way he told stories. He was much more attentive to the particular; he was straining, I thought, to capture the woof of his childhood days. He froze moments and described them with care; he began speaking of objects, of things. I was so appreciative. From his reading, I imagined, he had imbibed what it meant to fashion a book from a conversation. He was helping me in my task.

It is amazing how we—I—listen for what we most want to hear. For months I had walked around with this idea of a collaboration between us, one we both fully understood. I try to remember when I started doubting this story. I do not recall.

“What is it that upsets you when you read it?” I ask.

“It is two things,” he says crisply. “The one is the loss, loss, loss. First I lose my mother. Then I lose my home. Then I lose Yindy. Then the AliYusuf in Nairobi. Then I lose Yindy's family in Wardheer. Then Rooda. Then I lose my uncle, then my cousin, then Foosiya and my children. Everywhere, it is loss, loss, loss.”

His raised voice has woken Rahma. She crawls out of the fetal position in which she had been sleeping and lies on her back. She is watchful, her eyes on her father's face.

I am on the brink of telling him that he did in fact lose all these things, but I check myself. The import of what he has conveyed is so obvious that there is nothing to say.

I have spent the last couple of years memorializing his life. But there is no intrinsic value in remembering. He has in fact just told me that he cannot afford to take in the sweep of his life. To remember in this way is crippling. It is better for him, I think, to see his past as a series of sparks or flashes, a selection of moments when he was the one who decided what would happen next. That is what he must see in his past in order to craft a future.

This book is for me and for those who read it. It is of no value to him but for the money that will come his way. He will buy a truck with that money, or a part of a truck. From this book he will fashion another moment when he is the one who decides.

“What is the second thing that upset you?” I ask.

“The business with her,” he says, pointing his chin at the kitchen, where Sadicya is preparing dinner. “I think of Abdullahi people reading this book and feeling shameful. They will be angry.”

He stares out of the window. I stare at him.

“Are you asking me to take Sadicya's origins out of the book?” I ask eventually.

“No,” he says quietly. “It is shameful for them to feel shameful. I don't care.”

I could push the point, but it is in my interests to hold my tongue. I cast an eye into the future and see a time when he regrets having answered my question thus.

Rahma has crawled up in his lap again. Her thumb is in her mouth, her nose pressed up against his side. From the kitchen comes the smell of chicken and the crackling of meat in a pan. Sadicya is calling Musharaf to the table. We will eat in a moment. And after dinner I will say good-bye.

Acknowledg
ments

First thanks go to Pearlie Joubert, who introduced me to Asad Abdullahi and vouched for my trustworth
iness. I am enormously grateful.

When I began working with Asad in September 2010 I was a senior researcher at the Institute for the Humanities in Africa (Huma) at the University of Cape Town. In exchange for a monthly salary, I was obliged only to research and write what I liked, an inordinately privileged position. Many thanks to my former colleagues Deborah Posel, Shamil Jeppie, Natasha Distiller, and Heather Maytham.

Halfway through this project, I moved to the African Studies Centre at Oxford University. The formidable cohort of doctoral students who ran the Horn of Africa Seminar gave me the induction I needed to the politics of Somalia and Ethiopia. I am especially indebted to Emma Lochery who so generously shared both her deep knowledge and her circle of Ethiopian friends.

Many thanks to Hiruy Gossaye, who helped me get inside Bole Mikhael.

I was blessed to visit Dire Dawa and Harar in the company of Khalid Yousuph who, with grace and without inhibition, showed me so much of his own life.

I am also immensely grateful to Mohamed Mohamud, without whom I would not have discovered the life histories of Asad's parents.

Many thanks to David Godwin, Jeremy Boraine, and Dan Franklin. Special thanks to Dan Frank and Betsy Sallee, with whom it has been such a pleasure to work.

I am grateful, as ever, to Mark Gevisser for his shrewd eye, and to Tony Hamburger who helped me better to understand Asad's relationship with Sadicya.

Thank you, again, to Lomin Saayman, for more than I can possibly say here. And to Carol Steinberg and David Jammy, my bedrock.

The following books and articles helped shape aspects of
A Man of Good Hope.
They also serve as a guide to those who wish to read further about some of the many episodes, themes, and events covered in these pages.

Why a country whose citizens share a common language, religion, and long-standing heritage has torn itself to pieces is the great question that hangs over Somalia. It is the subject of an ongoing and sometimes ill-tempered debate. On one side are those who see the civil war of the 1990s as the expression of an ancient Somali proclivity to fight. The best proponent of this position is I. M. Lewis, the grand old ethnographer of northern Somali society. His ethnography of the Somali clan system,
A Pastoral Democracy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), was the bible of Somali scholarship until the 1990s, when younger scholars finally rose to challenge it. The latest edition of his
A Modern History of the Somali
(Oxford and Athens, Ohio: James Currey and Ohio University Press, 2002) contains his fullest account of the origins of the civil war. His take on the war is in part an expression of personal disappoint
ment; he was an ardent supporter of anticolonial Somali movements in the 1940s and 1950s and a great friend to many of the Somali nationalists who dreamed of building a progressive African nation from the ruins of empire.

Pitted against Lewis are a host of younger scholars who take umbrage at the idea that the roots of the war are primordial and are offended by the implication that Somalis are born to violence. These scholars find the roots of the war not in the ancient clan system, but in modern inequities of race and class, in the political economy of avarice and greed, and in the global politics of the Cold War. For an account of Somali society that differs sharply with Lewis's, see Catherine Besteman,
Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence and the Legacy of Slavery
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). And for an interpretation of the causes of the war that challenges Lewis's account, see the articles collected in Catherine Besteman and Lee V. Cassanelli, eds.,
The Struggle for Land in Southern Somalia: The War Behind the War
(London and New Brunswick: Haan and Transaction, 1996).

In the late 1990s, Besteman and Lewis had an abrasive exchange in the pages of a prestigious anthropology journal: Catherine Besteman, “Representing Violence and ‘Othering' Somalia,”
Cultural Anthropology
11, no. 1 (1996): 120–33; I. M. Lewis, “Doing Violence to Ethnography: A Response to Catherine Besteman's ‘Representing Violence and “Othering” Somalia,' ”
Cultural Anthropology
13, no. 1 (1998): 100–108; Catherine Besteman, “Primordialist Blinders: A Reply to I. M. Lewis,”
Cultural Anthropology
13, no. 1 (1998): 109–20.

In recent years, the debate has moderated somewhat and has become better for it. Now that scholars are no longer shouting one another down, more serious attention is being paid to the obvious complexity of the place of history in the Somali present. See, for instance, Jutta Bakonyi, “Moral Economies of Mass Violence: Somalia, 1988–1991,”
Civil Wars
11, no. 4 (2009): 434–54.

Looking at Asad's life, you can see that questions about ancient times are strikingly close to the surface and yet no less mercurial for that. It never occurred to Asad to ask Rooda, the most important benefactor of his childhood and youth, his clan. And yet, when Asad accounts for the behavior of black South Africans, he refers to what he believes happened to their ancestors in the mists of time. And his decision to marry Sadicya is at once a defiance of genealogical chauvinism and an acknowledgment of its continuing power.

For a penetrating account of the condition of Asad's home city of Mogadishu a decade after he fled, see Roland Marchal,
A Survey of Mogadishu's Economy
(Nairobi: European Commission, 2002). For a brief and incisive account of Somali politics during two decades of war, see Ken Menkhaus, “Somalia at the Tipping Point,”
Current History
(May 2012).

Anyone interested in Somalia would do well to read the novels of Nuruddin Farah. Readers of
A Man of Good Hope
might be especially interested in his trilogy made up of
Maps
(New York: Pantheon, 1986),
Secrets
(New York: Penguin, 1999), and
Gifts
(New York: Penguin, 2000) for its attention to the Ogadeni war and its aftermath, which, unbeknownst to Asad, did so much to shape his fate.

For a portrait of the Dadaab refugee camps where Asad and Yindy lived, see Cindy Horst,
Transnational Nomads
(New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2006). An excellent book on how money moves around the Somali diaspora, which includes an interesting portrait of Somalis in Eastleigh, Nairobi, is Anna Lindley,
The Early Morning Call: Somali Refugees' Remittances
(New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2010). An essay-length history of Somalis in Eastleigh is Neil Carrier and Emma Lochery, “Missing States? Somali Trade Networks and the Eastleigh Transforma
tion,”
Journal of East African Studies
7, no. 2 (2013): 334–52.

Precious little has been written on Somalis in Addis Ababa or in Dire Dawa. There is, though, a very fine doctoral dissertation on young hustlers who work the streets of inner-city Addis, the world Asad managed to crack and in which he earned a good living. See Marco DiNunzio, “ ‘The Arada Have Been Eaten': Living Through Marginality in Addis Ababa's Inner City” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 2012).

The most useful account of the Ogadeni war of 1977–78 I have read is Gebru Tareke, “The Ethiopia-Somalia War of 1977 Revisited,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies
33, no. 3 (2000): 635–67. On the Somali region of Ethiopia during the period when Asad lived there, see Tobias Hagmann, “Beyond Clannishness and Colonialism: Understanding Political Disorder in Ethiopia's Somali Region, 1991–2004,”
Journal of Modern African Studies
43, no. 4 (2005): 509–36; and Tobias Hagmann and Mohamud H. Khalif, “State and Politics in Ethiopia's Somali Region Since 1991,”
Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
6 (2006): 25–49. On the complicated ethnic politics of Ethiopia and the nationalist movements in its borderlands, see Christopher Clapham, “Rewriting Ethiopian History,”
Annales d'Ethiopie
18 (2002): 37–54.

Asad's journey from the Horn of Africa to Johannesburg is well trodden. Thousands embark upon it each year. For an attempt to map this odyssey and to account for the various fates of those who undertake it, see Christopher Horwood,
In Pursuit of the Southern Dream: Victims of Necessity: Assessment of the Irregular Movement of Men from East Africa and the Horn to South Africa
(Geneva: International Organization for Migration, April 2009). There is also a perceptive and deeply intelligent doctoral dissertation on the subjective dimensions of the sort of journey Asad embarked upon, albeit the subjects of this study were moving north, toward Europe, rather than south. See Joris Schapendonk, “Turbulent Trajectories: Sub-Saharan African Migrants Heading North” (Ph.D. diss., Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, 2011).

A small literature is beginning to emerge on the Somali traders who operate in the shacklands and townships on the southeastern periphery of Cape Town. See Andrew Charman and Laurence Piper, “From Township Survivalism to Foreign Entreprene
urship: The Transformation of the Spaza Sector in Delft, Cape Town,”
Transformation
78 (2012): 47–73; Andrew Charman and Laurence Piper, “Xenophobia, Criminality and Violent Entreprene
urship: Violence Against Somali Shopkeepers in Delft South, Cape Town, South Africa,”
South African Review of Sociology
13, no. 3 (2012): 81–105; Vanya Gastrow with Roni Amit,
Elusive Justice: Somali Traders' Access to Formal and Informal Justice Mechanisms in the Western Cape
(research report, African Centre for Migration and Society, Johannesburg, 2012).

Much has been written on the nationwide violence against foreign nationals that broke out across South Africa in May 2008. Of particular interest is a debate between two scholars from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. See Daryl Glaser, “[Dis]conn
ection: Elite and Popular ‘Common Sense' on the Matter of Foreigners,” in
Go Home or Die Here: Violence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference in South Africa,
ed. Shireen Hassim, Tawana Kupe, and Eric Worby (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008), pp. 53–64; and Loren Landau, “Loving the Alien? Law, Citizenship and the Future of South Africa's Demonic Society,”
African Affairs
109, no. 435 (2010): 213–30. See also Southern African Migration Project, “The Perfect Storm: The Realities of Xenophobia in Contemporary South Africa,” Migration Policy Brief, no. 50 (Southern African Migration Project, 2008); Loren Landau, ed.,
Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa
(Johannesburg: Wits, 2011).

As for Sadicya's harrowing story, the most illuminating material I could find on Somali minority clans was by the scholar and human rights activist Virginia Luling, who died while this book was being written. Especially informative is the expert testimony she gave to the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal in 2006 on the fate of the Galgale during the civil war. See
https://
tribunalsdecisions.service.gov.uk/
utiac/
decisions/
2006-ukait-73
. See also a document prepared for Canada's immigration services by Lee Casanelli,
Victims and Vulnerable Groups in Southern Somalia
(Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board, 1995).