A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (30 page)

“The next thing we knew, it was spreading beyond Johannesburg. It was in Durban. It was somewhere in Mpumalanga we had never heard of. Some were saying it was in Knysna. We were taking out our maps, brother. We were marking with an
X
where it was happening. We were praying to our God that the
X
s do not drop too far south.

“Every night, now, we are closing the shop at seven to watch the news. The leaders of the country are being interviewed. We are listening to them carefully. What are they going to do to stop it?

“Then one night the premier of the Western Cape, Ebrahim Rasool, was on the television. He had just met with a lot of foreign nationals, mainly with Somalis. He and the provincial police commissioner made a press conference after their meeting. They said it was not going to happen here. They guaranteed it. From the way they were speaking, I believed them. It gave me confidence.

“The moment the news was over, my phone started ringing. Hassan's phone started ringing. As soon as we put down our phones, they would ring again. By nine o'clock every Somali in the Western Cape had joined the debate. Can we believe the South African politicians? I and others said that the mayor and the police would stop it, the premier would stop it. Those who opposed us said no, it is unstoppable.

“The day after the meeting with the premier, the police came.

“ ‘Close the shop,' they said.

“I asked why.

“ ‘Because the people are going to attack you.'

“I said, ‘At the meeting yesterday, the premier promised it will not happen.'

“ ‘This is exactly what we are doing to stop it from happening,' the policeman said.

“I closed the shop. The police left. I opened it again. I phoned other Somalis. ‘What are you doing? Opening or closing?' Others phoned to ask me. That time was the time of the cell phone, brother. Every Somali had his phone to his ear listening to other Somalis predict the future.

“On the seven o'clock news that night, we saw that it was happening in Dunoon. Dunoon is a shack settlement just outside Cape Town, brother. Now my position changed: I realized that nobody could stop this.

“It was early evening. The streets were full of people. It seemed that they were talking louder than usual, moving faster than usual. I thought maybe people were staring at us more than they usually do. But I thought maybe it was just my fear making me see these things. I closed the shop. I start phoning other Somalis. At seven thirty, I got a phone call: ‘It has started in Khayelitsha, at Makhaza.' I get on the phone to the Somali who owns the shop just a little farther down Mew Way: ‘What should we do?' ”

“At eight p.m., a group formed outside our shop, singing, shouting, throwing stones.

“ ‘
Makwere,
you are leaving.
Hamba!
'

“Hassan and I locked the shop. We double bolted the door. We could not see well, but from the voices it sounded like everyone was there: young, old, men, women. These were just people on their way home. They would form a little group and shout for a while and throw stones. Then they would go on their way. Then another group came and shouted as it passed. Then another.

“I phoned the police many times, starting from when they began to throw stones. No response. Holding, holding, holding. Finally, someone answers. ‘What is your name? Your cell-phone number?' You hold some more. They say, ‘This is happening everywhere. We are busy.' I hear them talking to the patrol car while I hold the phone: ‘A Somali is being attacked on Mew Way.' Answer: ‘I can't help. I am busy with another Somali.'

“At nine thirty p.m. we heard thumping on our walls, on our door. We heard what we thought were people marching in the street. We tried to phone this Xhosa guy, a community representa
tive. He was always asking us for free airtime and free chicken because he was representing the community. We phoned him.

“ ‘Hey, my friend,' he said. ‘I can't do anything.'

“ ‘Just tell them not to kill us.'

“But he clearly could not stop this thing.

“I phoned the landlord.

“ ‘You must save our lives,' I said to him. ‘The police won't come. The community representative won't come. You are all we have left.'

“He was silent. He did not know what to do.

“Things were now happening back to back. They arrived. They broke down the door. I put airtime in one sock, cash in the other. I tried to break a hole in the zinc in the back door with a panga. I thought maybe we could get out of the back and run away. We couldn't do it. They came quick. One minute the door was there, the next it was lying flat on the floor. I tried to run through the door. They held me. Hassan, too. The shop was full. A big crowd. Most of them were men, but some mamas, too. Children, also.

“They started beating me with their hands, with sticks.

“ ‘Where is the money? Where is the money? Where is the money?'

“Hassan had also put money and airtime in his socks. The coins were all in a bin outside. There was not a single cent anywhere in the shop.

“An old man started to speak. He said to the guy holding me, ‘Let him go. Don't kill him.'

“The one holding me was carrying an iron pole. He hit me on the back, then let me go. I ran. Another person threw a stone. It hit me very hard on the back. Still, today, I feel it, when I turn sharply. I fell when the stone hit me. I got up. I kept running. After I'd crossed Mew Way, I turned and looked. I could not see Hassan. When I last saw him he had been sitting next to the fridge.

“I did not know what to do. I was trying to hide myself, but I was also trying to see what had happened to Hassan. I kept on walking back to the shop, then running away again.

“Ten minutes later, Hassan came out. His head was bleeding.

“ ‘Why did you take so long?' I asked.

“ ‘Because whenever I tried to get up and leave, they beat me. So I stayed still.'

“His cell phone had been stolen. Mine was still working. We phoned the nearest Somali neighbor. No reply. We went to his shop; it had been looted. We saw a police car driving down Mew Way and waved it down. They drove us to Mitchells Plain police station. They wanted our names, our phone numbers. They wanted us to make statements.

“I said, ‘No statement. We are bleeding.'

“We walked across the road to Mitchells Plain Town Centre. Thousands of Somalis were there. There were pickups full of groceries people had saved from the looters. Every new person who arrived was questioned.

“ ‘What happened? Let us see your injuries.'

“Some were sleeping in their cars. Some were walking up and down. The first-comers got a place in the lodge.

“It was safe here. It was Mitchells Plain Town Centre, a Somali place. The only South Africans here were colored. It was Xhosas who attacked us.

“With the feeling of safety, brother, came anger. The ones walking up and down, they were shouting. They were shouting at the tops of their voices about the terrible things they were going to do to South Africans. They were going to get automatic weapons. They were going to walk into Khayelitsha shooting from the hip. I just looked at them, brother.

“I could not sleep. I sat. I walked around. In the morning, I went to the police. The station was full, full. White people were coming and asking, ‘What do you want? You want to open a case? A safe place? Do you want a lift back to your shop?'

“ ‘A safe place,' I said.

“ ‘Go and sit over there. We will arrange it.'

“But none of the Somalis would sit. We wandered. We talked loudly. Nobody was doing as he was told. This happened for a long time, brother, until late afternoon—the Somalis walking around and shouting and not doing as they had been told. The white people kept saying, ‘You want a safe place, sit here. You want to stay at the police station, sit here.' Nobody listened.

“Hassan and I got into a truck taking people to a safe place. They dropped us at a military base in Ottery called Youngsfield. The place was full. It was raining. It was full of water. There were few tents. Inside the tents, men were sitting. Outside, women were standing in the rain.

“There were many nationalities there: Somalis, Congolese, Ethiopians. The Somalis had a meeting. We must come out of the tents. The women and children must have shelter first. The meeting agreed to this and broke up, but nobody listened. The women remained outside in the rain. There was water on the ground. They had to stand. It was cold and raining. There were no blankets.

“Somalis were coming and going in cars. But once night fell, the authorities did not allow anyone to come or to leave. I spent the whole night sitting around a fire we had made. There were many Somalis waiting outside the gate. They stood the whole night in the rain.

“Early, early in the morning, before it was light, the Somalis started making trouble. Some wanted to go out of the camp because they were told that the ground was drier there. People were trying to jump the fence. Some were hungry and looking for food. Some were separated from their families and wanted to leave. Others, their wives were locked out, just on the other side of the fence. Some wanted to take baby food to their wives. As for me, I was fighting hunger. I had not eaten since Mitchells Plain.

“A Somali came to the gate with food. He said, ‘Please give this to a woman called Ayaan. She is just in that tent there. I have just spoken to her on her cell phone.'

“A man took the food, but he did not give it to Ayaan; he shared it with his family. Us Somalis, we were fighting one another, we were fighting the authorities. We were fighting, fighting.”

“On the second day after the attack, in the afternoon, we heard that they had opened a refugee camp for us. It was at a place called Soetwater. We heard that it was dry. It was near Kommetjie, on the sea, far away from any township. Pickups full of Somalis were going there. My own car, it was being fixed in a garage in Mitchells Plain. There was a problem with the gearbox. I was still with Hassan. We were making decisions together. We thought we should go to Soetwater. We arrived there in the late afternoon. It was a quiet place, far away. On either side was beach and bush.

“Each Somali who arrived was tagged around the wrist with a number. There was a book at the gate. They wrote down your name in that book. Next to your name, they wrote the number that was put around your wrist.

“By the time that was done, the sun was setting. We walked in and found that there were too few tents. Much too few. There was not enough space for people to sleep. But it was much, much better than Youngsfield because it was dry and people were making tea.

“There was no food, though; we had come too late. I was very hungry, brother. How long had it been since I had eaten? A day and a half by now, I think.

“The next morning, they started building tents. You needed to join a group to grab a tent, otherwise you would be left outside. If the group threw you out, you fought.

“I joined a group. We chose some people, threw others out.”

“How did you choose?” I ask.

“You make a few quick judgments. First, will this person make trouble? Second, are they your tribe? My group was mainly Daarood, all sorts of Daarood. Just a minority of us were Ogadeni. There were some others, too, who were not Daarood. Like I say, we were making quick judgments. If this one looks calm, relaxed, if he looks like he will be useful, if you like the way he looks at you, even if he is not Daarood, you take him.”

“How did you decide whether somebody was Daarood?” I asked.

“First, they are taller. Second, you tell by their accent. Third, they are lighter. Anyone who seemed maybe to be Hawiye, we said no. Anyone thinner, shorter, with softer hair, or darker, you said no.”

“I slept very deeply that night, brother. It was the sort of sleep where you do not dream, and when you wake up you do not know for how long you have been sleeping. We walked out of the tent, and there were people giving out clothes and socks and blankets. There was food, also, but the queue was very long. Hassan and I decided to walk to Kommetjie, the village next to Soetwater, to buy food. We had stuffed a lot of money into our socks. Between us we had three thousand six hundred rand. We decided to pool it and use it to make business. The Somalis in that camp needed to talk to people, brother. They needed to know where their family was. We bought a lot of airtime in Kommetjie. And when we got back to Soetwater, we started selling it.”

When the troubles began, I was in the middle of a two-year visit to New York. I went online each morning and watched the violence spread day by day, first from Alexandra into eastern Johannesburg, then across a radius of smaller towns, then into other provinces. When it reached the Western Cape I called a photographer I knew, and we bought ourselves an air ticket each and flew home.

Our plane touched down on the morning of May 23. By late afternoon, we were in a shack settlement on the eastern periphery of Johannesburg called Ramaphosa, where, six days earlier, a crowd had doused a tire with petrol, put it around the neck of a Mozambican man, and set him alight.

In a square that had once been lined with the vegetable stalls and
spaza
shops of foreign nationals, we found a tense scene—a dozen or so young men at one end of the square, a group of police in body armor at the other. From the clump of young men arose a string of curses and insults and, every now and then, a stone.

My photographer friend is a big, beefy man, six feet three inches at least, and without fear. He muscled his way into the circle of young men, literally pushing their scrawny frames out of his way. Once he had their attention, he barked out his questions.

“What are you feeling? Who are you angry with? What are your thoughts about the Mozambican man who was killed?”

They all began shouting at once, and he raised his arms over his head and called for quiet and suggested that they choose a spokesperson.

One of them began to speak. “They are gone now,” he said. “South Africans can breathe again. All these empty stalls”—he raised his hand above his head and swirled an invisible sketch of the square—“they will soon be filled with South African businessmen. Now, when our mothers buy their tomatoes and their spinach, the money they spend will stay in South Africa instead of leaking, leaking, leaking. The wealth of this country is leaking away across the border.”

May 23 happened to be the very day on which Asad and Hassan fled their shop in Khayelitsha, some fourteen hundred kilometers from the ground on which we stood. Our discussion with the young men took place at about 5:00 p.m., I think, just when Asad boarded up his shop and began peering at the crowds through the cracks in the door.

I had returned from New York because the events unfolding were so obviously significant. It was as if South Africa had reeled back in time and was replaying a story long past, but a little differently now, the protagonists not quite the same. The last time people across the country had taken to the streets and burned tires and buildings and other human beings was in the mid-1980s during a two-year-long insurrection against apartheid. The crowds back then had sung freedom songs that spoke of heroes returning from exile with weapons and resolve and a taste for power. Now, more than two decades later, those old freedom songs were dusted off once more. But the words were different. Instead of condemning apartheid, they condemned foreigners for the jobs and houses and women they were stealing.

South Africa's middle class, and especially its white minority, watched the violence spread with grave unease. The image of an anarchic black crowd, unhinged and bent on destruction, is among the very oldest in white South African consciousness. When democracy came, and Nelson Mandela opened his arms and forgave, the worst white fear was that the moment of vengeance had merely been postponed.

And now, here these black crowds were, as if conjured by white fear, clearly unhappy with their lot since the dawning of democracy. But their anger was not aimed at white people, nor at the government they had voted into power, but at black African foreigners. Middle-class volunteers poured into the police stations and churches where foreign nationals had taken refuge, eager to help. They understood the victims as proxies of themselves; it was all too close to the bone.

From where did this xenophobia arise? After all, black Africans had been coming to South Africa for generations. Hundreds and thousands of Mozambicans worked underground in South Africa's gold mines during the course of the twentieth century. And countless others, from Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia, came illegally and worked without documents. They lived among black South Africans, largely at peace. Many of them learned to speak Zulu or Pedi, married local men and women, and bore South African children. Today, in Soweto, in Alexandra, in all of the country's large urban townships, born-and-bred South Africans walk the streets with their Malawian and Zambian surnames, testimony to a time when nationality counted for less.

Back then, the fact that everyone in the townships was black mattered a great deal. That some were not South African mattered less. These were times, after all, when millions of black South Africans had no right to walk the streets of their own cities and could be rounded up and expelled at any moment. South African, Zambian, Malawian—e
veryone was in the same boat.

Perversely, xenophobia is a product of citizenship, the claiming of a new birthright. Finally, we belong here, and that means that you do not.

Some say that the perversion runs deep, that black South Africans are reenacting the rules of the old apartheid state. Apartheid, after all, was an endless system of measuring and categorizing. All human beings had to be sorted into those who belonged in South Africa's cities and those who did not. Behind this frenetic sorting lay a persistent fear: that the cities were too full, too dangerous, that there were always people walking the streets who did not belong. Everyone must thus be measured and counted and put in his allotted place, for if all were to merge into an indistingu
ishable mass there would be no control.

This is precisely what the crowds of May 2008 were doing, some say. As they rampaged through South Africa's informal settlements, they were sorting, categorizing, differenti
ating. Those deemed not to belong were expelled. Apartheid thinking had finally reached its nadir, fourteen years after its demise. For now it was in the souls of black folk, and they were executing its logic with fervor.

There is truth in all of this, no doubt. But there is something else, something largely new. And that is Asad and his ilk.

White South Africans have wielded immense power. During the course of the twentieth century, they used black labor to build the edifice of a modern society. But they seldom encountered black South Africa unguarded. They have always protected themselves: behind walls; through a welter of laws; via a powerful and well-armed state; by building schools and churches and sports clubs and professions to which black people were not admitted.

With Asad and his kind—the thousands of lone entrepreneurs who have crossed South Africa's borders since the end of apartheid—it is different. They have walked naked into the settlements of the South African poor.

They come neither with weapons nor with the protections of citizenship. There may be a police force, but it does not bother to answer their calls. Nor do they come with pretenses or with artful stories. They do not want to make friends. They do not want to make South Africa their home. They want to make money.

And that is what they do. Night and day. Without rest. They leave their shops to defecate and to restock. Otherwise, they work.

They watch you closely. They learn never to run out of what you most want to buy. And they are always cheaper than their South African rivals. There is something magical, something insidious and relentless, about this moneymaking. Something less than human.

They can be killed, for the law is unlikely to catch the ones who murder them. And yet killing them does not take them away. The wife of the murdered one will simply sell to another. And if he is killed, his widow will sell to another yet. They are ineradicable. When one of them dies, they come from miles for the funeral, hundreds of them. They are grief-stricken. They are crying. They bury the dead one, and they cry some more. And then they come back.

Soon it seems that they are made to be hurt, that it is a part of who they are. Drawing their blood becomes a fashion. It starts because it is possible, and it keeps happening because nobody stops it.

During those weeks in May, the fashion became a carnival. One hundred thousand people were chased from their homes. When the last one had left, the crowds went home.

And then they started coming back, first the bravest, then the more cautious. They began selling again. People shook their hands and said sorry. And the game resumed.