Over the next three days, he occasionally joined AbdiKeni’s attempts to find family. But the task could not hold his attention for long. He chewed mira. He watched television. He ate. He slept. Dimly, he observed the systems and circuits inside him shutting down. The spectacle was of momentary interest. The feeling of thinking of nothing at all was far preferable.
—
Ten days after his arrival in South Africa, he found himself sitting on a Greyhound bus in Park Station, Johannesburg. It was two o’clock on a mid-February afternoon in 2004. At six the following morning, the bus journey would terminate in Port Elizabeth, where Uncle Abdicuur would collect him.
He did not sleep a wink. Whenever he looked about him, he saw people slumped in their seats or buried under mounds of blankets. He heard snoring and sleep murmuring. He seemed to be the only person awake.
He remembers being very cold throughout the journey, which is odd, since it was February, an unfailingly warm month throughout the country. He remembers staring out of the window, into the night, trying to gather from the little he could see the character of the country in which he now lived.
Every town the bus passed, he noticed, was divided into two distinct sections. There was always a settlement on the outskirts: it consisted of straight, narrow rows of identical houses, each as modest as the next. And it was always in darkness, save for the occasional blinding light mounted on a towering pylon. The effect was eerie, the homes around the light brilliantly lit up, everything beyond it dissolving slowly into darkness. He wondered why anyone would choose to cast such sharp, naked light from on high.
While the settlements at the outskirts seemed to have been slapped down in a day, the towns proper appeared to have grown organically and with grace. The steeples of fine churches stared at him, like ones he had seen in Addis and Dire Dawa, but much sharper, much more severe. And there were many, many trees, some of them heavy and ample and clearly very old. Lights burned behind drawn curtains. He tried to imagine the families inside, but he could not; he was not sufficiently familiar with this place.
He knew, from what he had been told, that the outer settlements were black townships, the inner towns white neighborhoods, that what he was seeing had been built under the infamous system of apartheid. It occurred to him that the home to which the young taxi driver at the Zimbabwean border had taken him and his companions was in a township. That is why everyone on the streets had said that there was no transport to Johannesburg from that place. What they meant, he now realized, was that intercity transport departed only from the white town.
From what he had seen thus far, South Africa was as prosperous as promised. Every Somali he had met lived in a good house and drove a good car. It appeared also that South Africa harbored far more prosperous places still, places Somalis seemed not to venture to. About the country was a general sense of plenty, a sense he couldn’t quite pin down. There seemed to be an abundance of food and drink. Everything was cheap. You could use small coins—two rand, five rand—and buy a lot with them. What they said about South Africa was true.
He knew, from the talk around him, that many Somalis made their money selling food and drink to black people in townships. You cannot arrive and simply settle in Mayfair, he was told, as if jobs in Mayfair grow on trees. You have to go out into the townships and open a business; that is the way to make money. But he had still not set foot in one, aside from that first night on South African soil. As the bus passed one township after another, he tried to imagine himself walking down one of its streets or sleeping in one of its houses.
He thought, also, of his uncle Abdicuur, and this made him a little anxious. His uncle would want to confirm that Asad was indeed who he claimed to be. The first hours, perhaps even the first day, would consist of an unannounced test.
“How does the test work?” I ask Asad. “If you were to receive a call now saying that your brother’s son was in Johannesburg, what would you do?”
“I would tell my nephew to come. I would pay for his journey to Cape Town. I would meet him and hug him and welcome him into my home. But I would be examining him: the nose, the cheeks, the way he talks.”
“The teeth?” I ask.
He looks at me with laughing eyes. “Especially the teeth,” he says.
—
Nobody was waiting for him at the bus terminal in Port Elizabeth. Two young Somali men who had been on the journey from Johannesburg invited him to come with them. He took in their worn bags, their casual clothes, and their slight, young men’s frames; it seemed he was looking at the last decade of his life. These rootless Somalis who hook up with one another on a whim, spend the next year or two together, night and day, without respite, without asking a question, sharing everything. And then, at a moment’s notice, one of them drifts off, never to be heard of again.
He was filled with warmth, with pleasure, with gratitude. But he felt, too, a rising nausea, a sense of panic. He declined politely and waited for his uncle, who appeared just as the young men were leaving, an unmistakably Somali face beaming at him from the driver’s seat of a smart new pickup.
Abdicuur got out of the car, revealing a prosperous belly, and embraced Asad and addressed him as “my son” and insisted on picking up the duffel bag and putting it very carefully in the back of the cabin, as if it contained recently blown glass.
On the journey home, he asked Asad where he had been. For a brief moment, the question seemed ridiculous. How could he possibly answer in one sentence?
“Everywhere,” he replied. “Islii, Addis, Dire Dawa, Wardheer, then all over the Ogaden on a truck—”
“All over the Ogaden?” his uncle interrupted. “Did you not hear on the BBC that your father was looking for you?”
“No. When was that?”
“In 1998 and 1999. He sent out messages twice. He was in Qabridahre in Qorahay. The message said you must make your way to Qabridahre.”
“Where is my father now?” Asad asked.
“We heard news that you were in Islii,” Abdicuur replied. “Then we heard that you had left and we did not know where to find you.”
Asad does not remember what they spoke of next. He thinks that his uncle told him a very long story and that he struggled to follow, in part because he was very tired, and in part because the news that his father had been looking for him was upsetting.
Abdicuur’s house was in a suburb in the white town of Uitenhage. It was full of things. Asad is at a loss when I ask him to recall precisely what, but they were the sorts of things, he says, that gradually fill a house inhabited by people who have money.
He wanted desperately to sleep, but his uncle was hovering anxiously; it seemed that he had taken the day off work, probably at great trouble, to be with his lost nephew. The two men danced awkwardly around each other for some time, each wanting to please the other but unsure what he might want. Eventually, Abdicuur went off to work, and Asad slept. When he woke, his aunt had prepared lunch.
Abdicuur returned in the early evening and took Asad out. A big soccer game was about to start, he said. His team, Real Madrid, was playing. Long-lost son or not, there was never an excuse for missing Real Madrid.
They drove to a Somali canteen nearby. It was packed with Somalis, perhaps fifty or sixty people sardined into a small room. Half of the clientele appeared to support Real Madrid and the other the opposition, and each side took turns shouting and exclaiming and sometimes both shouted and exclaimed at the same time.
When the game ended, Abdicuur chatted merrily.
“Where is my father?” Asad asked.
An invisible hand washed the merriness off his uncle’s face.
“He died two months ago. In Qabridahre.”
“How long had he been there?” Asad asked.
“Since 1991. He went straight there at the beginning of the war. He remarried there. You have a new brother. He is maybe seven or eight years old. He is growing up in Qabridahre.”
“How did my father die?”
“His time was finished. He got sick and died.”
Asad was silent a long time. He desperately wanted to ask a question. But he did not know how to formulate it. He was not even sure what it was that he wanted to know.
“How is it I never heard about him all the years I was in Ethiopia?” Asad finally asked.
“Well, where were you?”
“In Qabridahre!” Asad shouted. “I was in Qabridahre three times!”
He heard the incredulity in his voice and tried to calm himself. Then he told his uncle everything: about the decision of the AliYusuf in the Hotel Taleh to send him to Dire Dawa; about Yindy’s cold and loveless family and the months it took them to shake him off; about his abandonment in Wardheer; about the time on the truck with Rooda.
His uncle listened carefully but said nothing. Whether Asad’s story shamed him or just saddened him, he did not know. Perhaps he had heard a dozen versions of the same story before. Maybe the tale of Asad’s life was old and familiar and filled his uncle with nothing but weariness.
Abdicuur began telling him what had become of his siblings. A sister and a brother had settled in the North East Province of Kenya, near Garissa. A brother was in Somalia, in Kismayo. A sister was in a refugee camp in Yemen. As for the uncles Asad knew in Mogadishu, the one whom he lost in Qoryooley and who he later heard had lost an eye: he had been captured the very same day Asad lost him. He had been severely tortured but had eventually gotten away and was now safe and in good health. Another uncle, who had been a senior police officer in Siad Barre’s old regime, had been captured when Mogadishu fell; his torturers had broken one of his legs. He, too, was fine now and was living in Kenya.
“There’s something I’m struggling to understand,” I tell Asad. “In all the conversations you had with your uncle, you never discovered that your parents came from the Ogaden.”
He shrugs. “He said that my father was in Qorahay, but my brothers and sisters were in Kenya, in Yemen. There didn’t seem to me to be anything special about Ethiopia.”
“You didn’t ask your uncle why your father chose to go to Qorahay, of all places?”
“There are so many things I regret not asking my uncle,” Asad replies.
Shopkeeper
He stayed with Abdicuur for two weeks. On some days he would accompany his uncle to work. On others he would sleep late and then walk down the road to a place where young Somali men played pool. These days reminded him a little of his time in Dire Dawa. But there, the soccer table stood in a public space and a cross-section of the city came to play—young and old, Somali, Oromo, Amharic. Here, only Somalis set foot in the little canteen where he played pool. He slept under a Somali family’s roof, walked down the street, and played pool with Somali men, then went back to his Somali home for dinner. He felt that he was both in, and yet not in, South Africa. He could be anywhere.
His uncle earned a living running a general trading store in a black township. In South Africa these stores are called spaza shops. But he had still barely set foot in one of these townships. Thus far, they came to him only in the form of news reported around the pool table.
“One day, we were playing,” Asad recalls, “I think it was maybe five or six days after I had arrived in Uitenhage, when someone walked in looking upset and said, ‘In Motherwell, they have killed one of us.’ Everyone went silent. Everyone was upset. For the rest of the day, the mood was very heavy.
“The following afternoon, we all went to the funeral. There was fear, brother. People huddled in groups saying there is too much robbery in this country; it is not safe having a cash business. There was talk about buying illegal firearms, about hiring Xhosa people to be security guards.
“I had not heard about this at all before I came to South Africa. The people passing through Addis, who showed us all the dollars they had earned down south, they said nothing about Somalis dying in townships. But right from the start, it was something that was there, always, something in the background.”
It entered, too, into Abdicuur’s plans for Asad.
“He was looking for a job for me,” Asad says. “He’d come to South Africa in 1998. He was an old hand. He knew every Somali who ran a spaza shop in the whole region. His own spaza shop in Motherwell township was very successful. But he said I could not work with him because of the risks in Motherwell. He started listing all the townships: here is safe, there is not; here is okay; there is not so okay. He said he would choose where I was going to work.”
“He showed me how to write stock,” Asad recalls, “how many items must be left before you restock—four or five items. When he writes the order, he makes signs next to each item. This one is very low, this one less of a priority. This one is on special this week; buy more of it because there will be more profit.”
They would climb into Abdicuur’s impressive pickup and drive out of Motherwell to an enormous wholesaler on the outskirts of Uitenhage. The inside of the store was square and cavernous and very tall. The shelves were stacked impossibly high, brown boxes towering many meters above their heads, and men and women in blue overalls drove forklifts down the aisles.
Abdicuur gave Asad a trolley and a list of items to purchase and then watched quizzically as his nephew stumbled around the giant cave of a store, entirely lost.
“When I started,” Asad said, “I would look for the Omo washing powder next to the rice. ‘No, no,’ Abdicuur would say. ‘This part of the shop is dry goods, this part is fresh food, that part clothes, that part cigarettes and cell-phone airtime.’ ”
Back at the shop in Motherwell, watching his uncle selling the goods he had just bought, Asad was struck by the artistry of Abdicuur’s trade.
“In the wholesaler I noticed that he had bought sixty-five cans of Fanta grape, but only a dozen of Fanta orange. In the spaza shop, I saw why. For every six cans of grape his customers bought, only one would buy orange. The trick was to watch very, very closely. Do they like salt-and-vinegar chips or tomato chips? How many salt and vinegar sold for how many tomato? Brother, he knew his customers better than they knew themselves. He had a rule: never run out of stock; never turn a customer away because you do not have what she wants.”
Abdicuur’s store was in the heart of Motherwell township. But even here, deep inside a South African settlement, Asad did not feel that he was inhabiting this new country. Abdicuur’s shop was a shack. The yard was surrounded by a wooden wall so high that those inside the property could not see out, and those outside could not see in. The storefront itself was covered in wire meshing and bars. The only gap was a little half-moon at the level of the countertop, through which coins and notes and merchandise were exchanged.
The glimpses he got of Motherwell’s street life shocked him.
“My first feeling about blacks was that they have too much sex,” he recalls. “I have now adjusted a little. But back then, what I saw on the streets, to me it was illegal, uncultural, a shame to one’s reputation. A man holding a woman who is not his wife, squeezing her bum, putting his hand up her skirt. I could not even look at them. I would look to the side.”
He pauses and sighs. Hearing himself speak of these things has unearthed emotions. When he continues there is an uncharacteristic note of bitterness in his voice.
“Even if you consider many different beliefs about the world,” he says, “nobody allows that. Christianity, whatever: it is in nobody’s culture. It is a democracy here. You say nothing. It is how they are. But I tell you, they do not get this from their religion. It is not in their culture either. But they do it. They have lost what their ancestors once knew. Christian, Jewish, doesn’t allow it. Nobody allows it.”
—
His uncle drove him to the Department of Home Affairs office in Port Elizabeth to apply for asylum-seeker status. It would be a formality, Abdicuur said. You get a piece of paper saying that you have applied for asylum, and you are now in the country legally, pending the outcome of your case.
“And what if they decide I’m
not a refugee?” Asad asked.
“It all takes a long time,” his uncle assured him. “And if it is not going right, there are things that can be done.”
They drove into Port Elizabeth on a pristine highway, the asphalt as smooth as wet cement. The suburban houses on either side were like the ones he had first seen in Pretoria, built yesterday, only much bigger and smarter. And then, suddenly, the suburbs were gone, and they were outside a tall brick building, surrounded by line upon line of people. Asad and his uncle joined the queue and waited. They stood there a long time, and it did not seem to move. A little sheepishly, Asad asked his uncle how long they would wait. Abdicuur smiled and put a hand on his shoulder.
“The office only opens in two hours,” he said.
Waiting in the line, Asad thought he heard a snippet of what sounded like Swahili. As he strained to listen, another conversation drifted toward him, and it was unmistakably Amharic. Amid these familiar tones, he heard a fragment of his native Somali. He stood stock-still and opened his ears. It was as if fragments of his own biography had taken audible form and were now being thrown at him, as if a random selection of memories had left his head and found their way to the tongues of others.
As the day wore on, he heard more languages. He thought that one must be French. Of the rest, he could not make head or tail.
The country he had chosen as his destination now seemed vast beyond his comprehension. He pictured the highways and the suburbs through which they had just passed, then looked at the people of Africa gathered about him, then at the locked building in front of them. He wondered at the power of South Africa: without expending any effort, it could gather people from every country on the continent outside one building and force them to wait all day.
—
Aside from a pool table, the canteen in which he spent his days also had computers and an Internet connection. On his second day there he sent Foosiya an e-mail. It was a selective distillation of his experiences: barely mentioning the dramatic journey to South Africa, it announced triumphantly that he had found close family, that they were prosperous, that they were providing him with food and with shelter and that they were soon to find him work.
A Man of Good Hope Page 19