From a block away, he saw the crowd. He believes that there were as many as three hundred people standing there in the dawn. He did not know that so many Somalis lived in the Port Elizabeth area. They were mainly men and largely silent, and in their white thobes and prayer caps they looked ethereal against the morning’s gray light, as if they might vanish at any moment.
Asad walked into the crowd. He did not tell anybody that he was the dead man’s nephew. He stood shoulder to shoulder with people he did not know.
A man was beginning to address the gathering. He spoke in a quiet voice that Asad strained to hear. He was saying that he had been the first on the scene, that he had watched Abdicuur Abdullahi die. It happened shortly after dusk, he said. Five men had walked into the store and demanded money. Whether Abdicuur had tried to resist, he could not say, but the men had opened fire, and Abdicuur had been shot nine times. Still, he was not dead, the man continued. He lived another ten or fifteen minutes. He was conscious for some of that time. The two men had exchanged parting words.
A murmur rose from the gathering, as if it had just this moment become a single being and was taking its first labored breath. Then people began to speak softly to one another, and the illusion subsided.
—
Asad no longer recalls how long the crowds lingered outside the restaurant, only that they gathered again at the mosque later in the day. Still, he remained anonymous. He walked slowly through the gathering, head bowed, eavesdropping on myriad conversations. In each one, he heard a note of panic.
“My uncle was a big man in that area,” he says. “It was like a pillar had fallen, and now the house was going to fall down with it. It was only then that I realized what a very big man my uncle was.”
Sometime in the midafternoon the body arrived. Asad followed it through the crowds until two men blocked his way.
“I asked to see it,” he recalls, “and they shook their heads and said no.”
When he explained that he was the dead man’s nephew, he was examined with skepticism. Strangers had taken over the scene, people he could have sworn he had never seen before in his life. It dawned on him how little he knew of South Africa’s Somali community. A crisis arises, and people come from nowhere to take command. He did not know how and by what rights they had come to control access to the body.
“We negotiated for some time,” Asad says. “Eventually, they allowed me through.”
I have asked him twice what he saw and felt when he stood over his uncle’s corpse. His two answers are not at odds with each other, but they are very different.
A white sheet covered Abdicuur’s body, up to the top of his neck, and his face seemed exposed and disembodied.
“It is for a son to wash the body,” he says. “I felt sorry that I had not been there to do it.”
He took the sheet in both hands and slowly pulled it down to Abdicuur’s waist. There were two wounds in his chest and two on his left side. They were small and neat, almost as if a craftsman had made them, laboring away delicately and with much care.
“Then I saw the stitches from where they had cut him open after he died,” Asad recalls. “It is against Islam to remove the organs from the body. I do not believe that what they were doing was ascertaining the cause of death. I believe that because we are Somali and defenseless they were taking the organs for other people to use. We do not accept this. They did not ask us.”
In the months and years following Abdicuur’s death, it became an obsession. Asad has written to the newspapers. He has tried to speak on the radio. Of all the terrors inflicted upon Somalis in South Africa, it is this, the surgical work performed upon the corpse, that he feels most deeply.
“They did it without our permission,” he says. “They need to ask a relative for permission. They see it as a chance: ‘These people do not have anybody to stand up for them. They do not know their rights.’ ”
—
The second time I ask him about that day, his response is very brief.
“It was the first relative I’ve seen dead,” he says. “There was a switch in me. A change. It has happened. Now it will continue.”
On the tip of my tongue is an observation: this was not the first time he had seen a relative’s corpse. There was his mother. I hesitate a moment and then say it.
He nods very quickly, his face inscrutable, and changes the subject. It is an image, I think, that he has long cast from his head. He remembers holding on to her leg as the door to their home was being bashed down. He remembers the two thick plaits that ran down her back. And he has the sense, always, that he carries her in his being, for she was the first to love him. Her corpse does not figure among these images and feelings. She represents a foundation, not its shattering. It is Abdicuur’s dead body that must stand in for the feeling that the bottom of the world has fallen away.
—
He remembers sitting with other members of the family as one person after another filed past and said sorry. Of the burial itself, he says only, “We carried the body very slowly. It was not a hurried affair. The feelings must come out.”
Afterward, about thirty people gathered at Abdicuur’s house, all of them AliYusuf.
“We talked and talked and talked,” Asad recalls. “All the shop owners agreed: we must sell and leave. We must take Abdicuur’s wife and children with us and go to Johannesburg.
“Fourteen of us left immediately, within a week of my uncle’s burial. We took his wife and children with us. The AliYusufs all chipped in to pay their first six months’ rent in Johannesburg. The remaining AliYusuf remained in the Eastern Cape long enough to sell their property. Then they also packed up.
“My uncle was killed in April 2004. By July, to my knowledge, there were no more AliYusuf people in the Port Elizabeth area.”
Sterkstroom
He was back in Mayfair. When he had last been there, South Africa was new and unknown, and this little piece of Somalia had seemed a launching pad to an adventure. Now, it was more a lung, a corner of this vast country where one could breathe the air.
He wanted desperately to stay. He wanted to live his life within the four corners of this Somali island, never to have to face South Africa again. He wanted to wake up and hear Somalis shouting and to go to sleep listening to the sounds of the international news channels they watched into the night. He wanted to be able to walk the streets without fear.
Since his uncle’s death, the two rooms he had inhabited in Kirkwood—the first with Osman, the second alone—seemed like dungeons. When he thought of himself inside them, he saw the scene from a great height, a shivering wreck of a Somali man in a sea of hostile people. He felt bitter. Walking to the mosque one morning for five o’clock prayers, he found himself, much to his own astonishment, in angry dialogue with his God.
“If you designed my life,” he heard himself asking, “why make it this way? Why deliver me into the arms of family when I am least expecting it, only to take them away? Wouldn’t it have been better if you’d never led me to my uncle? At least then I would not have known. I would not have had to stand over his corpse.”
He could not find work in Mayfair. Work, he discovered, came through close family connections and through very old friendships. There were several AliYusuf families in Mayfair, but they were only distantly related. They were the sorts of people who might keep him safe for a while but would soon tire of the burden.
Among the AliYusuf people who had abandoned the Port Elizabeth area was another Abdullahi, a cousin named Kaafi, and his wife and small daughter. Asad had met him several times during his time in the Port Elizabeth area. Now that their uncle Abdicuur was dead, they were the only Abdullahis in South Africa. They resolved to stay together.
Kaafi mentioned a hamlet in Eastern Cape called Sterkstroom. He had passed through it several months ago. He and his companions had stopped in the black township next to the town center in search of something to eat and drink. They had found nothing; there wasn’t a single trading s
tore, just a boarded-up old place that seemed to have closed its doors many years before. Kaafi wanted to go there and open a shop.
“Where is it?” Asad asked skeptically.
It was in Eastern Cape but very far from Port Elizabeth, much farther north. The nearest town was a place called Queenstown. It was unlikely to be dangerous, Kaafi said. It was so small.
Asad was not sure. The words “Eastern Cape” did not sit well with him now. And the idea of hurling himself back into the thick of South Africa seemed rash. But he and Kaafi were both living on savings now, and every cent they used was a cent less to invest in their lives.
Kaafi had about ten thousand rand in savings. Asad had saved almost every penny he had earned since coming to South Africa, about four thousand rand. It would surely be enough.
—
Abdicuur died on April 9. Before the end of May, Asad, Kaafi, and Kaafi’s wife and child were in Sterkstroom.
The black township alongside the white village was very small. Just a dozen or so dirt streets lined with little old houses with corrugated-iron roofs. In the distance, on a hill, was a new settlement of what South Africans called RDP houses (referring to the Reconstruction and Development Programme), provided by the democratic government. These were all identical, laid out in rows, as if they were marks on a map somebody had drawn on a piece of paper.
Kaafi was right. There wasn’t a single trading store in the township. To buy anything—a liter of milk, a box of matches, a chocolate—the residents of the township would have to walk into the white town or board a taxi to Queenstown, about a half hour’s drive south.
On their first day in Sterkstroom, their bags at their sides, Asad and Kaafi stood outside the township’s boarded-up shop. Above the entrance was a sign saying MANGALISO STORE. Much time had clearly passed since it was last open for business. Most of the windowpanes were long gone, and the plaster around the windowsills was cracked and broken. From the ground, it was hard to see whether the roof was intact. The wood of the door at the entrance was warped and swollen.
In their broken Xhosa, the Somalis asked passersby who owned the place. They were directed to a home just a block away where an old woman came out to greet them leaning heavily on a hand-whittled cane. Asad surmised that she was eighty at least, her cheeks sunken by the absence of teeth and marked with deep dry crevices.
“She invited us into her house and gave us tea and treated us like people,” Asad recalls. “When we told her we were interested in her shop, she laughed and shook her head and told us a long story about the shop and why it was closed, but we did not understand. She was happy for us to use it. The rent she asked was cheap: I think seven hundred rand.”
The space was hardly ideal. The shop itself was tiny: just a narrow counter and a short, shallow shelf behind it. There was no space for a fridge, which was essential if they were going to stock fresh produce; it would have to stand outside, exposed to the elements, connected to a plug by a long extension cord.
Behind the shop was the house proper. It had four or five tiny bedrooms, and each was in disrepair. The Somalis touched the walls gingerly and treaded lightly on the floors, for the place seemed very fragile.
“We told the old lady on day one that we needed to do work to the place,” Asad tells me. “She said we could do what we like, as long as we pay for it. So we hired builders. They were three brothers. They lived just a few blocks away. First, we got them to build an extension so that we could stock the shop properly. Then we changed the roof—it was very old and leaked in so many places it was not worth trying to fix. Then we knocked down some of the walls to make bigger rooms. We made a nice place.”
—
They were the first foreigners to live in Sterkstroom. Every third or so day, when they went to restock in Queenstown, they would meet other Somalis. They soon ascertained that several AliYusuf families lived in a large radius around Queenstown. They punched the phone numbers of their kinspeople into their cell phones; they made contact; they met. They discussed family. They discussed business. Then they would retreat to the isolation of Sterkstroom, where the people spoke a language they were only slowly learning, and where the expressions on faces were hard to read.
“Twenty-four hours we were suspicious, brother,” Asad tells me. “We remembered Abdi’s death. When we were sleeping, the zinc in the roof made a noise, and we lay awake wondering.”
The more they came to know Sterkstroom, the more comfortable they felt. In Uitenhage and Kirkwood, there had been blacks and coloreds, and many people had seemed strangers to one another. Here, the Somalis soon realized, everyone knew one another, and everyone’s parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had known one another.
“The people in Sterkstroom were not only Xhosa,” Asad says, “they were from the same clan, the ones who cut off half of a finger of the girl children. Kaafi was the first to notice it. He pointed it out to me and his wife. We thought he was mad. Whenever a woman came to buy, we would watch her hands closely. It was true. Each had half a finger missing.
“At first, we were scared to ask why. We thought that maybe it is some secret, something they don’t talk about. Maybe if we ask, they will become angry and throw us out of town. But the people were so nice to us, especially the old mothers and the old fathers, that in the end we could ask quite easily. They laughed. ‘It is something we do.’ And they would show how it was done, when the girl was still very small and her bones had not yet formed.”
It took a few months, but they eventually realized that the whole township was connected by family ties.
“It’s something you realize as you get to know people,” Asad says. “This one’s that one’s auntie. But she is also the other one’s auntie and another one’s sister-in-law. You see how the families are connected. You discover this big family, that big family.
“They were lovely people,” he recalls. “The old ones were especially kind to us. They would come and sit and drink tea with us, and we would talk and laugh. They would ask us about home, and did we not miss home, why did we travel so far? They had lived in this one village for seventy years, eighty years. They said that if they traveled as far as we did they would die.”
It helped, no doubt, that the money the Somalis made was spread around. There was the old lady’s seven-hundred-rand-a-month rent. And the renovations they had done to her house were contracted to neighbors. Also, Asad and Kaafi did not have their own car; they would hire a pickup from a local, together with a driver, every time they went to Queenstown to restock. They distributed this business between three neighbors and would use each in turn.
And, of course, residents could shop for food in their own township for the first time in more than a decade. Soon it seemed that everybody was coming to the Somalis to buy their daily bread and milk, their crisps and chocolates and cell-phone airtime, their frozen chickens. Business was brisk. Asad and Kaafi eyed the RDP settlement on the hill; it was surely large enough for its own spaza shop. Perhaps, they surmised, they could open one there, too.
—
Asad called Foosiya promptly at the end of each week. And via the Western Union office in Queenstown, he sent fifty dollars to her in Berbera at the end of each month; the Somalis’ famous informal money exchange, the hawala, had not yet reached this remote part of Eastern Cape.
I ask him to describe their conversations. Were they tender? Did they laugh together? How much of his life did he describe? He shrugs and changes the subject. I suspect that what passed between them was brief and formulaic; each was just checking that the other was still there. He barely described Sterkstroom to her, it seems. And while he told her briefly of his uncle’s death, he evaded the troubled questions she asked in the wake of this news.
Then in September 2004, during one of their weekly conversations, her tone suddenly changed.
“You don’t love me anymore,” he recalls her announcing.
“What do you mean, I don’t love you?”
“It’s
been eight months. You no longer talk about me joining you.”
“You’re ready to join me?” he asked.
“Yes, right now.”
“Now?”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“Foosiya, it takes time—”
“How long?”
“I will send you money at the end of the month.”
“At the end of this month?”
“Yes, this month.”
“Do I have your word?”
As he recalls it, this conversation took place on September 20. Eight days later, he was standing behind the counter in his and Kaafi’s shop, when his phone rang. The number on the screen was Kenyan.
“It’s me,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “I could not wait until the end of the month. I’m in Nairobi.”
Asad stood there with the phone to his ear and squinted into the Eastern Cape sunshine. Foosiya answered the question he could not get out of his mouth. “I used the money you’ve been sending me,” she said. “Every fifty dollars you sent, I saved it all. But it’s not enough.”
“Of course it’s not enough!” Asad finally spat out. “It’s nothing!”
She told Asad that she had found a smuggler who would get her to South Africa for four hundred dollars. She also wanted another two hundred for food and drink.
“I only had four hundred dollars,” Asad recalls. “I went to Kaafi and told him what was happening and asked if he had another two hundred. ‘Of course!’ he said. ‘Of course!’ ”
Asad went immediately to Queenstown to arrange to send the money to Nairobi. Only once he was on the road, in the passenger seat of a neighbor’s car, did he gather his thoughts. Two different versions of his wife formed in his head. The first was the Foosiya he thought he knew: wise, thoughtful, deliberate. In Addis, he had the sense that she had spent years and years thinking about every word that came out of her mouth. Now, here was a second Foosiya, impulsive to the point of madness. He strained to remember this side of her in Addis and for a moment entertained the thought that the woman who would soon be coming to live with him was a stranger.
A Man of Good Hope Page 21