A Man of Good Hope

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A Man of Good Hope Page 23

by Jonny Steinberg


  Asad and his daughter are in love. When I follow him into his shack, after we have spent hours sitting in my car, he takes the little one from whoever has been holding her, cradles her head in the crook of his arm, and finds her eyes with his own. They stare at each other without blinking, as if each is daring the other to look away first. Asad is usually the one to blink. As he does so, he bursts into laughter. His attention is locked on her face, his absorption uncompromising. As I look upon this, I think of the way he is in my car, a piece of him always detached and watching the street for signs of trouble.

  I tell him all of this. I tell him that I am watching how he is with his daughter now because it is helping me to imagine how he was with Khalid then. He looks at me and grins. My words have triggered a memory.

  It was a cold August, and he had wrapped Khalid in two thick blankets. He was carrying his son down the street when he ran into his landlady and two of her friends. The old Xhosa ladies were delighted. They huddled around Asad and poked fingers at the little one and gave Asad all sorts of advice. He thanked them and walked on. He does not believe that he has ever been happier than at that moment.

  Pickup

  In January 2005, while Foosiya was still pregnant, Kaafi went to Port Elizabeth in a taxi and returned two days later in a single-cab Nissan Courier pickup truck. He stumbled out of the driver’s seat in a state of high anxiety. He had just driven across Eastern Cape without a driver’s license, he said. He never wanted to do that again.

  Asad laughed at his cousin. He knew many Somalis who drove cars, but few who had a license. If the police stopped you, you paid up.

  “Some police are even friendly about it,” Asad tells me. “They say, ‘You people pay fuck-all taxes on your businesses. Now is your time. Do it with a smile.’ ”

  That is not how Kaafi saw it, Asad recalls. He was terrified of South African law enforcement, terrified that he would end up in jail where South Africa’s famous prison gangsters would tear his limbs from his body. He had bought the pickup because it was good for business; they were spending far too much for the use of other people’s vehicles. But he did not want to drive it again until he had a license.

  It strikes me that this is the most substantial portrait of Kaafi that Asad has painted. They lived under the same roof day in and day out. They ran a business together, shared every meal, watched their respective children grow. It is like this with all the men with whom Asad lodged—with Yusuf in Dire Dawa and Nairobi, with Osman in Kirkwood. Only rarely does a man come to life in his recollections, and it is usually an older man, a father figure, a person who scoops Asad from the floor and cares for him: like Rooda and Uncle Abdicuur.

  It would take some time until Kaafi would be able either to buy a license or to test for one. And while Asad could drive well, and had in fact for several months driven all around the Port Elizabeth area without a license, Kaafi refused to countenance the idea of him behind the wheel of the pickup. And so they looked around Sterkstroom for a driver.

  It did not take long. Few young men in the township had gainful employment, and many could drive. In the end, the person they found was a neighbor. His name was Madoda, which means “old man,” his nickname Elvis. He was a son of one of Sterkstroom’s old families, which encouraged the Somalis. That they had now stopped paying for the use of three of their neighbors’ cars made them a little apprehensive, and they were pleased to be putting money in the pockets of another old family.

  Asad liked Madoda. He describes him as “an open person.”

  “He was very serious,” Asad recalls. “He was not a light person. He was not the sort of person to make you laugh. But he felt things strongly. If he thought you were angry with him, he would really feel it. It would upset him deep inside. He would try to make you happy.”

  Madoda had an old car that stood forever outside his house. He seemed always to be just short of enough money to have it repaired. Sometimes it stood on blocks, covered in a tarpaulin. And then, out of the blue, the cover would come off, and Madoda would spend an afternoon working under its hood, and by evening the engine would be running. But never for long.

  That Madoda had a car but not the means to run it seemed to the Somalis an emblem of the village itself: cars that used to work but now stood idle; a shop that was once open for business but was left rotting; roofs once solid and weatherproof now leaking like fishnets.

  In the privacy of their foreign language, the Somalis would talk to one another about their neighbors. They were Bantu. Bantu had once been slaves. They had lost their pride many generations ago and had yet to recover it. A man stands forlornly staring at his old car, and instead of starting a business to earn money to fix it, he laments over it.

  They had to remind themselves that Madoda was forty years old, that he had a wife and children. From the way he lived his life he seemed a mere youth.

  “They were waiting for someone to come and help them,” Asad tells me. “That was their attitude toward their new democracy. Now that they have voted, somebody must come and save them. Nobody has ever saved a Somali. From hundreds of years ago, when we were nomads, life was very tough, and either we fought or we died.”

  The Somalis’ relation to the people around them was Janus-faced. They appreciated the kindness of the old people and took delight in discovering another layer of old family ties. But they had genuine contempt for their neighbors; watching them sit helplessly in their poverty brought to mind a child crawling on the floor.

  “We think of black people as teenagers,” Asad tells me bluntly. “Their democracy is so new and precious to them, but it confuses them. When it does not bring them what they want, they start to get violent.”

  A month or two into his employment as a driver, Madoda asked Kaafi for a loan in order to repair his car. The Somali said no; he did not believe that Madoda was in a position to service debt. Madoda was furious. He stormed out of the shop and was more than an hour late the next day for an urgent trip to Queenstown. For the following week, he sulked, his usual openness gone, his face down. He would not meet Kaafi’s eyes.

  The Somali took pity on him. Now that he had a car of his own, he wanted to learn how to service it. Why not practice on Madoda’s car? He called upon a local mechanic, and the two men stood over the hood while Madoda watched from a distance. The mechanic explained what was needed and why, and Kaafi stood next to him, utterly absorbed, imbibing, for the first time, the logic of what made a car move. The two men went together to Queenstown and bought parts and spent a day restoring the car. Madoda seemed embarrassed. He mumbled a word of thanks and disappeared into his house.

  A month or two later, Kaafi acquired a driver’s license, and Madoda’s services were no longer needed. He was not happy to be dismissed; once again, he bowed his head and went silent and refused to meet Kaafi’s eyes. But he had known from the start that the work was temporary. And besides, he had gained more than a meager wage; he now had a working car.

  —

  The ban on Asad driving Kaafi’s pickup began to slacken. The need for an urgent trip would arise when Kaafi was busy. Asad could drive, after all, and there was a business to run.

  Asad remembers well his first trip alone to Queenstown. It was spring. He rolled down the window and felt the breeze on his face. He was simply going to buy airtime and a few other items of stock—clients were incensed when the Somalis ran out of airtime—and he would be back among his people in a couple of hours. But the time alone was quite lovely.

  Somalis from all over the region converged on one Queenstown wholesaler. They did not go to Metro Cash & Carry, the most well known in the country. Nor did they patronize another famous chain called Browns. Instead, to the last Somali shop owner in a fifty-kilometer radius, they all patronized a business called Big Daddy’s.

  “Why there?” I ask Asad.

  “Because the manager respected us. Metro Cash & Carry was not rude to us, but they were not on our side. If you fight with a local trader—say, for exam
ple, there is a long queue and people get upset with each other—the security at Big Daddy’s will help the Somali. They know it is the Somali who is vulnerable. You feel safer there.

  “I do not remember the real name of the manager at Big Daddy’s. We called him Gamagab, which means ‘short arm.’ He was stocky with very thick, short forearms. We really liked him. And we found out later that he was Jewish. We liked that, too. Isaac and Ishmael were both sons of Abraham. Jews and Muslims are brothers.”

  “Was Big Daddy’s cheaper than the others?” I ask.

  “Sometimes, sometimes not. But once Gamagab knew that Somalis would always come back to him, he was kind to us. If we were short, he would loan us money on low credit. If we bought a lot of something, he would lower the price a little.”

  I smile at this story. Across the country’s townships, South Africans tell tales of Somalis conspiring to buy in bulk. They may look like lone entrepreneurs, it is said, but they are in fact organized into quiet networks that secretly bargain with the big wholesalers. A Somali can thus walk into a wholesaler and get the same cheap price as a large supermarket chain. South African businessmen don’t stand a chance.

  I smile because, in Asad’s account, Somalis converge on one wholesaler primarily from a sense of fear. They go to the one who will protect them from South Africans.

  —

  When Khalid’s first birthday came around on July 29, 2006, Foosiya was five months pregnant with a second child. Her asylum-seeker papers were also on the brink of expiration. Asad phoned around the district and discovered that an AliYusuf man who lived not far from Queenstown and had a pickup of his own was also planning to take his wife to the Home Affairs office in Port Elizabeth. He offered Asad and Foosiya a lift.

  The four set out for Port Elizabeth in the early afternoon. They spent the night at a lodge in the city and woke at three o’clock the following morning to stand in the queue outside Home Affairs.

  By midday, their business was done. They were eating lunch at a Somali restaurant when Asad took a call from an AliYusuf man named Mohamed who lived in the Queenstown area. He asked Asad about Kaafi’s condition.

  “Kaafi’s condition?” Asad asked.

  “Are you not in Sterkstroom?” Mohamed asked.

  “I am in Port Elizabeth.”

  “Kaafi was stabbed this morning in his shop. They took him to the clinic in Sterkstroom, but his injuries were much too serious for the clinic. He is in the hospital in Queenstown.”

  Ten minutes later, Asad and the man who had driven him to Port Elizabeth were back on the road. They had left their respective wives at the lodge where they had just eaten.

  Over the next three hours, Asad made thirty, perhaps forty, phone calls. Each was to relatives sitting in the waiting room at the hospital in Queenstown.

  Kaafi had been stabbed many times, they said. His injuries were very severe. It was not certain that the hospital in Queenstown was equipped to treat him. There was talk of emergency surgery that could only be done in East London. But the hospital staff was also saying that it was dangerous for him to travel as far as East London. It would be better if he stabilized first. They were deciding where the greater risk lay: in moving him or in not moving him.

  Asad put his phone in his lap and stared at the road ahead. It was impossible that another Abdullahi might die. Impossible because unthinkable. The murder of another Abdullahi would be catastrophic beyond description. Remaining in this country would be intolerable. And yet leaving now was intolerable, too. He narrowed his focus. He thought only of whether Kaafi was to stay in Queenstown or move to East London. He calculated the quickest way to East London should they get news that Kaafi was being moved. He did not allow his mind to wander any further.

  He kept phoning. He kept looking at the route ahead of them. It was still possible to veer off the road to Queenstown and head for East London. The news at the other end of the phone was to shape their journey. He hung up and stared at his phone and could not stand its silence. He phoned again. And then again. And then again.

  They were less than an hour from Queenstown when he received the news that Kaafi had left by ambulance for East London. His condition had improved enough for him to travel, the family was told. They were expecting him at the hospital in East London. They were preparing to receive him.

  Asad and his driving companion turned around and headed in the opposite direction. They had missed a turnoff to East London some time back. It would take them the better part of an hour to get there.

  Asad’s phone rang. It was the first time since he left Port Elizabeth that they were phoning him, rather than he them. The person at the other end was in a car driving behind the ambulance that had taken Kaafi from the hospital. Not far out of Queenstown, the ambulance had stopped. It had remained stationary on the side of the road for five or ten minutes. Then it had turned around and headed back to Queenstown. Kaafi had died on the road. Kaafi was dead.

  Kaafi

  By the time Asad returned home that evening, the whole of Sterkstroom knew what had happened.

  When Asad and Kaafi came to town and rented the old Mangaliso Store, they saw at once that the site of their new shop was far too small. Their first and most urgent renovation was to increase their floor space by four or five times. What had been the original shop was now a cage of mesh and bars in which the cashier locked himself. That is how it was with all Somali shops in South Africa. Asad had never known any different.

  After Kaafi was rushed to the clinic, his Koran was found lying on the floor outside the cage between the ten-kilogram bags of maize meal and the fridge. It appears to have been a quiet morning. The shop empty, Kaafi had left the cage and had sat on a chair to read his Koran.

  Madoda had walked in accompanied by two other men. One was Aubrey; he was a regular customer; the Somalis knew him well. Like Madoda, he was a member of one of Sterkstroom’s old, large families. The other was a man called Mike. The three had probably come to buy cigarettes or airtime. They were regular customers. Kaafi had no reason to think that he was in danger. He was probably going to finish the passage he was reading before wandering back to the cage to serve them.

  As for the three men, they walked in and saw the cage door standing wide open. One of them must have nudged the others and pointed. Kaafi read while his customers plotted.

  The door to the shop usually stood open. Now, Mike closed it behind him and stood outside. Two women came to shop.

  “The man is praying,” Mike had told them. “Come back later.”

  —

  A few minutes after the three men left the shop, a customer found Kaafi lying in a pool of blood. She ran to his house and shouted for Kaafi’s wife. What happened next is legendary among Asad’s branch of the AliYusuf clan. Aside from Asad himself, I heard the story from a relative of his I met in London, a man who had never met Kaafi and had lost track of Asad. But he knew about the fate of his unknown relative’s corpse.

  Kaafi’s wife was nursing a young child when she heard the shouts. Still carrying her child, she ran to the shop. When she saw her husband lying on the floor, she put the child down and cradled Kaafi’s head in her hands. She looked up to find her baby daughter crawling through a pool of her father’s blood, her clothes and her hands stained red.

  —

  Kaafi was taken to the clinic at Sterkstroom on the backseat of a car, his head still cradled in his wife’s lap. When the party of Somalis got to the clinic, they found Madoda slumped on a chair. As Kaafi’s unconscious body was carried through the front door, Madoda sat up and stared at it, then slumped in his chair again. Kaafi’s wife asked him what he was doing there. He mumbled something in Xhosa she did not understand. Then he put his head in his hands and wept.

  —

  Aubrey and Madoda were arrested that afternoon. Aubrey had not bothered to change the shirt he had worn when he killed Kaafi. It was speckled with blood. Mike was gone; Asad never saw him again.

  —

  I t
wice ask Asad about the aftermath of Kaafi’s murder. He goes very quiet. He takes a long time to reply to a question. His answers are brief.

  And so, what I know of Asad’s experiences of this time takes the form of a series of short reports. The first is Foosiya’s immediate response to the murder. When she returned from Port Elizabeth the following day, she told Asad that they must leave South Africa at once. They must take their Khalid and the unborn child in her womb and go to live with her family in Somaliland. They could no longer live here.

  She will calm down in the next few days, Asad thought. She is in no condition to make decisions. Once she has taken a step back, she will change her mind.

  Asad sold one of the two shops he and Kaafi had opened. With the proceeds, he bought Kaafi’s wife and children plane tickets to Nairobi. He took them to Johannesburg and ushered them into the airport. There would be AliYusuf people waiting for them on the other side. He has not had contact with them since.

  Only a handful of South Africans ever spoke to Asad or Foosiya about Kaafi’s death. They would do so discreetly, in lowered tones, when nobody else was in earshot. As for Asad’s landlady and her friends, they did not offer to do Foosiya’s hair anymore. They still bought from the shop. They greeted, thanked, and that was all. The same with the many members of Madoda’s and Aubrey’s families. They came to the shop to buy as usual, but they did not stay to chat.

  —

  Asad’s accounts of the next two months are no more than a series of vignettes. I have had trouble trying to order them chronologically and have supplemented what he has said with my own visit to Sterkstroom’s police station and to the regional court in Grahamstown. I think that things happened like this:

  Madoda was released. All charges against him had been dropped. Asad went to the police station to talk to the investigating officer about what had happened. On his third trip, he was received by a thin, wiry man, his countenance nakedly impatient. Neither suspect would talk, he said, and there were no witnesses. Aubrey was still inside because of the blood on his shirt, but Madoda had no blood on him; there was no clear evidence against him. But against Aubrey they surely had a good case. His shirt had been taken to the DNA lab in Pretoria, as had a sample of Kaafi’s blood. If the two matched, the case would be easy. It was simply a question of awaiting the results.

 

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