A rumor coursed through the township: Asad was going to kill Madoda. That is what Somalis did, it was said. If you killed a member of their family, they would come and kill you in revenge. It was written in Somali law.
When the rumor reached Madoda, he took fright and went to the police station. He reported that Asad and three Somalis he did not know had come to his house in a white car. The car just stood there outside the house. The people inside did not get out. He believed that they had come to kill him.
Later that day, Asad received a visit from three uniformed police officers. They emerged from their car with Madoda in tow.
“When I saw Madoda with the cops I got very angry,” Asad recalls. “Here was the man who killed Kaafi. He was not only free, but he was being escorted by the police.
“The cops were very aggressive. They pointed their fingers at me: ‘You went to his house? You want to kill him?’
“I got very upset. I got very angry. I could feel I was not in control. I began to shout there in the street at the top of my voice. ‘He is the one who killed my brother! Even if he was fired, he had no reason to kill Kaafi!’
“It all came out, brother.
“ ‘When Kaafi was taken to the clinic, Madoda was already there, waiting.’
“The police tried to shut me up: ‘This is our investigation. Do not tell us how to do our work.’
“I kept shouting: ‘The clinic is far away, in the white town. Why did he go all that way? And why was he crying in the clinic?’
“While I was saying this to the police, Madoda began to shake all over and to cry.
“The police said, ‘Look how frightened you have made this man. We cannot allow you to intimidate somebody like this.’ ”
Asad was issued with a restraining order. He was not permitted to walk on the street where Madoda lived, nor the next street; he had to give Madoda’s home a two-block berth. And were he to see Madoda on the streets, he must remain outside a ten-meter radius of Madoda. Were he to break the conditions of this order, he would be arrested. Conspiracy to commit murder was a very serious charge, he was told. It would be best for him to obey the restraining order.
Foosiya had watched the altercation between Asad and the police. She had looked on when the restraining order was read to him.
“We cannot stay here,” she said. “By the time my baby is born I will be with my family in Somaliland. With or without you.”
—
Much of what Asad heard during the following weeks came to him in the form of rumor: South Africans discreetly whispering something in his ear; a phone call from a Somali who had heard something from someone.
Among these rumors was news of a hearing for Aubrey in Grahamstown. Asad did not know whether this was a bail application or a trial or an inquiry. He phoned the investigating officer, the man who had assured him that the DNA on Aubrey’s shirt would match Kaafi’s. He now said that the DNA lab was taking much longer than expected but that, yes, Aubrey was going to appear in court in Grahamstown. Asad asked whether it was not a problem that the DNA evidence might not be done in time for the hearing. The detective told Asad not to worry, that everything was running smoothly, and that he would phone Asad a few days before the hearing so that Asad could attend.
When he went to Big Daddy’s in Queenstown, the Somalis he met there advised him to stay away from the hearing.
“They were all telling me that if I went to court Aubrey’s family would recognize me and kill me,” Asad recalls. “They kept warning me: Aubrey was from an old, old Sterkstroom family. His cousin was the elected representative of the township. The pastor of the township church was also a relative of his. They were saying, ‘Asad, this town belongs to these people. If you fight, you will get hurt.’ ”
The investigating officer did not inform Asad about the hearing. One evening, Asad heard that it had been held that morning and that Aubrey was back in the township. Whether he was out on bail or had in fact been found not guilty, Asad did not know. He heard conflicting stories about this. He phoned the investigating officer and left messages on his voice mail. He received no reply.
The following morning, at about eleven o’clock, pretty much the time when Kaafi had died, Aubrey walked into Asad’s shop and asked for a single cigarette.
“I said nothing,” Asad recalls. “I did nothing. I just stood there. He put his money down on the table. I just remained still.
“ ‘Asad,’ he said. ‘There is nothing you can do. I have been here since my birth in 1984. You came only yesterday.’ ”
—
By the time Aubrey left his shop, Asad had resolved to leave Sterkstroom. To wake every morning and know that your brother’s killer may breeze into your shop, may put his hands on your merchandise and his money on your counter, as if he were a stranger, as if he had never done anything to you—to be treated like that was to be treated like a goat. One slaughters a beast and then throws feed to his brother. One does not do that to a human being.
That very afternoon, he put word out that he was selling his shop. He would leave the moment he was offered a reasonable price. The question was where to go. It was November now. Kaafi had been killed in early August. He had thought that Foosiya’s desire to return to her home would diminish with time. It had not.
“If we stay, they will kill you,” he recalls her saying. “If we stay, Khalid will one day crawl around in your blood while I cup your head in my hands. I am not staying for that.”
Asad pleaded. The whole of South Africa was not dangerous, he said. It was a big country. Parts were both safe and lucrative.
“You want to run from the dangerous place to the safe place,” he recalls her saying. “The people do not want us here, Asad. One day, the country will decide that it has had enough of us. And then there will be no safe place. Wherever we go, the people will want to kill us.”
Asad remembers growing angry. “You have just arrived in this country,” he shouted. “And already you think you are an expert. There are Somalis who have been here since 1995. They are still alive. They are rich. And they are safe.”
“Things change, Asad,” she shot back. “Nineteen ninety-five is not 2006. Things change.”
From deep in his bones, he resisted the prospect of going to Somaliland. For one, he did not know how an Ogadeni man would be received there. In the late 1980s, during the final years of Siad Barre’s rule, when Somaliland was still part of Somalia, terrible things had been done to the Isaaq people up north. He was Daarood and was thus associated with the old regime. And he was Ogadeni; the Isaaq had a long and complicated history with his kind. He would be on foreign turf. He would not have a place there.
But more than that, returning to the Horn of Africa would signal a defeat of the deepest kind.
“I knew life there,” he tells me. “I knew that if I went back there life would be the same, the same, the same, until I die. To be able to wake up in the morning one must know that one day life can be different. To stay in South Africa is to keep that possibility of something different alive. Maybe if I applied again I could get a refugee card. Then I could travel. It is easy to get an invitation to visit Europe. You have an invitation, you can get a visa. You get a visa, you can go and never come back.”
He looks at me carefully to see that I have understood.
“You are only on this earth a few years,” he says. “How long? Sixty years? Maybe eighty years? For many of those years you are a child. For many of those years you are an old person. The years in between: it is a small time, really; it goes fast. If you do not make something then, you have lost your opportunity. You die without having lived.”
—
He sold the shop to a Somali man who owned a string of businesses in Eastern Cape. He got seventy thousand rand; it was a good price. And why should he not get a good price? His was still the only shop in the black township next to Sterkstroom. There was a lot of money to be made. And the new owner would employ a shopkeeper to run it; if so
meone were again slaughtered it would only be a hired hand.
Aside from the seventy thousand rand, Asad had saved a fair amount of money during his time in Sterkstroom. He and Kaafi had done well. He was flush.
On an afternoon in mid-November, Asad, Khalid, and a heavily pregnant Foosiya left Sterkstroom for Port Elizabeth. Early the following morning, they queued outside Home Affairs. When they finally got to the front of the queue, they asked for “go-home” papers for Foosiya and Khalid.
“Why do you want go-home papers?” they were asked. “Your country is very dangerous. You cannot go there.”
“Here is dangerous,” Asad replied.
Foosiya’s and Khalid’s applications were refused.
Asad made some calls. Among others, he phoned AbdiNoor, the man who had once been so efficient at getting the papers Asad needed from Home Affairs. He was told that one could not buy go-home papers, but there was a way to acquire them without buying them. He was given a phone number and an address for a refugee-support organization in Johannesburg. These people knew how to get go-home papers, he was told.
They left Port Elizabeth that very afternoon on an intercity bus. In the morning, they checked into a lodge in Mayfair, washed, changed, and headed for the offices of the organization they had been advised to visit.
“They ask Foosiya why she wants to go home,” Asad tells me. “Foosiya says, ‘My grandmother died. I must go for the funeral.’ They write a letter. We go to the Home Affairs office in Johannesburg and show them the letter. She is given permission. Khalid is given permission. There is nothing to stop them now.
“From there on, brother, it happens quickly. I find a flight to Nairobi. I buy two tickets. She phones some Isaaq people in Islii. They will meet her. They will make arrangements for her to travel from there to Hargeisa and from Hargeisa to her father’s home. From the time we got to Johannesburg to the time she left, it was just a few days.
“When we said good-bye, we said it was not for forever. We would find a way. We would be together in a place that could make us both happy.
“I parked at the airport and walked inside with them. All the time, I was holding Khalid. I stood with them in the queue to check in. I was still holding Khalid. Then it was time for them to walk where I could not walk. I handed Khalid to Foosiya, and I turned around.”
She called him the following morning. She was in Eastleigh. She was safe. Arrangements had been made. She was going home. She would phone again once she had given birth. She would tell Asad whether it was a boy or a girl.
He put down the phone. He was once again a young man in a travelers’ lodge in an African city.
He never did find out whether the hearing in Grahamstown was just for bail or a trial proper. He does not know whether Aubrey was ever punished for his crime.
—
That very afternoon, he got to work. He had a lot of money from the sale of his business. He would not invest in another South African venture. He would use what he had to get to Europe or to America. He had to move fast. Every day in South Africa his savings would diminish. By the end of the year, he wanted to be gone.
There were several options. The first was to go again to Home Affairs to get a refugee card. With a refugee card, he could get a refugee passport. With a refugee passport, he could travel. He knew of a dozen people who had gotten to Europe this way.
He went to the same Home Affairs office that had granted Foosiya her go-home papers. He was told, once again, that there was no record of his ever having applied for a refugee card, and that he would have to do so yet again.
He did not have time to wait. He turned his mind to a second option: the United States.
“You pay a smuggler a lot of money to get you a good passport,” he tells me. “You fly to São Paulo. Next, you must get through Venezuela and Ecuador, en route to Mexico. We had heard that it is not difficult. They give you transit visas. They do not care whether your passport is fake. They know you are on your way elsewhere and they do not care.
“But next is Mexico. For that, you need a visa. You need an illegal transporter to get you into Mexico.
“I had heard of people who had done it. A cousin of mine had done it from Nairobi. I also heard of two others who had done it successfully. They all flew to Brazil; they walked across the border into America. They were arrested there.
“Brother, in America, they do not deport you to Somalia because Somalia is at war. They do not deport you back to Mexico because Mexico does not want you; you were not there legally in the first place. So they lock you away for a long time. One person I heard of spent two years in the cells. Another was in the cells three and a quarter years. Another for only one year.
“While you are in prison, they are finding out who you really are: Are you militia? Have you received military training? Have you been involved in terrorist activity? When they are happy that you are truly a refugee, they give you documentation. You leave prison. You go and live in America.
“Brother, my plan was to spend twenty-four months in jail. Then I would bring my wife and children.”
“Would Foosiya have followed you?” I ask.
“Who knows? Maybe she would have married someone else in the meantime.”
—
In Mayfair, he got the cell-phone numbers of three smugglers.
“I phone the first one. He asks me where I am. I say Mayfair.
“‘Ai,’ he says. ‘I am in Pretoria. I will call you when I have time to come to Johannesburg.’
“But he doesn’t call. Finally, after I have phoned him three, four times, he says, ‘We meet tonight at eight p.m. at a restaurant called Al Jazeera in Mayfair.’
“We meet. We drink tea. He says he must pay eight thousand rand to the man who brings the fake South African passport. This man will also put a history of visas into the passport; an unused passport is suspicious. Another eight thousand rand go to the officials at the airport who must be bribed. Then another eight thousand for the ticket to São Paulo. Plus another twenty thousand for the smuggler himself. Altogether, it is forty-four thousand. I must pay the whole thing up front.
“I tell him I will think about it.
“The second smuggler I phone offers to meet me immediately. He was too rushed. I did not trust him. He wanted thirty thousand rand up front for everything. It was too simple. He said everything was guaranteed. Nothing could go wrong. I did not like it. I walked away.
“The third smuggler was always too busy to see me. I waited two weeks. Finally, he picks me up, takes me to where he lives in Mayfair, tells me the options available: ‘UK, nonstop flight. But probably they will send you back when you get to Heathrow.’
“America: he can get me as far as Brazil. No guarantee after that. He says, ‘In Brazil, maybe they can catch you and bring you back. Who knows?’
“As for the price: twenty thousand rand, which you pay up front. It gets you the passport and the ticket and the instructions about what to do at the airport. Another twenty thousand for the smuggler. But you only pay once you are safely in Brazil. If you do not get there, the smuggler forfeits his fee.
“I go with this one. I trust him. He is talking straight. I pay him twenty thousand rand. The other twenty thousand I give to an Ogadeni man called Ahmed, a shopkeeper. He is trustworthy. I give him the money in front of the smuggler. I know that if I do not make it, Ahmed will keep the money for me. Or he will use it to get me out of whatever trouble I am in.
“The smuggler comes back with a passport. It has a few visas, visa stamps. He gives me an air ticket. I do not remember for how long I waited for this. A week, maybe? I am not sure.
“I begin spending time with the other people he is smuggling. There are fourteen of us. Eight will go in one shift. The following night, I will go with five others. We agree that all fourteen of us will join together again in Brazil. For once we are in Brazil, we are on our own. It will be difficult there, we know. We are vulnerable. We can be robbed. We can be arrested. Even small
things are bothering us. We will have to change our South African rand. Where do you do that in Brazil? Do they take South African rand? And what if I am robbed at the airport? I will have thirty thousand rand in cash with me. That is the money I will need to get from Brazil to America. What if I lose it all on day one and I am in Brazil with no money? We are all asking ourselves this question. We must stick together in São Paulo.
“A couple of days before it is time to leave, the smuggler tells us what is going to happen. On the day of our departure, he will tell us what time we must be at the airport. He will hire us a taxi. While we wait for the taxi, he will speak on the phone to a manager at the airport. He is the one who is being bribed. He will tell the smuggler at the last minute: ‘Your people must go to check-in counter number forty-seven.’ The smuggler puts you in the taxi. You never see him again.
“The first batch, the eight, left the night before us. They said they would turn off their phones when they got to the airport. If the phones remained off, they have flown. One guy said to me, ‘If we do not get through, you are the first person I will phone.’
“I got a missed call from him at eleven thirty. I thought this meant that he had passed through. We got another call at twelve thirty, this one from the smuggler. ‘They are in the cells.’
“Actually, six of them were in the cells. Two hid in the toilets. They locked themselves in. They only came out at midday the next day. They had seen the people in front of them being arrested. They had turned and walked.
“The smuggler met with us the next day. People were very angry with him. They were shouting at him. They wanted their money back. I was not one of the people shouting. The smuggler had told us from the start that we were gambling. He had told us that he could not control everything. That is why I went with him. He was honest.
A Man of Good Hope Page 24