“Something there was broken,” Asad says, “something around my eye. As the evening went on I felt it closing. By the time I woke up the next morning, it was closed shut like it had been stuck with glue. I went to the mirror. I did not recognize myself, brother.”
—
The following morning, Abdi and Asad opened the shop for business at about nine o’clock, some two hours later than usual. Asad stood at the counter and, with his good eye, looked out onto the street. Bra Sam’s door opened, and the old man stepped unsteadily out of his home. Asad looked at his watch. A couple of weeks earlier, he had started to time the old man’s journey to the shop. Now it had become a habit. While he waited, a young woman came to buy milk. Two men who were strolling past stopped and bought loose cigarettes. Each time another person stepped up to the counter, Asad went cold. He could not recall seeing any of them during the robbery. But each surely knew what had happened. Why did they not say something? Why did they not comment on the state of Asad’s eye? Why could they not at least say that they were sorry that the people from whom they bought food every day had been hurt?
He imagined the days ahead. He imagined life just going on as if yesterday’s events had never happened. He could not stand the thought. The robbery would soon be swallowed up by the passage of time. Would he require a permanent injury to remind himself that it had happened at all?
At about ten o’clock, Evelyn appeared. With downcast eyes, she asked for half a liter of milk and half a loaf of bread. The end of a crumpled ten-rand note spilled out of her closed fist.
Asad stared at her in disbelief. He was frozen. He could not move.
Evelyn looked up at him quizzically and asked again for milk and bread. He examined her a moment longer, then turned to fetch her purchases.
He placed the bread and milk carefully on the counter.
“You are abris,” he said softly.
“What is that?” she asked. “Why are you talking to me in your language?”
“Abris is a kind of snake,” Asad replied. As he spoke, he heard the pitch of his voice rise. He struggled to contain it. He did not want to lose his cool. “Most snakes have a head and a tail. They can bite from only one side. An abris has two mouths, one in the head, the other in the tail. It bites when you think there is no danger.”
As he spoke, he watched her indignation form at the sides of her mouth and climb into her eyes. She began shouting at him in a stream of Pedi that he did not understand.
“Brother,” Asad recalls, “she wanted to fight me. There and then on the streets of Mabopane, she wanted the two of us to fight each other with our fists.”
Asad left the shop in disgust. With his good arm and his good eye, he drove himself to the hospital in Pretoria and asked to see an ophthalmologist. After waiting two or three hours he was seen by an elderly man who appeared incapable of communication. He gave Asad two injections but could not say what they were for. He also gave Asad tablets to take home with him but did not explain what they might do.
When Asad woke the following morning, the puss around his eye had crusted. He ran a finger over the space where his eye had once been, and it felt like cracked, grainy earth. He found the name and number of an ophthalmologist in Mayfair and got his driver to take him to Johannesburg.
On the journey, Evelyn’s image infested his thoughts. The more he tried to shake her free, the more tenaciously she clung. He hated her as much as he had hated anyone. As much as he had hated Yindy’s father when the old man decided to leave him in Wardheer.
His eye throbbed. He kept touching the swollen ball above it. It felt enormous, as if it were protruding several feet from his face, as if his arm would soon be too short to reach the end of it. The idea of Evelyn and the pain in his eye swirled together and became inseparable. It seemed that Evelyn herself was the pain; she had taken residence in the side of his face and was beating him with her fists from the inside.
In what had happened the previous morning there was a darkness more insidious than anything he had experienced; more insidious, even, than the aftermath of Kaafi’s murder. As grim as it was, one could understand that Madoda’s people wanted to protect him. In their treachery there was something to which Asad could relate.
But this was something else. To watch the Somalis being tortured and then walk over them and steal their stock; to arrive the following morning and behave as if yesterday had not happened. He felt a surge of hatred. For Evelyn, for Bra Sam, for every single South African with a black skin. They were something less than human. He did not know much of the history of southern Africa, but he guessed that for generation upon generation, their ancestors had been slaves. Their masters had beaten them into a new shape, a subhuman shape. They had become submissive, treacherous slave-beings, beings without self-worth, without honor. And then the whites had come and made them slaves again. Now they had been freed, but such beings could not handle freedom.
The ophthalmologist in Mayfair told him that there was nothing wrong with the eye itself. It would get better once the wound above it healed. He injected an anti-inflammatory into the area above the eye and gave Asad a cream and some tablets to take home. He also wanted payment up front. When Asad saw the bill he swallowed hard. This robbery was going to cost him, he thought to himself. In the following days and weeks and months, he would keep paying for this robbery.
On the highway back to Pretoria, he found that his hands were shaking. At first, he was not sure why. He tilted his neck, pushed his head back into the seat, and listened to the sound of his breathing. Once it came to him, it was obvious. He was shaking because he was on his way back to Mabopane. He did not want ever to see that shop again. It was an evil place. Going back there would make him ill.
That afternoon he told Abdi that he could not work in the shop anymore. Abdi said nothing, but his eyes pleaded.
“I felt very sorry for him,” Asad tells me. “His savings were all in the shop. His life was in the shop. He felt he had to keep going. I was leaving him to face Mabopane alone.
“I told him honestly, ‘I can’t stay. Those people can turn against you anytime. If one is your friend, they are all your friend. If one is your enemy, they are all your enemy. If I stay I will die.’ ”
Abdi struggled on alone for a while. Asad busied himself with his taxi business, ferrying people between Pretoria and Johannesburg. He did not set foot in Mabopane or in any other township. He lived his life in Marabastad, in Mayfair, and on the highway in between.
Within a couple of weeks, Abdi lost heart. He and Asad sold the shop, together with the pickup, for eighty thousand rand. Asad sold the car he had been using as a taxi for sixteen thousand. The income from the taxi alone was not sufficient to sustain him; he would have to look for something new.
The man to whom he sold the car didn’t have nearly enough money to buy it. But he was married with children and had no shop of his own and desperately needed to earn money. Asad took six thousand rand from him and deferred the remainder of the payment.
He went back to Mayfair and looked for work.
“I wanted to drive a truck. I went to the big Somali businessmen, the ones who live in very nice houses and have chains of shops and buy in bulk. If I could drive a truck, I would never have to go to a township again. You pick up your load, you take it to Mayfair, to Marabastad, to the Somali places in Cape Town, in Durban. You are a hundred percent safe.
“But it was difficult. You need a code-fourteen license to drive a truck, and you can’t get one without a South African ID. I thought that maybe one of the big Somalis would give me a job anyway. But they said it was not worth their while for their drivers to keep getting caught by the police.
“I went back to Pretoria. Nobody would employ me to drive a truck if I did not have a license. So I packed my bags and went to Cape Town.”
“Why Cape Town?” I ask.
“If you are stuck in one city, you move to another,” he replies.
“Yes, but why Cape Town?”<
br />
He shifts in his seat. “We had heard rumors about Cape Town,” he says.
I wait for him to continue, but he remains silent.
“What rumors?”
He says it rapidly, as if to get it over with as soon as possible. “Cape Town was run by white people. Therefore it was safe.”
I write down what he has said in my notebook, my face quite solemn. Then I look at him and laugh. He turns his head from me, rests his chin on his elbow, and stares out into the Blikkiesdorp street.
The Month of May
He took a bus to Cape Town. It was June 2007. In the contacts file on his SIM card was the cell-phone number of a man called Jbene and the word “Bellville.” Jbene and Asad had played pool together in Uitenhage three years before, when Asad had first come to South Africa. They had been in touch ever since.
He took a taxi from the Cape Town railway station to Bellville Town Centre, where Jbene was waiting for him. The following morning, they hired a Somali driver to take them on a long, circular drive through the townships that fanned from the southeastern periphery of the city, an introduction for Asad.
As he took in the scenes, his heart became lead. It was a new city, to be sure: some of the faces were much lighter, the houses stubbier and flatter. The spaces seemed more open. On the sides of the streets there was beach sand. But these differences were skin deep. The underlying structure was the same.
Cape Town had two Mayfairs: Bellville Town Centre and Mitchells Plain Town Centre. These places were thick with Somalis and with commerce. There were travelers’ lodges and supermarkets and cell-phone shops and shops selling contraband designer clothing. In the residential flats above the commercial areas, Somali faces stared out of the windows.
Around these oases stretched mile upon mile of township. Just like in Johannesburg, in Pretoria, in Port Elizabeth. He recalled that first bus journey from Johannesburg to his uncle Abdicuur in Uitenhage. He remembered staring out of the window as the bus passed one town after another. How peculiar they seemed at the time: each town divided into an outer and an inner world, the outer consisting of rows of identical houses, the inner full of old trees and church steeples and history. Now this geography seemed his prison. He was an able-bodied man; his two feet could carry him wherever he commanded. And yet all paths led to the outer world, to the township, where he was going to die.
Again, he plowed his energy into the quest to drive a truck. As in Johannesburg, he hit a brick wall. Without a South African identity document, he could not get a code-14 license. And without the right license, nobody would employ him to drive a truck.
He returned each night to Jbene’s home in Bellville and unloaded his frustration on his friend.
“Jbene told me I was wasting my time and my money,” Asad recalls. “He said it was obvious: in this country you had to make business, and to make business you must go to the township. I told him I would die in the township. I could feel it in my bones. He said Allah had decided long ago when I was going to die. It was not for a bunch of South Africans to decide. But I knew he was wrong. If I went to live there again, I would die there.”
“You have also said that Allah wrote your future while you were in the womb,” I say.
“I know,” he replies. “I have thought about that a lot. It is a difficult question.”
He looks at me closely. “Why do you ask that question?”
He does not wait for me to reply. “Look at it this way,” he says. “If you want to have a child, you cannot say, ‘I don’t need to do anything; Allah has willed that I will have a child.’ You need to have sex to have a child.
“If you want to make money, you cannot say, ‘I can sit back; Allah has already decided how much money I will make.’ You need to go out and make business.
“So it is the same with deciding to go to live in a township. Because of that decision, you may get paralyzed or burned alive or killed.”
But as his third week in Cape Town came and went, and the prospect of driving a truck remained as remote as ever, he realized that he was once again walking the road to the township. He was living off his savings, and that was intolerable. He had to invest, and there was nowhere to do so but in the place he most feared.
“You might have left altogether,” I say. “You could have headed north. You could have gone to Addis again.”
He says nothing; he merely sighs. As if what I have said is a barbed comment tossed from a gallery of spectators.
“I forgot to leave South Africa,” he says finally, his voice tinged with sarcasm.
—
In the end, he chose the biggest township of all, Khayelitsha. A settlement of more than a million people, some twenty-five kilometers from the center of Cape Town, it was a place of Xhosa-speaking migrants. Almost everyone over the age of fifteen had been born in Eastern Cape and had come to Cape Town to look for work. From the first day, Asad found himself looking for women with nine and a half fingers. Most young people from Sterkstroom went to Cape Town at one time or another. Many ended up in Khayelitsha. It was as if there were a foul-smelling creature inside him searching for the very worst of the past.
He had a new business partner, yet another AliYusuf man. His name was Hassan.
They were both old hands, Asad and Hassan, and they went about establishing a shop with methodical precision. They walked the streets of Khayelitsha, day in and day out, looking for an empty shack, a vacant prefabricated hut, or a stand on which they might construct a building themselves. Once they found something promising, they examined the surrounds. It had to be on a thoroughfare people used to get to or from work. Just a street or two away, and there would not be enough passing trade. Then they would look for the nearest Somali spaza shop. Did it feed off the same commuters somewhere upstream? Or did it service other people on their way to other places?
On their third day, they found an empty shack on Mew Way, one of the two arteries linking Khayelitsha to the N2 motorway. Thousands of people streamed past this point every day. The nearest Somali shop was five blocks away, far enough. They knocked on neighboring doors and asked who owned the property. Within an hour, they were negotiating with the owner, a well-off, middle-aged Xhosa man keen to do business.
The following day, they spoke to the neighbors once more, this time asking for people in the construction business. By the end of the week, they had entered into an agreement with local builders who demolished the shack and erected a prefabricated wooden structure tailored to the Somalis’ needs. It was small. The two men would share a two-by-three-meter bedroom at the back.
Slowly, they began to gather stock. With their first two days’ proceeds they bought more stock and then more. Business was steady on bad days, brisk on good days. Within a month, they had a full-fledged spaza shop. Asad was back in business.
—
I ask him what he thought of the people of Khayelitsha, and his answers are careful and judicious.
“Different people had different attitudes,” he says. “Some made friends with us. They looked us in the eye, and when they smiled at us you could see that they were smiling with their hearts. But most people were saying, ‘You are Somali, you don’t belong. You are makwerekwere. You are making money in our country. We will kill you.’
“Some of the people who said these things were our customers. They bought bread from us, they bought cigarettes from us. And they said they were going to kill us. I got used to it. Maybe it is because we were making good money. Maybe it is that we prayed five times a day. Five times is a lot, brother. You turn your back on these people, and you face your God. It fills you. It makes you strong.
“But then something happens and suddenly you realize you are not okay. One day, my colleague arrived at the shop with stock. The door was open. Two guys wanted to help unload. We said no. We knew, if they just touch our stuff, they will want a lot of money. Whether it is a man, a woman, or a child, they must not touch our stuff. It will cause a problem. We said: We don’t want your help.
“One of them went to pick up our box. I pushed him. He said, ‘Why are you pushing me?’ He took a gun from his waistband. I ran behind a car. He shot at me twice. Some taxi drivers were standing in front of the shop. They shouted, ‘Hey, put your gun away, for fuck’s sake, this is a public road, there are people walking past.’
“These two young guys just walked away. Slowly. Taking their time. Down the street.
“When you lie in bed on the night after something like that has happened you start to think: I could have been dead. One of those bullets could have hit me and killed me, and those boys would still have just walked down the street. Maybe they would have been arrested. But they would not be in jail for long. No witness would come forward. The case would die.
“So you lie in bed and you think: This is crazy; I can’t live like this. But the next morning you open your shop and everything is normal and the money is coming in. You forget.”
Now, he says, when he looks back he sees such obvious signs.
“Like what?” I ask.
“There were some schoolgirls who’d come to us every day asking for sweets. They were little: maybe six years old, seven years old. They would hold out their hands and say, ‘Sweets. Sweets. Sweets.’ We would say: ‘Tomorrow.’ What we meant was that every day was tomorrow.
“Once, I think maybe it was in March or April 2008, I said to a little girl, ‘Tomorrow.’ And she said, ‘Tomorrow uzohamba [you will be leaving].’ She knew what the adults had been talking about. She knew what they wanted to do.”
—
On a Sunday evening in the early winter of 2008, an old man stumbled up to the counter and asked for a loose cigarette. His breath reeked of brandy, and his eyes were shot with blood. He had clearly been drinking all weekend.
“Somali,” he said as Asad passed him his cigarette. “Have you seen what they are doing to your brothers in Alexandra?”
“What are they doing to my brothers?”
“They are slaughtering them, Somali. There is makwerekwere blood flowing on the streets.”
A Man of Good Hope Page 26