A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (26 page)

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.

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 example, 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.

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 twice 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 chronologi
cally 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.

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.”