A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (22 page)

He stayed with Abdicuur for two weeks. On some days he would accompany his uncle to work. On others he would sleep late and then walk down the road to a place where young Somali men played pool. These days reminded him a little of his time in Dire Dawa. But there, the soccer table stood in a public space and a cross-section of the city came to play—young and old, Somali, Oromo, Amharic. Here, only Somalis set foot in the little canteen where he played pool. He slept under a Somali family's roof, walked down the street, and played pool with Somali men, then went back to his Somali home for dinner. He felt that he was both in, and yet not in, South Africa. He could be anywhere.

His uncle earned a living running a general trading store in a black township. In South Africa these stores are called
spaza
shops. But he had still barely set foot in one of these townships. Thus far, they came to him only in the form of news reported around the pool table.

“One day, we were playing,” Asad recalls, “I think it was maybe five or six days after I had arrived in Uitenhage, when someone walked in looking upset and said, ‘In Motherwell, they have killed one of us.' Everyone went silent. Everyone was upset. For the rest of the day, the mood was very heavy.

“The following afternoon, we all went to the funeral. There was fear, brother. People huddled in groups saying there is too much robbery in this country; it is not safe having a cash business. There was talk about buying illegal firearms, about hiring Xhosa people to be security guards.

“I had not heard about this at all before I came to South Africa. The people passing through Addis, who showed us all the dollars they had earned down south, they said nothing about Somalis dying in townships. But right from the start, it was something that was there, always, something in the background.”

It entered, too, into Abdicuur's plans for Asad.

“He was looking for a job for me,” Asad says. “He'd come to South Africa in 1998. He was an old hand. He knew every Somali who ran a
spaza
shop in the whole region. His own
spaza
shop in Motherwell township was very successful. But he said I could not work with him because of the risks in Motherwell. He started listing all the townships: here is safe, there is not; here is okay; there is not so okay. He said he would choose where I was going to work.”

“He showed me how to write stock,” Asad recalls, “how many items must be left before you restock—four or five items. When he writes the order, he makes signs next to each item. This one is very low, this one less of a priority. This one is on special this week; buy more of it because there will be more profit.”

They would climb into Abdicuur's impressive pickup and drive out of Motherwell to an enormous wholesaler on the outskirts of Uitenhage. The inside of the store was square and cavernous and very tall. The shelves were stacked impossibly high, brown boxes towering many meters above their heads, and men and women in blue overalls drove forklifts down the aisles.

Abdicuur gave Asad a trolley and a list of items to purchase and then watched quizzically as his nephew stumbled around the giant cave of a store, entirely lost.

“When I started,” Asad said, “I would look for the Omo washing powder next to the rice. ‘No, no,' Abdicuur would say. ‘This part of the shop is dry goods, this part is fresh food, that part clothes, that part cigarettes and cell-phone airtime.' ”

Back at the shop in Motherwell, watching his uncle selling the goods he had just bought, Asad was struck by the artistry of Abdicuur's trade.

“In the wholesaler I noticed that he had bought sixty-five cans of Fanta grape, but only a dozen of Fanta orange. In the
spaza
shop, I saw why. For every six cans of grape his customers bought, only one would buy orange. The trick was to watch very, very closely. Do they like salt-and-vinegar chips or tomato chips? How many salt and vinegar sold for how many tomato? Brother, he knew his customers better than they knew themselves. He had a rule: never run out of stock; never turn a customer away because you do not have what she wants.”

Abdicuur's store was in the heart of Motherwell township. But even here, deep inside a South African settlement, Asad did not feel that he was inhabiting this new country. Abdicuur's shop was a shack. The yard was surrounded by a wooden wall so high that those inside the property could not see out, and those outside could not see in. The storefront itself was covered in wire meshing and bars. The only gap was a little half-moon at the level of the countertop, through which coins and notes and merchandise were exchanged.

The glimpses he got of Motherwell's street life shocked him.

“My first feeling about blacks was that they have too much sex,” he recalls. “I have now adjusted a little. But back then, what I saw on the streets, to me it was illegal, uncultural, a shame to one's reputation. A man holding a woman who is not his wife, squeezing her bum, putting his hand up her skirt. I could not even look at them. I would look to the side.”

He pauses and sighs. Hearing himself speak of these things has unearthed emotions. When he continues there is an uncharacte
ristic note of bitterness in his voice.

“Even if you consider many different beliefs about the world,” he says, “nobody allows that. Christianity, whatever: it is in nobody's culture. It is a democracy here. You say nothing. It is how they are. But I tell you, they do not get this from their religion. It is not in their culture either. But they do it. They have lost what their ancestors once knew. Christian, Jewish, doesn't allow it. Nobody allows it.”

His uncle drove him to the Department of Home Affairs office in Port Elizabeth to apply for asylum-seeker status. It would be a formality, Abdicuur said. You get a piece of paper saying that you have applied for asylum, and you are now in the country legally, pending the outcome of your case.

“And what if they decide I'm not a refugee?” Asad asked.

“It all takes a long time,” his uncle assured him. “And if it is not going right, there are things that can be done.”

They drove into Port Elizabeth on a pristine highway, the asphalt as smooth as wet cement. The suburban houses on either side were like the ones he had first seen in Pretoria, built yesterday, only much bigger and smarter. And then, suddenly, the suburbs were gone, and they were outside a tall brick building, surrounded by line upon line of people. Asad and his uncle joined the queue and waited. They stood there a long time, and it did not seem to move. A little sheepishly, Asad asked his uncle how long they would wait. Abdicuur smiled and put a hand on his shoulder.

“The office only opens in two hours,” he said.

Waiting in the line, Asad thought he heard a snippet of what sounded like Swahili. As he strained to listen, another conversation drifted toward him, and it was unmistakably Amharic. Amid these familiar tones, he heard a fragment of his native Somali. He stood stock-still and opened his ears. It was as if fragments of his own biography had taken audible form and were now being thrown at him, as if a random selection of memories had left his head and found their way to the tongues of others.

As the day wore on, he heard more languages. He thought that one must be French. Of the rest, he could not make head or tail.

The country he had chosen as his destination now seemed vast beyond his comprehension. He pictured the highways and the suburbs through which they had just passed, then looked at the people of Africa gathered about him, then at the locked building in front of them. He wondered at the power of South Africa: without expending any effort, it could gather people from every country on the continent outside one building and force them to wait all day.

Aside from a pool table, the canteen in which he spent his days also had computers and an Internet connection. On his second day there he sent Foosiya an e-mail. It was a selective distillation of his experiences: barely mentioning the dramatic journey to South Africa, it announced triumphantly that he had found close family, that they were prosperous, that they were providing him with food and with shelter and that they were soon to find him work.

For a long time he received no reply. Concerned that the message may never have reached her, he sent it again.

On the very afternoon he resent the e-mail, his phone rang. He remembers it as a momentous occasion; it was the first time during his years on this earth that he had received a telephone call. The phone was a Nokia 3310. The moment it rang, he knew it must be his uncle, for Abdicuur had bought it for him the previous day and was the only person who knew the number.

His uncle's voice was urgent, agitated.

“Asad,” he said, “can you drive?”

“Yes,” Asad replied. “A taxi driver taught me in Addis.”

“This is no joke, Asad,” Abdicuur said. “Tell me the truth.”

“Honestly, I can drive.”

“Are you a perfect driver?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know cars that are different from the one in which you learned?”

“I can drive any car.”

“You can drive a right-hand drive?”

“Yes.”

“You know the road signs?”

“Yes. Why do you not trust me to drive?”

A long, skeptical silence followed. Then his uncle hung up.

That night, Abdicuur phoned Asad from outside the house and told him to come outside. Asad walked up to the truck, and his uncle got out of the driver's seat and offered it to his nephew.

“We drove to a Somali restaurant down the road,” Asad says. “All the parking around the restaurant was taken. When Somalis close their shops for the day, they all go to this restaurant—to store money, to watch television, to talk. So I found a very, very narrow parking space, tiny, and I parked the pickup perfectly, one inch between me and the car in front, one inch between me and the car behind.”

He turned off the ignition and looked up to find that his uncle was smiling broadly.

“I have found you a job,” he announced. “It involves a lot of driving.”

The job was in a
spaza
shop in a small township on a hill overlooking the rural hamlet of Kirkwood. It was about a half-hour drive from Uitenhage. The salary his uncle had negotiated on his behalf was extremely attractive. He would earn one thousand four hundred rand per month—about two hundred dollars at the time—plus one hundred rand extra for Saturdays and twenty-nine rand in cell-phone airtime per week. He would also get free food and lodging. It was very good by South African standards: the average wage for a Somali shop assistant was between nine hundred and twelve hundred rand. It was considerably more than he had ever earned in one month during his four years in Addis. In one fell swoop, his journey down the African continent seemed justified. He resolved to save every cent. Quite for what purpose he was not yet sure, but with money came choices.

One person's good wage, of course, is another's slavery. In March 2004, when Asad began working in Kirkwood, one thousand four hundred rand per month was well below the minimum wage in every sector of the South African economy. The lowest grade of workers among South Africa's gold and platinum miners—gen
erally considered to be among the most exploited of the country's formal labor force—was around four thousand rand per month. Asad found himself at the floor level of South Africa's vast, unregulated service industries. That he celebrated it as an opportunity to become rich would have come as a shock to most South Africans. That most South Africans regarded his wage as below their dignity would have left Asad dumbfounded.

Asad was in fact given two jobs, which is probably why he was paid well above the average wage of a Somali shopkeeper. He was responsible for the stock, a task that required him to drive to a wholesaler, either in Uitenhage or in Port Elizabeth, every third day. And he was also the assistant shopkeeper; whenever the regular shopkeeper took a break, Asad would stand at the counter and sell.