“do not go gentle into that good night / rage rage against the dying of the light”

Cape Times, 3 June 2008

AN ERRANT beach ball bounced towards us, chased by a small Somali boy.

I stuck out my foot to stop it. The boy giggled and hugged my leg with all his might – a warm welcome to the Chrysalis Academy.

Here in the idyllic surrounds of the Table Mountain National Park in Tokai, past the towering pines, the campgrounds and the barbecues, has sprung one of the largest informal shelters for displaced foreigners.

It’s also one of the nicest. The 310 Somalis, Congolese, Zimbabweans and other displaced foreigners are staying in dormitories regularly used for at-risk youth who come to take part in free social crime-prevention programmes and leadership classes.

In the small parking lot where we pulled up, volunteers were serving lunch outside, piling rice and chicken high on to hot pink plastic plates.

A group of women sat on stools in a circle washing clothes in a plastic basin. Behind them, on beds of green plants, kids’ shirts and pants were laid out in the sun to dry.

A toddler peeked out of the driver’s side window of a royal blue bakkie. I asked him how old he was.

“He’s three,” came a voice from behind me – his mother, Horia Ahmed Hassan.

She wore a brightly coloured sweater over a full-length hijab, and her head was draped in a scarf.

She arrived from Vredenburg two weeks ago with her kids, she said. Her husband died in a fork lift accident eight months ago.

“They didn’t even given him a funeral. They didn’t do anything.” Tears fell from her face on to the ground like seeds.

The family came from Mogadishu 10 years ago. Her husband had worked for the contractor for seven years.

Since then, the stay-at-home mother of four has been staying with her brothers, who owned a grocery shop, and living on the financial support of her friends.

Then, the shop they’ve had for six years was attacked by xenophobic South Africans. They packed what they had left into the blue bakkie and went to the police, who directed them here.

Safe for the time being, she’s now worried about her 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter, both of whom should be in school.

“I’m worried for the education of the children,” she said. “What do we do? Life is |expensive.”

By now, a crowd of Somalis had gathered around us. All had similar stories.

One man held out a string of keys, “Left the bakkie, but still have these!” Everyone laughed.

Now that there was an audience, Ahmad Mohammed Ali, an ex-policeman from Somalia came over and began raving angrily about the South African police.

“They make the problems!” He yelled, swatting at the air with his baseball cap. “They are criminals.”

Under the guise of protecting their shops, the police would tell them where to park and then steal their vans and their money, he alleged.

The crowd murmured its agreement.

It’s nothing we haven’t already heard, so I asked them to show us their living |quarters.

We wound through a small path in the grass and crossed into a courtyard large enough for a soccer game.

In front of us was a two-story, grey-concrete building with outside hallways facing the courtyard.

We climbed up a flight of green wooden stairs to the sleeping quarters. Clothes hung everywhere.

The foreigners had separated themselves into rooms by nationality, one of my guides said. Each room was jammed with 14 single beds set so close that the metal frames touched each other.

There were nearly enough mattresses for everyone, though some sleep on the wooden floors.

Back downstairs, I got a tour of the open showers and the sole toilet in the camp. They take turns cleaning it.

Next, they took me to see the cafeteria. A large assembly hall had been cleared out, a small group sat at the far end watching a small TV, donated by a church volunteer.

Because I’m a reporter, they took special interest in showing me their news collection. On a large chalkboard, they had cut out articles and pictures of the xenophobic attacks and taped them into a collage.

Someone makes a daily run into town for newspapers, they said.

Behind a screen, I saw cardboard boxes stacked high with donated clothes. Every day at 4pm, the residents form a line and are given five minutes to choose their new clothes.

“We won’t forget that they are helping us,” said my guide, showing me the white plastic wristband that entitles him and anyone who has one to food and supplies. On it was handwritten with a black marker his name and number: Abderahman Hassen, 155.

We went back outside and into another courtyard. Twenty kids of all nationalities chased each other around.

A 25-year-old student from UCT, who heard about the camp from her roommate, held a crying girl in her arms.

“We are waiting for someone to tell us what to do,” said Hassen.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen. But nothing will be the same as before.”

UPDATE: read about the story on IOL’s (parent company of Cape Times) website.

Today’s front page

The Capetonians — cabbies, reporters, legal advocates for refugees, social workers and African traders at Greenmarket (an outdoors souvenir market for tourists) — I’ve spoken to this week didn’t think the xenophobic violence would spread from Joburg to down here.

Last night, however, something did. Hundreds of foreigners fled from the informal settlements around Cape Town, escorted in police vans, after being kicked out by their neighbors. A half dozen Somali shops were looted.

The Cape Times article is locked to nonsubscribers but here are the highlights:

“… the looting had started after a community meeting about the xenophobic clashes in Gauteng and how it may spread to the Western Cape…” [Gauteng is the region of South Africa containing Johannesburg]

“A joint operations centre had been set up [at the Killarney race course] and disaster management, police and other emergency personnel swarmed the area speaking on walkie talkies. One could be heard trying to set up a temporary mortuary in case violence erupted and people were killed.”

“A number of Somalis stood in the street, flagging down police vans and begging the officers to escort them back into the area so they could find missing relatives … The sirens often drowned out their voices as some of them tried to contact family members with their cellphones and had to give up as they could not hear.”

“… more than 100 people from other parts of Africa living in an informal settlement in Knysna sought refuge at the town’s police station last night after five Somali-owned spaza shops were looted. Although none of the foreigners living in Witlokasie had been attacked or received threats, they felt at risk, police spokesperson Malcolm Pojie said. They were given accommodation in a community hall.”

“Said Stephen Ngobeni, Regional Manager of Metrorail in the Western Cape: ‘Commuters can expect random searches on trains and at stations to ensure that no weapons are taken on to trains or stations. We ask our customers to bear with the inconvenience, but our actions are taken with their safety at heart.’”

The reporters have been telling me that anti-Somali sentiments have been around for a long time here — Somalis look different, speak a different language (Arabic) and have a different religion (Sunni Islam). As they were keeping watch on violence spreading to Cape Town earlier this week, they were careful to distinguish between the usual anti-Somali cases and anything new.

Also this week Germany, the U.S. and other Western nations issued travel advisories for South Africa due to the mess in Gauteng. For the most part I don’t feel scared, because for now at least it appears to be a black-on-black issue.