In 2015, a wave of xenophobic attacks spread across South Africa. That year, the spark was the death of 14-year-old Siphiwe Mahori, who was shot dead by a Somali shopkeeper in Johannesburg.
detailed the events which had unfolded that day. That Monday afternoon in January, they wrote, a young man the media and the community called a “nyaope boy” – both a description of him and the explanation for what he did – tried to enter the Waka Waka shop. The shopkeeper got angry and told the boy to leave. The boy threw rocks. One of the shopkeepers appeared with a gun and tried to force the boy to get out. But once the weapon came out, others in the community got angry.
Siphiwe was lying face-up on the pavement where he had fallen. He was alone. Still breathing. No one had touched him. Mntlane left Siphiwe in Mdingi’s arms and tore down the street, frantically and unsuccessfully trying to call an ambulance on her cellphone. Eventually she found a police van. She stopped it on the road.
But in the chaos no one could make sense of what happened. Even when Mntlane first recounted the story to us, it was Mahori who she remembered was pressing a shirt against the wound to slow down the bleeding; Mahori who held Siphiwe and told him everything would be alright.Al Jazeera “They are very, very sensitive about how they are viewed,” Patel says. “In many ways they want to belong, but in other ways [they feel] they don’t. So theirs is a peculiar position in society and there are significant tensions between old Mayfair residents and the Somalis. There is this perception, with often very little evidence to prove it, that the Somalis are somehow bankrolling the councillor in some way or extracting favours from them.
Sheikh is almost always dressed in a loose-fitting, button-up, long-sleeved shirt. He is friendly, always ready to talk. Always ready for business. Sheikh always has his cellphone – which never seems to stop buzzing – within reach. But he always made time for us; for journalists. Sheikh was one of our first stops when we began asking about what had happened that night in Snake Park. He told us he was there that night after the shooting. That he had made his way through the township chaos as the violence broke out. A week later, on behalf of the Somali community, he went to see the Mahoris, accompanied by regional official. A photo of him in front of the boarded-up Raso shop wearing an olive-coloured kameez was posted to the group’s Facebook page not long after.
“The father was at least well-composed,” he says. “But the mother was… hurt, and you could read that in her face and in her body, her interactions.” Considering the decades of unrest, civil war, and conflict that have ravaged Somalia for years, it is not surprising that the Somali community continues to feel the effects of that violence wherever they are in the world. Whether in Somalia or South Africa, their daily reality leaves them vulnerable and susceptible to attacks.
“It was very difficult to cross the border. We were five, that time. Five guys. They hid us in a truck.” Hassan has converted the shop from the Raso to the Royal, which looks like a modern supermarket, with neatly packed, well-stocked shelves, albeit under a tin roof with a hard dirt floor. He is certainly winning against competition from the big supermarket chains on what should be their own turf. His methods are simple, he told us.
But most of the time he does. The forces of honour and the threat of expulsion from the community are at least as strong as the law. And it also works very well in places where there isn’t really a lot of law at all. Somalis are world champions at parallel structures based on clan loyalty outside formal jurisdictions.In February 2015, the atmosphere outside the Protea Magistrates’ Court in Soweto was at fever pitch.
The magistrate asked the prosecutor about any other witnesses, particularly the other person who had been shot that night, the attempted murder for which Yussuf was also being charged.“Your Worship, we have not obtained his statement,” prosecutor Mthethwa told the court.“Shoo,” the magistrate blew out.“Oh, is he in hospital?”“Were there no other eyewitnesses?”The State protested against granting Yussuf bail, afraid that he might flee the country.
“But in townships you can do whatever you want. Because of this unregulated business… many of the locals, who actually could not cope with this business, ganged up against [the foreign shopkeepers and] formed associations, in order to make sure that these businesses don’t survive.” By then we knew just how connected the community was. And we also knew the gatekeeper, however hospitable, was not willing to open the gates.It was at the tail-end of one of our early meetings with Sheikh that we met GG Alcock, his sometimes business partner. An expert in the informal economy, Alcock is the author of. In fact, it was Sheikh who passed us Alcock’s freshly printed book explaining the booming marketplace of the informal sector.
The project the men are currently working on together is the launch of Sky, a washing powder brand. And for this we get into Alcock’s four-wheel drive double cab and follow two of their sales reps into Snake Park. On the way, Alcock explained how the township economy, rooted in apartheid history, works.
Ibrahim and Alcock say that by the time immigrants began to start businesses in the townships, they found stores closed. Or close to it. But it isn’t until we stop at the Soweto Cash and Carry that the scale of the business really comes into perspective. The huge warehouse spills out on to a parking lot of trucks streaming in and out of the loading dock. This is what Alcock calls a “midi-wholesaler.” A business which, according to Alcock and Ibrahim, takes in anywhere from R3-million to R9-million a month.
Nobody has a real handle on the size of South Africa’s informal sector. But these are big numbers, no matter how you slice them. Statistics South Africa says the informal sector employs more than three million people, a full 20% of total employment in the country. The International Monetary Fund puts the2016 KPMG study on the Fast Moving Retail Goods Sector – that sector of the economy in which spazas operate in South Africa – says it is worth $23-billion.
Hassan wasn’t there the day we visited with Alcock and Ibrahim and the Sky washing powder sales reps. But, given Ibrahim’s description of how the buying and selling of shops happens in the Somali community, what are the chances that Sheikh, Ibrahim and Hassan didn’t know exactly where Yussuf was?On 2 September, more than six months after Siphiwe’s death, Yussuf’s trial resumed in the Protea Magistrates’ Court.
The defence argued that Yussuf should not serve jail time considering his justified fear of the angry crowd outside. He was a first-time offender, and told the court R25,000 had been paid by the “Muslim Organisation Fund” to assist Siphiwe’s family with burial expenses. The State told the court that it recognised the circumstances of the crime, but argued that the family – and the community – were looking for justice.
In the end, Badenhorst cautioned and discharged Yussuf for the possession of ammunition and for discharging a firearm in a municipal area. The possession of the illegal firearm was more problematic; a minimum sentence of 15 years should be imposed. It looked promising. Seventy pages of evidence. But soon it became clear that it revealed very little. There were a couple of statements from those who arrived after Siphiwe was shot. Nobody saw what happened. There were statements from the officers who came to the scene. But the differing details seemed relatively minor. Siphiwe’s age was mistakenly put at 17 rather than 14.
And then there was the other story. The one about how the local councillor, Jabulani Thomo, had “instigated looting.” Thomo denied any involvement toEarly on, we had tracked down Bongani, the “nyaope boy” who provoked the shopkeeper at the Waka Waka to pull out his gun. “What is often overlooked in these grand narratives are the actors that are leading this violence. They tap into that anger and frustration in a way that national politicians often can’t do. They pay to mobilise.
When it was time to commit all the different accounts to tape, we weren’t confident enough about what we knew in this paperless, semi-autonomous existence where rumours and paperwork and people disappear under a veil of aliases and nicknames.The Mayor of MogadishuDespite all his research, Harding wrote that it had been years since Somalia’s bureaucracy was destroyed, along with all records of births and of identity, so he couldn’t even tell you where Nur was actually born.
“God only knows what happened,” he said of that night in Snake Park in one of our first interviews. “Everything else is hearsay.”After a string of emails and phone calls over a period of three months, in February 2020, the Protea court’s chief prosecutor, Lynne Wessels, finally agreed to an interview. She was generous with her time.
It was his mother, a neighbour said, who wouldn’t let him speak to anyone about what had happened. Another neighbour told us it was his brother, who was a gangster, that was blocking the conversation. Several people said Ncamla was a “nyaope boy”, as if his drug habit explained everything.
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