By Robyn Dixon
The township was burning. A mob of protesters sprang up quickly that wintry June day in Atteridgeville, outside Pretoria, South Africa.
Ahmed Hashe was serving a customer in his small grocery shop when he saw them surging down the street, and he knew they were coming for him. They were carrying machetes, bars, knives, sticks and rocks, and they had blocked the roads.
The crowd had originally come together to demonstrate against the governing party’s mayoral candidate. But as political protests often do in South Africa, the gathering swiftly degenerated into frenzied looting of foreign-owned shops. Gleeful citizens carted away stolen groceries and furniture, including commercial fridges. Dozens of shops were smashed and ruined. Some were burned as a pall of black smoke rose over the neighborhood.
The 28-year-old Somali shopkeeper abandoned everything and ran, but he fell.
The protesters smashed his face with a rock, breaking his jaw, stabbed him in the back and left him for dead.
Shops like Hashe’s are frequently the target of violence in South Africa. Although unemployment among South Africans ages 15 to 34 is 37.5%, young Somali refugees find work quickly, usually by working in a spaza shop – a convenience store that sells basic groceries – owned by another Somali. It’s a tough and dangerous life, but after a few years, they can save the money to start up their own shops.
Their steady success breeds resentment.
Researchers say that local politicians and community business groups encourage the violence against the foreigners’ shops. There were 1,993 incidents of crowd violence in 2015 — five on any given day — according to police statistics, compared with 660 cases in 2004. About 1,500 Somalis have been killed violently since 2002, mainly in robberies and xenophobic attacks, according to the Somali Community Board of South Africa, which tracks the deaths. South African police do not track xenophobic attacks or foreigners killed.
Hashe woke the evening of the attack in a hospital bed, his eyes tiny slits in a swollen face. The only reason he survived was that the mob thought he was dead. His cousin, Hamza Farah Ibrahim, survived too. Ibrahim fled his own shop, Good Lucky Supermarket, and picked Hashe up.
Hashe’s friend, Shukri Shariff, had been beaten and killed by a mob in 2014, so he knew he was lucky to have survived. He recovered in a small room in a Somali boarding house, with medicines, milk and juice by his bed and a copy of the Koran by his pillow.
Many Somalis have lost their shops more than once. Abdul Khadir Farah, a 50-year-old father of five, has lost three shops to looting, has been robbed five times, and was left with a broken femur after being shot in April 2015. His shop was completely destroyed in Atteridgeville in June, leaving just a vacant block.
“I thought we’d be killed, 100%. And I’ve got a family to feed.” He sighs softly and shakes his head slowly. “So I’m a loser. I think a lot. I don’t sleep well. I think where will I start?
“They discriminate against you, isolate you. I feel pain, but I don’t have a voice to say anything back to them.”
Nine of Suleiman Hussein’s relatives have died in violent attacks. He left Somalia at age 19 in 1996, after his mother and brother were killed there. Now, as the chairman of the Pretoria branch of the Somali Community Board of South Africa, he is often called to collect the wounded and dying after attacks, including robberies.
Since 2009, based first in Port Elizabeth on the southern coast and later in Pretoria, Hussein has picked up 51 Somalis after violence; 21 of them died of their wounds.
“If Somalis get killed, no one asks, no one cares,” Hussein said. “Somalis often know who the attackers are, but they can’t go to court because they will be killed the next morning.”
In 2013, four desperate Somali brothers were trapped in their shop by a mob in Booysens Park township near Port Elizabeth. In a typical pattern, that protest began with a local issue — anger about local criminals. Police could not control the mob. Protesters turned vigilante and killed two alleged South African thieves before attacking Somali shopkeepers.
Source; LAtimes
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