By Michael Schmidt
South Africa’s 15 000-Somali refugees are here to stay, despite living in fear after the killing of about 30 Somalis in attacks in several Western Cape settlements over the past month.
The latest murder occurred on Wednesday at the Du Noon informal settlement at Milnerton when Osama Mallen, 27, was shot and killed and his 25-year-old assistant wounded in an armed robbery of their small grocery shop.
With no Somali embassy in South Africa and no homeland to return to (the country fell apart into warring factions in 1991), the Somali exiles, with 5 000 of them in Gauteng alone, form one of the country’s most vulnerable exile groups.
Abbas Yusuf, of Mayfair, Johannesburg, a leader of the Somali Association of South Africa (Sasa), says that although the community was “definitely afraid, now that our blood has been spilt on South African soil, we have more reason to stay. Somalis are a fighting nation and we will not move an inch.”
Jacob van Garderen, of Lawyers for Human Rights, notes there have been an increase in violent attacks on foreigners around SA.
Dosso Ndessomin, the head of the Co-ordinating Body for Refugee Communities, an umbrella body of 14 such communities, suggests that the Somalis are “living in a very isolated way” compared to other immigrants. Yusuf agrees, saying Somalis “don’t have any links with the community they’re trading in”.
But Sasa director Ahmed Dawlo says he doesn’t agree that “Somalis suffer from self-imposed isolation”.
Certainly, their Muslim dress and their slender builds mark them as distinct. Yusuf suggests there is a strong strain of Bantu racism behind the murders.
Loren Landau, chairperson of the National Consortium for Refugee Affairs – a rights lobby network – says that because of their looks, “there’s no chance for Somalis to really integrate. Zimbabweans, Botswana, etc, can, if they choose, make themselves nearly invisible, but for the Somalis that’s not an option”.
Landau says he believes Somalis are being deliberately targeted, perhaps as a form of “class warfare” because many are shopkeepers: “In rural areas you see a lot of Pakistani and Chinese shopkeepers – but they are not being killed – it seems to be taken as a special affront when a foreign black person owns a business.”
Van Garderen says although the Somalis have, in fact, integrated better than other refugee communities, their entrepreneurship drives them to set up trading posts in remote rural communities where they are obvious outsiders, rather than having the protections offered by cosmopolitan cities.
Yusuf says it takes guts for Somalis, who seldom speak any local language, to venture “into the bowels of Botshabelo or the heartland of the squatter camps and the remotest of areas to trade there”. Dawlo says perhaps 80 percent of the Somali community have settled in informal settlements and rural areas.
Yusuf says while the communities served by the Somalis welcome their presence, “selfish and uncompetitive businesses feel threatened and try to make the Somalis pack up and leave”.
Dawlo agrees that business competition is behind the killings, but says: “If other Africans come here and commit crime, you can blame them, but why blame us for running decent businesses and making a small profit?”
Source: Saturday Star, Setp 9, 2006
