“The family ate breakfast together every morning,” Asad tells me. “When it was finished, everyone was responsible for washing their own plate. One morning, the other two children did not wash their dishes. They put their dirty plates in the washing bowl and went out to play. At lunchtime, my aunt sees these dirty dishes, and she starts to shout at me. Automatically at me. I tell her I have already washed my plate. She gets even angrier. For lying, she says, I must wash the whole family’s plates.”
Asad imagined himself cleaning the dishes his lying stepsiblings had dirtied, and the humiliation of it flooded his cheeks and his head. He picked up a dish and threw it as hard as he could at Galal’s wife. He aimed for the bridge of her nose, but instead struck her square on the shoulder. The plate rebounded onto a wall and shattered.
Asad ran outside, his aunt close on his heels. When he had crossed the street, he stopped, armed himself with a handful of stones, and turned.
“We stood like that for a long time,” Asad recalls. “Me on one side of the street, the family on the other. Whenever one of them took a step toward me, I threw a stone. My uncle was out back eating mira with some friends. Somebody went to call him. I ran. My aim was to go to the furthest place in Islii, to get somewhere they couldn’t find me.”
It was by chance that Asad’s route took him past the house where the men had sat eating mira. There was just one man there now, and Asad stopped, walked up to him, and stared. The man chuckled and invited Asad to sit.
“What’s with you?” he asked. “What’s wrong at home?”
They sat together in silence for a long time. Finally, when the man got up to go, Asad followed. They walked several blocks before entering a hotel. The man’s room was on the second floor. Bare and simple, it had a single bed and a few possessions. The man told Asad that his name was Bashir.
He cut Asad a thick slice of bread and poured him a glass of milk.
“When you are finished eating,” Bashir said, “you must go home.”
Asad shook his head.
“Okay,” Bashir bargained. “You stay here. I will go and speak to your family. I will smooth everything. Then you will come.”
“No,” Asad said.
The stalemate was only broken when Asad drifted off to sleep. At some point, he felt himself being lifted and carried. Then he was gently settled on the bed. He woke during the night to find Bashir in the bed beside him.
The next time he woke it was morning. Bashir was dressed.
“I am leaving,” he said. “I will not chase you out now, but when I return this evening you must not be here. You must go to your family.”
Asad left about an hour later, but not for home. During the course of the previous three months, he had come to know several Somali children. He went to the house of one of them, sat down, and settled in. At nightfall, the adults of the household told him to go home. He refused and was allowed to spend the night. The following day, he visited another child and did the same there.
“Four nights in a row I spent in different homes,” he tells me. “Now, my story is out. The women talk among themselves. They bitch about my foster mother. ‘How can that woman…? The child has nobody. Who does she think she is…?’
“The story is now reaching Galal and his wife. It is becoming embarrassing for them. So I am caught. But I am not taken back to Galal’s house. A meeting is held among the AliYusuf elders. It is decided that I will live in the Hotel Taleh. The whole hotel is full of AliYusuf. Two floors. Wherever you go, families, full, full, full, mattresses in the corridor. Everyone offered me food. Everyone knew my story. I became friends to all the children. I slept in a different bed in the hotel every night.”
The AliYusuf allowed for this situation on the grounds that it was temporary. Sooner or later, Yindy would call for Asad to come to America. Or his father would turn up unannounced in Eastleigh. That was the thinking. In the end, Asad would live this way in the Hotel Taleh for more than two years.
—
That Asad spent so long in Eastleigh without ever learning its English name says a great deal, not only about his time there but about Eastleigh itself. Throughout its history, since long before Somalis came to live in its houses, Eastleigh was one of those twilight zones one encounters in great colonial cities. It was set a safe distance from the districts in which white expatriates lived, and white people seldom went there. Yet neither did it house black workers. The people who first settled in Eastleigh were largely Asian. They owned property there, but often had no title deeds, only verbal agreements and shared knowledge. They traded, but much of their trade was off the books. It was a place where business is transacted under the eye of legal officers but is nonetheless not regulated by law, where the rules are unwritten and the nature of commerce is a little opaque.
Somalis began to settle there in small numbers long after the British left, sometime in the 1970s. By then, most of the original Asian occupants had abandoned Eastleigh for more secluded suburbs, and the Somalis’ landlords were generally Kikuyu businessmen. It was a natural place for undocumented immigrants to settle, for one could do business and trade or work for another without too many questions asked, a place where one could figure out a modus vivendi with the agents of the law.
When the Somali civil war broke out in 1991, the number of Somalis in Eastleigh soon swelled. The footing they established in Nairobi was precarious. Kenya had accepted Somali refugees with great reluctance. Their legal status was kept ambiguous, partly because of bureaucratic inertia, partly because ambiguity leaves all options open. Somali refugees who lived in camps were legitimate, while those who made their way to places like Eastleigh lived in a zone somewhere between illegality and unofficial acceptance.
Among Asad’s most vivid memories of Eastleigh is the role Somali children played in mediating between their parents and the police.
“The children ran around all day,” Asad tells me, “and they would come home with Swahili phrases. They would learn from the talk around the kiosks, from the Kenyan children, from the taxi drivers. The children realized that this was very useful, to speak a language their parents did not, so it became a thing among them that they must know Swahili.”
Somali children learned Swahili in order to keep secrets from their parents. But in the end, their new language was put to other uses, too. Periodically, large groups of police would descend on Eastleigh, move at leisure through the streets, and arrest anyone and everyone they saw.
“You would have these bunches of fifteen chained Somalis out on the streets,” Asad says. “Then the negotiations begin. The police only allowed the children to interpret: if anyone else tried to interpret, they would be arrested. You pay; they let you go. You don’t pay; you go to the police cells. To get out of the police cells, you pay much more. Everyone paid at some point. That was the only route out. You pay. You go back to Islii.
“But we children always had this special role. The police arrest someone: people say, ‘Call the kids.’ ”
Now much has changed. When Asad passed through Eastleigh in 2004, after an absence of almost a decade, he could barely believe what he saw.
“There was so much money in Islii,” he says, “Somali money. There were paved streets, beautiful new shopping centers, buildings much taller than any that had been there before.”
In this twilight world, with one foot in and the other outside the law, Somalis had established a transnational banking system, a network of global trade links, and a marketplace for all sorts of commerce. Many of its residents remained dirt poor, living off others or on cheap, informal work. But alongside them were Somalis who had grown rich. By 2004, Eastleigh’s Somalis were purchasing electronic and white goods and fresh food so much more cheaply than anyone else in Nairobi that they were wholesaling to the rest of the city. Eastleigh had become the center of Nairobi’s consumer-goods economy, despite remaining all but invisible in the city’s deeds office.
—
But back then, Somalis were new
and barely had a foothold in the city. “The Hotel Taleh was full of people with no work,” Asad recalls. “Most Somalis had no jobs, no businesses, they knew nobody. Everyone would get up every morning and hunt. And there was no school for the children to go to. So we would also get up and hunt. The adults and children of Islii all hunting together.”
How Asad feels about his years at the Hotel Taleh depends on his mood. When he is feeling light, he remembers the joy of being unencumbered.
“It became a free life,” he says. “If something is good, I do it. If something is not good, I don’t do it. In the mornings, I would go out with the other kiddies who lived at the hotel. We would visit this one and that one. We would go and fight with the Kenyan kids. There was an old lady who only came out of her house once a day. We would throw stones on her roof to force her to come outside. Sometimes, we would sleep wherever we happened to be when night fell. We’d walk back to the hotel for breakfast the next morning.
“Inside the hotel, every room was mine. I would sleep with a different family every night. I would eat with a different family every mealtime. I was the orphan AliYusuf boy. Because I belonged to everybody, I belonged to nobody.”
But on days when he is not feeling so good, his memories of this time are taut and anxious.
Early one morning, for instance, before the adults had emerged from their rooms, Asad picked up a stone and hurled it at an unwitting boy. He does not remember now what provoked him, but he does recall the trajectory of the stone. The moment it left his hand, the world around him paused, for he knew that he had thrown too hard and too straight. The stone slammed into the top of the boy’s cheekbone, just below the eye, and when the world unfroze, the boy was lying on the ground, and the left side of his face was streaked with blood.
Somebody ran to wake the boy’s father, an important AliYusuf man at the Hotel Taleh, and word went around among the children that he would catch Asad and drag him to his room and thrash him.
Asad bolted. Once he was across the street, he looked back at the Hotel Taleh, picked up an assortment of stones, and waited. Then he dropped his stones and ran.
“There is a bus that goes around and around Nairobi’s Ring Road,” Asad says. “It is free for children. I jumped on the bus. It was overloaded like you can’t believe. I went around and around Nairobi three times before I got off.”
The spot he chose was miles from Eastleigh. He wandered away from the Ring Road, into Nairobi’s central business district, and walked and watched for hours.
“It was becoming dark. I heard this loud, pumping music coming closer and closer from behind me. It was a minibus taxi, full of people. They stop. One of them puts his head out of the window and talks to me in Swahili.
“ ‘Small boy, where are you going?’
“ ‘Islii.’
“They all laughed, the whole taxi. ‘We are not going to Islii. We are going the opposite way.’
“But they took me to Islii anyhow. On the journey, questions, questions, questions. ‘Why you wander so far? You want to be a Kenyan? You looking for a nice young Kenyan girl?’ They did not charge me. They dropped me far from the hotel, the other end of Islii.”
Asad walked home very slowly. He had half a mind to turn around and bolt again, but he had just come from Nairobi with his tail between his legs, and he did not have the stomach for another defeat, especially now that the sun had set. He thought of taking refuge elsewhere in Eastleigh, but there was no such thing. Everyone knew him as the AliYusuf orphan boy. The whole place was a conveyer belt that would deliver him to the Hotel Taleh.
“When I got to the hotel, there were these guys outside chewing mira.
“ ‘Asad, why did you hurt that boy?’
“ ‘It was a mistake.’
“ ‘His dad is going to beat you.’
“ ‘No.’
“They hid me in their room, and I slept there that night.”
In the morning, when he braved the hotel corridors, one of the first people he saw was the boy he had hurt.
“His eye was very bad. I said I was sorry. I said I didn’t mean it. And his father did not beat me, but after that everyone kept their children away from me.”
—
“The most senior AliYusuf at the hotel,” Asad tells me, “was a man named Mohamed Sheikh Abdi. He complained that there were no schools good enough for his children in the whole of Nairobi. So he found a Muslim boarding school in a town far away, still in Kenya, but on the border with Tanzania. When he enrolled his children there, he said, ‘Asad is going, too. One day, his father will come, and he will expect to greet a child with an education.’ Other AliYusuf men with money also sent their children. My old stepbrother, Galal’s child, he went, too, and also one of Galal’s brothers. Mohamed Sheikh Abdi took us personally in a hired minibus.”
Asad no longer recalls how many times he escaped from the school and returned to Eastleigh. He thinks three, maybe four.
“In Kenya,” he says, “if you wear a school uniform, you can hitch a lift. Anyone will stop for you. On the journey down, I knew that I would soon be coming back the other way. I did not want to go to school. I think that that first time, I was there maybe a week.” He stops speaking to let out a long giggle. “The adults at the Hotel Taleh think they have gotten ridden of Asad. One morning they wake up and there he is, leading the little ones through the streets.”
I press him on what school was like, on why it was so intolerable. He shrugs.
“I was too wild for the other children. I was either hurting them or upsetting them. This was a very proper school, a strict boarding school for Muslim Kenyan children to learn Arabic. The teachers did not tolerate my wildness. I felt bored. The teachers shouted too much. I would come up to other children to ask them questions in the middle of a class, when you are meant to be quietly listening to the teacher. I would take other children away to skip class with me. Mohamed Sheikh Abdi kept sending me back, but I never lasted. I think the longest was maybe three weeks.”
—
There was one Eastleigh ritual that did turn the crazy orphan boy into a solemn child. Every now and again, a Ogadeni would arrive in Eastleigh having escaped from a part of southern Somalia controlled by enemies. News of each arrival would crisscross the neighborhood in minutes. The following morning, after the newcomer had been given a chance to eat and rest, people would begin queueing at the door where he or she was staying. Everyone had been cut off from family. Everyone was hungry for information.
Each time, Asad would go and listen. And each time he would convince himself that he was about to hear news of his father. He did learn about other people. His uncle, for instance, in whose care he had fled Mogadishu, had been captured by enemy forces in the town of Qoryooley, taken back to Mogadishu, and tortured. It was said that he had lost an eye while in enemy hands but had escaped and was safe now, somewhere in Ethiopia. And Asad’s cousin Abdi, into whose arms he had just been transferred when the mortar exploded, had been killed in battle.
About his father, he heard nothing.
In his mind, always, he believed that he was living in an unfortunate interval from which he would soon be delivered. Either his father would appear and sweep him away. Or Yindy would call for him.
PART II
Ethiopia
To Addis and Dire Dawa
Yindy did call for him, but not in the manner he had imagined. The way he saw it in his mind, an air ticket would appear; he did not know from where. In the Hotel Taleh, it would pass from one AliYusuf hand to the next, each person who touched it imagining in his own private way the land to which this thin piece of cardboard was to take Asad. Then Mohamed Sheikh Abdi would hire a minibus to take him to the airport and fill it with well-wishers, adults and children alike. They would wave and cheer and take photographs as he walked away from Kenya and into the tube of an airplane. Of the journey itself he had no notion at all; he knew only that Yindy would be waiting on the other side to lead him into a new
life.
It was not that simple. Yindy’s proposal was an awkward one. She was able to responsa a dozen people to join her in America. Among them were her mother—who was also Asad’s father’s sister—her father, and several of their relatives. They were all in Dire Dawa, a town in Ethiopia many hundreds of miles from Nairobi, waiting for their applications to be processed. Asad must go to them, Yindy said. It was only from there that he could get the documents to go to America.
The AliYusuf elders held long discussions about these people waiting in Dire Dawa. Who were they, precisely? There were close blood family among them, to be sure: Asad’s paternal aunt. But she was part of her husband’s family now, and while he was Ogadeni, he was not AliYusuf; the ties were thus thin. And so the question arose: Do we send this lone AliYusuf boy far away into the care of a man we don’t know? What if Asad’s father should come to Islii to collect him? He must stay with his people.
In the beginning, that was the majority opinion. But as the discussions with Yindy continued, perspectives changed. What if his father never arrives? What if he is an orphan? Can we deny him the opportunity of a life in America for the sake of a father who is quite possibly dead? Life is for the living; one does not wait for ghosts.
Once, Asad himself spoke to Yindy on the phone. Her voice sounded surprisingly close, as if she might walk into the Hotel Taleh at any moment. But her manner was stiff and nervous: Your uncles are thinking, she said. You must do whatever they decide.
As the weeks passed, Asad grew increasingly certain that the elders would tell him that he was going to Ethiopia. And as his certainty grew, so his relation to the world around him began to change.
“Something funny happened with me. I became quiet. I didn’t drift far from Islii. I stopped leading the other kiddies to trouble.”
A Man of Good Hope Page 6
