“There was a student march on the campus one day,” Asad tells me. “I’m not sure exactly when, but very soon after Foosiya and I were married. A student was killed by the soldiers. There was a rumor among the students that the soldiers were coming to their residence to kill more of them, so they fled all over the city. Many ran to Bole Mikhael; there were a lot of students living in the neighborhood. And government people came after them. All of a sudden, government men were walking around Bole Mikhael. They were knocking down doors and breaking into houses. They had lists of names. They were looking for particular people.
“And then things became hard to understand. There was this old Amhara man who lived in Bole Mikhael. He owned some flats. He was a harmless old man. He used to just sit all day in the sun on a plastic chair, greeting people. One day, he was gone. I was told that intelligence people came to his house in the middle of the night and took him away. He never came back, not while I was still living in Addis.
“Then about a week after the old man disappeared, soldiers came for someone I knew well. His name was Faizel. He used to chew mira with us. We would call him Fooljeex, which means ‘cracked front tooth.’ He was taken away. This was maybe three months before I left Addis. I did not see him again. I’m not sure if he ever came back.
“My fear was a very lonely fear, brother. Other Somalis did not understand what was happening the way I did. To most of the Somalis in Bole Mikhael, all Ethiopians were the same; they were all Amhara. I was different. I got to know Ethiopians better than that, so I could see things other people could not see, and what I saw was frightening me.
“There are layers among any group, brother. Even Somalis. Most Ethiopians thought we were all the same. But no. There are those from Ethiopia and those from Somalia. And then even within those two groups there are Daarood, Hawiye, Isaaq. You have a group in general, and then you look deeper. I went deeper into the Ethiopians. I knew more than most Somalis about what was going on. I knew because some taxi drivers were talking to intelligence: they were spies. And I knew the taxi drivers, I knew Yared and his friends. Yared had many lives, brother.
“And so I knew that the sort of people they were after were specific. They were after student activists, Oromo nationalists, Ogadeni nationalists, and some Amhara people who were against the government. But I also knew that their information systems were rubbish, brother. They just listened to talk. And then a person disappeared. That old Amhara man: somebody whispered about him; he had nothing to do with anything.
“And I was an Ogadeni, brother. And I was out and about, talking to this one and that one. It was my work to be out and about. I thought: It’s a matter of time before somebody finger-points me. I will be taken away one night, and Foosiya will never see me again.
“So that is why I thought again about South Africa. Of all the many things we’d heard about that country, one of them was this: if the police come and throw you in jail, you have a right to a lawyer. You do not just disappear into the prisons and never return. There is justice.”
—
When I visited Bole Mikhael in April 2012, I searched for people who had lived there in the second half of 2003, the time that Asad decided to go to South Africa. I wanted other people’s recollections of that time; I wanted to know, in particular, how other people experienced the Ethiopian military.
Bole Mikhael is a transient place, Somalis coming and going all the time, and it took a while to find the sort of people I was looking for. Even then, it was not easy. For one, only a fool would talk openly with a stranger who comes asking questions about the secret activities of the Ethiopian security forces. And, besides, something happened after Asad’s departure that tampered with the memories of those who remained.
In July 2005, nineteen months after Asad left, the Ethiopian government went to war with Addis Ababa’s youth in the wake of a disputed national election. More than a hundred students were killed on the streets. Tens of thousands of people were rounded up and thrown in jail. Such dramatic events scupper even the most meticulous memories. My interviewees couldn’t really distinguish between the second half of 2003 and the second half of 2002, or 2004, for that matter. The past was divided into a before and an after. July 2005 was the only moment they could pinpoint with precision.
I spoke, too, with scholars of the Ethiopian youth movement and also with scholars of Somali resistance to Ethiopian rule in the Ogaden. Neither marks the second half of 2003 as a time of unusual fragility or of heightened repression. All I spoke to were puzzled that this was the moment that Asad took fright.
I am guessing freely, and I may well be wrong, but I do not think that Asad was fleeing danger. On the contrary, he was courting risk; he was plunging from the shore of a life he knew into the depths of one he did not.
There were two ways to get to South Africa. One was to head for the Kenyan coast and buy a place on a boat heading south. It would dock in secret on a quiet beach in Mozambique. Its passengers would make their way to the South African border on foot. The idea filled Asad with dread.
“You do not want to mess with the sea, brother,” he tells me. “You want land under your feet. On the boat, it is just you and the ocean, and you have no control over the ocean.”
The other option was to stuff his pockets with his savings and head south by bus. There were many borders to cross: first into Kenya, then Tanzania, then Zambia, then Zimbabwe, then, finally, South Africa. At each border, a smuggler of human beings would have to be hired; officials would have to be bribed. As Asad describes it, the journey seems to me so obviously uncertain, the chances of safe arrival much too scant. How does one begin to read so treacherous an environment as a lone stranger? One must serially place one’s life and liberty in the hands of the most dubious strangers.
“I didn’t even think of the journey,” Asad tells me. “I thought only of life on the other side.”
“But you were so frightened by other journeys,” I protest. “You thought that the Sahara would kill you, that the ocean would kill you, but this…”
“Ah, brother,” he says. “It makes so much sense when you say it here in this car. It was different back then in Addis. I really wanted to go to South Africa more than anything I’d ever wanted before. I couldn’t afford to think about the dangerous journey. If I’d done that, I would have been stuck in Addis.”
—
At the beginning of December 2003, just three or four months after their wedding, Asad proposed to Foosiya that he would leave for South Africa in early January. He took out his wooden box and showed her the contents. It contained twelve hundred dollars to take with him, plus enough to pay for Foosiya’s rent and food in Addis for three months.
At first, Foosiya was unsure. She asked Asad many questions about his plans for the journey to South Africa. He had no plans; he had not even imagined the journey. She asked what he’d do to make money when he got to South Africa. He had barely pictured South Africa beyond the fantastical land the tongues of travelers had spun.
She looked at him skeptically. “I will not live in this city alone,” she said. “If I do not hear from you, I am going back to Somaliland.”
“I will send for you within three months,” Asad recalls replying. “If you do not hear from me by then, it means I have been arrested and cannot contact you, and you must wait.”
“I will not wait,” she replied. “If you contact me within three months, I am yours. If you do not, I am not yours anymore.”
There was no question in Asad’s mind: he would send for Foosiya. He was only making this move in order to share with her the sort of life he had just begun to imagine. He was hardly fleeing her.
And what of Foosiya? What was she thinking? By now, Asad was referring to her as a “great woman.” He was somewhat in awe of her. But in truth he still knew little of her history and did not yet have the wisdom to divine her motives. Foosiya was from Somaliland. Much of her family lived there. By 2003, Somaliland had been stable and at peace for some time.
Foosiya was thus not in any sense a refugee. Why was she living alone in Addis? Why was she marrying an Ogadeni man, with whom her clan, the Isaaq, were on bitter terms? And an orphan Ogadeni barely out of his teens, to boot. And why was she about to follow him all the way to South Africa, a journey that would take her even farther from home?
That she had chosen a clever, hardworking man as a husband, one who seemed to make money easily, made sense. But perhaps she had picked such a young man because she might be able to fashion him into the sort of husband she wanted. And perhaps she chose an Ogadeni precisely because it would be awkward to take him home.
Maybe, for her, South Africa represented fresh ground, far from old constraints, on which a woman might be free to build the sort of life she coveted.
PART III
To South Africa
Journey
Eight years after he left Nairobi for Addis Ababa, Asad did the journey in reverse. He had walked into Ethiopia carrying a Koran, a thin pile of photographs, and a couple of changes of clothes. Now, he left with the possessions he had gathered in the intervening years.
He divided them into two groups: the expendable and the precious. The first were his daily clothes—T-shirts, jeans, sweaters, a down jacket—which he stuffed into a large duffel bag. The second bundle he carried in a small Samsonite briefcase, not a counterfeit but the real McCoy, which he had bought from a trader in Bole Mikhael. He had selected it with care: it had to be big enough to carry its cargo but sufficiently portable to be always in hand.
Among its contents were Asad’s smart clothes: a white ankle-length cotton thobe; a tailored suit that he had had made just a week before he traveled; a brand-new pair of jeans. Also, an album filled with photographs of his wedding, of Foosiya, of Yared leaning against his car, of the boys with whom he had shared a room for four years, of his Ethiopian landlady and her grandmother. And, finally, a thick red-covered journal that Asad called his Red Book. Rooda had given it to him in Wardheer—to keep a record of all his travels, he had said—and Asad had been carrying it ever since.
“What did you write in it?” I ask.
He throws a hand up to his ear and scratches it urgently, a sign of annoyance, I think, as if my question is fingering open the book itself.
“Whatever happened that was worth remembering,” he replies cautiously. “And, also, things that were funny.”
“Like?”
He shifts his weight in the passenger seat and glances out of the window. “Like when Zena imitated the deni getting so angry and everyone on the back of the truck laughed until their stomachs hurt.”
“What else was worth remembering?” I ask.
“I’m not sure. When I started planning to come to South Africa,” he replies, “I used it to practice my English. I was okay to speak English. But I thought maybe my work would require me to write it.”
I ask him again months later what was in his Red Book and get a different answer.
“It was a record,” he says, “of the very best and the very worst. Like the day Foosiya agreed to marry me. I wrote down the date, the time. And on days when I had nothing and saw no future, I would write down the date on which I had that thought.”
—
Seated next to him on the bus out of Addis Ababa was Khadar, one of the boys who had shared his room in Bole Mikhael. They would journey together as far as Nairobi, where each would make separate plans. Khadar had no interest in South Africa; he was determined to get to America.
Half an hour out of Addis, the flicker of headlights from a passing vehicle warned of an army checkpoint ahead. The bus stopped, the undocumented passengers got out—there were seven or eight of them, as Asad recalls—and walked through the bush, giving the checkpoint a wide berth. They returned to the road several hundred meters beyond the soldiers, where the bus was waiting for them. An hour later, the same thing happened again, and then again, and again once more.
The bus journey ended in the town of Dolo in the far south of the Ogaden, right up against the Kenyan border. They found a cafeteria in which to eat. That they were illegal travelers was obvious, and by the time their food arrived they had paid a man to give them information.
The stranger advised them to go the following morning to a town called Suufka, where they would find the border post to Kenya. The smugglers on the Ethiopian side of the border worked with the smugglers on the other side, he said. “You leave your bags with the Ethiopians, you walk across the border empty-handed so that the officials believe that you are going only for the day, and then you collect your bags from the Kenyans on the other side.”
Asad kept his thoughts to himself, but his incredulity must have been written across his face, for the stranger smiled.
“You need to learn whom to trust,” he said.
And then the man reeled off a list of smugglers, and each time a new name crossed his lips, Asad and Khadar wanted to know more. What is his tribe? How old is he? How long has he been in the business? Do you know people he has helped cross the border?
The seventh or eighth name was that of a woman, and both Asad and Khadar pricked up their ears. Who was she, they asked. An Ogadeni, he replied. Very strong. Very reliable.
“We chose her,” Asad says. “We feared other smugglers. They might have us arrested and then want more money to get us out of jail. We thought that a woman would not do that. A female would not have such plans.”
They got a lift to Suufka the following morning to find that the woman smuggler was waiting for them. “She was very black and very thin. She did not look at all like an Ogadeni to me. We greeted her. We listened closely to her accent. She took us to a Somali cafeteria where we drank tea.
“She asked us our names, how we got to hear of her, our tribe. She asked what money we had, but we would not tell her that. She said she would arrange to have our bags put on a donkey cart that would cross the river. She also said we must separate and cross the checkpoint alone and say that we are going to Mandera only for the day.
“She wanted us to give her all our money to keep. We were an easy target, she said: anyone could look at us and know we were traveling far and had lots of money. I said no. We each gave her fifty dollars to exchange for Kenyan money.
“We slept in a lodge and woke while it was still dark, washed, prayed in the mosque, and drank tea in the cafeteria. The smuggler did not come for a long time. It crossed both of our minds that she had run away with our things, but we said nothing to each other. Then suddenly she appeared. She sat with us. She was relaxed, cheerful. She said she was hungry. It was like we were just meeting to be social. Not to cross a border. We ate anchera—flour pancakes. We were sitting and sitting and sitting, and the sun was getting high, and I was wondering whether maybe I was going mad and that we would maybe have to remind this woman that we had just paid her a lot of money.
“Then suddenly she said, ‘Now is the time; your stuff is crossing the river as we speak.’ How did she know? Did she have a third ear that we did not have? We had no choice. We had to do what she said.”
The two men parted and crossed the border separately.
“The rule at the border post—if you are going to sleep on the other side, you need an ID. If you are coming back the same day, they just search you. The smuggler had told me to say I am going to Mandera to visit people. I stood there, and the soldiers were asking me questions in Amharic, and at the last second, I changed my mind. I didn’t want to say what the smuggler told me to say.
“ ‘I am just going to Mandera to look,’ I said. ‘I have never been.’
“That was good enough. I walked. Next came the Kenyan soldiers. They asked me nothing. They did not even search me.
“When I was sure that they wouldn’t stop me, I slowed down so that Khadar could reach me. We looked back, Ethiopia was gone, we felt no fear; it had been easy.”
The Ogadeni smuggler had said that a middle-aged woman would be waiting to meet them just beyond the border post. All sorts of people were sta
nding and watching the travelers stream in from Ethiopia. Some were men, some women, some middle-aged, others young.
A woman in the crowd raised her hand briefly and looked Asad in the eye. She turned and walked away, and Asad and Khadar followed.
“She greeted us and said that we must walk with her to Mandera. It was a long, long way. It took a couple of hours. And it was very hot, and she was very quiet. Once or twice, we asked her a question, but she said nothing, as if she hadn’t heard us. All the time, we were wondering: Where are our bags? Is she taking us to our bags?”
In Mandera, the woman walked the two travelers to the back of the market and settled them under a balbalo. Having barely said a word the entire journey, she now burst into life.
“ ‘Kenya is different,’ she said. ‘Soldiers ask to see IDs. Everyone is hunting illegal people. If they catch you, you are stuck here. They put you in a cell and take your money. Or they take you elsewhere and torture you and take your money. Or they ask for a lot of money and send you to a refugee camp.’
“She said she would arrange tickets and all we needed, and that our bags were safe and would be with us soon.
“She said, ‘If you want mira or anything else, ask now, because later I will be busy.’
“We gave her money; she went to a mira kiosk and came back with a lady who showed us an assortment of mira from which we chose. We could not calculate the prices. We did not know the money. But while we were choosing, our bags arrived, and we were so relieved that we did not care how much the mira cost. I think that we spent a lot of money.”
—
They left for Nairobi that same night. The woman who had led them to Mandera and to their bags told them that the bus ticket would cost them seven hundred shillings, that they must pay another seven hundred to soldiers at checkpoints, and another seven hundred for the conductor’s fee. They never found out precisely what that amounted to in dollars, but it was a lot. The fifty dollars they had changed in Suufka weren’t nearly enough, and they each changed two hundred dollars more.
A Man of Good Hope Page 15
