Brilliant article by Malaika Wa Azania on the recent attacks on Somali owned shops in Soweto. THE DAY SOWETO SHAMED ME (Sunday independent newspaper ) On June 16, 1976, the streets of Soweto were filled with young men and women who were trembling with indignation at the diabolical conditions confronting them. These young men and women, most of them students, marched through the dusty streets in protest not only at Afrikaans being used as a medium of instruction in township schools, but against the indignity of being subjugated in the land of their birth. Over the past few days, the streets of Soweto saw similar uprisings. Young people were trembling with fury. But this time it was not at a brutal system that had given birth to their disenfranchisement, nor at a regime that stratified people on the basis of pigmentation. It was at Somali shop owners, men who had fled the conflict in their land of birth to find refuge in a South Africa seen as an oasis of hope on a continent characterised by socio-political instability and economic ruin. The past week saw Afrophobic violence rearing its ugly head yet again. It was sparked by the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy in the township of Snake Park. The boy was allegedly shot by a Somali shop owner. According to residents interviewed by the Daily Maverick, the Somali national had attempted to chase a young man addicted to nyaope away from his store, a store that had a history of being broken into by this same young man. This led to an altercation. Later, a group of young men converged outside the Somali’s shop, allegedly threatening to loot. It was at this point that the shop owner apparently fired shots into the crowd. A 14-year-old boy was killed and another young man wounded in the arm. The shooting caused outrage in the community, and residents began attacking Somali-owned spaza shops. As the days went on, the violence spread like wildfire through other parts of Soweto. I had the great misfortune of witnessing the violence in my township on Thursday afternoon. I was returning from a meeting in town when I got out of a taxi and saw a lot of people standing on the street looking at something ahead. I rushed to get a clear view of what was happening. What I saw was so chilling that it haunts me. In Mondli Street in Dobsonville Extension 2, a group of young men were attempting to break through the roof of a Somali-owned store to get in and loot it. Enraged, we confronted them, informing them that we will not tolerate anarchy in our neighbourhood. They immediately ran away, driving off in a blue CitiGolf whose number plate I took down to give to the police. Like most of the residents of Dobsonville Extension 2, I was angered by what I had seen. I was angry not only because of the brutality that was being meted out to Somali nationals by fellow South Africans, but because these attacks were a reflection of an even greater crisis we are harbouring in townships. The shooting of a 14-year-old child by a Somali shop owner is truly tragic and is in no way justified. But it must not be looked at in isolation lest a false picture is painted. I am a resident of Dobsonville and I say without fear of contradiction that our community is being torn asunder by these young men and women who are nyaope addicts. The things they do in the township are beastly. They break into our homes and steal our furniture and possessions that we’ve worked very hard to obtain. On the streets, they torment us with muggings. One is even terrified about walking the short distance from home to the taxi stop. It has become so bad that we cannot leave our clothes out on the washing line to dry because they steal even wet clothes. Such are the nerve-racking conditions in townships where nyaope has taken over. Over the years, Somali shop owners have been on the receiving end of the cruelty of these nyaope addicts. Their shops have been looted, they have been stolen from. Their property has been vandalised. And, more often than not, the community and police have done nothing to bring the perpetrators to book. If anything, they have been accomplices in this criminality. What happened in Snake Park started with a nyaope addict being chased away from a shop by a Somali man who, as even the community corroborates, had been harassed by the same young man. This young man had a history of stealing from the same shop. That the store owner was brandishing a gun must not be amplified. When you’re a shop owner whose store is perpetually broken into by drug addicts, you must protect yourself and your property. We in townships know how violent these boys can be. My sister, Tshepiso, was stabbed for a mere BlackBerry Curve cellphone two years ago! Why then is it that today there are members of our society who want to claim that these Somalis, who have been tormented by the same people tormenting us, are the biggest problem in this situation? The problem is not that there are Somalis opening spaza shops in our townships – the reality of the situation is that we gain more than we lose by having these shops in our neighbourhoods. I live in a part of Dobsonville Extension 2 that is a bit far from the main shopping complex. The supermarket nearest my home is Pick n Pay, in Extension 3 – a taxi trip away. Without these shops, I would have to take a taxi, which costs R16 for a return trip, to purchase basics such as bread, vegetables and milk. This is true for most residents and that’s what informs the great support for small businesses in the townships. Furthermore, the relationship that we enjoy with the Somali shop owners is very good. When we don’t have enough money to purchase goods, they give them to us on credit. A lot of our grandmothers and grandfathers in the townships take bread and milk from these stores and repay them – interest-free – only when they get their pension money. This communal way of conducting business is something one cannot find at Pick n Pay, Shoprite or other major stores. The problem is not really Somali shop owners. It is that we have a crisis of unemployment in our country. This crisis emanates from structural inequalities informed by an untransformed, white-monopolised economy that is keeping natives of our land in bondage while a settler minority enjoys ill-gotten wealth. The problem is the high number of young people who are unable to access higher education. These young people are denied an opportunity for personal and social development by doors of learning being shut in their faces. What they then do, as they sit beneath the scorching sun on township street corners, is resort to criminal activities. But an even greater crisis is that townships are themselves designed to recreate the structural violence that is imposed on the millions of black people who, because of historic injustices and class background, reside in these suffocating confines. Townships were designed specifically to keep a black labour reserve for a white economy in the cities and leafy suburbs. Blacks would be bundled up in unsanitary spaces, suffocated on small areas of land. Unemployment, crime, poverty and disease would find a home here. And so it is no accident of history that even in a post-1994 dispensation, townships are largely constructed like this. Black-on-black violence and Afrophobic attacks emanate from this construct, hence we have “xenophobic” attacks in townships – but never in suburbs where white foreigners from Europe and America own luxury stores and restaurants. Our generation has the responsibility to reject the narrative that seeks to suggest that the problem in South Africa is so-called foreign nationals. That’s a convenient narrative that doesn’t address the root of the crisis in our country, which is that less than 10 percent of the population controls more than 80 percent of the economy, forcing 90 percent to share and fight for a small slice of the cake. It is this that is criminal. It is this that we must fight against – not our own people. We are Africans who reside in South Africa, not South Africans who are burdened by being in Africa! * Malaika Wa Azania is author of Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the Rainbow Nation
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 13:27:52 +0000
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