Johannesburg -
Ijigu Blaxe broke out in a terrified sweat. He had to pack up his life. Fast. The mob was coming.
Inexpensive tins of baby formula, bags of maize meal and tins of pilchards flew from his hands into empty boxes.
“You must hurry,” a police officer, standing sentry, urged the Ethiopian shopkeeper.
“They are coming. You have to leave now.”
“Get all your stuff out of this shop, onto your van, quickly,” advised another police officer.
“We will escort you out.”
Blaxe’s hands shook. He couldn’t believe it.
In the two years that the 58-year-old had run his neat spaza shop in Bramfischerville, he had tried to work hard to cultivate a good relationship with his customers.
But everything changed this week. Now neither he nor his staff were safe.
Since the deadly shooting of a teenager, allegedly by a Somali shopkeeper in nearby Snake Park on Monday, the looting and the violence had been spreading like a virus. In the outbreak of violence, xenophobia festered, like an open sore.
From Snake Park, attacks on spaza shops spread to Naledi, to Zola, Emndeni, and now Bramfisherville.
Soweto was burning.
Blaxe now knew, like some of his compatriots, that he had no choice but to flee.
“This is not good,” he muttered.
“I won’t sleep tonight. My mind is not making sense,” the heavyset Ethiopian said in broken English.
“I have a big problem here.”
“Relax. Don’t panic,” a police officer comforted Blaxe.
“Don’t give yourself high blood pressure over this. Everything will be okay.”
That’s when police, covering the street outside his small shop, received an urgent call. Looters had struck another Somali-owned store a few streets away.
“These people are not safe here in Soweto,” remarked another officer.
“Even when we escort these foreigners here, we have community members jumping on their vans, trying to steal more stuff.”
In the crumbling ruins of Yusuf Ahmed’s spaza shop, an angry crowd shouted: “You must go, you must go.”
Julia Mhlabo, a resident of Bramfisherville, spat: “We want these foreigners gone. They are shooting our children. Selling them drugs. We are fed up, we are tired. They must go.
“If my child is stealing from you, you don’t shoot him. You talk to me as a mother.”
Another laughed: “We want what’s in that shop, we want our food, our money, on behalf of the child who died. We are not working. They are giving jobs to their brothers from Pakistan, from Somalia.”
Earlier, the police arrested Ahmed’s brother for illegal possession of a firearm. That’s when the crowd struck, emptying the shop of almost everything on its shelves, tearing through its fragile exterior.
Ahmed looked hurt.
“Without reason, these people can do this to us at any time. We are feeling scared. These people stole our stuff. We are not safe. Yes, I know my brother shouldn’t have had an illegal weapon, but we need it for our protection.
“Here in South Africa, the people always do this to Somalis. We came here because we thought we would be safer than (in) Somalia.”
Ahmed said he planned to return to his native country this year as he feared for his safety.
“They looted my shops in Cape Town. It feels like it’s apartheid here in Soweto, that I’m not a human being. We are all targets for them.”
Zodwa Manana had little sympathy for the shopowner.
“They are helping us when we have no money, they give us credit, but here they are shooting our kids. They came here to make a business. Now we want them to go back to their own country.”
As she watched Ahmed and a small group of Somalis packing what little remained intact, Manana became even more outraged. “They run their spazas like a family. They buy goods in bulk and sell them cheaper than us. Do you know how much they sell matches for? 50c. We sell for R1. Who do you think will buy from us?”
A policeman, standing guard, monitored the ever-growing crowd suspiciously.
“These people, ah, they just want groceries for mahala,” he said, gesturing towards trampled loaves of bread.
“If we weren’t here, these shopkeepers would be hurt.”
Still, there was a semblance of fragile peace. “Wait for tonight,” said the officer. “That’s when we’re going to be really busy. None of these foreign-owned shops will be safe.”
- Saturday Star