By Tabelo Timse and Francois Rank
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Elvis Fanyana, who comes from Zvishavane (red mountain) in Zimbabwe, said starting a life without anything in a foreign country was difficult.
Fanyana, who worked on a mine as a driver back home, said he had come to South Africa in March after being retrenched.
“Things are bad back home. People earn salaries, but can‘t even afford a pair of shoes. I had no choice but to come here because my family would not survive otherwise.”
He said he had left his wife and two children, aged four and two months, back home. “The youngest I haven‘t seen and I don‘t know when I‘ll see her.”
The journey to South Africa was risky, but he said he had had no choice. “I even had to cross the crocodile-infested Limpopo River to get here.”
When he arrived in South Africa, he first went to Pretoria to apply for a permit, but it was difficult so he and other immigrants decided to come to Port Elizabeth.
While waiting for his paperwork, he looked for small jobs. “It‘s not easy because we are used as cheap labour and sometimes abused because we don‘t have the proper papers.”
Abu Dewan, from Bangladesh, said he had been in the country for four years and worked as a shop assistant in Govan Mbeki Avenue. He was in South Africa because his country was overpopulated and there were no jobs.
Dewan said he could have gone to European countries, but had decided not to because of the negative attitude towards immigrants there. “We are called all sorts of names and treated as terrorists. In South Africa we face many challenges as well, but at least we have a better life.”
His family is still in Bangladesh and he phones them from time to time.
Hadi Mohamed, who has been in the country for seven years, said the hardest thing for him was that he wondered every day where his family was. “When I left, everything was chaotic. Our village was attacked and we all ran in different directions. That was the last time I saw them.”
He said he owned a shop in Motherwell. “When things were good in my country, more than 50 per cent of the adult population were self-employed. That‘s what we did in our country – we traded. You will find almost every Somali in South Africa is trading.”
Mohamed said he would not hesitate to go back to his country if the civil war ended.
Dawit Godena and Fitsum Solomon are from Hossan, a small town in Ethiopia. What they missed most about their country was the national staple food injera, a pancake-like bread.
Although there was a democratic government there, they said people who fought for their rights were killed.
Another Ethiopian, Samson Asmare, said sometimes people waited for three months just to be served at the home affairs office as officials could only process 20 applications a day.
For Monica Lukezo, South Africa provided a safe haven from the horrors which plagued the Democratic Republic of Congo 12 years ago.
“I came with my family when there was still war in my country. My father worked for the government with Mobutu sese Seko and when they wanted to kill him we ran away.”
Lukezo, one of nine children, said her parents and the youngest children first fled to Zambia before coming to South Africa 12 years ago.
– Additional reporting by Justin McCabe.[email protected]
Source: The Herald Online, June 21, 2007