Friday, May 30, 2008
Pearlie Joubert |
“I was behind the counter in my shop when my neighbour came in. I’d lived next door to her for six years and we were friendly. She started doing that dance … toyi-toyi you call it.
“I said: ‘Hey, sisi (sister)! You must sing when you dance!’ She looked into my eyes and shouted: ‘Hamba kwerekwere, hamba (go, foreigner, go).’”
So began Somalian-born Muhamed Barre’s terrifying ordeal in Khayelitsha’s Site C last Friday night. At least 30 Somali-owned shops were closed in the township, most after being looted.
The neighbour’s sinister dance was the trigger for an invasion.
“So quickly, the other people and children picked up from her and then they started breaking and looting and also shouting ‘hamba kwerekwere, hamba!
“I know everybody who looted. They were my neighbours; some lived across the road. I gave sweets and chips to their children. I sometimes did their shopping for them. I lent them money.
“A woman across the road asked: ‘Where’s this man? We must put him six feet under tonight’.”
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| Somalian Muhamed Barre is bitter about his neighbours in Khayelitsha looting his shop and threatening to kill him |
The store was open seven days a week, sometimes from the early morning until
Twenty-four hours after foreign traders were chased out of Du Noon in Milnerton and their shops looted, his was one of the first in Khayelitsha to be hit.
Barre fled to the back of his shop. “People became more and more crazy and they started breaking up the whole place; I ran outside where a police vehicle was parked.”
As the rioters, some with knives and metal poles, turned their attention to his house, he says the police were largely inactive.
“A woman walked past one of the policeman with a big 15kg of [looted] sugar. She lost her balance and the policeman helped her to get a better grip on the sack. He laughed when she said thanks and danced away.”
“The cop asked me: ‘Do you want me to save your life?’ I said: ‘Please, please, they’ll kill me.’ He opened the back of the van and said: ‘Get in kwerekwere; I save you.’”
At the police station he found other Somalis who had taken refuge. There he phoned his former wife, a South African living in
“She cried over the phone saying I must not worry about our boy. She said I must please not come to
“What will happen to my Faizel? He looks like me. He’s also a Barre.”
In addition to his house and store, Barre lost R40 000 worth of stock.
Possessing just his resident’s papers and the clothes he is wearing, he is now effectively interned at the refugee camp at the Youngsfield army base in Wetton with 1 400 other foreign nationals.
Hugging himself against the icy north-wester, he now has less than when he left
The army has erected rows of brown tents and banned the media. A Muslim relief organisation feeds the fugitives twice a day.
NGOs coordinated by the Treatment Action Campaign and helped by the state’s disaster management service say the refugees desperately need medical and other assistance.
Barre wears a green plastic armband bearing a number which he must display if he wants to move around the base. Between
“We’re trapped,” said Barre. “We can’t use the railway because we’re told we’ll be killed and thrown off the trains. We’re scared of the taxi drivers. What can we do, madam?”
In an outpouring of bitterness and fear, Barre described
“I hate this country. Some of the black people in this country behave like animals.
hey’re cruel and uneducated and can’t even show on a map where
The official policy in
He has lost all trust in South Africans.
“We buried more than 50 of my countrymen in
“They want me to go back and sleep next to the people who wanted to kill me! You can’t change the hearts of people so quickly.
“Even the kids in this country hate us. I want to go back to