Living on Sidelines

It is the year 2000, after roaming around Cape Town looking for any type of job that does not require any qualifications from school or college, as long as you got two hands, two legs and you are willing to work; I get a job in Gatesville. I am working as a semi-skilled welder. We fit exhaust silencers and do gas welding. We are working on a roadside along Klipfontein Road opposite The Golden Dish Cafe.

I am working with my boss, Khaled. It is a simple informal business that requires simple equipment – two gas bottles (acetylene and oxygen), silencers and a set of ramps, and a few spanners, sockets and ratchet. He is making good money more than what a clerk makes in the office. He got two cars: a Toyota Hilux bakkie and BMW E30, and is not married yet. He is probably in his late twenties, he wears a long beard and his hair is thinning sideways across his scalp welcoming premature baldness. When we are busy on that day, he makes sometimes three thousand rand. I am earning three hundred and fifty a week, not that bad. He buys lunch everyday – Vienna Gatsby sandwich and a 2 litre Double O drink at Golden Dish Cafeteria, which we share from one paper cup. He is a very good man. I am staying with him at his parents’ house in Kensington. We eat together with his parents, brothers: Abdul and Yaseen. His parents are very welcoming and accommodating. We eat fresh food from the kitchen to the table. The typical Cape Malay dishes: yellow rice, spiced chicken curry, buttery roti and refreshing tomato and onion and cucumber sambals. But I miss pap and beans sometimes. Every morning at around 5 a.m., Khaled wakes me up for fajr prayers. He asks me politely if I would join him for morning prayers. No one with five senses working could refuse something good like a call to prayer.  He does not like to drive to the mosque early in the morning. They have a prayer room where we make salah. After salah, Khaled stays behind to read the Qur’an. I leave him and go to my sleeping place in the garage. I take out my novel from my bag and start reading. I am reading Of Human Bondage. I flip straight to the page I had stopped yesterday on chapter three. I read for an hour then I hear shuffling feet coming toward me.

‘Breakfast is ready,’ says Khaled.

‘Am coming.’

I close up my novel and put it back into my bag.

***

After living for a month with my boss’ parents in Kensington, I decide that it is time to live on my own. I want to live within walking distance to work which makes me look for a place to rent around the Athlone area. I have made a few calls around but the landlords and landladies seem not interested to take on black tenants. This is a coloured area. Blacks and coloureds live like oil and water as if apartheid segregation laws are still in force. And going to look for a place to stay in a township like: Langa, Gugulethu, Nyanga and Mannenberg is not an option. These are dangerous locations to stay especially for us foreign nationals. Every day people are robbed and sometimes killed just for a phone. And living in these areas you cannot buy a thing like a TV, nice clothes and furniture. There are frequent break-ins in these areas. Gang wars. The worst scenario is that you are made to feel as a foreigner every day of your life, even if you marry a local girl and lived among the locals for over twenty years. It is better to live behind high walls of the suburbs where they don’t mind about our business as long as we pay our house rents. We’re being denied of the right to healthcare. In hospitals, we are scowled upon and treated with unfriendly hands and tools. Our children born in this county are offered second-class useless birth certificates. We cannot vote, own property, or use the veritable cornucopia of our educational accolades to help ease the shortage of skilled labour in this country. Many of the immigrants who are graduates are languishing at car parks as car guards whilst their degrees and certificates are gathering dust. My boss, Khaled makes some calls for me around Athlone. He gets a back room in Voel Street in Belgravia. The rent is R800. It is a bit expensive for me and I rope in my Congolese friend, Alain to share the room with me. Alain is a qualified civil engineer but works at the Engen Service Station as a petrol attendant. Khaled would pay the deposit and I’ll pay the monthly rent. He will be deducting from my wages.

***

It is around five in the afternoon, the sun is still up enjoying its glow of yellow reign. It is summer and the sun stays up to 8 pm. It is like a real tropical afternoon in Central Africa. It is hot and many people after work go straight to the beaches to cool off the sweltering heat. I am in a bakkie heading to a my new place of abode in Belgravia. We pick up Alain at his work place. Alain is tired of staying at the workplace. His boss Mohammed doesn’t allow him to bring his girlfriend, Zodwa. Every weekend he must go and sleep at Zodwa’s place in Makhaza. He is scared that Zodwa’s other boyfriends might kill him there one day.

Khaled stops at a gate of the house we are about to rent in Voel Street. He fishes out his Nokia 6110 cell phone from his pocket and phones the landlady, Mrs. Isaacs.

‘We are out here,’ he says into the phone. Within a minute, we hear a door opening, a middle aged woman in a gaudy long dress sweeping the floor shuffles to the gate.

‘Are you the new tenant?’

‘Hmm…actually my two boys.’

The woman looks askance at us.

‘We don’t rent our separate entrance to Africans?’

‘But why?’

‘We don’t trust them.’

‘They work for me and I trust them.’

Then a potbellied man with bowed legs comes out and calls out to his wife.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘This guy tricked us. It is black guys who wants a room not him.’

The man comes close and looks at us like one looks at his favourite animals in a cage at a zoo. To him we look like two good monkeys.

‘Where are they from?’ pointing his finger at me and Alain.

‘From Malawi and Congo.’

‘Do they have passports or papers?’

‘Yes they do.’

Alain fishes out his asylum paper and I produce my passport. The man takes them inside the house. In a jiffy, he comes and gives us back our documents. Mrs. Isaacs looks disinterested as it is clear like a day that her husband has consented to take us in.

‘They can move in, BUT…no bringing friends and girls here,’ says the man.

The woman scowls at us and walks away. Khaled pulls the bakkie in and we offload our stuff: two mattresses, two pots, one frying pan, three cups and two Shangani bags and a hot plate. Khaled helps us to take the stuff into our one-bedroom separate entrance. The landlord comes with two plastic chairs.

‘I have noticed that you got no chairs.’

‘Thank you,’ I say receiving the chairs.

***

One Saturday afternoon after work at around three, my boss and I leave for Muizenberg beach. It is very hot today. We find the beach full: black and white people swimming together like children of one household. Women of all shapes in their lubricious swimsuits. A pleasant sight. But out of the water we scatter: the dissonance between us is so palpable. One accuses the other of stealing his land, while the other accuses him of being ungrateful for civilizing him and making his life easier. There are a few surfers surfing. The noise of the people is so sonorous but friendly to the ear. Khaled runs into the water and beckons me to join him. I hesitate for a moment, peel off my clothes and remain with my boxer’s short. I run and jump into the water. After an hour of playing in the water, we come out; dry ourselves and leave the beach. My boss then takes me around and we hit the beach road, cruise through the posh suburbs – Camps Bay, Constantia, Bishopscourt. It is a breathtaking sight. The area drips with opulence. One could not believe that he is in African city. I wonder when Khayelitsha will turn into Constantia. Alexandra into Sandton? It is possible and can be done. It is the same South Africa that produced these suburbs. The previous white regime made everything easy for themselves. They built these suburbs using the resources we have. What is wrong with us? Are we not ashamed to make our own people live in claustrophobic tin shacks, leaving them to perish in incessant and gratuitous humiliation? Aren’t we beggars living on the beach of gold?

And you, you call yourself an advocate for the poor; take your SUV car and drive to townships and villages, and see if you can withstand the people’s rage, hatred, and malice. They’ll skin you alive. People are suffering and anger is palpable everywhere. People are starting to lose their minds and soon they’ll gang up and fight their common enemy. You dine and wine while the voters perish in poverty.

These people didn’t choose to live in squalor; they’re forced by the evil system. And you’re propagating the system, and unashamedly you’ve become what the evil system wanted you to become. What the evil system did to the oppressed, you are now doing it to your own people.

 ****

Soon in this country, we will be celebrating thirty years of freedom. Will this be honourable, befitting celebrations? When our women are abused, murdered and raped in our communities; schools breeding grounds of future drug lords? People living in tin shacks and fear of gangsters. Corruption still not defeated, and many of our youth (the future of this country) are unemployed. No lights and water in a land of milk and honey.