Jonny Steinberg: When Nato's aerial bombardment of Libya began, I watched the television coverage in a travellers' lodge in Mitchells Plain.
Each room had four or five mattresses strewn across the floor; a traveller, I was told, paid R30 a night to sleep on one, his roommates invariably strangers. Everyone in the establishment - the owner, the people who cleaned the rooms and cooked, as well as the guests - was Somali.
The lodge's little restaurant was packed, each customer's attention fixed on the television screen on the wall. Standing with remote control in hand, the proprietor switched from Al Jazeera to Sky to CNN: any channel covering Libya earned the lodge's attention.
My interest in the coverage was somewhat abstract. I wanted Gaddafi to go lest he slaughter people I had never met. The conversation among the travellers around me, translated into English courtesy of my Somali companion, was considerably more practical. Were civil war to break out in Libya, someone asked, would Gaddafi's forces be too busy fighting to worry about border control? Would it be possible to walk right through the country to the Mediterranean and get a boat to Europe? And what if Gaddafi were overthrown, another person asked. It would take a new regime a long time to settle. Now would be a good time to get to Europe through Libya.
I was being educated in a whole new way of watching television. These people, I realised, imbibed large quantities of international news each day of their lives. All corners of the planet were of interest to them. They combined what they learned on television with the hearsay of travellers; with e-mails and Facebook postings from long-lost relatives; with rumours. They were always calculating, as habitually as they ate and drank, the question forever in their minds: where to go next?
Civil war broke out in Somalia in April 1991; 20 years later, it has not abated. Most of the people who watched television in Mitchells Plain that morning are in their 20s and 30s, their memories of their motherland dim. They are well aware that it will not be possible to go back any time soon. Their feelings of national belonging are sad and hungry and yearning in ways that only those who have lost their homelands will ever understand. They scour the planet, weighing each country against the next, asking only a handful of questions. Where will we be safe? Where will we qualify for refugee status? Where will our children be well educated? Where is it good to do business?
My companion was living in Addis Ababa in 2004 when a group of Somali travellers passed through from the south. They said that Mandela's country was the land of milk and honey. Black and white lived in peace. Living was cheap and there was money aplenty. And so my companion stuffed $1200 in his pocket and headed south. "They said nothing about xenophobia," he complained wryly. "I was foolish enough not ask them, 'If South Africa is so wonderful, why are you heading north?'"
During the first half of 2010, Cape Town's Somalis spoke of Uganda in excited tones. People on the streets of Kampala were friendly to foreigners. The police were lenient, even if you did not have papers. Business was good. And then a bomb blast killed dozens of Ugandans watching a World Cup soccer match and a Somali group claimed responsibility. Somalis around the continent put their ears to the ground and heard that things were no longer so great in Uganda. Ordinary people now spat at and beat Somalis. The police were no longer so friendly.
With Uganda gone, where to next? My companion had been told that if you walked across the Mexican border into the US, you would be caught and jailed. But the authorities would not deport you to Somalia's civil war. After a year or two in prison, they would give you American papers, and you could call for your family to join you.
"How do you know this?" I asked. "Stories," he replied. "Just stories."
That's the thing. CNN, Al Jazeera, the word of a passing traveller: these are hardly reliable sources of news. To be homeless is to be a gambler. You gather the information you can, you calculate, but ultimately you take a leap of faith into the unknown.
I cannot swear to it, but I would not be surprised if at least one of the people with whom I watched television that morning is now walking through Libya, an image of Europe guiding his way.
• Steinberg is with Huma at the University of Cape Town
Source: www.timeslive.co.za
No comments:
Post a Comment