Rowan Callaghan
Two-year-old Fartoun plays innocently in the doorway of the cavernous room at Angelo hostel just outside Boksburg, indifferent to the omnipresent stench which fouls the air. Her family fled civil war in Somalia, but they feel abandoned in South Africa.
The little girl’s mother has left home for the day to see if she can earn enough money to help feed the 26 Somalis (families only) sharing the old hostel room. Even the lights which glow in the high ceiling can’t penetrate the shadows in which she plays.
A woman parts the blanket partitions which separate the families and says something in Arabic as she points at the meagre supplies laid out on the table against the wall. She is angry, just like most of the other Somalis sharing the old mine hostel.
Sad Awil shares room 115 with over twenty single Somali males. It is larger, but just as gloomy. “We’re just going to save ourselves; there’s no one helping us here,” he says despondently. Both groups survive on what they can bring home from day to day.
Hassan Abdi, also a resident of room 115, excitedly displays the five rand he collected during his day in town. Though he got it by begging, it will help to feed a hungry stomach.
Sad says most of the refugees prefer to work, but they are exploited by local employers who know the precariousness of their situation. He laments their plight after the hardship of getting to South Africa. “Some of them came by car; some came by ship. They came through Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania. We are running away for our lives,” he said, pointing to his fellow countrymen. And the border crossing? That was the easy part.
“If the situation is right (in Somalia), we will go back. We don’t enjoy being in South Africa. They say ‘new South africa’, but what is the new South Africa?” Sad asks.
Much of the blame for Sad and his fellow refugees’ plight is directed at the South African Red Cross who, he claims, told them to come to the hostel, but then abandoned them. “The Red Cross said to me, ‘You come by ship, you go by ship’ … We get nothing from the Red Cross.” He claims the only people that do offer help are the Actonville Young Muslims
The Red Cross denies it abandoned the refugees, saying it looked after them at Angelo until it was closed down, upon which it found them accommodation at another shelter in Grasmere, where the refugees were again supplied with food and other necessities.
But the refugees were unhappy with the location of the new shelter and left, never to be heard from again. Red Cross officials believe it is the same refugees who have re-emerged at
Further complicating matters is that if the group should turn out to be made up of “illegals”, no help may be given, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which sponsors the programme, does not allow funds to be spent on illegal immigrants.