Marion Edmunds
As in the movie Green Card, a Cape Town couple has challenged South African immigration officials to prove that they have not consummated their marriage.
Moroccan baker Youssef Essakhi (24) says he is wildly in love with his wife Amina (62) and he is taking the government to court for denying him permanent residence in South Africa.
The Western Cape Immigrants Selection Board rejected Essakhi’s application in June this year, saying his marriage to Amina ne Gamieldien was a sham. ”After interviewing you and your wife, all evidence [presented by yourself] indicates that the marriage was contracted to evade the provisions of the Aliens Control Act,” the board stated, advising Essakhi to leave the country and return to his family in Casablanca.
But Essakhi says he is in love with both his wife and Cape Town and is fighting back. In papers before the Cape High Court, he explains that he was attracted to Gamieldien – who is old enough to be his mother – from their very first meeting.
”There was something about her that immediately attracted me to her. She is to me a beautiful and vivacious woman,” he said in a sworn affidavit. She declared in a supporting affidavit: ”As far as I was concerned it was love at first sight when I met him.”
Essakhi met Gamieldien while on holiday two years ago. He flew from Casablanca to Johannesburg, but after three days in the city, he was mugged and robbed of all his goods. Shaken, he retreated to Durban, and met the Naidoo family at the Isipingo mosque.
They befriended the lonely traveller, invited him home frequently, and it was there that he first clapped eyes on his beloved, who was staying with the Naidoos, on a short visit from Cape Town.
Both Gamieldien and Essakhi claim to have embarked on a whirlwind romance, and when she left for home, he followed and they lived together in her Athlone house.
They married in April last year. Essakhi got a job as a baker in Mitchells Plain, and started to bake ”a new line of products with a Moroccan influence”. Essakhi vouches that he and his wife have healthy and regular sex, and that he is satisfied that their marriage is the lasting kind. Gamieldien claims to be equally satisfied.
Essakhi’s legal representative, Shehnaz Seria, said his week: ”Had she been a 62- year-old man, and he a 24-year-old woman, there would not have been such a gasp. The fact that she was a woman, and so much older, triggered off prejudices.”
Ironically, Gamieldien was 17 years old when she married her first husband, who was 22 years her senior. He died 15 years ago. She has six adult children and she acknowledges that they have taken a while to get used to her marriage.
She is learning Arabic so she can communicate better with her husband. They are both Muslim, but were married in a civil ceremony, in community of property. The couple are angry with the Immigrants Selection Board for judging their relationship after a short and, they believe, superficial inquiry.
”No member of the board inquired from her whether or not we enjoyed an active sexual life,” said Essahki in his affidavit, ”nor did they inquire about our living and domestic arrangements.
”No member of the board attended on her or I at our home, nor did they require that a person well known to us attend the interview to be asked questions about our relationship.”
The interview took 20 minutes and was the government’s only test of the depth of their relationship.
The board based its rejection of the application on the grounds that Essakhi was not an expert baker, that the couple had not married according to Muslim rites, and that their answers to the questions were not credible. The interview was prefaced by the remark by a member of the board to Essakhi: ”We the panel believe that you only married so that you can stay in the country.”
The minister and the Department of Home Affairs are opposing Essakhi’s application.