When Ahmed Mursal (27) was held up by a drug-desperate gunman in the tuckshop where he was working in the Cape Flats township of Delft, he offered to buy the gun for R250.
He told the gunman he could pay only R30 then, but would speak to his Somali brothers, one of whom was sure to want to buy the gun. If the gunman brought the gun the next day, Mursal would pay the balance of R220. The gunman accepted.
“After he left, that’s when I felt shaken. I could not even lock the door,” says Mursal, who has been trading himself out of trouble since he fled war-ravaged Somalia in 2003 — a strategy he seems to share with most of the 6Â 000-strong-and-growing Somali community in South Africa.
Mursal came by boat, knowing only that he wanted to get to South Africa where, he heard, there were “greener pastures”.
He says he wanted to “try my luck” and didn’t bother to worry about whether South Africa was safe. In Somalia people were fighting in front of him, people were dying. He just needed to get out.
He got off at Beira and made his way to Maputo, where he was given shelter in a mosque before heading for Johannesburg. “I paid some guys, who were doing the trafficking.”
He spent one night sleeping in a railway yard in Johannesburg. With nothing but the clothes he had been wearing for a month and the English he learned at school, he made his way to Mayfair, the centre of the Somali community in Gauteng. He was given food, clothes, space in a room with five fellow refugees and taken to the mosque to pray.
The “new brother” was introduced to a Chinese merchant, who lent him stock of five belts and three pairs of socks. He started trading in busy streets, stations and taxi ranks. One winter, during his year-and-a-half stay in Gauteng, he did well selling jerseys. But it was difficult work and sometimes he was robbed of his day’s income.
Meanwhile his network in the South African Somali community strengthened, which, for someone in his position, counts as hard capital.
He moved to the Western Cape when he was offered a job for R1Â 500 a month by a fellow Somali as a shop assistant at the Delft tuckshop. But he gave it up after the incident with the gunman. He began running a small cigarette and sweet stand for another Somali at the safer Bellville taxi rank. He saved up — “just eat once a day” — and started his own stand.
A successful Somali trader offered him a job in his cash-and-carry store, Basheer Wholesalers, in Bellville’s CBD. He took it, because street trading is difficult and selling cigarettes did not sit comfortably with his Islamic beliefs.
His break came when Basheer moved his shop, but wanted to keep on renting the premises as a storeroom and repackaging warehouse. Mursal jumped at the chance of turning the shopfront into an internet café.
Basheer pays the rent and, in return, Mursal helps him manage the storeroom at the back.
He started with two PCs. “The little that I save I use to buy another one, step by step.”
A Ugandan refugee, also a Muslim, helped him set up his network and comes in to fix problems. Mursal taught himself about computers “through mistakes” and from customers, who are mostly job-seeking South Africans who come in to have their CVs typed up or to send emails to prospective employers.
He employs two workers, both South Africans. One cleans the café and the other helps customers to type up their CVs and takes care of the shop when Mursal is out.
Why doesn’t he employ fellow Somalis? “Other Somalis are too busy with their own things. You don’t want to be selfish, you see. We also need to employ South Africans.”
The formality of Mursal’s business seems to be on the same level as many local high street businesses, although his shop has a more scraped-together look than most internet cafés. On the day of the interview it was closed for renovations, which he was doing himself.
He doesn’t use an accountant, but he keeps a set of books, mainly to measure the monthly progress of his business. Business studies did not form part of his schooling in Somalia, where he attended a medrassa — an Islamic religious school — and a private school in a rural village set up by teachers when the government system collapsed.
Most of his business knowledge was acquired from his father, who was a maize and banana farmer, and other Somali business people.
In keeping with his upgrade from the streets to a formal shop, Mursal says he recently registered as a taxpayer. He hasn’t found it difficult to open a bank account, he says, and uses FNB, like many in the Somali community.
It’s been five years. His asylum-seeker document is worn as thin as tissue paper. Just last week he married a fellow Somali who he knew from back home, but fell in love with here. His business is growing and he rents a house in the suburb of Brackenfell. “There is one other Somali family there.”
It looks like he’s settling down. No, he says emphatically, he will go back … maybe next year.
The dangers of being shopkeeper
The six men spending their lunchtime in Ahmed Mursal’s internet café in Durban Road, Bellville, look like a group of war refugees. One of them, identified as Mohamud, is paralysed from the waist down — he was shot through the spine — and all of them tell stories of acquaintances shot and killed.
The stories, though, are local. Last week a Somali shopkeeper was shot in Kraaifontein. Just last night two were shot in Kimberley. Mohamud was shot in Stellenbosch in the shop where he worked. They killed his colleague and fled taking nothing — evidence, he says, that Somalis are being targeted in a low-key xenophobic war.
Mursal disagrees. Perhaps the robbers panicked after the shooting and fled. “It’s a general thing that’s happening all over South Africa. They even kill other South Africans. You can’t say that we are being targeted. If you read the Daily Voice you will see lots of South Africans are killing each other. It’s something general. But because Somalians are doing business, they are robbed on a daily basis.”
Mursal’s argument is borne out by South African shopkeepers, most of whom have at least one story about the time they stared down the barrel of a gun. Shops, more so than banks, are society’s cash collection points; they are soft, convenient targets for South Africa’s robbers.
The wave of violence against Somali business owners that swept the Western Cape last year did, however, appear to be a campaign. The shopkeepers driven out of Masiphumelele, the township in the south of Cape Town, were mob victims. It was only after a Somali delegation met local community leaders and police that things simmered down and continued at the level of “normal” South African crime rates.
Mursal says that perhaps criminals know that Somalis, as refugees, don’t have access to firearms. “So the gangster feels like, this guy, he doesn’t have anything, so let me try.”
Somalis mostly trade in groceries, clothes and linen, goods the South African retail giants dominate, so their growth prospects in city centres are limited. As hard-nosed traders, they constantly look for gaps in untapped markets and clearly see opportunities in underserviced townships.
Their retail style tends towards high volumes and low margins — average 20%, says Mursal — the opposite of the traditional township shop, which trades with a higher mark-up, low-volume approach. Until now this was feasible as there was a lack of serious competition.
The threat posed by Somalis establishing township businesses has resulted in at least some of the hits on Somali shops.
Of course an even bigger threat to traditional township shops are the large retailers, which are moving into the townships. There have been some spectacular, almost military-style robberies of these new large supermarkets. Are some orchestrated by local spaza-owning strongmen who see their sales dropping? It seems unlikely. The supermarket giants are simply too big and too well protected.
It is much easier to drive out the lone Somali trader, as tenacious as he is. — Barrie Terblanche