A Somali mother and her three children were killed in their shop in Tambo village near Queenstown last week. This was barely a month after they decided to leave a Cape Town refugee camp and reintegrate themselves into the community.
On the advice of government mediators Saida Mohamed and her children, aged 13, 10 and eight, left the Youngsfield refugee camp for what they hoped would be safer residence in the Eastern Cape. Mohamed’s remaining family members, still in the Blue Waters refugee camp outside Muizenberg, now expect to be deported to Somalia, a country in the grip of civil war.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) visited the Somali community in Queenstown on Wednesday this week to compile a report on the incident.
Mohamed and her children, who had been in South Africa for almost three years, had a spaza shop in Khayelitsha Site C, which was looted and destroyed on May 23. Neighbours told her to leave the township. Told by government mediators that it was safe to leave, she decided that the Eastern Cape would be safer than Khayelitsha.
She opened her shop in Tambo village three weeks ago. Last Thursday evening a group of men entered the shop, locked the door and killed the family. Saida was stabbed 113 times and she and her 10-year-old daughter, Asha, were allegedly repeatedly raped.
A witness who found the bodies the next morning said all four family members had been stripped and mutilated. After they were killed the bodies were piled on top of one another.
The first members of the Mohamed family came to South Africa shortly after their family home was bombed in 1992. Mohamed’s sister, Qarmar Musse, and her last remaining child, Zamzam Ibrahim, have been living in a tent for the past four months, first in Soetwater camp near Cape Point and now in Blue Waters. Both Ibrahim and her mother have been severely brutalised during the eight years they have been here as asylum seekers.
”Three men came into my shop and asked me for money. I gave them everything I had. They then told me to go into my room that was behind the shop. They said: ‘When we’re done with you, kwerekwere, you won’t stay in this country anymore — you will run back to your own country.’ Then they took turns to rape me,” Ibrahim said.
She said: ”We don’t blame your government. I just want to lie down and never wake up because my heart is so sore. I want to die, I truly do.”
Ibrahim’s mother’s, Qarmar Musse’s, face was battered against a security gate by people who robbed her shop and attacked her in Nelspruit a year ago. The sight in one of her eyes has been impaired. ”We have lost six of the original 11 members of our family in South Africa,” she said.
”I’m happy home affairs has rejected our application for refugee status. People are shooting one another in the streets in Somalia, but that’s better.”
Ibrahim’s husband was shot and killed in 2005 in Khayelitsha when his shop was robbed. Nobody was arrested for the killing.
Her younger brother, Mugtar Ibrahim, owned a shop in Johannesburg’s Alexandra township and has been missing since the xenophobic attacks occurred in Gauteng.
Said Ibrahim: ”Do you know why us refugees are killed here? It’s because South Africans want everything easy. You’re jealous people who don’t want to work hard. You want everything for nothing. We are very hard-working people.”
The UNHCR has offered refugees R500 per family to leave the Western Cape camps and the government is insisting that all refugee camps will be closed by mid-October.
In the past two months nine Somali shopkeepers have been killed in Queenstown and East London alone.
Acting provincial police commissioner Nomalady Dlani told the Daily Dispatch that the motive for the killings is robbery, not xenophobia.
Meanwhile, Percy Zvomuya reports that the Gauteng government permanently closed the province’s refugee camps this week, setting in motion an exodus of trucks piled with chairs, beds, blankets and other household items.
An ageing Mozambican-born man, a resident in South Africa since 1965, is now partially blind after he was injured in the xenophobic attacks in May. His South African wife, who lost a foot, says now she has to lead her husband around — even to the toilet. ”I don’t have anywhere to go,” she said. ”My house in Holomisa, on the East Rand, was burnt and all my furniture was stolen.”
Gauteng government spokesperson Simon Zwane said the authorities had ”no indication that the people don’t want to go back”.
Camp inmates accepted a R500 stipend to help them with relocation. ”If you take the money, you are basically saying you want to leave,” Zwane said.