WOOD – EL SISTEMA MERCANTIL

Hadis chose to close his shop early at around 8pm on Monday night, instead of the usual time of 10pm. The deadline for foreign national spaza shops to shut down and leave Masiphumelele township had passed two days prior, and he was concerned about rumours of potential violence. This was particularly the case given that South African shopkeepers had threatened at a recent community meeting to ‘send their

dogs’ against those shopkeepers whose businesses remained open.94 While some traders had complied with the demand fearing attack, he had decided to follow the advice of the local police and remain open. They had assured him that he was entitled to trade by law, and that they would patrol the area and guard against any threats. Hadis usually felt safe and at ease in the neighbourhood, and regularly walked its dark, beaten down streets at night to visit friends, one of whom owned a television set where he could watch football until late into the evening. But the mood in the township had changed over the past two weeks since South African spaza shopkeepers had sent out letters informing their foreign national counterparts to leave. Several heated meetings had followed where South African spaza shopkeepers demanded that police, community leaders, and South African landlords assist in the eviction of foreign national spaza shopkeepers from the neighbourhood. It had also not become uncommon for customers or strangers in the street to warn him that his time in Masiphumelele was almost up.

Hadis had purchased his shop ‘Mandela Cash Store’ two months earlier in June 2006 from a Somali trader who was leaving Masiphumelele to live in the Eastern Cape Province. He had received a fifty percent shareholding in the shop for a price of R35,000. R20,000 of this amount came from his personal savings earned by working for relatives in spaza shops in Upington and Samora Machel in Cape Town. The remaining R15,000 had been loaned to him from friends and family. The shop’s corrugated iron structure was connected to his South African landlord’s home, and stocked household items ranging from fruit, vegetables, bread, sugar, rice, meat, shampoo, and cosmetics. Hadis acquired goods for his shop from several wholesalers in the industrial area of Epping, targeting special promotions and the lowest prices on offer by wholesalers in the area. These price savings were passed on to customers, aided by low mark ups on goods, ‘If you get R6,00 for 1kg sugar, that’s just for example, then you need to sell for R7,00 or R8,00, while some other people sell it for like R10,00’.95 However as much as these practices benefitted consumers in Masiphumelele, they drew the ire of competing South African spaza traders who viewed foreign nationals’ low prices as pushing their shops out of the market.

94 _{Interview with Mohamed Aden Osman ‘Hadis’, Bellville, 30 April 2015.} 95 _Ibid.

Hadis had not yet drawn any income from the shop, as the business struggled to meet its monthly rental payment of R2,500, and any remaining profits had been reinvested back into the business in order to build up its supply of stock and broaden the shop’s product range. He and his business partner – a fellow Somali - managed to make ends meet by living on the shop premises along with their shop assistant, surviving off some of the food items that they stocked. Most dinners comprised sliced brown bread with butter, but on some occasions they prepared canned curry and bread, or chicken fried with onion and potatoes and boiled with rice. Conveniently, a talkative Somali woman named Hooda96 _{operated a small spaza shop or ‘tuck shop’}

called ‘Buya Buya’ across the road, where she lived with her Ethiopian husband and three children. When short of change or stock Hadis would cross the street and ask for her assistance.

The sun had long set by 8pm on the winter’s night of the 28th of August 2006. Hadis closed his burglar gate and served a few more customers through its iron bars. He checked his watch, and wondered whether to keep the shop open for half an hour longer. He had recently failed to negotiate a lower rental amount with his landlord, and was worried that he was not going to be able to pay his rent at the end of the month. His thoughts were interrupted when he noticed Hooda running hastily across the street towards him. This time her visit had nothing to do with their routine shop errands. She reached his gate panicked and frightened. Looting had started in Masiphumelele she told him, and hurriedly told him the names of shops in the area that she had heard had been attacked. She ran back across the dark street and secured herself quickly inside her shop. Hadis slammed his burglar gate shut, locked his front door, and phoned the police. The police on the other end of the line sounded rushed and distracted. They informed him that they were overwhelmed by looting and attacks on shops in the area, but would come through to the shop as soon as they could.

As Hadis sat in fear in his shop digesting Hooda’s news, he heard the voices and chants of a mob made up of over a hundred people coming closer to his premises. He gradually discerned the phrase ‘Hamba Baraka’, meaning ‘go away Somalis’97

96 _{Not her real name.}

97 _{The first Somali spaza shop to open in Masiphumelele was called ‘Baraka Cash Store’, which then became a} colloquial term for Somalis in the neighbourhood. See Craig Timberg ‘Not So Welcome in South Africa’ Washington Post 1 October 2006, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

being called out by the crowd. A stone slammed against the thin corrugated iron wall of his shop and then another, until stones, bricks, pangas and axes began raining down on his shop. A group of people shook the shop door and burglar guard, trying to break in. At the same time, the shop’s window shattered and arms and hands cascaded through, grasping for any items within reach. Hadis and his colleagues armed themselves with empty glass bottles and a panga (a type of machete) that they kept in the shop. One of his colleagues reached to the window where he hit people’s hands with a glass bottle, one injured looter exclaiming ‘Voetsek!’ (get lost!) as he pulled his arms back. Some looters climbed onto the shop’s corrugated iron roof in an attempt to break in from above. Hadis and his colleagues responded by hitting the shop’s walls with glass bottles and their panga to indicate they had makeshift weapons and were prepared to fight back.

Fifteen minutes into the chaos, Hadis heard the sound of police vehicles stopping outside his shop, accompanied by shouts and the firing of rubber bullets. The mob quickly dispersed, evaporating into the surrounding darkness. Ten policemen approached the shop, ‘Are you safe?’ one of them asked, and informed the stunned traders that a number of shops had been looted that evening. Hadis and his colleagues tried to load some of their stock into the police vehicle, but the police hesitated ‘look we have a report that some of your brothers are stabbed and you know we have life threatening things, so we cannot save the property’.98 Seeing no choice but to abandon his shop without any protection, Hadis climbed into the police vehicle, turning his back permanently on his life’s savings and possessions, and the South African dream as he understood it.

The riots in Masiphumelele were not the only attacks on foreign national spaza shopkeepers at the time. Somali community organisations reported that dozens of Somali spaza shopkeepers had been killed in various towns and cities in the Western Cape between July and September 2006.99 They claimed that these murders were orchestrated by competing South African businesses as a means of eradicating competition. Police originally attributed the murders to business robberies, but later

dyn/content/article/2006/09/30/AR2006093000982.html, date accessed 6 June 2012. 98 _{Interview with Osman (note 94).} 99 _{Staff Reporter ‘Toll hits 30 after more Somalis murdered’ IOL News, 4 September 2006, available at} http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/toll-hits-30-after-more-somalis-murdered-1.292234#.T89hQu3Q9UQ, date accessed 6 June 2012. Karen Breytenbach ‘Somalis are 'suffering brunt of xenophobia' IOL News, August 7 2006, available at http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/somalis-are-suffering-brunt-of-xenophobia- 1.288384#.T8-2He3Q9UQ, date accessed 6 June 2012.

conceded that competing South African spaza shopkeepers may have planned some of the attacks.100 _{Somali spaza shops in Knysna had also been looted earlier in the}

year, resulting in over a hundred Somali shopkeepers being evacuated from the area.101

Apart from leaving a permanent impression on the lives of an estimated 71 foreign national residents forced to evacuate their shops and homes that night,102 _the

Masiphumelele riots of August 2006 comprise an enduring marker in a different way. Against the backdrop of the chaos emerged possibly the earliest attempt to regulate foreign national spaza shops in post-apartheid South Africa. In other words, the aftermath of the attacks mark the beginning of a politics of governing foreign national spaza traders in the country - a politics that would spread across the city of Cape Town, the Western Cape Province, and eventually become a key national-level governance dilemma. After the high profile violence and fury in Masiphumelele, questions of how to address the perceived threat posed by foreign national spaza shops became of heightened importance. As a result, parties ranging from police, local councilors, South African and foreign national shopkeepers, NGOs, to local and national government members increasingly became engaged in various efforts to control the ‘influx’ of foreign shopkeepers and regulate their trade.

In document Resumenes (página 52-54)