A Man of Good Hope by Jonny Steinberg

Author:Jonny Steinberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

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Asad is not sure to which town the young man drove them. It may have been Musina, just a few kilometers from the Beitbridge border post. The youngster took them to his own home, a two-room brick-and-mortar house, and promptly went to bed. The seven Somalis slept on the floor of the other room, huddled under their own jackets, until just before daybreak. When they tried to wake the young man, he would not budge. They left him another hour and tried again, but he remained dead to the world.

“He was not interested to get up, brother. His work was done, and now he was going to sleep. So we just took our bags and walked.”

Dawn had not long broken. The Somalis asked whomever they encountered how to get to Johannesburg. Each person offered a different answer. Some said a bus, others a taxi. Still others said that it was not possible to get to Johannesburg from this town and that they would have first to make their way to somewhere bigger. Eventually, somebody told them that the only way to get to Johannesburg was to hitch.

“What does it mean ‘to hitch’?” Asad asked.

“It means to stand in the street and wave,” one of his companions explained.

The party of Somalis found a piece of a tomato box and borrowed a thick pen from the proprietor of a trading store. On the scrap of box they wrote: JOXANAZDEG. They made their way to the main road leading south and flashed their sign whenever a car drove by.

“Nobody stopped, brother. Hour after hour after hour, and nobody stopped. At the time, I thought we were unlucky. Now, when I think of what we wrote on that box, it is a miracle we were not thrown into jail—seven foreign-looking people with big bags, just near the border, with this ridiculous sign. It was a joke.”

The sun was directly above them and the party about to abandon the roadside when a minibus finally pulled onto the side of the highway. Asad strode up to the driver’s window to find two white men peering out at him.

“They said they were going to Johannesburg,” Asad recalls. “They had space for us all. Then one of them says, ‘But…,’ and he rubs his thumb and finger together. I’d never seen that sign before, but I knew it meant money.

“Out of the one thousand two hundred dollars I took with me I had one hundred and sixty-five left and I was worried because the journey was not over. I gave sixty-five. I hid the rest from the other Somalis. Nobody else knew what I had. Some of the others put in more money, but it still wasn’t enough. We agreed that we would give them more when we got to our destination.”

The Somalis sat in the back of the minibus, the two white men in the front. Asad chose the seat directly behind the driver and watched the white men as closely as he could.

He was struck, above all, by their size.

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