The Foreign Connection

While the hideous, unnerving sentiments towards xenophobia echo out on the streets, my heart recoils back to my late grandmother’s house and a guy nicknamed Edo. Diminutive and soft-spoken, even in a small gathering, Edo is the sort of person you’d hardly know was ever even there. So short he’s easy to miss; nothing about his physique or manner particularly standing out. 

Then one day you catch the barefoot silhouette of his teenage-like frame poised gallantly up on a roof. On nimble feet he manouvres the naked beams. Hauls large sheets of zinc being fed to him from the ground and promptly hammers them home.

It’s June 2021 in the Karoo. 

So cold the taps are frozen. The lush summer verdant turned into a gloomy ash. Double-downed people huddled around tin braziers and Eduardo Luis is standing barefoot up on a roof. His loyal team of four don’t offer anything exciting to write home about either. 

The nicest thing I can say of Lino is: He sports dreadlocks and is always clad – even hard at work – in a light brown leather jacket. Juvencio bears an easy smile, more so when the mercury is tethering on sub-zero brutality. With his balaclava always rolled all the way down, not sure what to make of “Ntate” except to say he’s from Lesotho. Working for an air-conditioning firm, Tony used to club-crawl into the wee hours of the Johannesburg and Durban nightlife. A snazzy swell who wore designer sneakers and drank Johnie Black but when he fell on hard times, the city had no further use for him.

There were hardknock stints couch surfing or crashing on friends’ kitchen floors or roughing it out on garbage-strewn pavements. It was tough, no doubt, but now here they are…in a platteland dorpie notorious for not much ever happening. Many here are either rankled by unemployment or agonising over the hard economic times or are simply indifferent, whiling time away in any one of the happening watering holes. Tik – that depraved methamphetamine – is a growing, troublesome past time. 

Sadly, for Edo and his chinas there’s simply no time to drink to excess or sulk. If that was the case, they likely would’ve stayed in their native countries where, by comparison, there is apparently plenty more to cry about. They upped and left because they believed something worth pursuing lay waiting beyond the horizon. 

Taught by his uncle everything he needed to know about building, Mozambique hardly offered any gigs. Not many people were building or renovating in his native village and when they were, every third or so able-bodied man turns out to be a builder. And he’s willing to drop his quote so low the job is often not really worth doing. 

Surely, Edo thought to himself, there’s got to be someplace else. In an Exodus that has seen him through overcrowded buses, knife-wielding tsotsis, inner-city slumming with no electricity and dubious landlords, finally he landed in Colesberg. He could barely speak the language and was taken aback by the amount of drinking, especially of his cousin with whom he was crashing. The only upshot was that gigs started trickling in. Erecting a toilet here, some tiling there, closing up that leak in the roof and then, one woman asked, “ok, so can you build an entire house?”

“Sure,” was his eager retort. “Even better than the one you have in mind.”

She raised a sceptical eyebrow, Edo chuckles. At 1.3m and around 50kg, Edo’s is not the type of physique you’d imagine shouldering bags of cement and heaving concrete-filled wheelbarrows. (A big bag of cement weighs as much as he does). But the woman was in a hurry to move into a refurbished place and the local builders were tied up elsewhere. She had no choice: the “tender,” as goes the local colloquial, was his.

Immediately he hopped on the phone and in no time, homeboy Lino arrived, joined shortly by little brother Juvencio, Ntate they met around the block. He is Sotho, they are Mozambican but they are all “bound by mud,” another succinct metaphor in the laybuilder’s kitchen-sink lexicon. The project was six-rooms big, massive kitchen and lounge; Edo knew just the man to make a breeze of it. One more phone call and the team was complete: Tony had arrived.

In the intervening months, based solely on the aesthetics of their craftsmanship, clients have been pouring in thick and fast. I’m not sure whether to chalk it up to the universal migrant experience which suggests that they have no choice but to make it. Mommy’s bossom being too away far to go weeping on and whatnot. And they are seriously up against it: Locals who are fluent in the language, are harrowed to the liver in the culture and have years of rapport to speak for them. And here you are, stomaching all sorts of xenophobic epithets and stereotypes that you’re not quite sure you deserve but there’s just no time to be upset. You laugh along, take whatever crumbs tossed your way and work harder than the next man. Such is the lot of the foreigner. Always outnumbered. Easy to pick on because there’s no big brother to stand at his corner when the proverbial has hit the fan. It is in these circumstances, one thinks, that true tenacity and self-reliance are hewed, in those lonely moments, when left and right, there is nobody, nobody but you against everybody else. That is where, speculatively, the foreigner finds himself most of the time and one cannot dismiss that he’s probably all the more tougher for it.

Personally, though, I was hardly impressed when Edo and his posse pitched up to flatten my late grandma’s four-room matchbox house. Way too many memories snuck in that old fossil: Misi – that’s my grandma – arched over a gas stove mixing berry essence into icing sugar that when ready, she would lather over Marie biscuits to be sold next day at S.S. Madikane Primary School where she taught Sub A (grade 1). Long nights in the lounge listening to uGonondo Omkhulu, a riveting, horrific piece of radio drama on the transistor. The constant lingering coffee aroma, umngqusho on the boil atop the paraffin heater and Misi in her faded pink pinafore, one-tooth-missing smile, whipping out the checkers board so she and her grandson (that would be me) could be at it again. But mostly the old hag, without ever saying it, demonstrating to me that in this life you can either be good…and there’s nothing else you should ever be. 

But I digress…

Sure, the cracks and flapping roof were reason enough to put the apartheid relic out of its misery. A coup de grace to the house I’d called home all my life. Where I ensnared small birds, plucked sweet apricots off the small tree out back and where my umbilical chord lies long buried in a corner somewhere.

Now here was Edo, sledge hammer clasped like a maedival battle-axe, poised to put the matriarch down. I wasn’t there to see her fall, but I imagine she put up quite a fight. If she was anything like the grandma who worked until forced into retirement by the department of education and who read the simultaneously charming and questionable colonial writer Henry Ryder Haggard, she could not have gone out any other way. I’d be disappointed to learn she went down effortlessly. That she couldn’t make the tiny Edo break a sweat.

And so every morning for the coming few months Edo and his charges would come rapping on my backroom door. Seven days a week, around seven, always eager, always sober. Never late. Never looking like they weren’t feeling up to it today. From their Bluetooth speaker, blared a mashup of unfamiliar Mozambican hip hop and rugged Lesotho folk, and the new house began its ascent. Work began when the sun rose and didn’t stop until it went down and it was way too dark to see. I wish I could tell you there were dents and shortfalls to their work ethic. Or that they were slovenly, or unreliable or any of the many reasons why clients often take issue with contractors. Or that, in them, I detected a foul spirit or negative energy, but I’d be…uhm, BS-ing you through my teeth. 

But as one steps up and presses an ear to the track, one can hear the train of hate chugging ever onward. Operation Dudula is seemingly one of the drivers, its conductors drawn from obscure political forces, sometimes faceless, often irate, and always with one vociferous demand: Foreigners go home! In political science lectures, I’d never come across the term “xenophobic nationalism.” If memory serves me correctly, the more commonplace phrase back then was “tribalism” 

In fact nationalism always seemed to go cheek by jowl with whiteness. Early Nazism, the Republicans of America, even our erstwhile National Party, all of them an antithesis to the so-called Pan Africanism which calls for a united Africa. As things stand, the enemy is the foreigner, the black foreigner to be precise. Every so often, we wake up to find disconcerting additions to our political lexicon. The #FallistMovement had their choice phrase; “decolonised education.” For the xenophobes, it’s #PutSouthAfricaFirst. 

When this year, Zimbabwean immigrant Elvis Nyathi was allegedly accosted by a mob and savagely murdered in Diepkloof’s Extension 1, I thought here we go again. The killing season is upon us. It’s only a matter of time before the floodgates burst open and blood overruns the streets. Before tyres doused with petrol are draped around a man’s neck and he is, in broad daylight, set alight. Just like that. Simply because he doesn’t happen know what an elbow is called in any of the local African languages. Or because he is a suspicious shade too dark. Or, well…just because.

Thus Edo sprung to mind.

Nothing at all like the caricature often laid about immigrants. He has not stolen anyone’s job – does not do, let alone sell drugs. Doesnt’t even smoke or drink, not even during the clichéd “special occasions.” Sure he’ll generously buy you your grog but will not be caught dead with his lips on it. His only sin perhaps is that he has made a good woman of a local girl and has a baby by her. She too nurses something of the entrepreneurial spirit. When Edo is out carving up someone’s dream home, she is given to making kotas – bread stuffed with chips, polony, atchaar – good ol’ greasy township junk food.

Several years ago the Institute for Race Relations published a report on immigrants. Authored by the outstanding Rian Malan, he who calls it as he sees it, the subsequent criticism came as no surprise. Malan not only appeared to suggest that local Blacks are lazy but an interview he does with a former spaza owner achieves a conveniently offending confession – they apparently steal too. Of course high-flown debate ensued from well-carpeted ivory towers, chastising Malan and reducing the IRR to a lobby group to outfits like the Democratic Alliance (DA).

These intellectual skirmishes, however, are all immaterial to Edo. And, I imagine, to anyone who, like him, does not ask for alms or social welfare – only the opportunity to put his head down and work for nobody but himself. He is not mailing out CVs or standing in a corner downtown, holding up a placard reading “builder” bidding for a piece job. He renders a decent service with a reasonable quote and people are sold. 

The dreadlocked Lino I bumped into the other day. Smile as wide as the heavens, paddling his second-hand bike like it was fresh out the wrapping and I couldn’t help but think how some people have had to grow up a little faster than the rest of us. Barely in his twenties, he finds himself on foreign land, away from all that is familiar, from all the things he’s grown to love. On that bike, he was like a little child, happy just to be here, alive, earning his keep – an honest, hard-working teenager with dreams like everyone else. Tony has seemingly learnt from the misspent years. Unapologetically, he eschews the bottle and good-time girls nowadays, preferring instead to hole himself up in a room that he rents listening to the nostalgic music of his native country. Juvencio, the youngest, supposedly restless extrovert, is just a kid whose time is preoccupied with trying to “pimp-up” his “crib”. Though a bulk of his pay goes towards rent and groceries, he hasn’t forgotten that a man’s abode – no matter how frugal – is his castle.   

Remember the woman who gave Edo his first decent building tender? Well, today her house stands majestically; “oohs” and “aahs” and “may I take a peep inside” from passers-by. A neat little piece of architecture that you simply can’t ignore. As a result, Edo’s phone is always busy, his diary stretched well into the coming months and his woman is doing everything but complaining. You should see his handiwork, this guy with not much in terms of formal schooling. Who comes from a village in one of the poorest countries in the world only to wind up in the most unequal country in the world. 

And survive. 

And prosper.

Respect!

His creations are versatile. Of course he works with a plan handed to him by the client but is not shy to embellish his own touch on to things. How about the window goes this side? And raise the roof a bit? And the pillars, don’t forget the pillars. They are something of his signature, spawning a popular building style that gives a vintage, even ancient, feel to the township.

Of course the thought has occurred to him: what if circumstances reach boiling point, leaving him with no choice but to go back home? To pack his bags, promise his woman and child that he’ll return for them someday and close the door on the house he’s called home all these years. As it does those in his dire set of circumstances, the uncertainty is always gnawing every time he looks upon his son. 

Or turns on the news. 

Or hears murmurs outside.

But as he has learnt over the years, there’s no time to sulk. His lot is to take it all in stride. Set the alarm clock for 5am and show up sober and on time wherever his gifted hands might be needed.

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