Couple return to place from which they fled
CONGOLESE hairdresser Salima Mkeyo has returned to Isipingo, south of Durban, despite vowing never to return, a year after she and her family fell victim to xenophobic violence.
Mkeyo and her husband, Sindayi Hebure Abdallah, were driven out of their home in March last year by South Africans on the rampage.
As they were fleeing, attackers threw a rock, which hit their one-year-old son and gashed opened his head.
The couple and their bleeding child sought shelter at the local police station.
A few days later, they were moved to a transit camp in Isipingo set up for victims of xenophobic violence, but were later sent to another camp, in Chatsworth. When the camps were closed three months later, the family was forced to move back into the local community.
They then found another temporary shelter, in Umbilo, but decided to leave South Africa for Botswana in September. However, they discovered that life for expatriates was even tougher in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana.
“We had gone there to restart our lives and little did we know that immigration laws in that country are worse,” Mkeyo said. “We were kept in a shelter that used to be a prison. Men are separated from women. I could only see my husband once a week and for 15 minutes only.”
After three months, the family applied to leave Botswana voluntarily. They returned to Isipingo — to the community that had once shown its hatred for them.
“We arrived in Durban in December and we were more than motivated to start our lives afresh,” Mkeyo said.
“I reopened my hair salon here in Isipingo and my hus- band, who ran a business fixing computers before we were chased out, has opened a new barber’s shop.
“Life is not easy. I lost a lot of loyal customers. I used to make between R800 and R1 200 a day, but since my return I sometimes make only R100.”
Mkeyo insists that remaining in South Africa is much better than going back to her home in Bukavu, on the eastern border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo — from which she fled in 2001 in the violent aftermath of president Laurent Kabila’s assassination.