Book review: A Man of Good Hope
Recounted to Oxford scholar and journalist, Jonny Steinberg who was born in South Africa, the terms of engagement are interesting.
Asad, whose mother was shot dead in front of him by militia men when he was just eight years of age, tells his traumatic life story to Steinberg on the basis that he will receive 25% of the royalties from the book. It is Steinberg that draws up this deal, all too aware of the unequal relationship that can arise between an author and his subject.
And besides, Asad’s time is money. Split up from his birth family and hustling for a living since he was a boy, Steinberg writes that Asad is “an immensely competent man. His capacity to read a place for ways it might secrete money is now hard-wired into his being.”
But, towards the end of the book, Asad wishes he could go back in time. He wonders why he didn’t search for his father who went into hiding. He asks: ‘Why did I forget myself? Why did I forget my family....Look at me now. I am in this terrible place because I lost myself.”
Asad, whose peripatetic existence in various East African countries and along the eastern seaboard en route to South Africa when he was in his early twenties, was always chasing a buck. After doing everything from flogging plastic bags to being a driver, he ran various grocery shops in townships. In one of these, his co-owner is murdered and Asad himself was later brutally attacked by black South Africans, resentful of him, making money in their country.
The hard-working Asad needed the money to travel, to pay smugglers to get him across borders, to supply him with documents and to bribe officials. A terrible existence unfolds but what keeps Asad going is his desire to settle in the promised lands of either Europe or America.
In between his grim life of working and sleeping, sometimes in the shacks of the shops he operates from, Asad manages to get married twice and has four children. But he should have heeded his wise first wife Foosiya who returns to her native Somaliland, warning her husband that if he remains in South Africa, “there will come a time when there is no place to run.”
Asad actually married Foosiya out of revenge. She had insulted him so he decided to marry this beautiful and sought after woman and soon after, divorce her. He wondered why she agreed to marry him at all.
However, Asad doesn’t carry out his heartless plan. He feels terrible sorrow over the pain Foosiya endures because of her genital mutilation. Consummating the marriage is difficult. Asad eventually tells Steinberg that he’s in love with his estranged wife.
But that didn’t stop him from marrying Sadicya, an abandoned woman with a young son. Sadicya is from Somalia but can’t claim lineage from any of the accepted clans of her country. She comes from a despised group of Somalia people known as the Saabs. Asad goes against the Somali elders by marrying her.
Steinberg puts it to Asad that his love for Sadicya was “pragmatic.” He suggests that Asad was in search of “a wounded person” to look after the damaged child within himself. There are other psychological theories in this insightful book.
It is an extraordinary account of resilience that ends on a hopeful note.
