The cabinet, which likely had a former life in someone’s living room, marks the threshold between the interior and exterior and serves as a countertop. At the end of each day, all the goods are brought inside and the steel roller-shutter is drawn down over the front of the store and padlocked to the ground.Īpart from the hooks and storage shelves that line the edges of this small store, there are two larger items of furniture which define the space: a cabinet and a cot. This makeshift table is a curated display aiming to draw the passer-by in, with careful attention given to its arrangement. Here, items described as “Somali food,” including various packets of unlabeled spices, soup stock, and oils sit among bags of rice, sticks of incense, boxes of sweets, and small bottles of perfume. The front of the store leans out into the walkway with a wooden board resting on crates.
Shirts, t-shirts, pants, and jeans hang from hooks lining the walls and ceiling, while socks, belts, caps, and leather sandals are laid out on tables and counters. It is only around two and half square meters in size, and every interior surface is used to display goods for sale. Her small shop is within Bellstat Junction, one of numerous Somali malls in the area. 3 Fatima fled to South Africa from Somalia as a refugee in 1997. Fatima’s shop, Cape Townįatima’s shop is a small clothing store which she opened in 2010 in Bellville, a northern suburb of Cape Town that is increasingly known for a growing pan-African population. They become homes made in contexts of displacement, and sites of precarious possibility.įatima’s Shop, Bellstat Junction, Cape Town. 2 Shops in Somali malls draw distant sites into relation. They are also intimately connected to similar sites elsewhere, creating a dispersed geographic intimacy across cities from Nairobi to Lusaka, Cape Town, and Minneapolis.
These multi-story sites include shops, residential accommodation, and services, acting as a social and physical infrastructure for new-entrants, and as a place to meet for those within the city.
Home is always both present and distant a difficult and contested terrain which must be worked at and maintained.įor east African refugees in Cape Town, the “Somali mall” often acts as a form of home. 1 Making home is a practice of creating a common space with the presence of many other pasts. For Sara Ahmed, in the context of displacement, home is “often that which exists in the failure of memory.” When an individual sense of home is lost and no longer exists, it is at times replaced by a collective sense of place.
#THIRTY ONE OUTLET SALE 2019 SERIES#
How do you make a home in the context of displacement? What is a home in a country marked by high levels of urban violence? How is a sense of belonging maintained in the face of being confronted as “other” and “out of place”? For migrants and refugees, home is often a series of places, including those left behind, present-day temporary accommodation, and a hoped-for destination, which might also be a return.
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