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Selbourne Gawu is well-dressed and well-spoken, and is capable of something I could not have done at his age: approach a stranger in a wealthy suburb to ask for money. Selbourne Gawu is about 15 years old, well-dressed and well-spoken, and bears an uncanny resemblance to Tiger Woods at the same age. He shows the same fresh-faced astonishment at the world that I imagine I once did. Except he's capable of something I could not have done fifteen years ago: approach a stranger, who's just stepped out of a red convertible in a wealthy suburb, to ask for money.
His story is familiar, in trajectory if not in detail, to anyone who's been approached like this countless times while living here: He's just spent a week in Tygerberg hospital after being stabbed and robbed. He has not paid the rent in two months, and now his little sister is sitting outside their home in Khayelitsha with all their belongings, evicted till he can pay the rent, which is R80 a month. I spend R80 on a cheap lunch for two; rent on my place would be 25 times as much. Whether or not his story is true, it is clear that Selbourne and I inhabit worlds more different than either of us can imagine.
He tells me his story and I'm skeptical. I've been taken for this ride before by a mother with a baby, and had her come back to me with the same story months later. So I look for more information, certain that I'll find the chink in his story that will let me off the hook. I ask him about his school, what grade he's in, what subjects he's doing. It's his throw-away comment about being in grade 8 -- the first year in high school -- that makes me start taking him seriously: "I'm worried that I'm falling behind". This is true or it's a master-stroke. And it can't be the latter because it's too good, the phrase and the sincerity with which he says it. I begin to believe when he flinches that the pain in his middle, where says he's been stabbed, may be genuine.
The weather is miserable: the wind is howling and you can smell it's going to rain buckets at any moment. So we go inside. I need to know more. In my lounge Selbourne and I have coffee. I ask him whether he lives with his parents. He says his mother, Florence, passed away, and he makes no mention of his father. Is he living alone with his sister? I know child-headed households are not uncommon in Cape Town. They live with his grandmother, Angelina, he says. She is 64, and no longer works. His sister, Faith, is three years old.
I leave the room to get the clothes I've thought to give him, and when I return there are tears in his eyes. "I'm scared," he says, "I don't know what to do. I'm so worried about my sister."
I begin to wonder how they've coped till now, why they are suddenly without rent. So I ask when his mother died. The most important information of all, the thing that would have had me head-tripping on dilemmas ten minutes ago on the street: she was killed three months ago on her way home from work, when the taxi she was travelling in was shot at. I know the taxi violence has been growing in Cape Town recently. Only last week several taxi ranks were closed after a run of shootouts. It explains why the Gawus have not paid rent in two months. The pieces fit for me, and at last I believe him completely.
We talk some more, about school, about how hard science and biology are, and I get down the names of his family, his teacher, his school. I get his Xhosa name, Nstikelelo, and his home address in Site B, Khayelitsha. I discover that his mother worked as a domestic worker in town, and that he doesn't know where. I give him my card, twice: one for him to call and tell me what happens, and one for his landlord to call me. I give him a month's rent, the R13 taxi fare home, and some change. I tell him he can pay me back when he leaves school and has a job, and he smiles.
It's getting dark, and I start to worry about Selbourne getting home before the rain starts, so I usher him to the door. Eye to eye we shake hands, a full, three-part, thumb-grabbing, South African handshake. "God bless you" he says, and he walks away into the mad wind.
I cannot tell this story, at least not to South Africans, without sounding like I was brilliantly conned. Or rather, without feeling like I sound conned. It's become somehow infra dig and foolish to believe any story we're given, especially when the storyteller is asking for money. And when we fall for a story, when we choose to believe it's true, we don't tell our friends because we're embarrassed that we believed it, or that we paid our way out of a dilemma.
And yet some of these stories are true. Some must be, statistically. Many repeated stories were probably once true, and got repeated because at some point someone chose to believe the story, and so it became a proven money-making venture.
Us wealthy folk need to get a grip. We need to realise that every case has its merits. We do this in our working lives every day: decide whether to believe someone or not. I'm sure I get lied to on a regular basis, but if I believed every promise I heard was bogus, I'd be pathologically paranoid, and incapable of doing my job.
Of course we won't ever be free of the nagging suspicion that we've been had. Right now I'm waiting for Selbourne's call, and I may wait a very, very long time. But I don't want to have to explain to anyone why I believed him. I don't want to feel that I have to. I want to believe he and his sister and his grandmother slept inside last night, and that he will go back to school tomorrow. The stakes are high in this place. People do get killed in taxi wars, or die of AIDS and leave their children orphaned, or get thrown out of their homes with all their belongings. If we won't drive through Khayelitsha to find these people and help them, the least we can do is believe the boy at our door with the good story. If we won't go to the mountain, we must be ready when the mountain comes to us.
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