Having successfully completed an intense and thorough adjudication process for the IOM/UNHCR World Refugee Day Writing Contest, led by senior officials both from the International Organization for Migration and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and an independent evaluator from Lawyers for Human Rights, we have selected top three winning stories.

It is with great pleasure to announce the winners as follows;

1st place – His Unforgettable Journey to South Africa by Shireen Mukadam - Apple MacBook AIR

2nd place – Story of Joe Kabanana by Tawanda Matanda - LENOVO Laptop

3rd place – Story of Salman Sayid by Elvis Mbangulas - SONY Digital Camera

1st position: His Unforgettable Journey to South Africa by Shireen Mukadam

It is close to midnight when the 63-seater bus draws up to the Beitbridge border post. Kudakwashe* has been on the road for 10 hours. He is hungry, thirsty and exhausted, but mostly he’s afraid. Terrified. His heart hammers in his chest. Next to him in the crowded bus some of the passengers sleep, some knit. The 24-year-old Zimbabwean reads the Drum magazine he found on the bus to distract himself. The world beyond the bus is cold and dark. In the distance a smudge of light beckons.

The dry tarred roads of Matebele South province are bumpy. The old green-and-beige bus exhausts smoke from the engine, and smells of diesel as it pulls along the trailer of luggage. Kudakwashe sits in the middle of a three-seater. His aunt is on his right, she got the window seat, and a stranger to his left. As they near the border, his aunt walks up to the conductor and collects the passport for Kudakwashe. She hands it to him in silence. The lights are off in the bus and Kudakwashe tries to open the passport so the stranger next to him can’t see the picture.

In the 10-hour journey from Harare, Kudakwashe thinks about his mother. He called her before he left Harare and told her he’d be back in three months. She told him to be careful, to be in touch and to go well. He thinks about his three younger siblings – their school fees, cost of textbooks and uniforms. That’s why he is doing this.
He carries a few extra shirts, and his high school certificate and ID with a picture of a stubbled, bespectacled young man in his mid- twenties.

The bus emerges from darkness as it comes closer to South Africa. Flood lights illuminate the border post. Kudakwashe and the other passengers disembark and shuffle towards the red-brick security check point.

Now the moment Kudakwashe has lived in dread of is here. He hands the passport to the policeman. It is as if he is handing his life over.

A heavyset policeman with a gun looks down at the passport. Kudakwashe takes a deep breath. He thinks it is the end of his life. The passport isn’t his. When he looked at it earlier, an old man he has never met stared back at him from the black-and-white photograph. He closed the passport quickly, too scared to look at the strange face any longer.
Since he boarded the bus he had an image of himself detained and crying in a dirty cell because his fake passport was discovered.

Maybe it’s just a trap, he thinks. Maybe the bus driver is setting him up. Kudakwashe’s aunt paid the driver R1000 to arrange his passport and entry into South Africa. This is in addition to the R300 for the bus trip.

The officer looks into Kudakwashe’s face. Without saying a word, he hands the passport back to him. Kudakwashe is free to enter South Africa. Relief rushes over him, but his hands still shake. Then he steps into puddles of disinfectant for foot-and-mouth disease.
Back onto the bus.

The bus pulls into Johannesburg just before sunrise. Kudakwashe washes his face and then whiles away the next 12 hours waiting for his connecting bus to Cape Town. He sits on a crate at a makeshift restaurant. He eats pap and sausages, cooked by a Zimbabwean. Exploring the City of Gold is not an option – he’s terrified of being picked up and sent to Lindela prison.

Another night spent on another bus, and the following morning he arrives in Bellville, and then a taxi to his new home in Khayelitsha. He takes a deep breath when he gets there. He can’t believe he has travelled all this way, spent all his money and risked time in jail to scratch out a new life in a place worse than Zimbabwe.

Shireen is a researcher and writer based in Cape Town. She holds a Masters in International Affairs, from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Shireen is passionate about writing stories with a social justice and human rights angle. 

Shireen Mukadam at IOM’s Cape Town office

2nd position: The Story of Joe Kabanana by Tawanda Matanda

The search for greener pastures is variable experience. For economic migrants seeking a better life, the grass may not always be greener on the other side. One has to struggle with getting the proper paperwork along with the culture shock, language and the overall economic systems in the countries where they go. One such struggle is that of metalworker and entrepreneur-cum-teacher Johannes Kabanana, from Zambia. Seeking a better life, he moved to the cold and windy Eastern Cape in South Africa to make a better life for himself.

He however found the going tough, experiencing the familiar difficulties of economic migrants, especially metal artisans. He faced language and work cultural barriers having not been familiar with the union system. Facing taunts, derision and calls for the makwerekwere to go back home he quit his initial job to try to work for himself. A gutsy and ebullient personality, Joe was able to harness his ingenuity and entrepreneurship to find a market for scrap metal-made pots and other utensils sourced from the shipping yards, which helped to alleviate his situation and gain him relative prosperity in his community. As a foreigner not fully assimilated in his community, he maintained a degree of distance from his fellow community members, in contact only to transact. However, an unfortunate event would force him to reconsider his stance.

Having gone on one of his daily trips to the shipyards to source materials for his goods, he came back to find the doors to his modest home ajar and most of his valuables stolen. As a man of meagre circumstance, he was left broken by the tragedy of seeing his home ransacked. Even more disconcerting was the fact that despite living in a close knit high density area nobody was able to prevent the theft or report to the police. Was it because he was a foreigner, a relatively successful one at that? No, the problem, as he came to find out, was the unemployed youth. Unable to afford further education or training opportunities they had resigned themselves to being menaces terrorising the community members and being a general nuisance to anyone and everyone who was unfortunate enough to fall in their path. Having avoided close contact with his community Joe saw this as an opportunity to change not only himself but also the community he lived in for the better.

He thus devised a plan to put their idle hands to work, literally. It finally hit him that he could use and impart his skills to help them overcome their difficulties. For any foreigner, taking such an assertive position is never easy, especially when the local people do not see you as purely one of their own. His worst fears were realised when at first, they refused outright, stating they would never work with a foreigner.

Nevertheless, Joe had learnt that persistence is its own reward and he rallied the community to aid his plan. Using his makeshift backyard metal shop as his “classroom” Joe not only imparted skills of metalwork but also basic business skills to ensure that the youth in his community could form ventures for themselves to uplift themselves and their families. With their newfound insight, they began to see foreigners such as Joe in a new light. For Joe he began to feel like a greater part of the community and for the first time began to see his dream and wish for a better life share with his fellow community members.

Tawanda Matanda is a B.A International Relations student at the University of Pretoria. A Zimbabwean national, Tawanda enjoys reading academic books and writing commentary pieces about global politics, issues of so globalization, regional security and integration.

Tawanda Matanda with IOM Communications Officer Gaone Dixon

3rd position: The Story of Salmaan Sayid by Elvis Mbangulas

It was early in the morning, Saturday, October 10, 2011. The sky was clear and the sun glowing with hope. Another day for Mbali Nkosi to do what she had committed herself to do; her everyday job as a shop assistant at a local shop. She cannot afford not to go, not when she got paid the day before, her R280 weekly salary. Mbali had a dream to further her studies one day and this job was her only hope.

She walked about one and half km a trip to her daily job. While Mbali was within half a kilometer distance from the shop she was greeted by the presence of the police in the yard, curious at what was happening, she hears “Salmaan Sayid is killed during a robbery on Friday night”. It was like the piercing of the sword right through her heart. He was Mbali’s employer, a Somalis national who arrived in South Africa in 2007. He, like many other migrants from his country came to stay in the township at Ekangala F2 where managed to rent and refurbish a spaza shop formerly owned by a South African. Salmaan, a man who was little known by many on a personal level, to the few who knew him on that level he was indeed larger than life. Salmaan hired Mbali who had finished matric but with no money to study further. He was sympathetic to Mbali’s situation; he never lapsed on paying her on time. Salmaan knew what the community did not know about Mbali’s situation – a drunkard mother and siblings to take care of. He did something that the community could not have done had he not been there; offering her a job.

Gogo Radebe, a pensioner with 2 grandchildren of her late daughter, stayed two streets away from Salmaan’s shop. The killing of Salmaan came as a bolt from the blue for her. She used to buy her family groceries from Salmaan. One thing the community did not know is that Salmaan used to give Gogo Radebe credit with no interest. Even when she ran out of basic necessities during the month Salmaan would still allow her credit.

Mama Sibiya, a widow and a domestic worker with 4 children nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard the news of Salmaan’s death. She worked at a nearby town. Mama Sibiya found Salmaan’s shop to be cheaper than others in the area, especially the one’s owned by South Africans. She knew she would not be returned empty handed even when she was short of 30 cents; Salmaan would still sell to her. This made a big difference in her life and that of her family.

Salmaan added value to this community through small, simple and unrecognizable things but with big impact. The community will now know the good man he was.
Now that Salmaan is dead who will be the source of help to these 3 families and ten or more souls?

Elvis Mbangulas is an IT lecturer at Boston College City Campus in Pretoria. He is also a spiritual advisor to Student Spiritual Movement (SSM), a student-headed civic group within Boston that runs various social development programmes. He enjoys writing inspirational pieces encouraging social change.

Elvis Mbangulas with IOM Communications Officer Gaone Dixon