Yusuf Saidi grew up in Salafi, Mangochi District, where his father was both a local chief and imam with three wives. Born in 1928, the youngest of his mother's six children, his daughter Sakina recalled that he was “he was extremely spoiled.” Though he was the first son of his mother, Sakina, his father already had another son, Ahmed, through his first wife. As Sakina was descended from royalty, and did not think it was her job to raise children “the third wife actually raised my father, and his siblings”.
Yusuf's family was relatively well-to-do with numerous cows, chickens and goats. Yusuf “was educated islamically, because his father was a sheikh, a mawlānā. Because he was the only son, he was then educated. My aunts were not educated, but my aunts married well - one was married to a doctor, another to a farmer, the other three were married to mawlānās, and they all had lots of children.” After being educated at the local madrassa, Yusuf left to be schooled in Zanzibar. Though he didn't elaborate much about this period, he spoke Swahili fluently, and read Arabic very well. His daughter Sakina, though aware that Yusuf’s father was descended from a Swahili mother and Arab-Swahili father, but could not elaborate any more on his childhood.
In the mid-1950s when Yusuf was 25, he was sent by his father to retrieve his brother Ahmed from South Africa. Not much is known about how Yusuf travelled south, but he certainly didn’t walk. Travelling either by bus or truck through Blantyre and then on through Zimbabwe he passed relatives of his mother living in Messina, and then probably hitch-hiked from the north of South Africa south to Johannesburg.
Ahmed had been working in a mosque in Germiston for a number of years, and persuaded Yusuf to stay instead of returning to Malawi. Initially, he arranged a job for Yusuf at the Avalon Bioscope - a cinema in Fordsburg, Johannesburg run by Indian Muslims who Ahmed knew. With a number of relatives already there, South Africa was a more attractive place to live – “it was a better life, there were more opportunities...”
From the 1940 through to the 1970, “Fordsburg was at the cutting edge of black urban culture. It was defined amongst much else by its anti-apartheid protest rallies at Red Square; its fish and chips and toasted steaks; its gangsters and romantic liaisons; its music, clubs and street fashions; and most prominently by its four bioscopes, off the street and within just a few blocks of one another.”
Yusuf spent a year working at the cinema, and it was during this time that he met Hawa, his future wife. Hawa was 15 at the time, a Ndebele and a Presbyterian. Hawa converted to Islam and the couple married in early 1956, the same year that Sakina was born. Yusuf did not insist that she converted to Islam, Hawa “became Muslim because she wanted to. My dad gave her the opportunity to opt out if she didn't want to be Muslim, but he would not have stayed with her if she was not Muslim because it was important for him.” Sakina recalled Hawa's “family had disowned her because she had married my dad.” As noted by their granddaughter Rabia, “to marry out of your own racial caste is something that is really frowned upon, so my grandpa and my granny had a shared experience like that. They were kind of disconnected from the normal family set up and all they had was each other. They were a very loving couple. you would expect because he was a mawlānā and had a religious position within society he would be dominant but that wouldn't be the case....when you look at the rights of a woman, a Muslim wife is not expected to cook or clean, your role as a husband is to aid with domestic chores, to split those chores and to honour your wife and to treat her with the utmost respect...what's there in the text is what I experienced with him, how he treated his wife and how he raised his daughters.”
Hawa was a strong woman, and though Yusuf was a patriarch, he referred “to my mum on everything, and he was asking her what do you think on this and that, and my mother was giving him advice. I was like wow, so it's my mum who runs the show in all these areas.”
After a year working at the cinema, Yusuf became a muezzin at the Kerk Street mosque in Johannesburg, taking the call to prayer and leading prayers. Within the Muslim community, Yusuf was known as Ismail Mohamed. In 1961 Yusuf worked at the Queen's Street Mosque, and the family relocated to Pretoria. A number of years later, it was here that Yusuf met Signal Phiri, who remembered him as “a nice man”.
Most of his time in South Africa however was spent in Marabastad - for Sakina, “that's where we grew up.” Yusuf's family lived within the precincts of the Marabastad mosque, which at the time was located in a coloured district alongside two other families.
Ismail A Kalla who knew Yusuf during his time in Marabastad recalled he recited the call to prayer and led prayers five times a day. “He had a very good voice, he was very articulate in his Arabic prayers...He was a very well-rounded gentleman and he had a very pleasant personality...He was one of the leaders in the mosque, a leading personality.” Very well read in the Quran and the Prophets, “his Arabic pronunciations were very powerful...Everybody loved him.” Other Malawians attended the Marabastad mosque “coming to prayer there were many who were working somewhere else. Within the mosque there one or two others, but he was a man of stature...leading personalities like him, they were few and far between, he was one of the outstanding personalities.”
Though working within a predominantly Indian mosque, there was “no problem among Muslims whether he is Black or White or Indian, there is no problem, there is no racialism. Many mosques you'll see many leading personalities are black and not Indian, and the Indians are in their hundreds - in one of the mosques near us we are the same.”
As well as teaching at Marabastad, Yusuf taught in Eastrus, a coloured community in the 1970s and 1980s. This “was the first Islamic School my father got the congregation to build. They built the mosque and then he said you need to build an Islamic school.” Numerous people remembered Yusuf when Rabia went to pray there in 2014, “he taught at Earstrus for a long period of time - he left a legacy there.”
As well as working for the Pretoria Muslim Trust, Yusuf was also a spiritual healer. Rabia recalled, “he had a spiritual connection to another realm - people came from all different walks of life; Indian, Afrikaans who would come to him for healing.” Sakina remembered “there was this one time there was this child who was having a seizure and his parents brought him. I was totally scared of him, and I saw my dad and this boy was fitting, there was foam coming out of his mouth, and my dad prayed and gave him a drink. I was thinking is it the water that calmed him down, or is it my dad? What is my dad? I was extremely scared of him after that. I thought I don't want to say anything to this man, if he said anything to me I would just do it, if my mum said something I'd be like I'm not doing that. I was never obnoxious with my dad, after that incident - it really set fear in me.”
Family life was very important to Yusuf and Hawa, Sakina recollecting “our father loved us so all, so much!” After Sakina's birth in 1956, Fatima was born in 1960, followed by Rookaya in 1963. Two more sisters Khatija and Zaytoon were born later in the 1960s. “When it came to his children - he protected us with everything he had.” He also supported their inquisitiveness. “If you asked him for anything he would never say I don't know. He would say let's find out about it, and he would have a discussion with you. Whereas my mum was an authoritarian...when you have five children, you don't have the time to be sitting down and talking to each one of them, and you have a busy life...For my dad it was easy, he was a priest and he had all this time.”
Sakina attended the local Indian school in Marabastad, exploiting the fact that the family lived within a coloured area. Rabia reflected that “they were hard on her - they told me, they pushed her academically”, but they also allowed their children to go to the cinema and drove Sakina to the local library.
As well as look after her children, Hawa was an entrepreneur and traded in second hand clothes in return for crockery. Yusuf's “job paid him less than when I started working. It was God and my mum and him being a healer that allowed us to go to an Indian school. My mum was vociferous that we get educated - she would say 'I work hard so that you get educated. I don't want you coming back here with your ten children and eating my pension money. She was so clear about that.”
Attachment to his family meant that though a humanitarian and a human rights activist, Yusuf did not get involved in politics - due to the risk of deportation and the fact that this would break his young family apart. Nevertheless Rabia remembered “he told me stories of how he burned his pass book.”
Living a successful life in South Africa, Yusuf did not return to Malawi until 1987. He did retain links with Malawi though. Yusuf was proud of his heritage – “there was no kind of hidden story about it - we knew our dad was Malawian and we were Malawians.” “That gave us a sense of who we are - you are Africans, you have your roots in Africa, and that's who you are...He was an Africanist - in terms of helping Africans”.
“All men who came from Malawi, because they were in South Africa they saw themselves as brothers. It didn't matter where in Malawi they were from as long as they were from Malawi. So they would have a kind of united process - banking among each other, they would assist each other”.
“So when we were growing up my dad would say this is my brother, so we didn't understand the concept of brother - gee he's got a lot of brothers. When we became aware of the concept of blood brother we sat our Dad down and said, 'so which one is your blood brother and which one is your brother because he came from the same village or the same country?” It was only at this point that Sakina learnt Ahmed was her blood uncle.
Throughout the year there would be numerous Malawian gatherings – “at different points people would have a fatija, or a just a gathering for prayer or zika, and people would come. And also there was a kind of solidarity for people coming from Malawi, because even if you didn't have a direct relation, there was a brotherhood. Very interesting because when you look at Johannesburg, the Basotho and among the Zulu people you had different cliques. And some would call it gangs, but what the tsotsis emerged out of was these different brotherhoods. When you came here it was like having a network that would help you set up, whether it's finding a job or having a place to stay for a couple of days, or if you were just passing through.”
Yusuf himself was a central figure in the local network supporting Malawians. “He would help people - their home it was a space where visitors were always welcome, and people would come and stay there.”
“On Sunday he would go to Mapobane, where there were a lot more Malawians there and they would sit and they would do all of the administrative stuff that they needed to do, or alternatively they would come to our house...because everyone congregated at our house, my dad dealt with a lot of things.” Those staying at their home included “people from Mangochi, or even from other places like Dedza.” To support this community Yusuf at the end of the 1960s “put together a structure and it was called the Malawian Association.”
“The whole thing started because when someone died they would have to go to the Indian people and ask them to assist, and this was not right - because we all worked and we all could contribute.” “They had to contribute every week, so if anything happened to anybody they would take money from there, and then they would assist. If there was a death, they would assist out of that money, if someone was sick and needed to go back to Malawi, that money would come from there. So there was a pool of money and if anyone was not in a job, or something like that they would then use money from there.”
As a result of both Yusuf and Hawa's jobs “we were OK, and so my father had a lot of cars - my father liked cars - so I think that the people thought he was buying cars with that money.” In 1980, “there was a fall out - and he said take your money, take your things, I don't have to do this, I really am not doing this for me, I'm doing this for us.” Sakina at the time “really don't understand it because they had a secretary, Uncle Yassim, they had a treasurer - and my father was the chairperson. So I don't understand how they thought my father was underhand , because there wasn't much money, my dad would say to me I need to count it because they wrote it in a book, and then he would give the money to Uncle Mmerjie, who kept the money - so if anything happened to them they knew they could go to Uncle Mmerjie. The money was not kept in our house. When my dad stopped doing it the whole thing disintegrated”.
Yusuf also kept in touch with his five sisters back in Malawi – “he maintained links because there were letters that were passed through.” Yusuf would often send money back to Mangochi and his children “had to send all our clothes to Malawi...a whole lot of people would come from time to time and they would take stuff.” In the 1980s, Yusuf also sent his daughters Sakina and Hatija to Malawi for a year so they could learn about their heritage and how to keep a home.
Yusuf himself only went back to Malawi once, in 1987. “Because he had us - and there was no way he was going to leave us. And we had our children, who were obviously his grandchildren. This was home for him and he was not going to go away and leave my mum.”
“Malawi is not an easy place to visit, because the expectation when you go is that you are money to solve all of their problems, and I said that to my Dad and he said these are poor people, and that's how poor people are.”
“He wasn't dismissive, [of his sisters back in Malawi] but he felt sorry for them that they'd not moved. But obviously these were women, and they had lots of children etc, etc. Some of them their husbands died, and two of his sisters were not married to Muslim men they were married to Christian men.”
Though within Muslim circles, Yusuf's racial background was not a problem, it did cause some friction with his relationship to Hawa's brothers. “When we went to my mum's family they would say mablantyre [from Blantyre], and we were like what's that? And then one day, my mum's brother, instead of just calling my sister Fatima (who looked darker, more like a Malawian) he would say ‘mablantyre lahow likha nire’, and my father would be so annoyed. One day he said to my mother ‘I actually don't like your brothers - they're dividing my children. I don't appreciate it, can you please have a discussion with them.’”
This prejudice has only increased over the last two decades. “He came at a time when being black was something that resented and hated, if you grew up in an Apartheid context it didn't matter what shade of black you were or where you were from, you experienced that kind of oppression and injustice on a daily basis. Just being able to walk on a particular side of the road, sit on a bus, or even go into a library...When I stayed with him he would take me to the library, but he would make me aware that this was something that people didn't always have access to and what a privilege it was.”
“Post-1994 there was discomfort with foreigners. A lot of the time the police would go and see if people had work permits and would lock them up. You'd always hear at the markets, oh so and so's not here because they've been locked up...It became more intense over the years. Now you're a foreigner, a Somalian, a Malawian. The early parts of the 90s you'd say my lineage, I’m from Malawi and I also have ties here and it was something that was accepted...” For Rabia the meaning of being a Malawians has changed – “now it's like all these people have come and taken our jobs.”
Yusuf lived a very successful life, going for Haj in the late 1980s and continuing to work at the Marabastad mosque until his retirement in 2000. He gave an excellent foundation for his family in South Africa – “position and status are tied to your parents, not so much in terms of wealth, but morality...Moral beliefs play a big role.” Sakina nevertheless reflected that, “I don't think it was easy...I think my father held his own because he was very eloquent and read very well, and because he understood human nature he was able to have a good standing within the Indian community but also within any community... a lot of the people in my generation were taught by him.” After Yusuf retired in 2000, he lived in the mosque precinct until 2004, when he relocated across the road when the mosque was rebuilt in 2004. Yusuf Saidi passed away in 2005.
