Drama and devotion on a Friday night

The Sayyeda Nafisa mosque in Cairo is surrounded by chaos, chaos that laps at its walls and occasionally seeps inside its doors.

The women’s section is entered via an alleyway running along one side of its walls, an obstacle course of ever decreasing human need: from beggars, supine and supplicating, to an insistent seller of single flowers wrapped in plastic and tied with a ribbon (a gift for Nafisa), to the relative self-sufficiency of a small stall selling religious bric-a-brac.

Inside, women lie prostrate or sit or pray at the shrine’s entrance, buffeted by the voices of three rambunctious cleaners who are as much concerned with cleaning out the pockets of the faithful as the faithful are with cleansing their souls, busily sweeping/blocking the mosque exit as they extol the beauty of the “moons” in front of them.

At the shrine itself women touch the walls as they recite Qur’an while on the other side of a trellis-like structure dividing the sexes, men do the same. At the end of a room an officious man in his sixties oversees proceedings, occasionally barking out orders at the squawking cleaners and even the devotional themselves.

There is a constant stream of people on this early Friday evening. A small boy wanders through the supplicants, lost in his own reverie – of crisp-eating. Another woman dressed in a black baggy tunic reclines against a wall, cheek in palm, staring into the middle distance. Then she suddenly and without warning prostrates herself in prayer, almost throwing herself flat onto the ground until her thin form is submerged in her clothes so that she resembles the Wicked Witch of the West who got her comeuppance.

There was drama inside the mosque on this Friday evening. With great bluster a woman – still wearing her shoes – swept into the entrance hall and declared that she had been robbed while at the shrine. One of the cleaners, a particularly active woman in her early 70s wearing a green khimar matched with a long necklace of prayer beads, immediately launched into action and declared that she would find the thief. The doors to the shrine room were shut, to no clear end. The thief had gone. The officious man, armed with a long metal ruler, began imperiously demanding that women at the shrine leave, and was mostly ignored. He focused his attention on a woman seated on the floor.

“Stop begging and get out,” he said.

“Don’t push it,” the woman replied.

The man declared that he would summon someone to remove her. The woman looked the other way and continued eating.

There is a donation box next to the shrine. A woman opened her purse and moved a single LE10 note out of the way to get at a few coins, which she dropped in the box. Another woman gave guavas to the officious man and the cleaners and anyone else who crossed her path.

The cacophony of it all was pierced by the call to the Esha prayer, beautiful but loud, pumped out of the mosque’s speakers. But even at top volume it could not drown out the sound of a fight coming from the alleyway outside. The cleaners took their brooms and immediately went to inspect.

Two robust matrons, eyeballing each other, were screaming threats and invective. One of them worked at the stall they were standing in. A group of people watched. A young girl of around 16 sat on a stool in the stall and became increasingly agitated until a youth of around the same age or younger suddenly flung himself on her and viciously attacked her, dragging her out of her seat and along the ground. One of the matrons hit her on the back with both hands. She was punched and pulled across the narrow alley until one of the cleaners, a determined septuagenarian, intervened and led the sobbing and distraught girl into the mosque to seek refuge. It was impossible to tell how the fight had begun or what it was about.

The robust matron sat on a plastic chair and answered her mobile phone as if nothing had happened. She interrupted her caller only to entreat the young man not to follow the girl into the mosque as he took his shoes off. He went in briefly anyway.

The cleaner who had rescued the girl appeared.

“Come inside again and I’ll give you fucking hell,” she promised the boy. He skulked away.

The fury lingered as the prayers began. A man had watched the violence impassively – he started reciting Qur’an halfway through while spectating. He left. The robust matron took up her sentry position at the stall again as the sound of the prayers floated out into the tormented night and disintegrated above a young woman who emerged from the mosque in tears and pressed her face into the wall, arms by her side, perfectly still apart from the sobs rippling through her body. Opposite her, somebody had twice written in a strange curling font on the mosque wall: “I seek forgiveness from God”.

Sarah Carr (@sarahcarr) is a British-Egyptian journalist. This post was first published on her blog www.inanities.org

Summer shopping in Mauritius: Brace yourself

Shopping for new clothes in Port Louis is less like retail therapy and more like one hair-raising experience after another. You need to be psychologically and physically prepared before entering a mall, something I’m still getting the hang of. Shop assistants have made a meal of me one too many times.

I recently walked into a clothing store in the tourist-filled Le Caudan Waterfront, and was immediately ambushed. “Where did get your boobs planted?” the owner asked lewdly. I ignored him and pretended to carefully inspect a Fedora hat, the price of which was way beyond my means.

“Is it really raining outside?” a shop assistant in the next store I entered asked, trying to strike up a conversation. I grinned, bit my lower lip and replied: “Sorry I’m just browsing. Cheers.”

As if to put me at ease and get me to stay, two other shop assistants in the store prodded me further. “You must be looking for something classier. Dinner date?” By this time I had adjusted my scarf, tripped over the wet mop on the floor, glued my ear to my Blackberry and faked answering a call. “Hello? Hello? Hel…” I was safely out of there.

I consoled myself by entering an Indian shop, thinking Indian staff would be less pushy. As I admired the summer floral dresses from Mumbai, the well-endowed shop lady approached me. “You’re blessed with curves,” she said, as if I didn’t appreciate myself. She thrust some fabric at me. “You’ll look good in these loose pants and sweater. Size 8.” These “loose pants” would be put to better use as a tablecloth but, out of respect, I relented and slipped into the change room with them.

Seconds later I heard her shout: “Do the pants fit? I mean, in there?” Before I could respond, the ultimate embarrassment occurred. The impatient, rude woman pulled back the curtain and exposed me to a group of stiletto-heeled young ladies! That was the deal breaker. I abandoned my purchases and walked out.

Privacy is not a consideration for shop assistants here. To some of them, a dressing room means a dressing down. One day I was trying on a dress that seemed a size too small, only to have a big-boned shop assistant barge in to ‘help’. “You got it wrong back here, wait,” she instructed, yanking the already tight belt tighter across my waist. As if that would make it looser.

For these shop assistants, the aim is to secure a sale at any cost from every shopper. Never mind that the jeans don’t fit or that it will shrink after one wash. “You inhale air, I push up,” the shop assistant is likely to say, grabbing your hip and manhandling your body into the garment. When her efforts fail, she will stop but never quit. “We still have nice scarves, Hermes bags, dinner plates, shoes …”

At the end of my shopping trips, I feel more than insulted but to get what you need in Mauritian malls, you have to brush off the annoyances and just swipe your credit card.

It’s not all bad though. The capital’s shopping trends can be gratifying at times. Some shops erect huge bins inside their stores with a notice: “Bring an item of old clothes every time you buy something new.” When I dropped two slightly used trench coats into a boutique’s exchange bin I was delighted to find that I became the owner of a pair of topaz stilettos. Shop owners say some of the old clothes brought back by customers are donated to charity, but no one really knows for sure. It is such a popular practice that I often see troops of college girls taking old clothes back to shops, announcing: “We’re going schwopping not shopping.” Some shops even offer “clothing surgery”, where they refashion old garments into new outfits.

The habit of exchanging old clothes also extends to the neighbourhood. Women gather for an afternoon of “swishing” – they exchange clothes that they are tired of wearing for someone else’s. Primrose skirts are swapped for fabulous suits. It’s a fun and coffee-filled event but beware: I got a deathly glare when I grabbed a Belgian sweater someone else was richly coveting.

Stella Boniro is a 23-year-old student at the University of Mauritius. Her goal is to be a fashion journalist in the near future.

King of fong kong football

In my wildest dreams I never thought I would own a soccer team. But here I am at 29, possibly the world’s youngest team owner. And the most stressed in Botswana, if not the world. It’s no joke to run a team. Ask Jomo Sono, Patrice Motsepe and Roman Abramovich.

Of course I’m still waiting to become as rich and powerful as they are. My team is just a social soccer side playing in an informal league known round these parts as the “Sunday Times” because of when we play.

The Sunday Times “league” has taken Botswana by storm. Matches are organised mostly by word of mouth and the teams include a few old men, but the bulk are wild and badly behaved youngsters — some as young as 15.

My team — Industrial Super Stars, so named after the scrapyard area in Itekeng where the majority of our players live — is made up of disgruntled and uncontrollable alcoholics without any soccer skills to boast about. My bunch was rejected by other Sunday Times soccer clubs.

In my quest to be Motsepe, I took the opportunity to name and organise the team. But finding them before a match is more complicated, especially at the end of the month. After payday, the team owner has to endure moving from one drinking hole to another in search of his players.

One of the unique things about the Sunday Times soccer league is that the usual football rules and regulations are relaxed. So relaxed, most of them don’t apply. A player can be substituted and come back into play later, as many times as he likes. A referee might smoke a cigarette during the game. The referee can also be substituted if one team feels he is biased in favour of the opponents. When this happens, the ref is likely to express his disgust at the decision by donning the kit of the team that stood by him when he was subjected to insults.

Alcohol and dagga abound and the players use them with abandon. Because most players are unemployed — especially in my team — pints of Chibuku, a traditional brew, are a regular feature at the games.

These players don’t care if team “owners” and officials such as me are present when they take their dagga. They are very uncouth. They spew venom. They don’t want to be shouted at like professional coaches shout at their players. They threaten to decamp to another side and there are plenty to choose from at the bottom of the league barrel.

In the worst scenario they threaten to form their own team that will be run and controlled by them without being subjected to civil behaviour lectures. The most foul-mouthed will tell you to your face that you don’t own them and that just because you occasionally buy them pints of Chibuku, this doesn’t make you better than them.

I have been told to go and write shit in the papers whenever I called some of my players to order. “Just because you write for newspapers doesn’t mean you can lecture to us about good behaviour,” I have been told countless times.

It is a bit unfair because other football team owners, such as Sono, Motsepe and Abramovich, are not subjected to this treatment. By the same token, just because my bank balance hovers close to zero most of the time, it doesn’t mean I should be subjected to this sort of treatment, I mutter to myself.

Although I’m not given the respect that I deserve, the team is happy to use the water in my house to wash the kit. I’m also the custodian of the kit, which is a raw deal. Come half time nobody listens to the coach. They don’t want team talk. They just want alcohol and that foul-smelling green stuff.

One of the Industrial Super Stars officials is my younger brother. One recent Sunday we Mosikares were accused of having hijacked the team.

Drunken debates ensued. I came up with the idea of forming a rival team to the neighbouring Itekeng Soccer Club when I realised that the majority of my present players were not being given a chance to prove themselves.

To explain the set-up for a South African audience, let’s put it this way: if Industrial Super Stars were a political party it would be Cope; Itekeng Soccer Club would be the ANC.

My breakaway plan was hatched in the middle of the month when I did not have money to buy a team kit. So one of my cousins — among those now accusing me and my brother of hijacking control — went and bought the kit at one of the Chinese shops in town. It is a “fong kong” kit costing less than P200 (about R250).

I wanted to refund him so that I could be left to run my Industrial Super Stars the way I liked, but he refused. My cousin can be difficult to deal with. On the field he will agree to be substituted only when he wants to smoke a cigarette.

In our way my team is like a close-knit family. And like all families, we bicker. It’s just as well we hardly ever win any matches — when we do, the boys drink until they drop.

Oarabile Mosikare is a reporter for Mmegi and Monitor newspapers. He lives in Francistown, Botswana. This post was first published in the M&G newspaper.