Chapter One

I’m Malik but people just call me Mali. My brother Rashid started calling me like that cause he said “Malik means king. You are too small to be a king so you are Mali – a little prince”. Rashid is roughly five years older than me and he had always been like a father to me. In reality he is just my half brother.

I never got to know my real father. He visited Kapstadt for some “business dealings”. His business included a little trip outside of Kapstadt to our small ghetto called “anthill” (it got its name because we’re living on a small hill that is very overpopulated and people have no real goal so they are wandering around). I don’t know if my sire had a soft spot for animals but above all he treated people here like that. When he walked around at the anthill and saw my mother outside of our ramshackle hut he violently grabbed her and tore her into the flat. My mum landed on the floor next to my oldest brother Kimotho who was quickly pulled out. The door was shut from inside and my brother had to bear my mums screams as the douchebag were doing his “business”. Afterwards nobody saw him at the anthill again. It was Kimotho telling me that story as I asked for my father but he just told me once and we never talked about it again.

Mum died when I was five years old. I don’t know what she suffered from but I recognize that she lost all her hair in front of the death. My memories of her are fading increasingly. Rashid told me that she was a silent woman but she always tried the best to keep her family alive.

All in all I have five brothers and three sisters. At least these eights are the ones I know. I’m the youngest one and most of my siblings left the anthill long time ago. Rashid was different from them. He always felt responsible for me. When I was hungry he started a thoughts- excursion with me. In our thoughts we ate the most sumptuous food and that made me feel better for a short moment of time. When I was sad, Rashid told me stories about far away countries where everybody has food and where all the people were nice to each other.

Every day, Rashid goes to the city centre of Kapstadt and tries to sell drugs or normal tobacco. Rashid just once used drugs himself but he nearly died afterwards because Lord knows what mixture Rashid had consumed. Afterwards he never took drugs again and he always tried to keep me away from it. “It makes you weird” he told me and because I also did what he told me, I never had a try.

Rashid knows what kind of black business he is doing but somehow we need to get some food. I contribute to our income by ransacking the garbage hills for butts which have still a bit tobacco left. I collect them all, scribe the paper and roll the tobacco into new papers to new cigarettes. Some years ago I got also used to prepare the drugs. I don’t know where Rashid gets the basic stuff from but we have to punch it to get more out of it.

It was about three years ago, when Rashid came back from Kapstadt that he began talking about the big America. America, the land of freedom where everybody can live in peace without drugs, without violence. The stories about America were the best stories Rashid ever told. I began to believe in that dream world and every time I was blue, I dreamed me away to America. That’s how everything started: America was a dream.