JEDDAH: His name is Abdullah Suwali, but his friends call him Maradona. This is not because he is particularly good at football, but because he’s as good with a blade as the Argentine midfielder was with a ball.
“I’ve never made any of my customers bleed,” he claims.
Suwali is a street barber whose only tools are a stool and a package of razors. Most of his customers are African visa overstayers.
Arab News spotted Suwali in an area between Ghulail and Qarantina, two of south Jeddah’s low-income districts populated by a large number of illegal African immigrants.
Like his customers, Suwali resides off the grid: An illegal in a foreign land. He came here three years ago on a pilgrim’s visa from Nigeria and never went back.
He says that for the most part he avoids Saudis out of fear he might be caught by immigration officials. Instead he sticks with his own, shaving and even etching designs into the haircuts of other African men.
“I learned this work from my older brother who made me master it,” he said, while carefully running a razor blade through a customer’s shortly cropped hair. “Most of the time the job is designing the head rather than doing haircuts.”
Though Suwali has no shop, he has regular customers who seek him out on the street.
He said hair etching with a razor (which is popular among young African men) requires sharp eyes and a steady hand. “One mistake and the whole design is ruined,” says Suwali.
“My reputation is so high that many people, even from north Jeddah, come to me for haircuts,” he said. “I know some famous football players in Makkah and Jeddah who come to me for haircuts. Former Ittihad striker Al-Hassan Keta used to visit me for haircuts.”
Suwali says he earns about SR150 to SR200 a day, far more than he would probably earn back home.
He says his dream is to save up money to get to America or Europe and, of course, open a hair salon.
