Features / Breakfast with Bristol24/7
Breakfast with Bristol24/7: Mohamed Makawi
My mornings are usually about a very sweet cup of coffee paired with good music.
There’s usually no food involved to call it breakfast. But on this particular day, walking to the bus stop from my home in Bedminster, I am excited about this special breakfast with the man I now know is a passionate traveller among many other things.
Elemental, where Stokes Croft becomes Cheltenham Road, is Mohamed Makawi’s idea.
is needed now More than ever
It’s a cafe just within his ward of Cotham that he regularly visits, and he waves to a couple of familiar faces as we walk in together on this Monday morning.
Green Party councillor Makawi came to Bristol in 1997 to obtain his licence from the British Aeroplane Company in Filton, which is a prerequisite for becoming a qualified aircraft maintenance engineer.
Despite a Somali community, large South Asian communities and a long-established Caribbean community, Makawi soon noticed the absence of a Sudanese community in Bristol. So he started the Sudanese Community Association with only ten people at its foundation.
Makawi is one of the councillors for Cotham – photo: Green Party
Bristol is not the first stamp on Makawi’s passport on what he calls his life’s “journey” that started in Sudan and continued to India, Oman, Scotland and Ireland. But he still admits having unfulfilled travelling desires.
“I would love to continue travelling because I haven’t done as much travelling as I would like,” the 59-year-old tells me as he sips his long black coffee. “I have to do the rest of Europe and I would like to go to America where I’ve got my siblings. Mostly I would like to travel to South America for the rainforests.”
Remembering his days in the south Indian city of Madras (now Chennai), where he studied aircraft maintenance and engineering at the prestigious Hindustan Institute of Engineering Technology, Makawai says: “The weather in Madras suited me. It was tropical, just like the Sudanese city of Khartoum that I come from.”
Makawi spent four years in the Indian city Chennai at Hindustan Institute of Engineering Technology – photo: HIET
Makawi’s face instantly lights up when I tell him I have roots in Chennai. It’s where my dad is from and I speak Tamil.
In fact, Makawi and I even speak a couple of sentences in the language which he still understands despite not living there in the 1980s.
As we chat away, Makawi – dressed casually in a green waterproof jacket concealing a Bristol City Council lanyard around his neck – checks the time to make sure he isn’t going to be late for his next meeting which is due to be about how to combat graffiti, fly-tipping and vandalism in the lanes of Cotham: regular issues in a councillor’s email inbox.
The councillor recently under took the task of litter picking with fellow Green Party members – photo: Emma Edwards
Elemental is right on the eastern tip of his Cotham ward, which stretches from just behind the BRI, encompassing Kingsdown and parts of Redland as well as Cotham.
Makawi tells me that he is extremely proud of this “friendly” cafe and bakery, also one of the best people-watching spots in Bristol.
Makawi joined the Green Party in 2015 and has been a councillor since 2021.
It is obvious to me that he has invested passion and energy into his ward, regularly going out litter picking, unblocking drains, and campaigning for more regular bus services.
Makawi is the kind of person who savours every sip of his coffee, as it takes a couple of hours for him to finish just one cup, ruminating over the dilemmas of life as a local politician: “From outside, you always criticise and always are in opposition to what the person in power is doing. But when you become one, you begin taking the heat.”
Makawi was pleasantly surprised to find downstairs seating at Elemental, a bakery that he frequents – photo: Karen Johnson
He insists that a politician of any kind must serve their electors to the best of their abilities: “That’s what I like about the Green Party – there’s freedom of expressing ourselves individually.
“We do what we say without being tied to some kind of hypocrisy.
“As politicians, you must try to work with what you promise, and do your best to bring it to these people.”
So how does Makawi – now in the party of power rather than the opposition at City Hall – improve his adopted home city?
Gently placing his hands on the glass table decorated with coins, Makawi says Bristol is “lacking especially in preventing crime and transportation”.
He adds: “The crime rate has especially gone high after the lockdown. And we also need good buses. The buses need to be in local authority or ownership.”
As Makawai takes the final sip of his coffee and taps the cup on the table, he recalls the August 3 violence in Castle Park, on Bristol Bridge and outside the Mercure hotel on Redcliff Hill: “We are different. We have to accept that. But, we also have to see how to work out our differences to make us stronger, not weak. Let us spread love.”
Illustration by Lucy J Turner
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