What is the What

by Dave Eggers

  Each day, Gop waited for news about those who were coming to Kakuma. We occasionally received word about a movement of refugees, and would anticipate their arrival and prepare for it. Even after three years, any given week could bring a thousand new people, and the camp continued to grow outward by miles, such that I could walk a new avenue each morning. Kakuma grew to encompass Kakuma I, II, III, and IV. It was a refugee city with its own suburbs.

  But most of the arrivals came from regions of Sudan, and particularly those villages closer to Kenya. Few were from anywhere near Marial Bai. Most of those I asked had never heard of my village. And when they knew anything of northern Bahr al-Ghazal, they provided sweeping news of its elimination from the planet.

  —You’re from northern Bahr al-Ghazal? one man said.—Everyone there is dead. Another man, elderly and missing his right leg, was more specific.

  —Northern Bahr al-Gazhal is now the home of the murahaleen. They’ve taken over. It’s their grazing land. There’s nothing there to go back to.

  One day, news of my region came from a boy I did not know well. I was at the water tap before school when the boy, named Santino, ran to me, explaining that there was a man at Lopiding Hospital who was from Marial Bai. Another boy had been at the hospital for malaria and had begun talking to the man, who mentioned my hometown, and this man said he even remembered me, Achak Deng. So I was obligated to find a way to Lopiding, quickly, I thought, for this was the first time in many years that someone had come to Kakuma from Marial Bai.

  But then I thought of Daniel Dut, another boy I knew who had awaited news of his own family, only to learn that they were all dead. For months afterward, Daniel had insisted that he wished he’d never found out, that it was far easier to walk through life in doubt and with hope than knowing that everyone was gone. Knowing your family was dead brought on visions of how they died, how they might have suffered, how their bodies might have been abused after death. So I didn’t immediately seek out the Marial Bai man in the hospital. When I heard, a week later, that he was gone, I was not unhappy.

  The announcement of the census was made while Gop was waiting for the coming of his wife and daughters, and this complicated his peace of mind. To serve us, to feed us, the UNHCR and Kakuma’s many aid groups needed to know how many refugees were at the camp. Thus, in 1994 they announced they would count us. It would only take a few days, they said. To the organizers I am sure it seemed a very simple, necessary, and uncontroversial directive. But for the Sudanese elders, it was anything but.

  —What do you think they have planned? Gop Chol wondered aloud.

  I didn’t know what he meant by this, but soon I understood what had him, and the majority of Sudanese elders, greatly concerned. Some learned elders were reminded of the colonial era, when Africans were made to bear badges of identification on their necks.

  —Could this counting be a pretext of a new colonial period? Gop mused.—It’s very possible. Probable even!

  I said nothing.

  At the same time, there were practical, less symbolic, reasons to oppose the census, including the fact that many elders imagined that it would decrease, not increase, our rations. If they discovered there were fewer of us than had been assumed, the food donations from the rest of the world would drop. The more pressing and widespread fear among young and old at Kakuma was that the census would be a way for the UN to kill us all. These fears were only exacerbated when the fences were erected.

  The UN workers had begun to assemble barriers, six feet tall and arranged like hallways. The fences would ensure that we would walk single file on our way to be counted, and thus counted only once. Even those among us, the younger Sudanese primarily, who were not so worried until then, became gravely concerned when the fences went up. It was a malevolent-looking thing, that maze of fencing, orange and opaque. Soon even the best educated among us bought into the suspicion that this was a plan to eliminate the Dinka. Most of the Sudanese my age had learned of the Holocaust, and were convinced that this was a plan much like that used to eliminate the Jews in Germany and Poland. I was dubious of the growing paranoia, but Gop was a believer. As rational a man as he was, he had a long memory for injustices visited upon the people of Sudan.

  —What isn’t possible, boy? he demanded.—See where we are? You tell me what isn’t possible at this time in Africa!

  But I had no reason to distrust the UN. They had been feeding us at Kakuma for years. There was not enough food, but they were the ones providing for everyone, and thus it seemed nonsensical that they would kill us after all this time.

  —Yes, he reasoned,—but see, perhaps now the food has run out. The food is gone, there’s no more money, and Khartoum has paid the UN to kill us. So the UN gets two things: they get to save food, and they are paid to get rid of us.

  —But how will they get away with it?

  —That’s easy, Achak. They say that we caught a disease only the Dinka can get. There are always illnesses unique to certain people, and this is what will happen. They’ll say there was a Dinka plague, and that all the Sudanese are dead. This is how they’ll justify killing every last one of us.

  —That’s impossible, I said.

  —Is it? he asked.—Was Rwanda impossible?

  I still thought that Gop’s theory was unreliable, but I also knew that I should not forget that there were a great number of people who would be happy if the Dinka were dead. So for a few days, I did not make up my mind about the head count. Meanwhile, public sentiment was solidifying against our participation, especially when it was revealed that the fingers of all those counted, after being counted, would be dipped in ink.

  —Why the ink? Gop asked. I didn’t know.

  —The ink is a fail-safe measure to ensure the Sudanese will be exterminated.

  I said nothing, and he elaborated. Surely if the UN did not kill us Dinka while in the lines, he theorized, they would kill us with this ink on the fingers. How could the ink be removed? It would, he thought, enter our bodies when we ate.

  —This seems very much like what they did to the Jews, Gop said.

  People spoke a lot about the Jews in those days, which was odd, considering that a short time before, most of the boys I knew thought the Jews were an extinct race. Before we learned about the Holocaust in school, in church we had been taught rather crudely that the Jews had aided in the killing of Jesus Christ. In those teachings, it was never intimated that the Jews were a people still inhabiting the earth. We thought of them as mythological creatures who did not exist outside the stories of the Bible.

  The night before the census, the entire series of fences, almost a mile long, was torn down. No one took responsibility, but many were quietly satisfied.

  In the end, after countless meetings with the Kenyan leadership at the camp, the Sudanese elders were convinced that the head count was legitimate and was needed to provide better services to the refugees. The fences were rebuilt, and the census was conducted a few weeks later. But in a way, those who feared the census were correct, in that nothing very good came from it. After the count, there was less food, fewer services, even the departure of a few smaller programs. When they were done counting, the population of Kakuma had decreased by eight thousand people in one day.

  How had the UNHCR miscounted our numbers before the census? The answer is called recycling. Recycling was popular at Kakuma and is favored at most refugee camps, and any refugee anywhere in the world is familiar with the concept, even if they have a different name for it. The essence of the idea is that one can leave the camp and re-enter as a different person, thus keeping his first ration card and getting another when he enters again under a new name. This means that the recycler can eat twice as much as he did before, or, if he chooses to trade the extra rations, he can buy or otherwise obtain anything else he needs and is not being given by the UN—sugar, meat, vegetables. The trading resulting from extra ration cards provided the basis for a vast secondary economy at Kakuma, and kept thousands of refugees from an
emia and related illnesses. At any given time, the administrators of Kakuma thought they were feeding eight thousand more people than they actually were. No one felt guilty about this small numerical deception.

  The ration-card economy made commerce possible, and the ability of different groups to manipulate and thrive within the system led soon enough to a sort of social hierarchy at Kakuma. At the top of the ladder as a group were the Sudanese, because our sheer numbers dominated the camp. But on an individual basis, the Ethiopians were the top social caste—a few thousand representatives of that country’s middle class who were forced out with Mengistu. They lived in Kakuma I, and owned a good portion of the prosperous businesses. Their rivals in trade were the Somalis and the Eritreans, who found a way to coexist with the Ethiopians, though their countrymen were at odds with each other at home. Meanwhile there was tension between the Somalis and the Bantu, a long-suffering group who had been transplanted from another Kenyan camp, Dadaab. The Bantu had first been made slaves in Mozambique and in the 1800s migrated to Somalia, where they endured two hundred years of persecution. They were not allowed to own land, or given access to political representation at any level. When civil war engulfed Somalia in the 1990s their situation worsened, as their farms and homes were raided, their men killed, and their women raped. There were eventually some seventeen thousand Bantu in Kakuma, and even there they were not always safe, as their numbers brought resentment from many Sudanese, who considered the camp theirs.

  Just below the merchants were the SPLA commanders, and under them, the Ugandans—only four hundred or so, most of them affiliated with Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group at odds with the ruling National Resistance Movement. The Ugandans couldn’t go back; most were well-known at home and had prices on their heads. Sprinkled around the camp there were Congolese, Burundians, Eritreans, and a few hundred Rwandans who many suspected had been participants in the genocide and were unwelcome in their homeland.

  Somewhere near the bottom of it all sat the unaccompanied minors, the Lost Boys. We had no money, no family, and little means to attain either. One step up from this low rung could be gained if one found his way into a family. Living with Gop Chol had afforded me some status and a few privileges, but I knew that once Gop’s family arrived, it would be difficult to spread the family’s rations around, and the many items necessary—with so many young girls in the home—would mean that there needed to be more income in our home, and an extra ration card was the beginning of the flow of wealth.

  —One of us will have to recycle once the girls get here, Gop said one day.

  And I knew this to be true. I received my own rations every week, and when his wife and daughters arrived, Gop would qualify for a family ration. But the rations for a family of five would be insufficient, and we knew that the prime time to recycle again would be immediately after the census, when there would be extra vigilance about how much food we would be given.

  —I will go, I said, and I was sure of it.

  I would go as soon as his wife and girls arrived, I announced. Gop pretended to be surprised by my offer, but I knew he expected this of me. Recycling was always done by the young men at Kakuma, and I wanted to prove my worth to the family, to earn their respect shortly after they arrived.

  For the weeks that followed, Achor Achor and I spent many nights lying outside my shelter, doing our homework in the crisp blue light of the moon, plotting my recycling trip.

  —You’ll need extra pants, Achor Achor said.

  I had no idea why I would need pants, but Achor Achor enlightened me: I would need pants because with the pants I would get the goat.

  —One pair of pants should do it, he surmised. I asked Achor Achor why I needed a goat.

  —You need to get the goat to get the shillings.

  I begged him to start at the beginning.

  I needed the pants, he said, because when I left Kakuma, I would be traveling to Narus, in Sudan, and in Sudan, they cannot find the sort of new, Chinese-made pants that were available in Kakuma Town. If I were to bring such pants to Narus, I could trade them for a goat. And I needed a goat because if I were to bring a healthy goat back to Kakuma, where goats are scarce, I would be able to sell the animal for two thousand shillings or more.

  —You might as well make some money while you’re out there risking your life.

  This is the first I had heard of the trip still being dangerous. Or rather, I knew that in the past, if one left Kakuma, and traveled the roads to Lokichoggio and past Lokichoggio, there were bandits one might encounter, Turkana and Taposa bandits, and they would, at best, steal everything you had, and at worst, steal all you had and kill you afterward. I had thought that those dangers were in the past, but apparently not. Nevertheless, the plan continued to develop, and Gop joined in.

  —You should bring more than one pair of pants! Gop huffed one night over dinner. Achor Achor was eating with us, which he often did, because Gop knew how to cook and Achor Achor did not.

  —More goods, more goats! Gop bellowed.—You might as well really make it worthwhile, since you’re risking your life and all.

  From then on, the plan expanded: I would bring with me two shirts, a pair of pants, and a blanket, all new or seemingly new, and with all this I would be able to trade for at least three goats, which would bring six thousand shillings in Kakuma Town, an amount that would keep Gop’s family in necessities, even in luxuries like sugar and butter, for many months. The money, combined with the extra ration card, would make me a hero in the family, and I dreamed of impressing my soon-to-be-sisters, who all would look up to me and call me uncle.

  —You can start your own store, Achor Achor said one night.

  This was true. Immediately I liked the idea, and thereafter this too became part of the larger plan. I’d long wanted to start a small retail outfit, a canteen, outside my shelter, where I would sell foods and also pens, pencils, soap, slippers, dried fish, and whatever soda I could get my hands on. Because I was trusted by those who knew me, I was confident that if I offered my goods at a fair price I would do well, and once I had some capital, the stocking of the canteen would be no problem. I remembered lessons from my father’s store in Marial Bai, and knew that in such matters customer relations were crucial.

  —But you’ll need more than the two shirts and pants, Achor Achor noted.—You’ll need two pairs of pants, three shirts, and at least two blankets, wool ones.

  Finally the plan became real. I would be leaving at the next opportunity, the next time the roads were considered safe. I was given a backpack by Gop’s cousin, a sturdy vinyl apparatus with zippers and many compartments. Inside I placed the two pairs of pants, the three shirts, the wool blanket, and a bag of nuts and crackers and peanut butter for the trip. I planned to leave early in the morning, to sneak out from Kakuma IV, and then walk the mile or so to the main road to Loki, which I would follow, avoiding Kenyan police, camp guards, and passing cars.

  —But you can’t leave during the day! Gop sighed when he heard of this part of the plan.—You leave at night, you dope.

  So the plan was altered again. At night I would not be seen by anyone. The official way to leave Kakuma was with an approved refugee travel document. But I had no legitimate business leaving, and even if I did, applying for such a document could take months. If I had connections at the UNHCR, I might be able to get my application expedited, but I knew no one well enough that they would risk anything for me.

  That left one remedy, the most popular and speedy, that being the bribing of the Kenyan guards along the road. Kakuma was never a gated camp; the refugees could walk out of the camp if they wished, but very soon, along the main road, they would be stopped by Kenyan police at stations or in Land Rovers, and the traveler would have to present his or her refugee-travel document. It was at that moment that a traveler without a document would have to present an appropriate incentive for the officer to look the other way. Night travel was recommended, for the simple fact that the less u
pstanding officers were given the night shifts, and there were fewer of them.

  So finally I was ready to go. But first we would wait for Gop’s family, to make sure there were still three daughters and one wife. Though they had sent word months before that the four of them would be arriving together, there were no such guarantees in Sudan. Gop and I did not talk about this, but we knew it to be true. Anything can happen during so long a trip.

  In the end they arrived, everyone intact, though they appeared without warning. One morning, Gop Chol and I walked to the tap to get more water, so that no one would have to retrieve it for a few days. As we approached the tap, we saw, in the distance, a Red Cross van steaming through the dust. We both stood, knowing that it was unusual to see a van in our part of the camp, and at the same time, we both wondered, Could it be? Gop had received word a week earlier that his family might be transferred sometime soon, but there had been no news since. We watched the van slow as it approached our home, and when it came to a stop it was in front of our door and Gop was running. I ran after him. Gop was not a fast runner, so I overtook him quickly. When we were within sight of the van, Gop began yelling. He sounded maniacal and unwell.

  —Aha! Aha! You are here! You are here!

  They couldn’t hear us yet. We were a few hundred yards away.

  A tiny girl, frail and in a white dress, stepped out of the van first, followed by two more girls, each taller than the last but both under eight years old, also in white. They stood, squinting in the sunlight, flattening their dresses over their legs. They were followed by a beautiful woman in green, the green of rain-soaked elephant leaves. She stood, guarded her eyes from the sun, and looked around at Kakuma.

  —You are here! You are here!

  Gop was yelling but wasn’t close enough to be heard. He ran, waving his arms wildly. Soon he was near enough for the woman in green to see him, but only as a vague shape in the dust. I had run ahead and could see his family clearly.

  —Hello! he yelled.