by Ben Rawlence
The refugees didn’t trust the WFP staff. They had lobbied for a separate community scale at which a gentle old man in a white skullcap took his time with everyone weighing bags to verify their amounts. The standard WFP ration per person is a finely measured and costed 565 grams per day providing 2,241 kilocalories per person. For Guled for the coming fortnight, this translated as three kilos of wheat flour, two of rice, one kilo of beans, half a litre of cooking oil and a cup of salt. In a strange incentive to reproduce, the amounts are the same per person, regardless of age. At the exit, a woman in a veil punched his card again and he emerged clutching his bags into the blinding midday sun.
As soon as he got outside, he sold some of his food. Traders lined the street buying up the rations cheaply. Two kilos of rice yielded 100 shillings ($1.2). So finally, ten days after he had arrived, Guled went to the phone shop in the market and called the three numbers that he carried in his head: those of his wife, his mother-in-law and his sister.
Maryam had almost lost her mind with worrying about him. But she and the others were fine. Overcome and emotional, Guled recounted, with an optimism unrooted in experience, all the benefits of the camp in an effort to persuade her to join him. He simply repeated what Noor had boasted of: that the camp was safe; that there was plenty of food, free housing, health care and education and even the chance of resettlement to America. He didn’t mention that he found the sun so hot he couldn’t open his eyes at midday or that the dust of Ifo caught in the back of the throat. Nor did he describe how the sewage stood in the street or how the overcrowded camp was still expanding.
Maryam was easily convinced. The heavy fighting in Mogadishu had continued. On 2 December an extra 8,000 troops from Uganda and Burundi had been deployed to the AMISOM peacekeeping force in the city. During the following three days over 100 people were killed. Plus, she carried within her a secret. One that she wanted to tell Guled in person. Without any idea what she was asking of him in a refugee camp full of people forbidden to work and reliant on international handouts to eat, Maryam told Guled to send money so she could come.
Guled was overjoyed, then instantly distraught. In Mogadishu he could have hustled the fare of $50. In Ifo camp he had no idea where to start, how to get money. He had sounded so confident to Maryam on the phone. So confident, in fact, that she would count the rosy unrealistic picture he had painted as the first betrayal.
5
Nisho
At the centre of the grey economy of the camp, where Guled hoped to earn some money, is the market. Business starts early in Ifo. At four a.m. every morning, on a cold slab of concrete, half a dozen camels are slaughtered. As the knives flash across their throats and the blood spills into polished bowls, the muezzin calls the faithful to the dawn prayer. By the time the market opens at seven a.m., skinned legs, ribs and camel intestines are hanging from metal poles in scores of makeshift butchers’ shops across the camp. Livestock has always been the mainstay of the Somali economy, and, along with sugar, so it is in the Dadaab camps. The markets in Dadaab sell everything from tomatoes to trucks and turn over at least $25m a year; it is a black market in technical economic speak but, in real terms, it is a quarter of all economic activity in North Eastern Province and everyone wants a piece of it.
The anarchy of the border country is, for those with capital and connections and the ability to exploit it, a giant opportunity. On the Somali side, the traffic is controlled, and taxed, by al-Shabaab, and on the Kenyan side by the police. Higher up the chain, Kenyan politicians and Somali businessmen take their cuts leaving the workers of the market to speculate about the deals being transacted above their heads. The traders of the market are the middle class of the camp and the middle men; in touch with both sides: paying off the police and al-Shabaab alike. Among them there are dollar millionaires who have made fortunes out of the humanitarian economy: smuggling sugar, pasta, rice, milk, shoes, cars and all manner of other things into Kenya; renting vehicles to the aid agencies, supplying food and drink, constructing offices. These entrepreneurs have usually started from small beginnings wired from relatives abroad. But for the thousands scrabbling just to raise some extra cash, the market is a cauldron of competition, struggle and uncertainty. This was where Noor advised Guled to try his luck to earn the money for Maryam’s fare.
The central market in Ifo camp is called Bosnia, named in the Somali tradition for something significant occurring at the time of its founding. Later in the year, it would live up to its warlike name, but not yet. In January 2011 the threats to life were economic, not martial. The drought and the war meant that trade was slow. The sugar convoys, the biggest business, were thinning out due to the competition between the rival cartels of Hagadera and Ifo camps. And the unskilled porters who fought for the chance to unload the trucks were starting to resent the rising tide of hungry young men like Guled muscling in on their business.
Guled asked around and was directed to the shop of Abbas, the most prominent trader in the centre of Bosnia, where the porters congregate on a concrete veranda, their wheelbarrows resting on the dirt. Here the fences of thorn are replaced by shacks made from opened-out oil drums in all colours – yellow, green, blue, red and brown – hammered flat and pressing in on all sides. Slender alleys hive off in many directions, and in the shadows crouch lines of men in sandals, grubby trousers and loose shirts, some with turbans, some with beards, young and old. These are the workers of the market and they stare at everyone and everything passing; evaluating, judging. It wasn’t long before a crowd of them had gathered around Guled. Who did he think he was? Didn’t he know there was a process for becoming a porter? They had an association. He couldn’t simply show up just like that. Job opportunities were viciously defended in Bosnia. In the coming months there would be many fights, and challengers to their territory would be hospitalized. The porters’ faces were hot and angry. One of them was Nisho.
Nisho crossed the road back to the siding where his colleagues were clustered around the back end of a truck. The lorries in the unloading spot in Bosnia were blue with red-and-white stripes down the side. They had green canvas awnings secured with ropes and Kenyan number plates. One was fully loaded with sacks of rice, the back of the other was down, a legend in Swahili painted along the bumper: Haivutiwi na kamba (No Towing). The lettering on the other truck was in English: ‘No Pain No Gain’. A bicycle weaved past, its bell trilling an alarm. Inside the back of the truck, Nisho and the other porters were pulling and rolling sacks down a wooden ramp into handmade wooden wheelbarrows accompanied by much shouting, heaving and whistling. The roof of the truck was open and beneath a lattice of steel, black against the sharp blue of the morning, Nisho tugged at a sack of potatoes that had had another sack sown on to the bottom to extend it and a white net of twine woven around the top to cram more in, the whole lot stopped up with grass to prevent the potatoes from bruising. His grey trousers were dirty and his red plastic flip-flops magically clung to his feet as he danced on top of the sacks, slipping down, clambering up, swinging from the bars of the truck. His T-shirt, also grey, a free gift from some distributor, said ‘Golden Instant Cup’ in yellow letters. He grabbed a sack and called to his colleagues, ‘One, two, three, heave!’ They strained.
‘Push! Push! That way!’ The sack slid down.
‘Kheylio is not working hard, he’s not lifting his end!’ The sack continued to slide. Nisho smiled, happy, enjoying the burn of his muscles and the pleasure of the work. The sack upended and landed with a thump on the wooden wheelbarrow. A plump-faced woman in a magenta hijab stood by the open tailgate of the truck squinting into the sun and shouting orders. Nisho jumped down, pushed another porter out of the way and grabbed the handlebars of the wheelbarrow. He grinned, a small gap between his teeth, sweat beading on his shaved skull, his eager eyes roaming around the street.
‘Take it to Ferdoza,’ the woman in magenta said. Immediately he turned and wobbled with the weight of the sack on the wheelbarrow. Another porter appeared in a blu
e shirt and a white turban with a hand to steady the load at the front. Together they set off through the crowded alleyways, one pushing, the other walking ahead, sandals slapping against bare heels, the frontman calling out: ‘Give way! Give way for Nisho!’
Nisho is not a big man, but he handled the loaded wheelbarrow dextrously; it is his ‘daily bread’, as they say in the market and he knows it well. Nisho liked to claim Ifo as ‘his’ since they share the same age. In the story his mother tells, he was born en route to the camp when his parents fled Somalia in 1991, arriving in Ifo just as the grid of squares was being carved on the plain and the pioneers were cutting thorns and mudding them with the red earth for huts. Although if you ask him how old he is he’ll most likely just blurt out a number that sounds roughly accurate, seventeen, eighteen, twenty. He has no real need to know.
The front porter laid a hand on the top of the sack, guiding, and Nisho pushed the 220 kilos of potatoes fast down a narrow passageway, too narrow for a car now, into the heart of the souk. The sprawling nest of shops is covered by sacking hung from the illegal power lines to soften the hammer blows of the desert sun. The wheelbarrow glided along, past clothes hanging from poles and jerry cans tied together in bunches, on hard-packed sand where the rubbish had been ground into a confetti of plastic and paper.
A woman in a full burqa stepped nimbly into a stall as the wheelbarrow wobbled past her. Then down another alley lined with curly mangrove poles holding up a tin roof from which hung nets of plastic footballs: pink, yellow and green. They hurried on into the butcher’s area with its ribbons of meat strung on nails above heavy brass scales slimy with fat and down a side passage where the tomato-sellers construct impressive towers according to size, spread on sacks and cardboard. Makeshift tables covered in cloth sported pots of local honey opposite a small metal stall made into a box and filled waist high with second-hand shoes. Dresses, shirts, children’s flip-flops, galvanized cooking dishes, pots and pans, all the manic commerce of Bosnia flashed past in a blur as the front man shouted out a continual warning and Nisho maintained the steady trot that he has learned to be the most efficient.
Nisho hadn’t wanted to be a porter, but after his father died and his mother went mad, he felt he had no choice. For a while he went to school in the morning and worked in a tea-shop in the market in the afternoon for a kind woman who bought him books and paid his school fees. But one day she got selected for resettlement abroad and within two months she was gone ‘up there’, America, Europe, wherever they go, those people lucky enough to be plucked from the miseries of the camp. Nisho hadn’t heard from her since. That was in 2004, when he was thirteen years old.
For Guled and the others who stayed behind growing up in Somalia, the camp had been talked up as a haven of opportunity; a gateway to health care, free education and resettlement to America. For those raised in the dusty prison of the camp, it was a very different world. A world with its own rules, its own boundaries and its own histories. Governed by the UN and the humanitarian agencies, it was a society weaned on food aid and the international vocabulary of rights. It was also a baking hot slum where new names had to be invented for every corner, where new legends were born. The war over the border was both close in the stories of the people who came to the camp and yet very far. Nisho and the generation born in the camp had not seen fighting and they feared what they heard about Somalia with the terror of the unknown. By 2010 the camps were nineteen years old and Nisho, never having set foot outside Dadaab, had been working in the market for more than half his life.
The first day that they put a sack on his back, he stumbled about from left to right and then fell in the mud completely. The other porters were encouraging; they told him he’d learn, that he was a man, and they comforted him with other sayings that made his new role seem more bearable, like ‘a man must struggle to survive’, and ‘when you sweat, you eat’. Going from house to house and begging is shameful and Nisho didn’t want to stoop that far. Back then, al-Shabaab did not exist and now that he was accustomed to earning a living, the lure of easy money promised by the al-Shabaab recruiters held no attraction. Besides, the nickname his mother had given her last born – Nisho: ‘little one’ – so suited him in his new employment he soon grew to think that fate had assigned him the role. ‘My life is carrying a sack,’ he declares these days with a kind of fragile pride.
Around a bend, the porters passed an open-fronted stall painted green stacked to the roof with reams of photocopy paper. Next door were freshly planed wooden boards with carved tops upon which every refugee child would practise Arabic calligraphy and learn the all-important verses of the Koran. And then, next to a stall selling spices and medicinal roots and powders, collision. Another wheelbarrow was coming the other way. Nisho, trembling, lowered his handles and inched forward as the Koran-seller steadied the potatoes on their way, keeping them from upsetting his wares.
Nisho and his wheelbarrow emerged in an open space among onion-sellers on another road about a kilometre from where they had started. Bosnia is huge, serving not just Ifo camp but the others too and a large part of Kenya’s North Eastern Province. They navigated around one woman selling clothes from a wheelbarrow and another tall one sashaying down the centre of the street in expensive grey cloth, and finally arrived at their destination. Nisho set the barrow down and put both hands on his load, hanging his head to breathe. Sweat popped out of every pore on his head. It ran down his face in streams. He bent his back, hands on hips, and grinned, mouth half open to reveal his gapped front teeth and drew his fingers down his face as though he were cleaning a window. He complained about the weight, and about the wages: 150 shillings ($1.9) the owner of the goods would pay him for moving them. It used to be 250 shillings ($2.5). Sometimes he used to have enough even for the crushed ice laced with syrup chipped from the huge rectangular slabs that emerged like sawn timbers from the ice factory in Bosnia. Those days were memories now.
Lunch would be seventy shillings, leaving only ninety to take back to his mother to supplement the dry UN rations with tea, milk and sugar and the occasional tomato or onion. She would be disappointed, if she was in her right mind. Nisho wasn’t sure which was worse. She had taken to wandering about the camp again and he hated having to tie her up. He had forgone school to care for his mother and she needed regular visits to the witchdoctor which were expensive, plus, if he ever wanted to marry – he had needs now he was older – portering wasn’t cutting it.
Nisho and his front man backed their wheelbarrow of potatoes into Ferdoza’s shop. The mangrove poles holding up the tin roof were polished smooth by decades of hands. Hanging from the walls and the counter were long strips of seasoning mix, ‘100% Power Glue’ and children’s flip-flops. A man in a black-and-white striped shirt, grey hair and a grey beard materialized out of the murk behind the counter. He was the store manager. He helped them upend the sack for it took all three of them. ‘Easy! Here! This way!’ they shouted. And with that, Nisho’s last paid load, his final hope of income for that day, was tied with string to a pole in the corner.
At the turn of the year, trade in the camp was unseasonably bad. Nisho really needed to find himself another line of work. He wondered whom he could approach for help. There were no kingpins from his clan, the Rahanweyn, but his faithful service over many years to the sugar barons should, he thought, count for something. Nisho was an important part of the chain: the mainstay of his income was offloading and rebagging the smuggled sacks, mixing it with Kenyan sugar. The traders of the market don’t call it smuggling though; it is what they have always done – to them it is simply ‘business’.
And business in Somalia is a family affair. Nisho lamented that he had no godfather, no well-connected uncles. ‘Can a man pushing a wheelbarrow be rich?’ he was fond of asking, of no one in particular. There are four major clans among whom political power in Somalia is traditionally divided and then several minor ones. The Rahanweyn clan are treated as second-class citizens, the ones who do the dirty
jobs: the cleaning, the carrying, the butchering. Abbas, the owner of the truck of potatoes, had started out just like Nisho, with a donkey cart. Now Abbas is not only rich, but ‘triple rich!’ That’s what ten years and a helping hand from the right clan can do; Abbas was from the Aulihan, a sub-clan of the majority Ogaden clan. Bosnia is a closed shop, controlled by the refugees with links to the host community of Dadaab who are also from the Aulihan who dominate on both sides of the border. Nationality here is mostly just a slip of paper; clan is what counts. The other cartel that operated out of Hagadera was from the Marehan. Both cartels wielded considerable power. There are men in Dadaab who can order whole ships to dock at Kismayo, kingmakers who control access to their home towns in Somalia and who have the power, through their influence within the clan, to nominate members of the Kenyan parliament. Huge sums of money are at stake.
Mapping the networks of economic activity and political influence in the Horn of Africa is a lesson in political economy: the two are almost indistinct. Politicians in Kenya just like everywhere else need campaign contributions and elections in Kenya are particularly expensive: they took a keen interest in the sugar trade and maintained their share. Keeping the border closed, tariffs high and yet the sugar flowing involved a range of compromises with the clan, the traders, police, customs and al-Shabaab; all of which carried a transaction cost. Nisho’s meagre wage was part of one of East Africa’s largest illicit networks that reached, so they said, right to the heart of Kenya’s State House.