City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  Abbas and Nisho used to sit and chat but Abbas didn’t have time for him any more. Like the other sugar barons, Abbas lived in Nairobi and drove a big car with black windows and knobbly off-road tyres. He had achieved the ultimate refugee dream: citizenship. He had followed the path of the wealthy and bought himself a Kenyan ID card – everything is for sale in Kenya. The card allowed him to live where he liked, obtain a passport, vote even. Abbas came to the camp only to check his trucks and his business. He was a Kenyan. He was free.

  Nisho wasn’t rich enough to be free, but he hovered a little way above the bottom rung of the market’s hierarchy. And freedom, like wealth, is relative. While Nisho looked up to Abbas, it felt good to have someone looking up to you. Things seemed better now he had acquired a protégé who really was on the bottom rung, at the level of the dust, whose struggles put Nisho’s worries in the shade.

  Mahat was a short boy stunted with malnutrition who had spent so long clawing a living from the earth of the market that he fancied his skin had turned a shade darker because of it. Mahat tried to act tough, wearing a dirty white vest under the men’s shirts that hung on him like a dress and that he tucked into jeans with an oversize Chinese plastic belt, but he had a lopsided smile of pure childish innocence and a halting stutter that belied his swagger. Nisho said the vest looked like he’d laundered it in a pit latrine. Mahat had come to the camp with his grieving mother in 2004 after his father was killed in Somalia, and he entered the market aged seven. Having an audience was precisely what Nisho needed to harden his nervous bravura into an act in which he himself could believe: ‘He’s like my son,’ he declares, throwing an arm roughly around his small friend, and Mahat smiles shyly.

  Nisho had taken Mahat under his wing and offered career advice. First he suggested shoe shining. Then later, a more promising line: firewood. For miles around the Dadaab camps there is a halo of stumps, the trees ravaged by the raiding parties of refugees gripping their insistent axes. Several hundred thousand cooking fires burn a lot of wood. Nisho and Mahat negotiated the rent of a donkey cart and Mahat joined the convoys that trundle out into the scrub in search of logs. While the others made 1,200 shillings in a trip of three or four days, little Mahat was only managing to load half a cart. One day the five men in his group met a lion with two cubs sitting on the path, just watching. Mahat sweated and shivered – it was the first time he’d seen a lion. An old man made them hit the donkeys and drive right past the lion as it watched them, looking but not stirring. Another time they saw a hyena. Another, a leopard. Mahat was scared. ‘I made a decision in my brain,’ Mahat said, and quit. He turned instead to collecting water.

  Every block in the camp has a tap stand fenced with thorns and locked with a key at which, each morning, there is a long line of people, usually women, usually children, with large yellow jerry cans jostling for position. It is the most frequent source of fights. Those who can afford to avoid the indignity of the morning squabble, hire children to fetch their water for them. A lady paid Mahat 500 shillings ($7) a month to get her water every day. But Mahat quarrelled with her and, too small to join Nisho and the porters, he had recently returned to his original job of shoe-shining. He had prudently kept the polish and brushes, stashed in the rafters of Nisho’s house. ‘Life may change,’ he said, justifying his foresight. Nisho nodded approvingly.

  Mahat was now looking to Nisho for another hustle while Nisho looked up higher still. It wasn’t going well. The anxiety dulled Nisho’s usual volubility and he was aggressive towards Mahat. Neither Abbas nor Mrefu, ‘Mr Tall’, in Swahili, nor any of the other wealthy traders, were able to offer any alternative to portering. He and Mahat slept together on a straw mat in a hut next to his raving mother and sometimes swapped stories of ‘an aeroplane full of money’. New arrivals such as Guled looking for work always made Nisho anxious. Every day now, four hundred people were arriving in Dadaab, driven by the drought and the war, coming even from Baidoa, his mother’s home town from which she had fled in 1991, the traditional breadbasket of the country. He knew that there would soon be even more of them, roaming the market with the vacant, willing eyes of the hungry, and that they would do anything, at any price.

  6

  Isha

  The great rivers of southern Somalia, the Juba and the Shabelle, never dry up. It was uncommon for there to be famine even in the breadbasket at the centre of the country. This was where, traditionally, people came when times were hard. But even as the water in the river dribbled past, the old Italian sluice gates to the irrigation canals controlled by al-Shabaab – whom the locals called ‘the River Barons’ – remained closed, for want of cash. Land ownership and control of the harvest have been a source of conflict since the beginning of the civil war. While the civil war in Mogadishu was, in the words of the novelist Nuruddin Farah, a sacking of the city by urbophobic herdsmen who saw it as ‘alien and parasitic’, in the countryside it was a war for land. Many of the residents of Dadaab, like Nisho’s family, had been driven from their farms in the original waves of invasion in 1991. In the militarized capitalism that is the economy of Somalia, harvesting crops and taxes and harvesting the aid brought by the NGOs is the core business of the militias in the countryside, including the latest one, al-Shabaab. ‘When the corn is ready, they come,’ said one farmer. ‘For four years I have been paying tax to al-Shabaab: one goat, two cattle, a percentage of my crops … now I have nothing left,’ said another. Al-Shabaab, desperate for funds for its massive war in the city, had taken too much.

  The farmers couldn’t pay for irrigation and so the crops, for the third consecutive year, lay short and stunted under a film of dust. The farmers mourned the soil that they had tilled with their own fingers and as it dried and was sucked into the sky, the atmosphere itself went brown. In one village the milk in a mother’s breasts dried up and her baby died. In January 2011, though, Isha still had hope.

  There was still a little water in the oasis not far from the town of Baidoa that the nomads call ‘Paradise’ where Isha’s husband took their animals. There, the exuberant aquifers bubble up from beneath the quaternary rocks into the sweetest spring. In the dry season, the pastoralists gather like birds around a pond and swooning palms throw shade over the sandy banks. The wells this time were overcrowded and, her husband reported, the people talked of going to Dadaab. Isha, though, did not want to leave. This was not the first drought she had ever seen, nor, in her opinion, the worst.

  When, twenty years before, the first of her neighbours had left for Dadaab, Isha had stayed. She was a young, unmarried woman committed to her people. Since then, she had given birth six times in the place they lived called Rebay, between Baidoa and another town called Dinsoor. Rebay meant ‘stay’ in the Somali language and Isha had taken it as an invocation. She had a connection, she said, with the red soil of that land. As well as her crops she had animals, a foot in two worlds, and among her people she was something of a leader. During national service in the army she had learned to read and write. In the romantic, nation-building exercises of the former communist government, she had been sent out to teach the pastoralists literacy and now people referred to her as ‘teacher’. She had relished the job, she was patriotic, but beneath a heavy hooded brow, her hard eyes still held a faraway look: she had the patience and the steel of the nomad. Nomadism as a way of life, though, was on its last legs.

  The clouds raced above, gathering, building and then burning off like the froth on a boiling pan. In the night, the sky flashed and crackled in the distance. But still no rain. The animals had mowed the desert until it was hard and flat, and the sand was cracked into little canyons. The thorn bushes had been nibbled spare, and the thorns turned from black to brown to white as the water left them. For days, the white clouds built and built, turned grey into rainheads and blackened the earth with their shadow, but then a wind got up and the clouds sailed calmly east scattering only a few drops as they went.

  The animals withered, their skin slack over bones too t
ired to keep looking for water or food, until they started to drop. The vultures whirled. And then the desert was spotted with carcasses, rotting to dust, until all that was left was a ribcage of fingers reaching upwards from the sand.

  Prices in the market in Rebay started to jump. Isha heard it was the same in other towns. By the turn of the year 2011 staples were up eighty per cent. In earlier lean times, Isha had relied on the government that had brought maize, oil and trucks of water but now, under al-Shabaab, there was little. In Isha’s view, life under the dictator Siad Barre had been good, all the politicians since had been hyenas. Sometimes al-Shabaab brought food to Rebay but usually it only gave it to its fighters. ‘God will provide,’ they told the people. But God was not omnipresent.

  The radio said that aid was coming but Isha saw none. Due to a corruption scandal the US had stopped funding the World Food Programme, plus al-Shabaab was restricting the access of NGOs across much of the south, including Rebay. Instead the little aid that was being unloaded in Mogadishu pulled food prices lower than in al-Shabaab areas and for those who didn’t own land or whose animals had already died, the exodus from the countryside began. Patterns of flight followed the grooves of memory: places people knew or had been before, or about which they had heard tell: enough of a story upon which to pin a thread of hope. Isha watched some go to the city while others looked south, to the camps. These were the people who were making the numbers in Dadaab jump and causing Nisho to worry.

  In Rebay, those with animals still alive were circling in the bush, hunting for the barest shoots of greenery for their goats and camels. Each day, they had to search further. Al-Shabaab was taking the remaining cattle by force. Only the Gu rains of March stood now between hope and certain death.

  When he was younger, Isha’s husband had been stocky and short and his peers had nicknamed him ‘Gab’, shorty. Now thicker with middle age, the steady attrition of the drought on his crops and livestock had drawn itself in tired lines around his gentle eyes and drained the colour from his hair. Over three years, all twenty of his camels had to be sold for food. He and Isha had debated fiercely the sale of each one; it was a finely balanced decision of diminishing returns and among the most important judgements a pastoralist will ever be called upon to make. Not once had he considered working for anybody else. He was employer, not employee. Now, at a loss, Gab said goodbye to Isha and took a final, desperate, gamble. He walked resolutely out with their eldest son and the remaining goats and cattle into the bush, ten nights on foot, where he had found grazing in hard times before.

  Isha stayed behind with the other five children, feeding them whatever she could find. The neighbours shared without words; everyone knew the situation. Isha cooked once a day, grinding sorghum with a stone to make porridge, and some days not even that.

  For the past three years, hunger had become a normal thing. Isha was familiar with the bleeding gums, the inflamed limbs, the cramped pain of drinking, the torture when the empty stomach eats itself. When the mind achieves a lucidity departed from the body, perhaps closer to God, and the world acquires a glassy sheen. Isha knew the lethargy like an old friend; when the brain shuts down and desire sleeps and the love between a man and a woman goes. Maybe the man says ‘they are your children’ and leaves, but a woman cannot abandon her children. The people of Rebay looked at the sky and worried. They looked at each other and they had nothing to say. Before, when someone told a story, they stood. But a hungry man will just sit and cry. Hunger keeps you awake. You cannot sleep. It was said that the mind of a hungry person goes gradually mad.

  But Isha had grown used to being hungry; it was not enough to make her leave. To leave meant to lose everything. If she went, no one would protect her land: it would go the way of all the others who fled before; there would be new claimants by sunrise. The refugees in Dadaab had long ago stopped sending emissaries to check on their property back home. If you asked about their former farms most would simply smile and shrug and say, ‘Hawiye,’ or ‘Darod,’ whichever of the large clans was not theirs; and thus the complicated history of the war was reduced to a single word. And so Isha placed her faith in God instead. When the nomad astronomers, the rain watchers of the place, said the rain was coming, she and the rest of the village wanted to believe them. It was easier to hope than to face the truth. ‘The rain is coming,’ they repeated to each other, like a consolation, even as the animals dropped.

  Isha could keep going, so long as there was no news from the bush, from her husband with their safety net: the animals. No news allowed the imagination space to roam, to live beyond the hunger. With their crops and their animals, Isha’s family had been well off, but if it didn’t rain soon, they’d have neither. She wished her husband and son well and she girded herself to wait; she was determined to hold on as long as she could. She couldn’t bear the humiliation of having to beg for food like a refugee. In her mind, she was rich, she was strong, she was proud. Three things that were all about to change.

  7

  Hawa Jube

  Alone, and thus ineligible for a plot of his own, Guled needed to find a family to take him in. Some people charge rent to single men, others simply take a share of their rations. Noor’s place was cramped, barely big enough for him to lie down himself. In N block, on the other side of the camp from block C3, Noor had heard of a woman he knew, also from Mogadishu, who was looking for a lodger. He took Guled to meet her.

  They walked out to the very edge of Ifo camp, along the wide, sandy road from the central maidan past the service area of the camp: the WFP warehouses, the teachers’ barracks behind a loose barbed-wire fence and the bright white-and-green chlorinated buildings of the hospital guarded by the laconic G4S private security guards who enjoy a monopoly protecting all aid agency buildings in the camp. The G4S employees are paid a mean wage, and they are often drunk, but it is a formal job, and as such, they must be Kenyans. This was the toughest billet: the gates to the hospital are usually swarming, no matter the hour of the day, and the guards had a habit of shouting.

  The neighbouring rectangular blocks of the camp are less densely populated here, interspersed with patches of bush thick with green thorns. The border of the camp is marked by the graveyard where mourners have ringed the sad mounds of orange sand with thorns to keep the hyenas from digging up the corpses. N block is the last of the blocks of the formal camp, known as Hawa Jube – named after a woman called Hawa (Somali and Arabic for Eve, the wife of Adam), who lived here and who was shaped like a bottle, Jube. To the north, behind a razor-wire fence, you could see the newly finished, empty overspill camp, Ifo 2, with its virgin roads, taps and shelters fitted for 40,000 and intended to decongest the other camps. To all the refugees, the very sight of the empty camp was an affront. Trembling in the heat in the distance, it made the foreground seem poorer, harsher in comparison. To the west was bush: dust and hyenas.

  Hawa Jube is the tougher end of town, the bad neighbourhood. It already had a reputation for bandits – a reputation that wasn’t helped by the slow accretion of a new slum, in the adjacent bush bordered by the cemetery on one side and the new Ifo 2 camp on the other. With the formal camps full up, this was where the newer arrivals had encroached on the bush, and carved their own space out of the desert, beyond the UN’s original lines in the sand. They were the people of Guled’s generation who arrived with restless reddened eyes: the war breathing down their neck. They stripped all the trees, and now new huts made of bent sticks and woven thorns were going up, as if in a property boom. The blocks of Hawa Jube are numbered N1, N2, N3 … up to N9, so the newcomers had christened their informal slum ‘N Zero’. The UN called these informal settlements ‘self-settled areas’. It was a nicer name than that given to the illegal town on the edge of Dagahaley camp: the inhabitants called that one ‘Bulo Bacte’, the carcass dump.

  Over ten thousand people were living now in Bulo Bacte and N Zero. The wind tore at the frail shelters and the people who lived on the very edge of N Zero avoided looking at
the wilderness, they turned inwards. To face the constant snapping wind that bore a fine charge of sand out of the relentless yellow sky was painful. It hurt the eyes. When another line of huts pushed the boundary of the camp further out, it was as though civilization had made a little victory.

  The dividing line between the slum of N Zero and the formal camp was in the geometry. The houses of N9 were grouped in squares and backed on to each other. N Zero had no pattern. Guled’s new home was a large compound on the corner of block N9 bordered on two sides by an alleyway. Behind it the road ran out to Ifo 2 and the cemetery, into the chaos of N Zero. It was a square homestead with an enormous satellite dish in the middle of a hard-packed compound and a round-domed hut where most afternoons various men sat on threadbare mats engaged in the habitual male activity of the camp: chewing the narcotic herb khat and drinking tea. The satellite dish no longer caught the news or the football: the wires had been chopped and sold. The woman herself lived in a tin-roofed house at one end of an L-shaped mud building containing a line of three rooms. She let Guled have the last one in return for the expectation that he would share his rations and help her out. She had a clutch of children and her husband was in Somalia. Guled didn’t ask too many questions. She told him to call her ‘auntie’.