by Ben Rawlence
‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.
‘I just wanted to visit where I used to come with the goats,’ she said.
‘Well, you could have told me where you were going!’
At the hospital they had no suggestions, so he had tried the witchdoctor who lived in A2. It had been his mum’s idea. ‘I don’t believe in his medicine,’ said Nisho. ‘But if you believe a medicine is going cure you, then it will.’ And that was what she believed.
The witchdoctor lived in a normal house, but he had another hut in his compound where he did his work. He called it his office. People visited him there and told him their problems and he scattered objects on the floor or consulted a book and offered his diagnosis. Nisho didn’t like going there. The man gave him the creeps. The strict Muslims called him names, insults like ‘Christian’; superstition was frowned upon in Islam but the wealth of the witchdoctor betrayed the pastoralists’ enduring faith in the old pagan ways. The witchdoctor was tall and black, walked like a camel and had a rare gold tooth. He was known for dressing entirely in one colour. The last time Nisho had counted out the 6,000 shillings ($75) he had begged and saved for his mother’s treatment, the man was clothed completely in black.
Nisho had been sent to the bush to gather leaves from a special tree whose name he didn’t know. His mother told him later that while he was gone, the witchdoctor had recited verses of the Koran over water and told her to drink it while he slaughtered first a white hen and then a black one. When Nisho brought the leaves, the witchdoctor mixed them into a paste with honey and butter and poured it into the small blue plastic lid of a water bottle. Nisho’s mother drank. There was muttering and smoke and some words she didn’t understand. But for sometime afterwards she slept through the night. She even cooked. But now she was back to shouting and waking up the neighbours; Nisho needed to find the money for another treatment.
He had heard that there was more cash to be made travelling on the trucks rather than unloading them and he badgered the people he knew for a position. It was only when he got the sudden news that a truck was going to Somalia the following day and he had accepted the job that he reflected on what he had agreed to. All he had heard of Somalia was war and he feared he would not return alive. But a small part of him wanted to travel, to see Somalia, his family’s homeland, and to glimpse something of the world other than the flat horizon of the camp.
At four p.m. on the day of departure, he climbed into the cab of a long ten-wheeler truck with a cargo of cooking utensils, most likely repurposed from the United Nations, bound for Mogadishu. The driver, a forty-year-old clean shaven man, large and fat, and his assistant, a young, skinny, confident boy, had both just come from Somalia. Nisho’s habitual restlessness was not suited to confinement in a vehicle. Forced to sit, Nisho will talk or sing or hum to himself, his fingers working a small padlock key attached to his trousers by a rope. He will roll his head and crick his neck and look around, peering into everything, his mouth hanging open in enquiry. ‘I am used to carrying fifty kilos,’ he once shouted, ‘I cannot sit idle!’ He had underestimated how much portering had shaped him. Up in the cab, he shifted in his seat and calmed his fears of fighting and his hopes of the money he would earn by losing himself in gazing at the landscape, the unending arid bush of the border country.
The Dadaab camps are surrounded by a fierce desert across which, without water or milking animals, it is often suicide to walk. The road south and west to Nairobi is interrupted with checkpoints and a bridge, the de facto border between Somalia and Kenya, over the fat wide brown loops of the Tana River. On the bridge, at the checkpoint they call halak – ‘the cobra’ – the Kenyan police sometimes collect money from everyone without a movement pass. On other days, they throw refugees attempting to escape Dadaab in jail before returning them to the camp. In many ways, things haven’t changed since the ‘Kipande’ system of the British who controlled the movement of the nomadic Somalis in the rangelands with their hated ‘pink slips’. The camp is a bounded world. To send your imagination out beyond the horizon of the plain is a dangerous enterprise, fraught with disappointment, and Nisho had blocked the idea from his mind. The way to Somalia, however, is clear.
A straight road runs through red-and-brown brush, the soil thinned and sifted into furrows of dust, to a little border town struggling on the plain called Liboi. Its sole landmark is the bare rusting pin of the abandoned telecoms tower. On the Somali side is Dhobley.
As the truck crossed the border, Nisho’s face was glued to the window, alert for signs of conflict. There were none. The first time Nisho’s feet touched the soil of his native country, he felt a strange sense of peace. By the roadside in Dhobley, the three travellers cooked rice on the ground and then the boys climbed up on top of the load to keep watch during the night. Annoyingly, his new colleague went straight into a deep sleep while Nisho struggled to stay awake, under the stars and alone in this new country that his mother had talked about his whole life.
All the next day as they drove through the stunted thorn trees, they passed people coming the other way, weak and malnourished, women and children mostly. Some, Nisho was shocked to see, without any clothes at all. He had never seen people in such a state before. The memory haunted him. And the graves that flecked the roadside through the forest left him pensive and quiet.
At a place called Afmadow they met their first al-Shabaab checkpoint. Old men in military uniform and beards – the younger ones were doing the fighting – took six million Somali shillings from the young boy and gave him a stamped letter of permission and a message: ‘Tell the driver to let his beard grow.’ The fat driver laughed but that night he didn’t shave. They were in al-Shabaab territory now and they were headed for their stronghold, the source of all the sugar and contraband that Nisho unloaded in Bosnia most nights, the port city of Kismayo.
Near the city, the convoys of military trucks brimming with soldiers increased. At that time, Kismayo was on high alert in the grip of rumours that US, French and British forces were capitalizing on the drought to squeeze al-Shabaab. Unattributed airstrikes and mystery shelling that seemed to come from the sea were common and in the city al-Shabaab scanned the sky, listening for the whisper of drones.
In the distance, above the rusting corrugated roofs and the ancient limed walls of the old Swahili port city, Nisho spotted a band of blue that at first he thought was ‘moving water’. Then he changed his mind and considered it to be ‘water that had stayed for a long time’. The driver told him it was the ocean and Nisho felt proud of his country for the first time; whatever its problems, at least it had a beauty to speak of.
The next day they turned north, to Xamar – the local name for Mogadishu meaning ‘the red place’, perhaps referring to the earth, perhaps to the skins of the cosmopolitan people from India, Persia, Zanzibar who have inhabited the ancient city for millennia. In a ruin that had once been a petrol station, and still sold fuel siphoned out of huge steel drums, they spent the night. Nisho asked the driver why all the buildings they were passing had collapsed and the whole final day of driving was taken up with the answer; it was the first time Nisho had heard the history of the war narrated from beginning to end. When the long truck came out of the tall trees and onto the dusty white soil of the coast near Mogadishu, Nisho braced himself for gunfire.
The truck aimed for Bakaara market. For Nisho, who had only heard the name on the radio as a place of constant mortar fire, the word itself spelled fear. The truck bounced along the shelled roads coated with white dust and littered with the burnt-out carcasses of cars. Huge beige AMISOM armoured cars, of a design pioneered in Soweto and Baghdad, crawled along. In the harbour, tankers and cargo ships waited like basking sharks for their turn to dock at the port while the dark windowless sockets of beachfront hotels watched them, like skulls. The tree-lined ocean boulevard was now a parade of stumps amputated for firewood. Rubbish smoked in little piles on the roadside. The city appeared calm and stable to him that day, not ten
se. Apart from the ruins everywhere, there was life, it seemed, threading its way through the destruction. When they dismounted in Bakaara the place was bustling with money.
Bakaara was not one market as such but a whole district, with different streets for different goods. One street sold only medicines and the walls were painted with pictures of pills, another sold shoes, another meat, another vegetables, charcoal, scrap metal, weapons. In the place they called Cir Toogte – literally ‘sky shooter’ – hundreds of traders hawked AK-47s, pistols, RPGs, mortars and ammunition which eager customers tested by firing into the air. An AK-47 at that time cost $350 and bullets fifty cents each. Despite the official arms embargo, the regular European and American shipments of guns to the Transitional Federal Government kept the price low. There were around half a million unregistered small arms in Somalia; nearly every gun found its way to Bakaara eventually.
In a wide, dusty open area, the truck pulled up. Nearby another truck offloaded rice onto blue handcarts. Stacks of yellow jerrycans filled another cart. In comparison to the market Nisho worked back home, the volume, the noise, the colour, was ‘double Bosnia’. Mogadishu seemed peaceful, it was not like the media reports that Nisho had seen and heard and the experience challenged his faith in television: ‘The problem is not just Somalia, all over the world you have the media saying one thing and the truth is completely different,’ he said. In fact, he was just lucky.
A few days later, on 2 May, the TFG and AMISOM launched the ‘Bakaara offensive’ to oust al-Shabaab from the market. For two months there would be almost daily battles, sniper fire, mortars and suicide attacks as the frontline moved every few hours. The TFG and AMISOM failed to take the market, but not before they had lost a senior Ugandan commander, the Interior Minister, fifty soldiers to al-Shabaab’s thirty, and at least eighty civilians.
While the driver disappeared into the city, the boys took it in turns to look after the truck and explore the market. The skinny assistant was away for a long time. He knew the place, and clearly he had means for he came back sporting new clothes: a shirt, trousers and a hat.
‘I bought clothes,’ the boy said to Nisho. ‘Why don’t you?’
‘With what money?’ Nisho thought to himself. When it was his turn, Nisho never let the truck out of his sight. He talked to no one. His memory of Mogadishu was the food that he bought with the small amount of Somali shillings the driver had given him: injera, pasta and all types of fruit, many that he didn’t know. At night he lay rigid in the hotel in the market listening to what he discovered in the morning was the whoosh and roar of aeroplanes. He was glad they were going back to Kenya that day.
The road south was clogged with dozens of minibuses, trucks and cars, all brimful of people leaving. The driver had strict instructions not to carry any passengers; the truck was supposed to be returning empty to Kenya. But by Afmadow the human flood was impossible to ignore: hundreds and hundreds, walking doggedly south. ‘If you look at them, you will not ask them anything,’ Nisho said. The whole story was written on their grey faces: the desperation, the hunger, the journey. The driver was a good man and they managed to fit around a hundred into the bed of the ten-wheeler and took them as far as the border.
It had been five trying days to Mogadishu and five risky days back again for which Nisho was finally paid 500 shillings ($6). He had been expecting at least 3,000, for the witchdoctor. He was furious. The truck owner claimed that this had been only a trial run, that there would be more next time. But contemplating those bumpy dangerous roads thick with misery, Nisho loudly told his friends, ‘never again’. And from that point, his expression increasingly took on a kind of tragic weariness: the door to an imaginary room had been closed.
When the truck finally rumbled into Bosnia his heart sang. He pointed and babbled out the names of familiar places, as if seeing them for the first time. He was delighted to be coming back safe, ‘where my work is’. It was the longest he’d ever been away from the camp and the only time he hadn’t slept in the hut with his mother. She was pleased to see him. There was a lesson in his maiden departure from the camp: ‘Ifo felt like home.’
10
The Silent March
The kindness shown by the driver of Nisho’s truck was in fact an exception. Many of those moving along the roads at that time were not so compassionate towards this new wave of displaced people. A car from Kismayo to the camps was $100, from Barhdeere in Gedo region it was now $200. People were selling food, animals, all they had for a lift. Those without money, walked. From Luuq, Dinsoor, Baidoa, Bu’ale, Jilib and Jamame, they came. Ragged groups moving silently through the bush found others, joined forces, and soon there were crowds, whole villages, thousands of people dragging themselves, their children and each other along the roads. These were the people that Nisho had passed on the road south. He didn’t know it then, but among them was his future wife, Billai, and ninety-three others from the village of Salidley. Another of those walking towards the border, her hope broken and her pride in shreds, was Isha.
It was at the beginning of June, when the first child in the village of Rebay died, that people began to stir. News from Isha’s husband came soon after. A boy who had been with the herders in the bush for the past three months brought a message: ‘The animals are dying and the others are going also. Your husband and son cannot come here, they have nothing and they feel ashamed.’ With forty cattle gone, Isha decided it was time.
For three years as the militants had taxed the community into privation, there had been no help. But as the situation in Rebay became critical, even al-Shabaab showed compassion. The group had a network of social workers who kept an eye on the community. In Rebay, the social worker was a tall dark man who spoke the Rahanweyn af-Maay dialect. He knew everything, including which families had nothing left. In other areas, al-Shabaab prevented people from going to Kenya to seek help from the infidels, but the tall dark man was not so cruel. Isha and her neighbours didn’t fear to tell him their plans: they were desperate. When he heard, he gave the families who were leaving a twenty-five kilo sack of rice saying, ‘Take this and go to the camps.’
Isha packed one cooking pot, one kettle, one cup, one plate, one twenty-litre jerrycan full of water, one mat and five children, and then along with seven other families on the edge, she said goodbye to the neighbours who still had camels. Camels allowed you to try and stick it out a while longer, although many of the neighbours would leave, too, in the end. She took ‘no books, no photos, no memories’, she would later recall.
The plain was hot and dry. The low scrub provided little shade. They walked when it was cool, by moonlight, until the children wailed and would not go on and then they’d make a fire, some tea, maybe a little food. The seven families shared one donkey cart. When Isha carried her youngest daughter on her back, she put the twenty-litre jerrycan on the cart, taking turns. When the jerrycan got to about half full, they would have to beg to get it filled again. ‘It was hard to carry, so hard, but your children will die of thirst if you don’t do it.’ During the heat of the day Isha arranged the children in a row, their heads on the mat, their feet resting on the sand, their thin little bodies inside a circle of thorns to keep the lions out.
After the town of Saakow where they begged a little maize, the ground was unfamiliar. For three nights the seven families wandered lost in a forest of tall trees and cacti, convinced that they would die. Isha was wasting away, walking on nothing; the food and water was running low. Hunger made her terror worse: that her children would die before they could get to the refugee camp. Finally, by chance, they came upon a road and, defeated now, they sat down to await their fate. They decided, if no one passed by soon, that would be the end of it and they would bury their children and each other among the foreign trees.
And then occurred one of the many divine moments that people walking out of Somalia would recount, a miracle, but for the grace of which they would not be sitting here, telling the tale. Almost immediately, a group of people
came walking down the forest track. ‘Are you trying to find the refugee camps?’ they asked. They took the men who had strength to walk to the nearest town and sent them back with hot food and with directions to the main road at Afmadow.
Forced to start walking again, the children were complaining and dragging. The sand had taken all the skin from their feet. So Isha took a small piece of cloth, wetted it with the valuable water and wrapped a child’s red raw soles and gave it a rest on the donkey cart while the others walked, each one taking their turn. They were in a bad way. The adults took to scaring them: ‘There’s a lion coming! Don’t sit or relax, keep moving!’ although they themselves walked slowly, conserving energy. It was the same with the others they met along the way and so, quietly, the group grew bigger and bigger: a silent battalion, marching.
Somewhere on that road, at the same time, perhaps part of Isha’s column, were thirty families from a leper colony near Jilib who had walked for fifteen days, sleeping in abandoned homes. They had the lightness of death about them. One said, ‘When a human being has something maybe they are afraid and keep themselves separate, but when you have nothing you can move anywhere and you are less scared about yourself. You are free.’ But when the group met the al-Shabaab checkpoint at Afmadow and the men in black asked, ‘Where are you going?’ the refugees feared to admit the truth: to Kenya, to the infidels. The males among them were ordered to return and fight for their country and the rest of the people took to the bush. Al-Shabaab turned back many.
The refugees learned to avoid the roads in the government areas, closer to Dhobley, as well; armed men of all stripes were a menace. One group of refugees stopped by government soldiers was robbed and held at gunpoint through the night. The men and women were separated and in the morning when the women returned, ‘their clothes were ripped and their faces were sad,’ and then they carried on their journey. Rape of asylum seekers was epidemic. And they might have considered themselves the fortunate ones: they were alive. Whole families were left behind. ‘The animals go first,’ said one old man, ‘it’s the children next.’ Over ten thousand children were dying each month by then, many of them buried along the way: little mounds beside the road, foot-long bumps in the sand.