by Ben Rawlence
Isha’s little troop from Rebay were lucky. None of them was raped, and none of them was left behind. Eighteen days, Isha counted until, finally, their huge crowd, the adults at the back, picking up the children, arrived at the town of Dhobley.
An elder came and met them on the road, ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘No more walking. UNHCR will take you to the camps from here, and you will eat very soon.’ It was just as well. The valiant donkey was on strike. He had had no water the whole way and at Dhobley he finally gave up; they decided to leave him there.
At that time the Somali telegraph was in full cry, with lists of the villages on the move gathered and broadcast down the line to the camps; nearly one thousand arriving every day now. ‘People from here, and there, and so and so, spotted on the road!’ The refugees who had relatives on the way sent out parties to meet the newcomers and to search the police stations of Liboi and Dhobley. To the police on both sides of the border, the influx was a once in a lifetime chance to get rich. Many people only arrived at the camps after two or even three attempts, having been turned back by al-Shabaab and then robbed by TFG or Kenyan police. Again, Isha’s journey was unusual.
At the camp, a committee of existing refugees organized themselves to help the newcomers, cooking food and making collections of money and clothes. Although five, six, seven UN trucks were bringing people from Dhobley every day, it was taking over a month for new refugees to get cooking utensils, blankets and tents and nearly two weeks to receive the first food rations. Wrangling between the UN and the Kenyan government was still keeping the new Ifo 2 camp closed. As always with humanitarian emergencies, it is the people on the ground who are the first responders. The internationals, if they come, are always late.
When Isha’s bus stopped on the main road, the older refugees gave her and the kids blankets and showed them to a tree, under which they would sleep with half a dozen other families for the next three days. In a makeshift house in the new suburb of N Zero belonging to someone distantly related to them by clan whom they had never met, Isha’s children ate unground American yellow maize for the first time but they were too hungry to complain.
When the family was strong enough, they stretched a plastic sheet they had been given over a frame of sticks gathered from the bush and set it in a little spot of cleared sand next to the others. There were close to 400,000 people in Dadaab now and nearly 25,000 in N Zero, and the frontier of the city crept a little further towards the hyenas and the bush. Daily, the plain was studded with numberless female figures stripping thorns for houses, their coloured dresses bright against the implacable brown sky, the wind whipping their skirts about them.
11
Muna and Monday
The wind that sweeps the plain during the Hagar season is called kharif, and it is strong enough to loosen the tethers of a tent. It blew sand into the huts of N Zero, and it pulled and tugged at the long line of new UN white plastic tents on the edge of Hawa Jube, making them vibrate. By June there had still been no major airlift of aid, no international response. Still, near the hospital, the UN had set up a temporary complex to register the extraordinary numbers arriving. Along with the constant droning of the wind, the guy ropes made an eerie rhythmic whipping like the snapping of halyards against masts in a harbour. It elevated the tension as the hungry people huddled in their lines against the wind.
After three days under the trees and thirteen in her makeshift house, with barely enough to eat and no more than three litres of water a day given out from UN trucks, Isha had heard a message broadcast from a loudspeaker calling new arrivals to the reception centre. And she and the children had been waiting there since five a.m. There was a backlog: 2,000, 3,000 a day were being registered, but 31,109 new refugees had reached Dadaab along with Isha that month.
People were shaking the fence now. G4S guards struck the metal links with batons. ‘Get back!’ It was the only registration centre for the three camps – all the procedures had been amalgamated – and some people had walked for up to twenty miles across Dadaab to reach the place. Along the line, community leaders marched up and down with clipboards and lists waving their arms and barking at the people, ‘Yow! Yow! Yow!’ It was the same command with which they herded goats. A man with a megaphone arrived and then police, with low-slung guns. The hubbub simmered down.
The G4S guards were collecting bribes of between six and twenty-four dollars a head to get into the reception centre during the emergency. Although Isha saw money changing hands, no one asked her for any; she assumed it was obvious from her face and the state of her children that she had none. Eventually, they filed through the wire gate and took their place on narrow wooden benches beneath an awning. Isha wore a long dress with a tight-fitting hijab that folded over her temples pinched by the sun. Her face was smooth and reddened from exposure, like fired clay. The angles of her bones showed beneath her skin. In their small brown sandals her toes had shed their nails, but her eyes were no longer filmed with panic. All her children were alive. Sixteen days after they had arrived in Dadaab, international help was finally at hand.
Out of the holding pen and into the first in the long chain of tents, Isha sat down with her children to watch the welcome video, a new innovation since Guled had come. Somali music accompanied the face of a man who spoke slowly in Somali: ‘Welcome to Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world. While in Dadaab you are under the protection of the Government of Kenya and UNHCR. Today you will begin the process of integration with camp life.’
This was the moment of encounter. The meeting point between the two contradictory arcs of the twenty-first century: the rule of law that had spawned the international humanitarian system, and its other legacy: the chaos unleashed by the end of the colonial project to subjugate and carve up the globe. It was also the moment of the bargain. When you traded your name for a ration card number. When you surrendered your autonomy to be processed into the faceless bureaucracy of the UN system. Isha surrendered willingly. She needed the protection of the camp. Therefore the camp was good. And she was grateful.
Isha’s name and those of her children were entered into the manifest on the computer. A wristband showed their family size in permanent marker. They smeared their fingerprints on the paper one by one and then a string around their upper arm graded their malnourishment. Isha had got them there just in time. Down the production line they went: interviewed about what had caused them to flee, immunized, wormed, injected with vitamin A, photographed with the web-cam and issued with a health card. Then the video again, commanding: ‘Wash hands! Seek medical help! The camp is designed to support your needs! Camp services are free!’ This last concept was a constant battle. The timid watchful people processing through the tents were easy prey for poorly paid security guards, bullying refugee leaders and rotten agency officials.
Everyone had been quick to apprehend the opportunities afforded by the influx: from the G4S guards asking for bribes, and a system of recycling old refugees, to a sophisticated process of identity theft. Many of the older refugees had purchased Kenyan ID cards but new software was weeding them out, matching the fingerprints, and so they needed a ‘clean’ refugee document with fresh prints to keep in with a chance of the resettlement lottery. For a large fee, officials were double-dipping famine victims’ fingers. Unaware of the money being made all around them, Isha’s family shuffled through the line of tents until they emerged into the blast of the wind, blinking and newly stamped, like cattle.
Next to the Somalis was another line of tall, black, stern-looking people, passing through. Some had dashes of scars ribbed across their forehead and on their cheeks. The Somalis eyed the strangers warily. They chattered.
‘They have our colour of skin. They’re tall like us.’
‘And thin!’ someone shouted, and the others laughed.
‘Why have they come here?’
‘They are Somalis, but they are from the west,’ someone said.
‘No, no, they dress differently, they don�
��t have the culture of Somalis,’ said another. Nobody knew. It was Isha’s first time to see a foreigner. She asked one of the men in the line, ‘Are these people Somalis?’
‘They’re Sudanese,’ he said. ‘They’re also refugees.’
The chattering stopped. The Somalis stared. Somalia was not the only conflict that season. Fighting had broken out again along the border between North and South Sudan at an oil town called Abyei and in the Nuba mountains. Hundreds of Sudanese refugees had been shipped from Kenya’s western border with South Sudan on the other side of the country. Kenya liked to warehouse all its refugees in one place where someone else could be relied upon to feed them and where they were easily surveilled. This created unusual communities and unusual conflicts. Although 96 per cent Somali, Dadaab was, in fact, a cosmopolitan city and Ifo was its most international quarter.
In Ifo there were Ugandans who had fled with the revolutionary Acholi spirit medium, Alice Lakwenna, the 1980s insurgent whose mantle was taken up by Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. There were Congolese victims of Africa’s other endless civil war and even some Burundians and Rwandans still afraid to go back after the original genocide in 1994. Over 20,000 Ethiopians had come too, victims of the government’s brutal land clearance schemes, its secret war in the Ogaden region and its harsh treatment of the Oromo majority. There were also an estimated 40,000 Kenyans in the camps illegally, who had come for the free food, free education and health care that their government did not provide.
The Sudanese in the line had elected to be shipped to Dadaab rather than the other refugee camp in Kenya, Kakuma, because they had compatriots here from Abyei who had fled earlier iterations of the conflict. As they filed through the tent and were interviewed by the UN staff, some of them wept and embraced their interpreter: a tall middle-aged man in a UN T-shirt with a kind face and smiling manner. He laughed and hugged the people he had known many moons ago before he had fled Abyei as a teenager. He was a refugee himself, living in Ifo. His name was Mayar which meant, in the Dinka language, ‘white’. But he was, like his people, among the blackest human beings on earth. ‘Maybe I am white on the inside?’ he used to joke. Working with many nationalities at the UN he found it easier to go by the nickname given him by his mother whom he had not seen since one night in Abiyei in 1996. She had called him Monday, because he was born on a Monday.
Working with the UN was not Monday’s first experience of the challenges of multiculturalism in the melting pot of the camp. He had taken the position of interpreter because at his last job his Somali colleagues had threatened to kill him. And that morning he had arrived at Hawa Jube in a UN vehicle specially tasked to collect him from his hut in the camp because, a few weeks prior, a Somali mob had jumped him on the way to work. It was not a random lynching. Twenty years of living cheek by jowl with other nationalities had done much to soften the notorious mistrust of the Somalis towards outsiders, but it had not yet corroded the conservative laws of clan and religion. Monday had violated the Somalis’ first commandment: thou shalt not touch our women.
∗
You had to feel sorry for Monday. There were not that many Sudanese girls to choose from. And the marriage arrangements of the Dinka people that he came from involved three or four hundred head of cattle – a challenge even in peace time and impossible in a refugee camp. He was from a group that in Sudan they called the ‘Lost Boys’ – those who had been orphaned or displaced during the civil war, many of whom had famously walked hundreds of miles into neighbouring countries to escape the violence. Although to call them boys was no longer accurate. They were now thirty-five-year-old men. Monday was one of 16,000 when they first came to the Kakuma camp, on Kenya’s border with Sudan in 1987. Some had since been resettled in the United States to cold places like Minnesota, others had melted into foster homes or returned to Sudan, or found their own way to the West. The majority though, were left behind in camps in Ethiopia and Kenya.
While the Somali refugee population in Dadaab is predominantly female, among the Sudanese it is the opposite. The war had ended a few years before and most of the women had gone back. The Lost Boys, however, were still traumatized and afraid. When he first came to the Kakuma camp, Monday lived in a block of a thousand boys – all orphans, all former child soldiers. He had been kidnapped from his home in Abyei by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in 1995, when he was thirteen. After a year on the battlefield during which he had seen his friends ‘killed, shot! – like on TV!’, he managed to escape and return to Abyei. He was just in time to witness an attack by the Janjaweed of the North in which they shot his father in front of him and his mother and younger brother disappeared. The bullets, by God’s grace, missed him. He ran.
When he met the Somali girl Muna, fourteen years later, after living in three different refugee camps in as many countries, he was a plumber with the German development agency GiZ, inside the large, secure aid agency compound in the town of Dadaab. Because the Kenyan government does not allow refugees to work, the UN had cooked up a compromise in which they were permitted to volunteer. The agencies called them ‘incentive workers’ although they were, in effect, interns paid a stipend far below what Kenyans received for doing similar work. In the camp where hard cash is scarce, competition for such positions is fierce. Monday had got his job through a connection with a Congolese guy who went to the same church. For her part, Muna came to GiZ as a cook, as a result of an experiment in gender balance. It was an experiment that horribly backfired.
Christine was the head of the kitchen at GiZ. She was a handsome Kenyan woman, broad and strong. At six feet tall she towered over the diminutive Muna and felt sorry for the younger woman. She was trying to be, as she put it, ‘gender sensitive – we had so many men in the kitchen at that time’. During the interviews for the job, Muna did not excel. Nor did she have much idea about cooking. But something about Muna called out to Christine that caused her to suspend her professional judgement. ‘I felt Muna really needed a job at that particular time,’ she said. ‘I took a chance.’ She was right to pity Muna. By that time she had been widowed, divorced and had two children by two men. She was only eighteen years old. What she needed though was more than a job. She needed to escape.
The kitchen in GiZ is a low wooden shed, blackened on the inside, that stands in the middle of a wide compound planted with palm and neem trees surrounded by circular concrete buildings with thatched roofs made to look like traditional African huts. Painted on the side of one of them was a colour map of Germany. It was a pleasant place and Muna thought it beautiful. In an open canteen behind the kitchen, the staff came to take their meals. Afterwards, when a tall muscly ‘incentive’ plumber called Monday would linger and make jokes with the cooks, Muna, at first, ignored him.
Monday can’t remember what it was about Muna that drew him to her. There were other Somali women working in the compound. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you get a feeling.’
Muna was one of the very first Somalis to arrive in Dadaab in flight from the civil war. When the soldiers of the United Somali Congress of General Aideed arrived in Saakow in southern Somalia in 1991, Muna was an infant in her mother’s arms. They shot her uncle and raped her elder sister but the presence of the baby in Muna’s mother’s arms saved both of their lives. That first night in the camp they slept in the bush, under the stars, where the airstrip is now. ‘It was like a zoo,’ Muna’s mother recalled, ‘animals everywhere,’ and the first refugees used to hunt gazelle, zebra and giraffe. Soon, Muna’s father succumbed to disease in the camp and her mother began collecting firewood to support her children. ‘Life is hard,’ are the first words Muna remembers her mother saying.
The baby who came to the camp aged six months grew up to become a fiercely independent young woman. She had come looking for a job at GiZ because, in the relative safety and limited opportunities of the camp, her schooling and her grasp of her own rights had brought her into conflict with the diktats of the clan, with her uncles who at
tempted to control her life. She was part of that first generation raised entirely in the camps exposed to Kenyan education and the liberal ideals of global NGO culture. She felt safe. Safe enough, in fact, to rebel.
Muna was clever and strong-willed, but she also possessed a quality that can be such a liability in the hands of someone unaccustomed to its power: beauty. Big brown eyes beneath two smudges for eyebrows filled her almost perfectly symmetrical face and she walked with a lazy swish. Her skin shone with health and the satisfaction of mischief.
Her family was happy with her first marriage. Falling for your maths teacher in a primary school in Dagahaley at the age of fourteen was a common enough event in the refugee camp, even back in Somalia. When Muna was six months pregnant, her husband Aden returned to Somalia to visit his father who was sick. One day soon after, she was called to the ‘Taa’ – the VHF radio station that was the way news reached Dadaab from the bush in the days before mobile phones. Aden had contracted cholera, his father told her. He was dead. Three months later, she gave birth to a girl. The infant’s long curly hair and striking face with its high cheekbones would forever remind Muna of her handsome, lost, first love. She named her Umaima, which means ‘my heart’.
As the tradition goes, as soon as Umaima was old enough to stand, the clan sent Muna to live with Aden’s elder brother, a middle-aged man called Mohammed to whom Muna took an immediate dislike. She refused the match. Her mother pleaded with her uncles but in vain. Soon after the forced wedding ceremony, she became pregnant again; she doesn’t like to recall how. She fled back home with Umaima to her mother. Her uncles threatened to kill her but the pregnancy earned her a reprieve.