by Ben Rawlence
‘Uhuh,’ said the other, his eyes on a UN vehicle that was circling the tree in the centre of the police camp. Many people, police and refugees alike, thought the war was just an enormous business deal, that some in the Kenyan government were trying to control the smuggling business from Somalia’s Kismayo port that kept Nisho employed. His sidekick Mahat wasn’t even sure that the kidnap had actually happened: ‘People lie,’ he said; ‘people talk a lot.’ The conventional wisdom in the camp was that the kidnap was just an excuse: the Somali radio stations spat the news of the invasion with disgust. The more conspiracy minded thought the Kenyans may even have encouraged the kidnap as a pretext for war. But a war for what? The invasion, launched into the middle of Somalia’s rainy season, seemed so plainly self-defeating that Wikileaks cables would later reveal even the US and UK had argued against it.
In fact, among the UN officials, diplomats and the Kenyan government, the war had been a long time coming; it was an open secret of which Lukingi was certainly aware. The invasion was, in some respects, a war against the refugees. Repeatedly since 1991, Kenya had tried to encourage the refugees to go back home. When the US-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia faltered in 2007, Kenya nervously watched the rise of al-Shabaab. In 2008 it had hatched a plan to carve a new country out of southern Somalia bordering Kenya. It would be called Jubaland. The thinking went that such a state, cut loose from the in-fighting in Mogadishu, could host the refugees from Dadaab and act as a buffer-zone against incursions by al-Shabaab into Kenya. It would be a state which Kenya could control, and, later, into which it could drive the refugees. Kenya liked the plan so much that the then foreign minister Moses Wetangula asked the Americans three times for their blessing. Three times the Americans refused. But Kenya went ahead with the plan anyway.
Nisho remembers young men joining up to fight for Jubaland; the recruiting office was in a hotel on the main street in Dadaab town. It was something all the refugees wanted to believe in: a peaceful country in which to be free. The Kenyan recruiters promised the young men money, training and a gun. The gun was all they got. After a few border skirmishes and a year spent in an alcoholic barracks in a desolate place called Archer’s Post, many of the young boys sold their weapons and found their way back to Dadaab. The so-called ‘Jubaland Initiative’ had failed. Now, with the influx of 150,000 extra refugees, the idea took on a new urgency. The invasion, then, was the Kenyan army deciding to do its own dirty work, to establish Jubaland itself.
Out of the opposite office from Lukingi’s, across the sandy forecourt, the new District Officer emerged into the shade of his veranda and stretched in the heat. He was a young slim civil servant called T. K. Bett with an upright bearing and a genial manner, less coy than Lukingi. He had only been in the job a week, yet, for a Monday morning following the declaration of war, he was remarkably not busy. He thought that the NGOs who refused to travel with police escorts, like MSF, had only themselves to blame for the kidnap. He had a not uncommon suspicion of white people; that they were naive, delicate humans, always smelling of soap, clutching bottles of water and afraid to walk in the street. There was resentment at the fuss made over the whites. A Kenyan driver kidnapped only weeks before had occasioned simply a report. Bett was proud of his government’s plan to invade and create the new state called Jubaland. ‘Al-Shabaab have been taking us for a ride,’ he said. ‘It is time for us to show them what we are made of!’
Above, the midday clouds boiled over. It rained all afternoon, a hammering roar that deadened the spirits and invited sleep.
In the evening, the Administration Police officers and the other government officials crawled out from their barracks and galvanized zinc huts inside the AP camp and made their way to the makeshift wooden bar at the back of the compound, next to the wooden church among a jumble of defunct generators, satellite dishes and beer crates. The government employees from the hills of central Kenya were, in some sense, also refugees here in the northern desert, clinging to their God and their drink.
Far from home the poorly paid civil servants huddled under a roughly constructed shelter and watched television on a set suspended from the ceiling. The leg of a goat roasted over a blackened oil drum sliced in half, filling the air with smoke. Men and the occasional woman tip-toed heavily on breeze blocks to traverse the lake that had sprung up between the TV hall and the bar. Then tottered back again carrying bottles of the Kenyan national drink: Tusker lager.
In baseball caps with round bellies spilling over belts, they sat on wobbly wooden benches and watched the news from Nairobi while the rain drilled on the roof. It was all about the invasion. Burning graphics declared ‘Nation at War’ and footage showed long lines of trucks rumbling past. There was no hint of what it might mean for the future. No intimation of the bombs planted in buses, in churches, in markets and in shopping malls. Of the hundreds of dead. When the TV reported the government claim that it had ‘sealed the porous border with Somalia’ a laugh rippled through the crowd. It was a ridiculous idea. The anarchic bush pulsed in the dark, metres beyond the fence.
When the government claimed that the incursion would be swift and victory certain, they believed what it said. They had to. They were targets now, somebody’s enemy. Never mind that the Kenyan government was less a state than a corrupt collection of rival cartels, some of whom probably had an interest in prolonging the fighting: this was war. And the assortment of drunk and overweight police officers staring at the television were, God help them, the front line. The news finished, the bottles tinkled together and the laughter dribbled on as before. The smoke from the barbecue billowed out into the rain, not rising.
16
Tawane
The following day, Tuesday 18 October, in a little cafe opposite the entrance to the AP camp, beside the road that was turning to dirty porridge in the rain, Tawane frowned. Neatly framed by the straight lines of his exquisitely barbered hair and clean-shaven jaw, his face was grave. He glanced suspiciously at his goat soup and took a slurp of sugary tea made with camel’s milk as he pondered the consequences of the weekend’s chain of events.
Tawane was the youth leader for Hagadera, the largest camp. He had taken a minibus to Dadaab town at the request of UN staff, since they were confined to their base. In response to the kidnap, the UN had implemented a general ‘suspension of all non-life saving activities’. The blocks were eerily quiet, crouched against the rain. The war the refugees had all been running from had finally arrived in Dadaab. And with the suspension in services, they were on their own.
A humanitarian catastrophe was looming, fast: food needed distributing, water pumps needed refuelling, health clinics needed to be staffed and stocked. The UN required nothing less than a volunteer refugee army. And the three elected youth leaders from Ifo, Dagahaley and Hagadera camps were the ones who could deliver it.
Tawane had arrived in Kenya on a donkey cart in 1992, aged seven. His whole family had fled together, apart from the ones they had not had time to bury, from a small town on the road to Mogadishu where two old Italian bridges span the river Juba. It was the reverse of a journey his grandparents had made two generations before.
Tawane’s grandparents had been born on the plain at a time when the camel trains trekked from the Red Sea to the mountains of Ethiopia and back again without any idea of borders, nations or checkpoints. Italy, Great Britain and the Emperors of Ethiopia of course had other ideas, and at the end of the nineteenth century they drew three very straight lines that met at a point where Tawane’s nomadic family often visited for their summer grazing. But it was not until the twentieth century was well under way that the family that had reigned supreme in their native wilderness suddenly realized what had happened and found themselves colonized.
In their family compound in block E5, Tawane’s grandmother tells the story without words but with short breathy whistles and chopping motions of her hand and a curling of the eyelids to show the whites of her eyes. Robbed of teeth, she can no longer talk and her tal
es become performances that attract an audience of her grandchildren who hoot at every scene.
She shows how she pleaded with the British not to rape the women in the northern Kenyan town of Wajir where they were staying at the time and how – an extended finger to motion shooting – she grabbed the barrel of a gun of a Kenyan soldier who tried to shoot her clansmen. Following the ancient logic of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, her husband, Tawane’s grandfather, joined the Italian police force in revenge and the family moved to the small, fertile town of Bengine between the bridges over the wide, brown delta of the Juba river.
When, sixty years later, the war arrived in Bengine, Tawane’s father, Idris, was unprepared. Idris is not an imposing figure. He is short and slight. But his angular jaw with its hard mouth, his nose like a beak and his piercing eyes atop a strong wiry neck radiate a determination and authority that his children knew not to dispute. In later life he cultivated a sharp-pointed beard, dyed orange with henna like his hair; it gave him at least the air of dignity and authority, a kind of compensation for what he had lost.
Although the inhabitants of Bengine knew that the rebel militia of the United Somali Congress (USC) were coming down the road from Mogadishu, they thought they were still far away. That day in 1992, there had been some discussion about the exact position of the USC army but Idris ended it by ordering his two eldest sons to go to one of his three farms to harvest what they could before the inevitable attack.
Idris had not been born a farmer but he had worked hard to wring considerable wealth from his land and he was reluctant to leave it for the approaching militia. Idris had two seasonal farms that relied on the flood waters of the Juba river and one on higher ground where Italian bulldozers had pushed the soil into ramparts during the Second World War and where, after the rains, he would occasionally unearth bombs that he would dutifully hand in to the police station. When the river retreated from its annual flood, he was, he declared, ‘the richest man in the whole world’. The land allowed his children to eat three meals a day and made him one of the wealthiest men in the town, a respected elder with a seven-room house roofed with iron sheets next to the tarmac road. Apart from the monkeys that lived in the trees on the river bank and occasionally raided his crops, he feared nothing.
For the past few months, since the collapse of government authority, a local militia had been causing trouble in the district. The leader was from a sub-clan hostile to Idris’s, who called himself ‘Rambo’. One day Rambo and his boys arrived at the family home and helped themselves to two sacks of rice that Idris had set aside for the difficult period that he reckoned to be ahead. When Idris made a fuss he found himself face down on the tarmac road. Two of Rambo’s men took a hand each. They dragged him along the road leaving shreds of his clothes and several layers of skin on the blacktop. Soon after, they put a bullet in the head of his only milking cow and sent him a message: ‘As we have done to the cow, so you will also be done the same.’
On the day the warlord General Aidiid’s USC army came, sweeping all the sub-clans with their petty rivalries before them, Idris had expected to join his sons later at the farm but, around noon, he looked out of the window of his house. A convoy of trucks crammed with armed men and pick-up trucks with bazookas welded onto the back rolled past. Soldiers followed on foot. Far off, gunshots sounded as if coming from the outskirts of town. He waited for the army to pass on its way to the bridge and, as soon as the coast seemed clear, Idris raced to the farm. Along the earthworks the maize stalks were high. Here and there some had been knocked down in a rush; the cobs still clung to the plants, their wispy beards hanging down. He followed the broken stalks and, soon enough, he found his boys in the field. They still gripped tools in their hands, one lifeless body on top of the other, a single bullet in each. They were eighteen and twenty-two years old.
Idris climbed a tree and watched another convoy of vehicles loaded with rocket launchers, heavy machine guns and men moving along the road. He stayed out of sight and picked his way back home. There, he gathered up the other children along with his wife and his mother and went away from the road, to the river. At Bengine, the Juba river is nearly at the ocean and it is broad and swift. The family had no boat and the children couldn’t swim so Idris found two drums and tied them together to make a raft for them to struggle across. On the road south a tractor picked them up and they joined the anxious throng that was filling Kismayo.
Idris was better off than most of the refugees: he had money. After two days on a truck that dropped them at the border, they rolled into Dadaab in a rented donkey cart and registered with the UN. The place Idris, Tawane and the rest of the family were taken was an area of uneven sandy ground, unimaginably hot and without natural water. The land was bush, nine miles from Dadaab town. The locals called the area Hagadera, the place of the tall trees. The sand of Hagadera is soft enough for feet to sink into the sugary red soil. The thickets of thorns are brown. When the wind blows the sand gets everywhere and turns everything: feet, shoes, tents, hair, a shade of red; it is a world with a limited palette. It was to be their home for the next twenty-five years.
The arriving refugees were told to build a traditional house – the local style was to make a frame of sticks and cover it with mud thickened with dung. But Idris refused. He insisted on constructing an aqal, the nomad’s tent: a bent wood structure covered with blankets and skins which the family erected on the square of sand they were allocated amid the grid of the camp, block E5. After all, he reasoned, the family would soon be going home. Being poor is harder when you have known riches. Idris knew that the sand upon which he slept belonged to another clan and that fact burned within him like a fuse.
As more and more refugees arrived in Hagadera, the people organized themselves as they had done back home. Clans collected together in certain blocks. People who had been elders and elected officials back home slipped easily into positions of authority in the emerging forums of the new camp. Some appointed themselves ‘block leaders’ and would go to the authorities with complaints from their constituents. Businessmen and prominent farmers such as Idris were among the first to be offered plots in the new market that had been sketched in another grid in the sand. Again though, the proud man refused. The family, he was sure, would not be staying long.
Before the distribution centres were established with their system of warehouses, twice a month the World Food Programme would give out rations in an open space and Idris would go and line up with the others in the sun. One day, not long after the family had arrived, he saw a familiar face in the line. Rambo recognized him too. His old foe asked for forgiveness.
Idris told him: ‘I know that here I can mobilize people for revenge but I will give you peace. However, I will not forgive you. You planned to kill me but it is only God who kills.’ The next time Idris saw Rambo he was a block leader of E7, the one adjacent to his. They were to be neighbours for the next ten years.
Even as Idris got used to their new surroundings, learned his way around the grids and started referring to the tents and makeshift huts as houses, as homes, his mind rebelled and held itself apart. And that was really the only way that the reality of their new life could be borne. ‘I had the name of refugee but I never had the mentality of settling here,’ Idris said. Everyone in Dadaab has an original story. A story that has been retold so many times, the narrative worn smooth like a wooden handle. It doesn’t matter that Tawane himself can’t remember that far back, what’s important is that the family has a story to make sense of their present predicament. And, for Idris, it had become a habit, a part of him even.
Somalia, for him, was still a hinterland of trauma that flashed and trembled on the horizon like the electrical storms that made the animals nervous. When Tawane finished high school in 2003 and requested permission to return to Somalia to look for work, Idris refused and Tawane became an incentive worker for the US agency CARE instead. And when, in 2005, the Danish Refugee Council offered Tawane a job in the relatively
stable northern part of Somalia called Puntland – for ‘$900 a month’, he still remembers joyously – his parents again advised against it. ‘That place is not our home,’ they said. ‘It is under administration by another clan. In case of any incident in another part of the Somali world, even in Kenya or Ethiopia, they can kill you.’
Tawane’s friend Omar took the job instead. When Omar came back to visit in 2009 he was earning $2,400 a month and driving a new car. ‘He had completely changed himself, very fat! Very brown!’ Tawane was sick with regret, but he didn’t blame his parents. He had lost the battle for control of his own life long ago when he had allowed his mother to choose his wife.
A generation back, a drought had dispersed his mother’s family and one brother, a pastoralist, had crossed the border back to Kenya in search of grazing. Her brother had ended up in the town of Haberswein, a small community seventy miles north of Dadaab. Even for a man rich in goats and camels, when his eyesight failed, the hospital of choice was the free one in the camp. When her ailing brother came to stay guided by his beautiful daughter Apshira, Tawane’s mother saw her chance to keep her son close.
She talked to the young girl and convinced the fifteen-year-old child that her cousin Tawane would be a good match. Tawane was not consulted. ‘She seduced her for me!’ he says. For Apshira, it was a shot at freedom. Her family was most likely planning on giving her someone else to marry and she didn’t trust their choice. She agreed.
Tawane cried and pleaded with his mum, he was eighteen then, not yet finished high school and with dreams of further education, he didn’t want to marry. But his mother was implacable and crafty. She kept the plan from her brother. ‘He is a very difficult one, that man!’ she said. ‘Very complicated. He would have asked for hundreds of camels and we didn’t have that.’ She plotted with Apshira: the girl would return to Haberswein with the old man and then Tawane’s uncle would steal her back to the camp to elope with Tawane. A compensation dowry – an apology for a crime of passion – was much cheaper than a formal contract.