by Ben Rawlence
‘It was a success!’ the old lady cackles still, proud of her subterfuge. In a week, Tawane’s life had been transformed and his mother’s power confirmed. A year later, Apshira bore their first child. Tawane’s mother believed she was defending tradition against the corruption of the new culture in the camp. ‘It is my job to ensure that the old ways are not entirely diluted,’ she told Tawane.
Tawane stood on a threshold. He was a new kind of person from his parents. But the bonds of the old world were still visceral, still strong. He was a prisoner of guilt and of fear. The fear belonged to his parents but the guilt was his own: at having survived, at not remembering.
His whole life, Tawane had been cautious, avoided conflict and done as his parents advised. He hadn’t intended to get involved in politics. He was, by instinct and upbringing, a businessman. He had sought election to the youth umbrella, a consortium of community groups from sports to counselling, because he was interested in the ‘income-generating activities’ that it supported; credit and training for the youth to set up enterprises, and he had been voted in as treasurer.
For a while, things had gone well and Tawane had become something of a tycoon. There is no fixed power in the camps so with credit from the umbrella, Tawane and several friends bought a generator. They charged 220 subscribers, business owners and some of the richer residents, a monthly fee of 1,000 shillings ($15 dollars) each. But there wasn’t much to spend his earnings on in the camp. He dreamed of buying a big house, but no permanent dwellings are permitted. He had considered getting a car, but with the movement restrictions safaris were limited. In any case, nothing of value in Dadaab stays nailed down for very long. So he did what people do with their money in Dadaab: he buried it. Dadaab’s scruffy compounds hold billions of shillings just below the surface of the sand. His family was happy. But then the chairman of the umbrella had contracted meningitis right before the influx, and as the second in command, Tawane had stepped into his shoes.
During the famine, Tawane had frantically organized collections of money, food and clothes for the destitute newcomers and taught them how to cook the unfamiliar rations. Uninitiated mothers had mixed the white American flour with water and fed it to their babies thinking it was powdered milk. Little bellies had swollen up like footballs. At a coordination meeting with the agencies he had shamed them all into following the example of the older established refugees in contributing from their own pocket to assist the coming hordes. And when the Kenyan driver was snatched from Hagadera three weeks before the Spaniards, he had tried to help negotiate with the clans across the border to find a way to speak to al-Shabaab, which people suspected of holding the man. Now, as youth chairman, fate had cast him in the spotlight. It made his father Idris nervous.
Tawane saw immediately the dilemma facing the refugees. On one side was the Kenyan state that harassed and ransomed the refugees with impunity. On the other was al-Shabaab, from which many had already fled at least once. The refugees were, literally, between the rock and the hard place that the name, Dadaab, embodied. Taking another slurp of tea, his frown deepened as he offered his prognosis: ‘Al-Shabaab will start bombing in the camps, pretending they are refugees, changing their clothes. The Kenyans won’t know the difference. And they will make us all suffer.’
17
Heroes Day
October 20th in Kenya is called mashujaa, ‘heroes’, day. In the national stadium in Nairobi, the President dresses up in military uniform and the security forces march past. Traditionally a day to celebrate those who fought for independence against the British, from this year onwards it would be a day to commemorate those who were at that moment losing their lives in Somalia fighting Kenya’s first ever war. The army was currently bogged down in heavy mud ten miles outside the al-Shabaab-held town of Afmadow. They would remain there for weeks. The headline in an article in Time magazine that week read: ‘Kenya Invades Somalia. Does it Get Any Dumber?’
Meanwhile, in the aid agency compounds inside the UN base in Dadaab, the televisions carried the celebrations live from the capital. Bored aid workers slouched on sofas and watched the out-of-tune pomp, the soldiers sweating in their white gloves and tight chinstraps and the overwhelmingly Christian songs and rhetoric. You’d have thought Kenya was a Christian country. Due to the kidnap, the aid workers who had not yet been evacuated were prisoners of their little bungalows, painted blue and white like a holiday camp. Outside, the volleyball and badminton nets hung limp on their steel poles in the afternoon heat. Dadaab was now a security level 4. Only Iraq and Afghanistan were higher, at 5. The compound was suddenly, uncommonly, quiet.
For the aid workers and the journalists, the emergency had been a ball. The staff danced the dust off their boots at the UN bar called Pumzika (‘relax’ in Swahili), which throbbed into the early hours. ‘At that time, there was a party every night!’ the UN staff reminisced. ‘Ahh, the emergency …’ they waxed sentimental. The stream of visitors and all the extra staff made it like spring break. People crawled to work hungover, out of unfamiliar bedrooms. ‘If you lifted the roofs off, you’d be shocked!’ said one. Another aid worker recalled tripping over not one but two couples having sex in the bushes outside Pumzika. Free condoms are distributed inside the compound. The UNHCR main compound alone gets through an estimated 10,000 a year, and this is not a family station. And when it comes to cleaning out the septic tanks, the maintenance guys complain, they are invariably blocked with rubber. The kidnap had put a stop to all that. The bigger agencies, like CARE and Save the Children, pulled out all their expatriate staff immediately. By heroes day, ‘it was as if there had been a nuclear strike’, said one of the UN staff left behind. The compound was a ghost town while the UN figured out what to do.
Trucks were still delivering fuel to the agency generators, although not to the boreholes in the camps. The roads were quiet. The mud lay undisturbed, smooth and glistening in the ruts. The registration centres were empty and the hospitals had lost qualified doctors and surgeons. The suspension was supposed to be ‘all non life-saving services’. No education, no resettlement, no counselling, no care for disabled people, no income generating activities, no protection for people at risk of rape or abuse. In the blocks of Ifo 2 some people who, like Isha and Gab, had only just cut thorns and mudded huts, talked of going home to Somalia.
The mood grew sombre as the agencies began to look more critically at their operations and how they might plug the gap in personnel. There were elected refugee leaders among the elders, but the UN found them tricky to deal with: too many subterranean politics and curious allegiances. The under-twenties were an unpredictable, largely uneducated force, and in any case most of them spoke no English. The ’92 group, though, the UN understood: the ones like Tawane, Muna and the others who had arrived in the first wave from Somalia who had grown up in the camp and were now aged twenty-to-forty. They spoke the UN’s language. So, it was to them that the UN turned in their moment of crisis.
To Tawane and his colleagues in the youth centre, it was not heroes day but a busy Thursday. Tawane arrived early at the white concrete building in a rectangular compound of rubble, opposite the hospital in Hagadera camp. The two G4S security guards lolled in their corrugated-steel hut, feet up on broken chairs. The war had made little adjustment to their posture. On the wall of the main building was painted: ‘Information Technology and Youth Centre (funded by DANIDA)’. Inside, the computers donated by the Danish government were already all occupied by kids willing to pay 440 shillings ($6) a month for access to the internet, their cheeks shining in the glow of Facebook and the English Premier League. When he got to his office, Tawane found a line of people waiting to see him. In the week since the kidnap, his authority as the de facto camp manager had been almost automatically established. He found himself telling people what to do, and to his surprise, they complied.
As the elected leader of the ‘Youth Umbrella’, Tawane had no formal role to compel people to volunteer on behalf of the refugees, but he ha
d a respect that had been earned. The youth who had come of age in the camp felt a responsibility to their people and to the camp. They were not like the traumatized elders of Idris’s generation, shell-shocked, spending their days staring out at the horizon. They had always seen themselves as separate. From Somalia, but not of Somalia, they considered themselves uncorrupted by the war, not like the forty-to-sixty-year-olds whom they blamed for starting the conflict and the under-twenties whose naiveté and muscle, they thought, was responsible for sustaining it. They were a unique creation of the United Nations, an unwitting experiment in humanitarian social engineering.
In some ways, the camp had been good to them. Although a few, like Muna, had not finished school, most of that first wave raced through the Kenyan school system laid on in the camps and onwards, to correspondence diplomas and even degrees. They spoke English and Swahili and wrote it better than they wrote Somali. They had been raised on a diet of NGO culture, of ‘gender balance’ and ‘rights mainstreaming’, drilled in all the proper liberal values.
But adulthood in the camp for the ’92 group was an unfamiliar place, for which the elders could offer no guide. Having acquired all the educational garlands possible, they had reached Dadaab’s glass ceiling and were eager for a bigger life elsewhere. Many of their friends had been resettled to Europe and North America, before 9/11 caused the number of slots in the lottery to evaporate. The young men and women at the youth centre now were the ones left behind, who followed the progress of their friends abroad on Facebook – the cars, the clothes, the unveiled women. They marvelled and they were consumed with longing. Stuck in the camp and forbidden to work, they lived on the welfare of incentive jobs and passed the time playing at politics and civil society in the youth umbrella, preparing themselves, they believed, for a career beyond the camp.
They were a close-knit group: problems were shared, savings were pooled and work was communal. On any given day, some of them could be found at the youth centre, passing the time together as they had done every day for over two decades. Present that morning was Tawane’s right hand man and best friend, a tall handsome soccer player named Fish who also worked as an incentive employee for CARE. He was the cabinet member of the umbrella responsible for sports supervising 143 football and eight volleyball teams, and had achieved fame as the organizer of the camps’ most celebrated football league. The caretaker of the youth centre, Mohammed, nicknamed ‘Africa’, was the webmaster of Dadaabcamps.com – the portal that spread news about the camp, though the traffic was mostly from the diaspora outside, desperate for news from home. Owke (pronounced okay) was there too, a musician who played in the camp’s most famous band: they borrowed instruments from CARE and sang mostly for the agency calendar: international water day, world toilet day, international day for zero tolerance of female genital mutilation, and so on, though they were also available for weddings. And ‘Norwegian’, whose nickname derived from a computer error on his ration card.
In the week since the kidnap, Tawane had already become accustomed to a new life: leaving home at six o’clock every morning and often not back until midnight. Meetings, organizing, mobilizing: committees for food distribution, for security, for health extension, for water, for rubbish collection, for the youth. It was like running a medium-sized city without a budget, and his friends in the group had rallied round. The camp was facing an existential crisis, the present, for once, loomed larger than the imaginary future.
Outside, under a neem tree that had struggled up from the rubble of the compound, the friends of the ’92 group had assembled themselves on broken plastic chairs, an upturned jerrycan and a breeze block. When Tawane walked over to greet them, the talk was full of suspicion: that the UN intended the suspension as a kind of punishment to the refugees for hosting the kidnappers, a charge the loyal ’92 group deeply resented.
‘The trouble with the whites, they have no security, they have no clan,’ somebody said, trying to pin their troubles on the foreigners’ culture. But it was easier to blame it on the newcomers: those who had fled later iterations of the civil war, who hadn’t been to school and who were thus, they assumed, more at risk of being radicalized. Among the group, education was held up as an essential value, one of the pillars of a more civilized world.
‘Imagine, a child of ten or twelve,’ said Owke, ‘chewing khat!’
‘At eleven in the morning!’ said Tawane. The ’92 group associated khat with degenerate behaviour and by extension, a propensity for other degenerate activity such as joining al-Shabaab.
‘Life was good before. Security was good. Before they came,’ said Africa. The kidnap was a watershed. Suddenly, the ’92 group had become the old guard and the hot, hungry, miserable past had become halcyon days. They had all mobilized to help the new arrivals but the ’92 group mistrusted them all the same. The kidnap seemed to have proved their natural suspicions right. The rumours of fighters visiting the camp were now thicker than ever but when Tawane and his friends made investigations their attempts at counter-intelligence drew a blank. They had no connections, no way in to the networks of the newcomers like Guled. The problem was, as the elected representatives of the youth readily realized: would the UN and the police understand the distinctions between the refugees? And even if they did, could they resist the urge to punish them all collectively? On the evidence so far, it appeared not. And this was the source of Tawane’s current problems.
There were eight boreholes in Hagadera camp that relied on generators to draw the water up, but the diesel for the generators was in the CARE compound. The police had refused to escort the agency vehicles and the aid workers themselves were also refusing to come to the camps. So Tawane asked his friends under the tree to arrange to fetch the drums with donkey carts. He would telephone CARE to tell them the volunteers were coming. They would go to all the boreholes, a journey of many miles. It was hard work, but minds that had been sick with dreams of America would find a brief distraction in the urgency of the present crisis.
In the absence of any agency staff, the women waiting in their burqas alongside Tawane’s office had contributed money and hired a car to survey the damage caused by the rains. They knew that the UN trusted Tawane, so now they brought him a list of all the latrines that had collapsed. And they came with a complaint from the inhabitants of the new NGO mud-brick houses – they were melting in the downpour. Tawane told them he’d report it, but he could promise nothing else.
As he worked his way through his meetings, out of his office window, across the sandy street, Tawane could see the welded blue-steel gates of the hospital shaded by eucalyptus trees, the only original ‘tall trees’ of Hagadera that had escaped the axe. Inside, his wife Apshira was in a bad way. She had been due to give birth on the day of the kidnapping. Five days later, the baby had finally come, but Asphira had lost a lot of blood. She was in a critical condition, breastfeeding the newborn and awaiting a transfusion that was taking longer than usual to arrive. The Hagadera hospital was run by the International Rescue Committee and it was operating beyond capacity, with beds arranged sideways to fit more in, and patients lying on strips of cloth on the floor and in the courtyard. Cholera had just been confirmed in Hagadera and the staff were braced for worse. Tawane had spent the last few days flitting between his wife’s bedside and his office.
At the end of the day he crossed the street to the hospital. Apshira was asleep on one of the iron beds, her long body curled in a protective crescent around her sleeping newborn, swaddled in the green medical linen. Afraid to wake her, Tawane tiptoed out again and turned for home.
The house in block E5 in which he had lived all his years in the camp was on the other side of the camp from the hospital, a thirty-minute walk. He was a stocky, powerful man with a round head and a jaw that when it wasn’t smiling could appear fierce. When he walked, he did so purposefully. He made his way now through the Hagadera market, not stopping, but nodding and greeting people chewing khat in their shadowy stalls, sitting next to unsteady
towers of plastic goods, mostly from China. Everyone knew him.
As he passed a small tent made of sacking stuffed with men drinking tea and talking loudly, there was a shout. He turned to see a tall man in Kenyan police uniform cuff one of the men round the head several times then kick him in the behind. Apparently he had insulted the policeman. There were hundreds of men sitting around within sight. They could have seized the policeman in a second, yet they sat there, staring at the scene with the sullen gaze of the disempowered. It was the way they had looked at men in uniform for generations.
As the policeman moved on, a stone sailed through the air and landed innocuously on the sergeant’s boot. He jerked his head up and took a few rapid steps in the direction of the stone. A gaggle of children shrieked and ran for cover. When the sergeant turned his back another stone whistled past his ear. Enraged, like Mr Wolf in a game of grandmother’s footsteps, he wheeled again. The children bunched together, screamed in delight and retreated. It was a classic image, kids throwing stones at occupiers. In the hostility of the children to the policeman and in the sergeant’s nervous bullying lay the beginnings of the war’s arrival in Dadaab. Both the sergeant and the children knew which sides they were on.
Beyond the market, Tawane crossed the wide maidan in front of the E blocks. Under a low, black sky, lapwings skittered with little crested heads bleating like goats. Schoolgirls’ veils billowed as they walked home from class and smaller children wearing only T-shirts tugged and pulled each other to the ground. On the maidan boys played football threading between holes dug in the sand for building materials and two rubbish-piled skips, one of them alight. Between the blocks, long lonely alleyways stretched for half a mile. And all along the edge of E1 and E3 the gates into the compounds were painted in multicolour stripes, triangles and geometric patterns. One of them was plated with USAID tins and embroidered with a lattice of barbed wire. Inside were mountains of scrap metal scavenged from the camp – valuable loot.