by Ben Rawlence
If ever he had proof of a specific threat to his life, here it was. Others had already been killed; the urgency could not be denied. Tawane shared the message with UNHCR and asked them to protect him. In the prefab offices humming with air-conditioned cold inside the bomb-proof compound, some emails were dashed off about ‘the person of concern’, but their efforts soon ran out of momentum. Resettlement slots, the junior UN officials told him, were very limited. But it wasn’t even clear that his case had been considered; Tawane knew the process and no one had interviewed him about his experience. Instead, the officials urged him to go to Nairobi, at his own expense. Tawane was so angry he could not speak. The bureaucracy for which he had risked his life had failed him.
‘I am emotionally out,’ he told a friend on the phone. ‘I want to tell the UN: you are an enemy to me. You have not asked me anything. I risked my life. I am updating you day and night. People who have the same title as me have run away, are dead. I am the only one that remains. Do I have a spare life? I should opt to join the ones in the sea, dying inside the ocean on the way to Italy.’
He didn’t want to go ‘down Kenya’, but Apshira pleaded with him and his parents backed her up. So, unhappy and afraid, he boarded a bus to Eastleigh. ‘As I left Dadaab, my heart was crying.’
A single night in the cold, cramped room crawling with internet cables with Fish and five others was enough. The tenants scrambling for a living in the city had multiplied; there were two or three eager young men to a mattress now. When they made room for him out of respect for their elders – not yet thirty but in Somali terms he was an old man – Tawane felt bad and moved instead to the Maka Karam Hotel on 12th street. But the dingy room with a view over the rubbish-strewn street was no place to spend the day. He missed Apshira and the kids too much. ‘A poor man cannot stay in Nairobi,’ he told her on the phone. He was worried about the threats and what would happen if he returned to Dadaab too soon, but he had a job to do. ‘I thought to myself, I have not done a wrong to any person. I have tried to live a noble life. If they want to kill me, let them. I will die with a clean heart.’ And, after only three days in the city, he took the bus home again.
Going home, though, the threats resumed. On his first day back behind the heavy desk in the whitewashed cube of the youth office, Tawane was having a meeting with his ‘legal adviser’ in the youth umbrella when his phone rang: the news of his return was already swirling far beyond the camp. The number was from Somalia.
‘We know you are back and we can get you any time,’ said a voice in Somali. Tawane hung up. The legal adviser called back and put the phone on loudspeaker.
‘Who are you?’ he barked at the phone. No answer. ‘Where are you?’
‘Bakaara,’ a voice replied.
‘Mogadishu?’ asked the legal adviser.
The phone went dead.
‘Ahh,’ said Tawane, desperately clutching at straws from which to thatch a denial, ‘if they are far, then they are harmless.’ He told a brave story of faith in God, that only He would decide his time and how he’d rather die at home with his wife and children than in the city like a beggar. His faith, though, was not sufficient for him to sleep in his own bed. The chairman of Ifo CPST had been shot back in December. Al-Shabaab had eyes in the camp and they had form. He could have moved along with his family to the so-called safe area of Transit, where Muna was with her family, but whatever trust Tawane once had in the UN’s ability to protect him was gone. He took to living door to door, choosing a different friend’s house in which to try and sleep each night, but invariably he’d end up lying awake, listening to the dark.
24
Grufor
Insomnia was endemic in Transit too. Those who had opted for the dubious protection of the safe area did not see it as a haven. The family of the murdered chairman of Ifo CPST were now living there, though the broken fence offered no defence against the threatening phone calls that stalked the chairman’s surviving children. ‘We have killed your father, and we will return to finish you!’ said one message. For a son that had seen the body of his father in the market with a bullet wound to the head, it was enough to put an end to sleep. And so the boy joined Muna and her lost-boy husband Monday and the many others in Transit who lay awake in their plastic tents, starting at every shift and creak in the night; imagining masked figures moving, liquid in the dark, scaling the broken fence, silencing the G4S guard sleeping off his liquor, exacting revenge.
As the dry season turned to rain and then the wind of the Hagar, the war moved around Dadaab. Troops and police continued to be blown apart by landmines on the Kenyan border. Grenades and machine guns killed scores in attacks on churches, restaurants and nightclubs in Nairobi, Mombasa and Garissa. In May another landmine claimed a policeman in Dagahaley camp and an IED tore through shops injuring thirty-eight in Nairobi’s Central Business District. And each time the President thundered about pushing the refugees into Jubaland. Fish worried about getting on the wrong bus in the city. Nisho asked God to spare him an unlucky day at the market. And Guled feared that al-Shabaab would finally catch up with him.
In June a bomb exploded in Bosnia, targeting Mama Isnino, the chairlady of Ifo. It sent everyone in the food distribution centre running, scrambling on top of each other to get out. Pregnant women fell down, so did Guled, and the stampeding crowd trampled them all. Someone shouted ‘The hospital! The hospital!’ and Guled joined the crowds racing to escape from the incipient police, but the G4S guards locked the gates of the hospital and beat the desperate crowd back. Avoiding the road he threaded through the blocks but when he reached his hut, his mother-in-law urged him to go and hide in the bush. ‘I should not have sent you!’ she wailed; Maryam was pregnant again and they were taking it in turns to fetch the food for the family. By the time he returned at dusk, she was rueing her delay in returning to Mogadishu and had redoubled her resolve to quit the camp as soon as her debts were paid and the road was dry.
A few weeks later, armed men attacked a convoy of the Norwegian Refugee Council in Ifo 2 and kidnapped three more foreign aid workers. A few streets away, in Handicap International, Kheyro was safely bundled into a car with her colleagues and taken to the UN compound to wait with the other incentive workers under armed guard.
Through the boom of the landmine and the bomb, and through the panic of the kidnappings, Muna sat in Transit as though the war didn’t touch her. She rarely ventured beyond the fence and Monday fetched the rations for her. To her the violence was as distant as news on the radio. Far more interesting were the tragic turns of her own life, whose daily dramas she chewed over with her neighbour Sweetee.
Apart from the lack of space, life in Transit had started off well enough. Soon after Muna and Monday and the children Umaima and Christine had arrived, hundreds of Sudanese moved in – residents of Hagadera who had had a fight with the Somalis there and wanted now to be moved to Kakuma, Kenya’s other camp that was majority Sudanese. They served as protection, a buffer against the casual discrimination shown to Monday by the Somali residents, and against any foolish schemes launched on behalf of Muna’s inflamed family. The tent behind Muna’s was inhabited by a group of Sudanese boys. Impossibly tall, they shared one prized yellow Arsenal T-shirt between them – each one wearing it on alternate days – and on their tent in permanent marker pen was scrawled ‘Manchester United’.
Muna and Monday needed the safety of numbers. Moving to Transit had not stopped the phone calls threatening divine vengeance. For the hardliners, miscegenation was not something that they could square with their world view. Even the Dinka in S3 did not condone what Monday had done, but they were less evangelical in their bigotry. As Monday’s neighbour Julia explained, ‘In our clan it is forbidden to marry outside. But in this place, people are few, so you take whatever you can get.’ She was understanding of the Somali wish to eliminate Monday even if she didn’t agree with it: ‘The Somalis want to kill him,’ she said, ‘that is their rule.’ Clan rules were immutable.
On her side, when Muna talked to her sister in Nairobi on the phone and asked her to send money for sugar, the response was ideological: ‘How can I assist someone who has become a Christian?’ It was as though she had stepped out of the Somali world entirely.
After the Sudanese were transported to Kakuma in the huge white buses of the International Organization for Migration, the children Umaima and Christine lost their defenders. The other Somali kids began to taunt and beat them. And when Muna confronted the parents in Transit, she got the same uncomprehending response: ‘How do you know what my children did? You are a Christian, you don’t believe in God, how can we believe you?’ So she just kept quiet, stayed at home and told the girls not to go too far. Whatever the neighbours said, she did believe in God. And she prayed to Him to take her away from Ifo.
Whether or not the UN heard her prayers, discrimination on the basis of race or religion was something they easily understood and Muna, Monday and the girls were put on a fast track for resettlement, to Australia. Muna was happy. Her family had been accepted for resettlement once before but her mother, fearing that her daughters would be corrupted in America told UNHCR ‘no thanks’. It was a rare and bold move and one that Muna and her sister resented. Now, hope was renewed. Monday had a dream of studying engineering and returning to Abiyei with a big drilling machine to claim the oil of the place for his people. He was pleased that his daughter would have three nationalities. Sudanese, Somali and Australian. ‘Maybe she will be an ambassador one day for Australia! … There is a right there, for everybody,’ he said. Muna talked gladly of the fact that ‘They say nobody talks bad about anybody there, even a woman with no husband and no children.’
Still, in the meantime, Muna and Monday could not live on hope alone. Monday went back to work as a plumber for the Red Cross and he found Muna a job as a community health worker for the agency Islamic Relief. Soon, though, she stopped going. One day, she had left Transit at the most dangerous time, the afternoon when the camp’s eighteen football pitches were full, and some boys playing football, sweaty and excited, stoned her. Since that day she complained of kidney pain. Tests at the hospital revealed nothing. ‘But it is her body,’ said Monday. ‘You cannot argue with her feeling.’
Monday says that from then on Muna changed. She claims he did. But whatever the truth of it, their relationship began to fall apart.
Sweetee pinpointed the trouble to the visit of her friend Sofia. Sofia came to look after Sweetee when she fell sick and it was Sofia, she said, who taught Muna how to chew miraa. Miraa or khat is the narcotic leaf that keeps a large proportion of the male population of the camp intoxicated in the afternoons. Sweetee was a chewer. She admitted to the vice without shame, as though it were simply an unfortunate fact, and she had no choice in the matter at all.
‘Stress, that’s why,’ she said in her forlorn sing-song voice by way of explanation. She drank alcohol too. ‘I need to forget, but then in the morning I remember again.’
Born in Mogadishu, Sweetee had fled to Nairobi aged twenty-three after the man she eloped with was killed by the gangster cousin her aunt tried to force her to marry. She was eight months pregnant and the shock made her miscarry. In Nairobi she had caught sight of the gangster again so she came to the camp and threw herself upon the mercies of the UN, who gave her a tent in Transit. She was a beauty, and the Somalis had nicknamed her ‘Sweetee’ on account of her charms.
‘Don’t do it,’ she warned Muna as Sofia offered her some leaves. But Muna gave a wry smile like a miscreant child and stuffed the green narcotics in her cheek. Soon, the two women were to be seen chewing every afternoon, their tents dirty, food uncooked, clothes unwashed and the children far and wide; Christine was once discovered eating stools by the overflowing communal latrines. One day Monday came home from work slightly early and found the friends sitting outside the tent, chewing and smoking cigarettes. He was no stranger to khat, or to drink; he knew the damage they could cause.
‘Is that where the money I brought you has gone?’ His 10,000 shillings salary had gone in three days. ‘That money is for the kids!’
‘Yes,’ said Muna, not dissembling. ‘I have stress, I need to chew.’
‘I forbid you.’ Monday chanced his authority but Muna was having none of it.
‘You chew. So I can too,’ she said.
‘I cannot chew when the children are there. I cannot chew the money that is meant for them,’ he said.
Monday cautioned her against Sweetee. People said she was a prostitute. It was well known that she drank and smoked – rare, almost unthinkable, activities for a woman. Muna was defensive. ‘If I stay alone, I think too much,’ she told him.
‘That lady will destroy you,’ Monday warned.
But Muna ignored him. When he went to work, she did as she pleased. Finding the tent and the children in a mess, Monday would quarrel with Muna and then take his frustrations elsewhere. The Sudanese cooked liquor in S3 and he spent more and more time among his own people, drinking there. Sometimes he brought alcohol from the aid agency compound in Dadaab where he worked. Little bottles with names like ‘Hardman’, ‘Flyhounds’, ‘Kane Xtra Golden Spirit’. North East Province is officially dry. The only places you can legitimately buy alcohol in Dadaab is inside the UN compound or the police mess. That was where Sweetee got hers.
In some ways the troubles of Muna and Monday could be traced to geography. Transit was metres from Ifo police station and, across a barren triangle of sand, the Ethiopian block E1. The Somalis of the camp called E1 ‘Grufor’ – a corruption of the English words ‘Group Four’, for the security guards who paid for sex and gave the block its reputation for prostitution. It is hard to say whether E1 became corrupted as result of its proximity to the police station or whether it was doomed from the start. The oldest inhabitants claim it wasn’t always like that, but over time there developed an unhealthy symbiosis between the two. Grufor was where all the bad girls were. And Sweetee was certainly one of them.
With its ragged line of shops backing onto the windward side of the camp, Grufor was like a lonely outpost in the Wild West. Rickety tin verandas jutted out on poles dug into the sand. Behind green and red scraps of cloth figures moved and eyes flashed in the gloom. Several times a day, across the dusty triangle you could see the officers coming, waddling in their half-uniforms, guns loose, come to buy cigarettes or food or just to look for diversions. ‘Burqa hotel’ was at one end of the strip and ‘Dube restaurant’ was at the other behind a huge pile of firewood for the furnaces of the kitchen that never went out. In between was ‘Brothers Shop’ where the wrapped green stalks of khat lay beneath strips of damp sacking.
Dube was a large man with grey hair and pinched lips who sat on a car tyre behind a broken desk in his restaurant, counting his money into a little wooden box while he waited to join his sons in the US. He had recently wired them $75,000 to purchase a twelve-wheeler truck to save them the ignominy of cleaning toilets or butchering unclean meat. He wanted to go to California, he said, ‘just to see it, and to make some money’, but then his plan was to return to Ifo to retire. He had set up his restaurant and his myriad other businesses at the beginning of the camp in 1991, with money he had brought from home, as had the Ethiopian Carlos who ran the ‘Mini-Shop’ next door. Carlos with his soft child’s skin and woman’s thick lashes, sat in his wooden shop
sunk like a coffin buried along with washing powder, sugar, cigarettes, sweets and matches. The shop was a full foot below the surface of the ground. Twenty years of sand blown across the desert had raised the level of the plain making him sink a little every year.
Behind Carlos’s, down an alleyway, was Lamma’s ‘Photo Studio’ with its laminated backdrop of unearthly Alpine waterfalls. He had an old Kodak Instamatic and detachable bulbs on stalks which he had purchased through two years of hunger by selling his rations. The films he sent to Nairobi for processing and the finished prints he sold for fifteen shillings a go. His compound was the only green one in the block, perhaps in the whole of the camp. Banana plants, elephant grass and white climbing flowers surrounded a square metre of what could only be described as lawn. He was from the mountains of southern Ethiopia and had recently been reunited with his wife and child whom he had lost, six years earlier, when he fled after being wrongly accused of treasonous political beliefs. Now he spent an hour every morning carrying water so that his child could know what it was like to sit on grass. There was more dignity and resistance in that square metre of green than there was in the whole of the rest of Grufor.
Some people survived the pressure cooker of Dadaab by keeping their eyes on a distant prize: people like Nisho and Kheyro, who worked hard at the narrowest sliver of opportunity that the camp had to offer. But they were few. For every Kheyro who kept their dream alive against the odds, there was a Sweetee for whom the effort of belief in a better life was too much. For whom the evidence of misery and hopelessness was overwhelming and whose only rational option in the circumstances was to pass the time, to dull the pain. It was often the most clear-eyed that slipped through the cracks into the fleshpots of E1. And Muna was no different.
The camp was an introduction to another world. For young Somalis, raised within the strictures of a conservative culture, the exposure to Christians, Ethiopians, Sudanese, Ugandans, Congolese and others was liberating. And this was precisely what the traditionalists and the elders feared. E1, the majority Ethiopian block, for them, represented the worst of Dadaab, the place where Somali culture went to die. Professor White Eyes scrupulously kept to his own compound in E2 next door. Nisho could not bear to hear the name of the place – he would place his hands over his ears whenever anyone mentioned ‘Grufor’. Sometimes, young Somali boys from other blocks came to peek at the goings on as though it were a right of passage. The motley inhabitants knew that they were outcasts, ‘There are no good people here,’ they would laugh. Everyone had a story of how they had fallen foul of the crowd, or their husbands, and they came together, the outcasts, and named themselves ‘Survivors’.