by Ben Rawlence
‘The open and transparent election is a good example to the youth of other camps,’ Fish translated. ‘I acknowledge the former regime of Mr Tawane and I call upon the incoming chairman to warm up.’ The youth umbrella had held elections for a new leadership and today, 4 May 2013, Tawane was formally handing over. His effort was finally at an end. He had considered running for re-election but after glancing at the national political landscape he had withdrawn himself as a candidate. He had felt a shift in the attitude towards refugees among the incoming Jubilee government and he had turned his attention instead to another venture. His political sixth sense could not have been more acute. And his timing could not have been more adroit.
The day before Tawane’s handing-over ceremony, on 3 May, the new President Kenyatta had delivered his first foreign policy speech, on Somalia. The controversy over the results of the national election had been settled after a court case that conveniently ruled out the need for a recount and Kenyatta had been sworn in three weeks earlier, on 9 April. He was addressing the twenty-first Extra-Ordinary Summit of the Heads of State and Government of the Inter-governmental Authority for Development (IGAD) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a regional cooperation forum of governments in the Horn of Africa. In a gloomy, panelled conference room, under a cross-hatched gold ceiling and seated at a table covered in green velour, the President eschewed the bluster of his predecessor, the slurs on the refugees and the promises about Somalia being safe. Kenyatta instead offered substance. ‘Kenya will embark on consultations with the Somali government and other players, especially the UNHCR,’ he announced, ‘to develop modalities for the safe and orderly return and resettlement of Somali refugees. This will culminate in the organization of an international conference on the safe return of Somali refugees co-chaired by Kenya and Somalia.’
In the camps, the detonation of this bombshell was bigger than anything planted by al-Shabaab. This was not the urban refugees being moved to the camps, this was a plan for the camps themselves to be dismantled. On the radio talk shows and in the tea-shops there was outrage. Under international and Kenyan law, refugees are supposed to return home voluntarily at a time of their choosing. Refugee leaders repeated the mantra that peace was not yet there in Somalia. Kenyatta’s speech came five days before the second London Conference on Somalia, and although the communique following the London conference was careful to use different language, talking instead about ‘creating the conditions for voluntary return’, the refugees had heard Kenyatta’s message loud and clear.
It was as Tawane had forseen. He joined in the anger even as he adjusted to the change in policy. To his friends, Tawane talked of setting an example like Nelson Mandela of an African leader willingly relinquishing power. But he had actually decided not to seek re-election as chairman of the youth umbrella because he had another idea, ‘downloaded,’ he liked to boast, ‘straight from the fresh mind of Tawane’. He had set up his own organization to do projects back in Somalia to promote peace, and to facilitate the return of refugees. With a good reputation among the UN and the agencies, he could become, in the language of the humanitarian industry, an ‘implementing partner’, running projects that the UN could not do. That was where the dollars would be now that Kenyatta was so keen to get the refugees back over the border. It might enable him to move the family to Kismayo – if the fledgling Jubaland administration held firm, or maybe it would just allow him to visit his homeland and do some good while earning real money and still living in Hagadera. The plan was, at least, a vehicle for his imagination that had more mileage than the eternal cul-de-sac of the camp.
While the speeches in the hall went on, Tawane slipped outside, talking on the phone, sweating in a reflective purple shirt with black buttons and new trousers, threads still clinging to the fiercely pressed creases. Around him the grubby onlookers poked their noses through the mesh, to watch events in the hall. Several of them wore free T-shirts from some NGO with the message: ‘Together We Can Make Change’. Peering in, Tawane smiled a self-satisfied grin as a succession of speakers trooped up to pay tribute to his brave and extraordinary leadership. The last three years had been a heyday for the youth of the camp but the future loomed, uncertain. President Kenyatta’s words hung over proceedings and undermined their confidence.
The manager of Hagadera camp stood to speak. Kiai was a short Kenyan man from Central Province. ‘This is the happiest day of my life in Hagadera,’ he told the meeting. He welcomed the ‘incoming regime’ with its new ‘cabinet’ of officers. The language of government was part of the youth umbrella’s game of pretend. And he said nice things about Tawane, even though they had quarrelled in the past: ‘If he wanted something he would not rest. When he got what he wanted, that is when he would sleep.’ The deputy youth chairman from Ifo camp praised Tawane’s example: ‘Through him, we have learned what accountability means.’
The youth of the camps saw themselves as leaders-in-waiting; indeed they had been encouraged in that vision by the rhetoric of countless NGO workshops and trainings. They adopted the political correctness, the bureaucratic habits and even the dress of the NGOs, and they spoke in clichés. Words like ‘democracy’, ‘transparency’, and ‘accountability’ were to them like new outfits. Having marinated in the UN vocabulary their whole life, they had a naive idea of the outside world: that there was a standard, a normality that existed somewhere, in America, in Europe, in the United Nations, for which they were practising. For a democratic future that they would inherit and make real. As though what was missing from the current motley crew of criminals and warlords governing Somalia was simply a proper grounding in liberal principles.
The next generation was embodied by the new chairman. Several years younger than Tawane, Garad had precision hair and his soft skin was unlined. He wore a shiny black shirt with a white fringed collar, and when he rose to speak he left a black backpack with the NGO logo ‘IRC’ of the International Rescue Committee by his chair. Tawane returned to the hall in time to catch his words.
‘I thank the outgoing chairman, his excellency Noor Tawane …’ said Garad. ‘My fellow Hagadera youth, today we celebrate democracy, peace and brotherhood. Let justice be our shield and our defender … May we go forward in unity!’ His co-chair was a young woman perspiring in heavy black dress and veil. Many men were after her, she claimed, and she appeared to compensate for this with extremely demure outfits. ‘We are the future,’ she told the gathering, quietly.
When it was his turn to speak, Tawane stood up, sweating still, his hands shaking slightly, and buried his audience in statistics: 2,478 members of the youth groups, 516 of them female, 78 disabled and 40 minorities; 112 football teams, 16 volleyball teams. ‘These are the groups and individuals that are under my fingertips,’ he announced. He handed over a list of the assets of the youth umbrella and enumerated them: ‘The computer centre has one toilet, one tap stand, three staff, two trainers and one cleaner. Stand up, that I may handover.’ The mentioned staff shyly stood up. ‘I will not disclose their payment, it is a close-door issue,’ he said, emulating NGO-speak. The audience tinkled with laughter. Various other sensitive issues, like the state of the finances, he promised to share ‘in close-door’.
The second half of the speech was motivational: ‘We are refugees by status but not by choice,’ Tawane said. ‘We are not vulnerable people, we are super humans. Refugee is a state of mind. Look at the examples of Madeleine Albright, of K’naan.’ It was a valiant effort, but it was more an expression of faith than experience. And that was the contradiction of Dadaab. To many of the educated young people coming up behind Tawane and trapped in the camp, Tawane’s vision might have seemed like a distant dream. To the tens of thousands denied a place at primary or even secondary school, to the grinning boys pressed up against the mesh windows, it was in practice almost meaningless. And yet, the defining characteristic of the young people in the camp was a surfeit of brimming optimism: a conviction that life for them had not yet begun; even Fish, the wrong side o
f thirty, spoke in the future tense. Among the rowdy kids outside was a budding teacher, a doctor and a premier league football player.
When Tawane finished, Garad solemnly received the accounts, recommendations for the staff and the three stamps of the organization. ‘I want to say ’bye to all, and I will be in the White House,’ said Tawane with a smile. America was still the lodestar in the refugee firmament, the model, for better or worse.
The new regime stood and introduced themselves and after that, finally, what the little boys assembled at the windows had been waiting for: the music. The sound of live instruments and singing was not common in Dadaab. The calendar of traditional cultural festivals had been forgotten and the religious ones, once a carnival of song, were now tuneless. The few weddings that did take place were, increasingly, silent, either as a result of a lack of money to pay the musicians or out of fear of the mullahs. The position of artists in the conservative milieu of the camp was desperate. They crept out and appeared at occasions such as this one more to affirm their own memory of who they had been than for the meagre amount of money people offered. It was only recently that the agencies had stopped compensating musicians in surplus cooking utensils instead of cash; the musicians had complained. They considered it an insult.
A tall man wearing the flowery shirt of the artist over a wiry frame topped with a heart-shaped face and a receding hairline stood up. Madar had small dancing eyes and a warm smile that revealed tobacco-stained teeth. During the speeches, he had been smoking outside, squashing the cigarette between his long fingers with the definite motions of an experienced smoker. In Somalia in the early nineties, he had just been getting famous but the arrival of the war had ruined his chances at establishing a reputation. He played the piano robustly and sang into the microphone which a woman alternately lifted to his mouth and pointed at the speaker of the Casio keyboard. The kids outside were delirious, reeling in circles.
Next was Sid Ali, in jeans, sunglasses perched on his crown, a novelist and ‘event poet’ in his own terminology. On the spot, he composed a poem, more of a rap, in the traditional Somali style, to express and commemorate the spirit of the event in song. If it was good, others would memorize and recite it and it would live on, although here in the camp the chances of that were remote. Sid had fled Mogadishu after he was hunted by al-Shabaab for writing a novel about love. His wife’s parents had forbidden her from leaving the capital with him and so now he missed his children terribly and spent his freedom in exile writing more novels in thin-lined exercise books about the same subject: love, heartbreak and longing.
Jowahir drew the largest crowd. While some of the kids had wandered off during the poetry, they raced back when the tall gap-toothed singer in her flowing orange dress and casually draped veil picked up the microphone and began to sing of home. The sound seemed to freeze the air and calm the birds. Jowahir had grown up next to a barracks for military bands in Kismayo. When she was fourteen she joined them and had never known another profession. ‘If you give me money and tell me to go to the market I cannot do it,’ she says. When war arrived, she sang and earned good money as a member of a musicians’ co-op in Kismayo where people who wanted a band for a wedding or a celebration would call, but when al-Shabaab took over in 2007, people stopped coming. The rise of the militants coincided with her husband’s taking of a second wife. Unemployed and consumed with jealousy, she fled to Dadaab with her five children. She was thirty.
As she sang, she tapped her hennaed toes in their beaded flip-flops and touched her bangled wrists with long painted fingertips, one finger carrying a fat gold ring. Jowahir lived to sing. In the camp though, her spirit was fading. ‘If I thought there was peace in Kismayo, I would not wait for the night to come. I would go,’ she said. ‘Here people don’t understand the importance of poetry. Here people have problems, collecting food, firewood. There are no parties now. They have forgotten their culture. I don’t understand it.’
The music stopped. The earnest young people carried the chairs back into the computer centre and Tawane and Garad and other cabinet members of the new regime put on their serious faces as they squeezed into the chairman’s office for the ‘close-door’ part of the handover. The ragged boys poured into the hall and gathered up all the plastic water bottles discarded by the delegates. Then they perched on the wall in the midday sun and, one by one, sucked them dry.
A week later, a group of women were sitting on the floor of the CARE social hall watching DVDs called ‘sensitizations’ on how to wash vegetables, HIV/AIDS and ‘harmful cultural practices’, a nice way of referring to female genital mutilation. Outside, in the shade of a tree, Tawane sat squinting at a laptop. He was impervious to the background noise of constant FGM campaigns. That week, his eldest daughter, Jehanne, had been circumcised. ‘Not mutilated,’ Tawane insisted, only a small cut, what medics refer to as a cliterodectomy. Tawane faced the future but he still had one foot in the past. Apshira had sourced someone from the hospital to do it, he said approvingly, not just any old lady with a rusty knife. ‘The ones who have been cut in the sunna way can feel the same as men. The girls themselves want to be cut, otherwise they refer to you as a Christian. Who will marry her?’
Following the announcements on repatriation from Kenyatta and the London conference, the NGOs, like Tawane, anticipated a shift in donor policy and rushed in with unseemly announcements of programmes supporting refugees to return. Tawane was energized, eager for a slice of the new funds. On the plastic chair in the shade of a bush he tried to ignore the ritual droning of the television as he drew up a mission statement for his new NGO on a borrowed laptop.
An old man in a skull cap, his hands resting on a knobbled worn stick peered at him, this vision of modernity with his computer, through the chain-link fence. Under another tree, the new chairman Garad was also bent over a laptop, sweating and rubbing his forehead in concentration over spreadsheets of the youth umbrella’s finances.
‘How are you doing?’ a friend came over and asked.
‘I think I am becoming a leader,’ Garad replied.
29
Too Much Football
With President Kenyatta’s speech, it seemed that Somalia was being treated to the same brand of hubris that had seen declarations of peace foisted on other countries still at war like Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of a settlement, a bargain, and at least a patchy attempt at reconstruction and victor’s justice, these conflicts were being declared over with an election and a timeline for troop withdrawal. Peace became not an objective standard to be reached but a slippery, elastic concept: a matter of opinion. And Guled and Maryam could not agree.
Ever since Maryam’s mother had gone back to Somalia at the end of the year, her phone calls brought a steady drip of cynicism about Dadaab contrasted with expansive stories of fresh fish, fruit and the rebuilding of Mogadishu. For Maryam, a young woman with two small children, the rosy stories of Mogadishu coupled with the promise of childcare were hard to resist. And with a husband hooked on football and unable to bring home an income, there was little about camp life to hold Maryam. Most of all, she wanted milk.
Like many poor communities the world over, the camp was gripped by the insidious myth that a newborn needs powdered milk, or formula, and it was expensive. Many nursing mothers sold valuable food to buy it. Guled had no money for such things, and little idea how to find any. He had asked about driving jobs but there were few cars around. There was shoe-shining or portering but the competition for new entrants made it almost pointless. Anyway, from his point of view, apart from the lack of money for incidentals and better food, life in the camp was good. There was no rent to pay, there were rations and he had plenty of free time to indulge in his twin hobbies: ‘Playing and watching football is my ideal life, I am addicted to football,’ he readily admitted. He had begun to harbour a new dream, to play for the junior team of Manchester United. In Ifo he was famous for his skill and he considered himself one of the best in the leagues in the camp. Of the two
teams in Guled’s block, he played for Leopards FC and wore No.9, striker. His team shared the football pitch with sticks for goalposts with four other teams and played on alternate days. On the off days, he sometimes helped out ‘Auntie’ with her stall selling khat but it wasn’t enough to make up the shortfall between Maryam’s demands and the UN rations.
‘Children need milk, will they get that from the UN?’ she asked him. ‘Do they know that their father cannot work? That it is not his fault?’ Maryam had little sympathy for his excuses. She wanted him to provide. ‘Too much football!’ she grumbled. She wanted to go back home. Guled’s sister advised him on the phone not to come, that the threat of al-Shabaab discovering or press-ganging him was still there, but Maryam disagreed. She thought that the militants had more important things to do than hunt him down and that Mogadishu was full of young men in the same position. There was nothing special about him, she said. He thought she was playing down the risk to suit her own agenda of going back. They were stuck.
With walls made of sticks and roofs of plastic, little in the camp is private. When they discussed al-Shabaab, Guled urged Maryam to keep her voice down, but when the argument moved on to football, she gave full volume to her frustrations. The neighbours of course overheard their discussions and they joined in. ‘What is it with your idle man? Only playing football? He doesn’t care about you,’ they told her, and sometimes even to his face.
Kenyatta’s declaration on returns had made people insecure; it created a frame of borrowed time. But it was the accretion of little details that tipped the scales in every household; with every security incident in Dadaab, Guled’s case for staying was eroding. Two suspected suicide bombers had accidentally blown themselves up in Hagadera camp a few days before his and Maryam’s little boy was born, and another IED hit a police car in Dagahaley some days after. Now, in May, attacks on incoming trucks along the road to Somalia were a weekly occurrence. Policemen kept getting killed. No one knew the precise details of the sugar smugglers’ conflicts. One theory had it that the cartels were paying off the police and groups within the police were taking sides. Another rumour claimed the slowdown in trade was making the police chief in Dadaab greedy and the cartels were picking off his officers as a bargaining tactic. Either way, the sugar wars were far from over, and the refugees grew to expect violence.