I made my first visit to Marratane a week before meeting Liban, thanks to the living Yellow Pages maintained by the owner of the restaurant in Bombeiros, known to much of the neighborhood as Kaiser, or London Boy.33 Kaiser, who grew up in London in a family of Somali refugees, sat at the register just inside the doorway, acting as a kind of fixer for the neighborhood. He helped fellow foreigners extend their visas without incident. He knew someone who could get you a desirable cell phone number—with a long string of eights or alternating ones and fives—and someone else who could help you pass a vehicle emissions test without having to bring your car in for inspection.
When I started asking about Marratane, Kaiser introduced me to a friend who made his living delivering goods to the shopkeepers at the refugee camp and buying sacks of World Food Programme rations (all clearly marked “Not for Sale”) from staff and residents both. Another friend of Kaiser’s, a Kenyan Somali named Abdul Raman, came along to translate. On the road before the main entrance, we passed a small makeshift cemetery with sand mounds and wooden markers. These were graves, the driver said, of Somali and Ethiopian migrants who had succumbed to malaria gone untreated. At the camp gate, he stopped and handed 100 meticais, just over three dollars, to the policeman so that he could continue, against the camp’s regulations, with his car. Then he took us to the transit center, at the end of the road. A gaggle of Ethiopian men eagerly surrounded the car as it stopped, then backed up and stared at us quizzically when we got out. The driver left. I stood with Abdul Raman and took in the miserable scene around us, which I imagined to be much the same as it had been, intermittently, for the last year and a half. Groups of sallow Ethiopian men huddled over frying pans fashioned from steel oil barrels, cooking maize flatbread and watery pots of beans. Others, laid out with malaria, limply waved the black flies from their faces and rolled back and forth on straw mats inside lean-tos made from plastic sheeting.
One of the men standing nearby was a lanky farmer named Watiro Wachamo, aged thirty, who, as it happened, was one of the few Ethiopians in camp who spoke Swahili. Wachamo was just returning from a burial at the graveyard we’d passed on the way in, and he said that five or six people died each week. In early 2010, Wachamo left his wife and two kids at home in southern Ethiopia and walked across the border into Kenya, hoping somehow to make a better living than he had growing maize and sorghum at home. For five months, he did the piecemeal menial labor that is readily available for Ethiopians in Kenya: offloading charcoal trucks and hauling water in restaurants, carrying rebar and concrete as a porter at small construction sites. With a bit of cash to show for it, Wachamo made his way to the coast.
“I was looking for a good refugee camp to live in,” Wachamo said, so that he could eventually find a way out of Africa altogether. In Mombasa, he met a man who told him that if he made it to Marratane, he could get to the United States or to Canada. He gave the man $500 and boarded a dhow to Mozambique. For a week, he crouched in the hull with one hundred others as the boat headed down the coast of Tanzania. During the second half of the trip, he said, several fellow passengers were thrown overboard when they became too weak to help bail water. Landing on the Tanzanian side of the river, Wachamo and his cohorts were robbed, then chased into the water by border guards. They managed to swim across to Mozambique at low tide, but several of Wachamo’s companions didn’t make it. Now, after four months in Marratane, Wachamo was penniless, and clueless about his prospects for resettlement.
When the police call the Ethiopians and Somalis in Marratane “alleged” and “so-called” refugees, Wachamo is the type they have in mind. In a sense, they are right. Wachamo did not flee persecution, armed conflict, or war. Even under the expanding definition of “refugee” brought into play by the treaties signed since the UN’s 1951 convention, Wachamo doesn’t qualify. At most, he might be considered a “climate refugee,” born into a farming family in a place where farming has become next to impossible. Soon after Wachamo left Ethiopia, a terrible drought in the region renewed the Somali refugee crisis in Kenya and brought the idea of climate refugees to the world’s attention for the first time. But if Wachamo shares something with Somali climate refugees, it is not a category recognized under international law, or by Mozambique’s government.
Danilo Mangamela, a lawyer and protection officer for INAR, conducts many of the interviews that determine the legal status of irregular migrants arriving in Mozambique and says it is common for migrants to claim refugee status whether or not they are justified in doing so. The Ethiopians, he told me, always cite political reasons for their flight from Ethiopia, because “they know that if they mention drought that they will be sent to Immigration.” What he means is that they will be repatriated, even though, in fact, they won’t be: they will end up at Marratane one way or another.
Somalis are more likely to qualify for asylum. An American woman I met in the UNHCR office in Nampula came to her post after four years conducting asylum interviews in Nairobi. “The Somalis, before you even speak to them,” she said, “you already know what they’re going to say: ‘Tall men came into my house, they killed my father, then raped my mother and sister.’” Whether or not this story is always true, it does usually work to obtain asylum.
On another visit to Marratane in July, I met with the new camp administrator, Francisco Chihale, a barrel-chested man in his late forties with a soft voice and distaste for confrontation. Chihale is a former employee of the World Food Programme who had been in his post for only three months and said gravely that he took over at a “very complicated time.” He was trying to avoid speaking directly to the consequences of the fact that smuggling routes had become entangled with the government’s system for receiving asylum seekers. Marratane had become a repository for people of vastly different legal statuses—refugees, who have the same (nonpolitical) rights as Mozambican citizens; people whose asylum applications have been rejected but could not be repatriated; those with unresolved claims, some dating as far back as 2001; and economic migrants in transit who were caught by the police. “They are all here and they all receive the same treatment,” said Chihale. “What are we supposed to do with the [nonrefugees]?”
A few weeks into his new job, Chihale spent an afternoon speaking with the leader of a group of thirty-three Ethiopians who had been discovered in the woods one hundred miles south of Marratane, apparently on their way to South Africa. “He told the whole story,” Chihale recalled. “The smugglers were two Mozambicans and one Ethiopian—he even had their phone numbers. They took the Ethiopians to a place he’d never been and let them out in the middle of the night, at three thirty a.m. They said, ‘No one can speak, no one can cough, and no one can stand up. A car is going to come for you.’ But the locals heard something going on, and they called the police. At the end of the day, I gave him something to eat and sent him back home, but he’s already left camp.”
Chihale had not tried the phone numbers. As we spoke, though, I couldn’t help but think that he might learn something by talking to Liban. At Marratane, smuggling had thrown the camp’s basic functioning into disarray. For a subset of migrants to Mozambique, the informal system moving them about had completely taken over the one run by the government and the UN. “Last night is going five car, last night is going 120 people,” Liban said at the end of our first meeting. Evidently, he still kept his ear to the ground; it seemed likely that he missed being a mukalas.
Chihale said he had trouble even learning how many Ethiopians and Somalis were in the camp at any given time, which complicated the task of providing basic services like shelter and rations, let alone issuing Travel Declarations. “The camp is not closed, so people come and go as they please,” he told me. Chihale pointed to a chart on the wall that showed that four hundred Ethiopians had left the camp in the last month. He didn’t yet know how many had come there. After all, it was hard to tell who was arriving in Marratane for the first time and who had been there once before. It didn’t help, he said, that so many of the
migrants shared portions of their names: Mohammed, Ahmed, Ali.
In July 2011, the minister of the interior visited Marratane with a fleet of Indian-made SUVs and a couple dozen strong men who formed a security barrier everywhere he walked. He was accompanied by the entire staff of the Nampula offices of INAR and the UNHCR, and though he’d never set foot in the camp, he strode deliberately through it, dictating his own itinerary without comment. He said hello to Congolese market women selling cherry tomatoes and plastic baggies of vegetable oil by the road, then jumped back into his Mahindra jeep and sped off, two hundred yards farther into camp. With a single sentence, he thanked the teachers from Marratane’s elementary school, and made an about-face. They remained in receiving line formation until he was out of sight again. A crowd formed at a respectful distance from his entourage and followed him throughout, chasing after the jeeps. The mob was thickest at the transit center, where hundreds of Ethiopians looked on from beyond the security cordon. There was not a woman, child, or man over fifty in sight. The minister walked down long lines of ragged tents chatting with Chihale. “They come from Ethiopia to here by themselves?” an aide asked one of the INAR employees. “Is there a map or something?”
Beyond the transit center, the minister strode off on a foot-path that led into a cassava field, with soldiers and barefoot Ethiopians fanning out among the crops. After twenty yards, he narrowly avoided stepping in human feces, and the Ethiopians grinned eagerly while the entourage turned back toward camp, chuckling about “land mines.” The minister stopped briefly in front of a group of Ethiopians. “Como está?” he asked. How are you? They murmured, as one. The man standing directly in front of the minister stuck his fingers in his ears. “Language!” someone shouted, in English. The minister continued walking. I asked a bystander what the people had been saying in Amharic. “Hungry!” he said.
The minister went to greet a Mozambican family living on the edge of camp, then turned back once more to address Marratane’s remaining Ethiopians, a group of roughly four hundred, who squatted en masse under a large mango tree. “I want to talk to all of you,” the minister said. “We are visiting you here . . .” An Ethiopian man translated stoically for the crowd. “We are visiting you here to change ideas, to know how life is here in this center.” The crowd erupted in a hundred conversations.
Minister: “What did they say?”
Translator: “Continue, continue.”
Minister: “No, I want to know what they say.”
Translator: “Yes, yes, continue, no problem.”
The minister gave up. “I want to talk with you and hear what you have to say, but I see that we’ll need more time. So I’ll come back another day, and we’ll talk, and talk, and talk.” The crowd applauded loudly, looking thoroughly amused. As I walked away, I heard one man speaking angrily to a friend. What did you say to him? I asked. “I said, ‘Why are you doing this clapping? We have things to say. Why you are only clapping?’”
After we met that first day, Liban and I spoke on the phone every week or so, though our conversations never lasted more than a minute. He’d call me from Cabo Delgado, or Niassa, or some other far-flung corner of the country and explain where he was headed next. He hauled cotton, sugarcane, coconuts. “Yes, amigo, where are you? Tudo bem?” Everything good? “I am, Montepuez, that side, now. I’m coming, Nampula, one week. Yes, okay, vou ligar pra tí.” I’ll call you. Inevitably, when I called back, we had missed each other, and Liban was on the road again. We finally met up in Maputo, two months later. He picked me up at a sidewalk liquor market in Baixa and had me throw my bicycle on a jumble of papers and cardboard boxes in the back of his Nissan Path-finder. Together, we drove to the Maputo International Airport, a gleaming glass and concrete box where I’d arrived in the country in March.
Marratane, Liban said, was dead. Police scrutiny in Nampula had forced smugglers and migrants to reshuffle. There were no boats landing near Palma or Mocímboa da Praia, and the camp had returned to the dreary routine of its long-term inhabitants from the Great Lakes. Jesus Sanchez, the UNHCR officer in Maputo, told me that there was a “practical seal” on the northern border of Mozambique for migrants from the Horn of Africa. Similar crackdowns had taken place in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, he said, evidence of a so-called knock-on effect from South Africa itself. When the UNHCR high commissioner met with President Armando Guebuza at an African Union summit to voice his concern over the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers in Mozambique, “the official version was that no one was being deported unless they were suspected of a crime,” said Sanchez, “but in fact, deportations are happening. Unfortunately, it’s a regional trend.”
Watiro Wachamo, thirty, left his wife and two kids behind on their farm in southern Ethiopia in hopes of making it to the United States or Europe.
Liban was not so sure: he thought there were still migrants going through Malawi and Zimbabwe. But there was also a growing contingent of mukalas working through the regular Ethiopian Airlines flights into Maputo. This was why he was taking me to the airport. Already, Ethiopian Airlines was gaining a bad reputation around Mozambique as the carrier of choice for drug trafficking and illegal entry into the country. A single flight to Maputo in January 2011 carried 133 Bangladeshi and Pakistani migrants with forged entry visas, on their way to South Africa.34 After suspect police and customs officers at the airport were replaced that July, nearly every week brought new headlines about cocaine seizures, including that of one South African who deplaned with more than thirty pounds of cocaine in his suitcase.35 The very week I visited the airport with Liban, police made four separate cocaine seizures from passengers transiting through Addis Ababa.
By the beginning of 2012, these men were some of the only Ethiopians left at the refugee camp in Marratane: everyone else, they said, had gone with smugglers to South Africa.
Liban pulled up against the curb just outside the parking kiosk, at the front of a long line of cars seeking to avoid parking fees by stopping short of the gate—the Chinese government funded the construction of the airport, but evidently, the Mozambican style of management still prevailed. By the entrance, young hawkers in MCel and Vodacom vests lingered with their pockets full of cell phone credit and backpacks full of pens, lighters, and glitzy plastic watches. Arms outstretched, they sold knock off Ray-Bans and other trinkets for the business set. On the other side of the sliding glass doors, the terminal was nearly empty. We were an hour early, so we waited at a café at one end of the hall with espresso and grilled cheese.
Soon, Liban began pointing out men he knew from his old trade—“That one, little one, Ethiopian one, he is mukalas. He is coming to tell flan-flan,” meaning so-and-so, “I have coming, five people, six people.” After a while, Liban grew impatient, and he beckoned me to follow him to see how things worked on the inside. He strode confidently up to the bay of doors leading to customs and immigration, used exclusively as an exit for arriving travelers, opened one, and brushed by a young security guard who protested but didn’t bar his path. By the tables where baggage is searched and disembarkation cards are turned in, Liban shook hands and chuckled with a familiar customs officer, then turned to me to say that the plane wouldn’t be long. “They coming this side, you say, I have this many people. . . .” He made it sound very easy. We went back out through the customs exit, and Liban crossed the hall to greet more old friends. Three detectives, he said, from the police criminal investigations unit. I was beginning to believe that Liban really did know all the cops in Maputo.
When the flight finally did come, the passengers scattered like marbles, but Liban pointed out two small groups—two Ethiopians and four Somalis—carrying only small backpacks. The foreign mukalas he’d pointed out earlier were long gone, but each of the groups was promptly met by a Mozambican handler who led them out of the terminal. “Already, he is waiting in the car,” Liban said of the mukalas. “Vamos lá?” he asked, in Portuguese. Should we go? “If you want, I follow them.”36
&nb
sp; 5
Where Have You Hidden the Cholera?
NAMPULA
Stones and brickbats were thrown at the premises, several windows were broken, even in the room where the woman, now in a dying state, was lying, and the medical gentleman who was attending her was obliged to seek safety in flight. Several individuals were pursued and attacked by the mob and some hurt. The park constables were apparently panic struck, and incapable of acting.
—LIVERPOOL CHRONICLE, JUNE 2, 1832
Rioting and social unrest in response to cholera was not entirely confined to Britain. Civil disturbances arose in Russia in 1830, and were followed elsewhere in mainland Europe in 1831. In Hungary, castles were attacked and nobles murdered by mobs who believed the upper classes were responsible for cholera deaths.
—GILL, BURRELL, AND BROWN, “FEAR AND FRUSTRATION”1
It was a story of bicycles.
—DOMINGOS NAPUETO
In October 2010, a government laboratory in Port-au-Prince confirmed Haiti’s first cholera case in nearly a century. The Ministry of Health quickly flooded the airwaves with spots urging residents to wash their hands and treat their water. International observers who were surprised that cholera would resurface after such a long absence reacted skeptically at first, but the disease’s path of devastation quickly proved them wrong.2 The outbreak tore through the central plateau and up and down the coast of the Gulf of Gonâve, the bay that forms the hollow middle of Haiti’s horseshoe-shaped map. Four thousand five hundred people died, and nearly three hundred thousand fell ill.
Cholera was a second, shattering blow to a country already crippled by an earthquake that had struck earlier that year, destroying much of the capital and leaving more than a hundred thousand people dead. Where had the disease come from? Had the jostling of tectonic plates during the earthquake unleashed cholera-carrying waters in the Gulf of Mexico? Had benign strains of the cholera bacterium already present in Haiti somehow morphed and become virulent? Suspicions quickly fell on a contingent of Nepalese soldiers with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, whose camp was in Mirebalais, near the outbreak’s start, and where sewage was said to have leaked into a tributary of the Artibonite River. Cholera outbreaks occur in South Asia every single year, and it was presumed that UN soldiers had unwittingly carried the pathogen with them to Haiti.
Go Tell the Crocodiles Page 16