Terror, hardship, enterprise – and Manchester United – in a remarkable account of life in Dadaab camp in Kenya.
Dadaab is the world’s largest refugee camp, home to about 350,000 people. Located on Kenya’s border with Somalia, it was established in 1992 to house around 90,000 refugees from the civil war there. Since then it has grown into a large sprawling city in the parched desert where generations of Somali refugees (and a minority from Sudan, Ethiopia and elsewhere) are born and where the majority of those will die. As Europe grapples with its own refugee crisis, Ben Rawlence’s remarkable book comes as a timely reminder that the vast majority of the world’s refugee population will never see European shores, and that the quintessential refugee experience is not so much of movement as being stuck, physically and psychologically, individually and collectively. In Dadaab, when times are “good”, lives are lived in limbo; when times are bad, they are lived in terror.
Rawlence first visited Dadaab in 2010 working for Human Rights Watch. Over the next few years he spent extended periods in the camp, observing, interviewing and recording. The book tells its story through the lives of nine individual refugees and their families, weaving in, simultaneously, an account of regional politics and international humanitarian aid. Rawlence’s barely suppressed rage at the corruption, greed and ineptitude of the international community pervades his account. His fury is understandable, but the one weakness of the book is its undifferentiated portrayal of those within the aid community as remote, frequently hungover and raking in their tax-free salaries. The reality must be a little more complicated than that.
The Kenyan government also comes out very badly in this story, though Rawlence provides the occasional glimpse of a humane official struggling against the odds. Kenya inherited a colonial border, colonial tribal stereotypes and a deep suspicion of nomadic pastoralists. When war and drought drives Somali nomads to become refugees, and when the western world is engaged in a “war on terror”, the suspicion of mobile Muslims turns into fear, and the fear into hatred.
Dadaab means “rocky hard place” and many of Rawlence’s subjects are caught literally between that rock and a hard place. We meet Guled, for example, at the beginning of the book as a teenager sheltering from shelling with his sister on a football field in Mogadishu. Like many other young men, he was kidnapped by the jihadist terrorist group al-Shabaab, but he managed to escape and found his way eventually to Dadaab. To the Kenyans he was a real or potential terrorist. To al‑Shabaab he was a traitor, and while Dadaab provided him with a bare minimum of subsistence, he lived in daily fear that they would come and find him. When, in 2012, two medical workers were kidnapped, the UN suspended services to the camp and the Kenyans declared war on al-Shabaab, the prospects looked bleak for Guled and thousands like him. And when the Westgate attack in Nairobiexploded, things got even worse. The people of Dadaab knew that now every Somali would be a target.
Rawlence is brilliant on Dadaab’s complex material life and what seems like a huge experiment in a mixed economy. The conditions of this trial are set by the UN and other agencies that determine the level of rations and other supplies and the provision of services. This is a vast operation and anyone who can become a link in the supply chain is on to a good thing. Fortunes can be made from Dadaab, not least from the violent criminalised business of smuggling the white stuff – which in this case is sugar. Further down the pecking order, small-time officials and policemen take their more modest cuts. The refugees themselves, though theoretically the passive recipients of “handouts”, cannot survive without exercising extraordinary entrepreneurial abilities, selling and exchanging rations, dealing in identities (biometrics notwithstanding), supplying haircuts, transport, food, alcohol and sex, raising the money for bride price and finding a way to top up the sim card that keeps you tantalisingly connected with the outside world.
Employment is what everyone wants, but employment (at least of the formal kind) is the very thing that is denied you as a refugee. The people of Dadaab find various ways round this. The refugees employ each other: there is plenty of exploitation in this, but also a strong sense of the need for mutual support. The agencies, meanwhile, circumvent their own rules by creating what they call “incentive positions”, low-paid jobs for auxiliary workers in education and health and administration that create the makings of a camp middle class.
Dadaab is both a social and economic experiment, and education is at the heart of this. For families that are not completely broken and destroyed, the camp’s education facilities, which are not bad by the standards of the surrounding region, offer hope. Dadaab, as described by Rawlence, is full of young people bursting with knowledge that they have worked hard to acquire in the makeshift classrooms. This is empowering up to a point. Tawane and his friends, for example, are extremely articulate and have completely mastered the language and bureaucratic skills of the NGO world they inhabit. They know how to organise themselves, to run a meeting, lobby those in positions of power and articulate their hopes for a better future. But even with all their education, most of them are stuck. Education certainly gives young women from conservative backgrounds, such as Kheyro, the confidence to walk out without a man, take a job in the camp and support her family.
Isha, from a once proud nomadic community in Somalia that had been reduced to dust, is determined that her children will go to school. Her boys, displaying their newly acquired skills, have written “PEOPLE WHO LIVE THIS HOUSE HAVE ENGLISH” across the door of the family hut. In this supposed hotbed of Islamic radicalism, the young people of Dadaab are deeply imbued with liberal values. They know everything there is to know about gender “sensitivity” and they would run rings most of us in a UN quiz. It’s deeply ironic that a population so profoundly knowledgeable about the theory of human rights is that least likely to be able to exercise them. And, as the women come to learn when the Kenyan police run rampage in a revenge attack, no amount of knowledge of gender sensitivity is going to protect you against systematic rape.
As Rawlence writes, for every individual living this hell, there are small things that tip the balance, precipitating them over the edge into illness or despair, and those small things are both material and psychological. You can feel the constant fear of violence wearing away at fragile minds, and the material deprivation wearing away at bodies that have often been damaged even before they arrive at the camp. The deep human investment in creating some semblance of family life is one of the most striking themes in this book, and it is moving, but it comes with a price. Rawlence describes men driven mad by the impossibility of fulfilling the expectations they have of themselves – to provide a decent life for their wives and children. In the wake of Westgate and UN budgetary cuts, and the worsening crisis in Syria, camp rations are cut by half, and we watch with Rawlence as men starve themselves to save food for their children and pregnant wives.
For the women, motherhood brings flashes of joy and fulfilment, but all too often also comes with difficult pregnancies and births, followed by overwhelming anxiety over how to feed their children, keep them healthy and ensure them a future. The indignities of life in a camp get to everyone. It’s easy to identify with those members of the self-styled “Life Research Group”, who have given up on any expectations and have formed their own drug and alcohol-dependent subculture. Though Rawlence does recount one instance of an armed attack on a cinema by homegrown terrorists, in general he finds little support for extremism among Dadaab’s inhabitants. But there is enough frustration here to charge a thousand suicide vests.
“We watch with Rawlence as men starve themselves to save food for their children and pregnant wives”
In the background of this Greek drama there is the reassuring rhythm of the Premier League – the power of love for Manchester United, it seems, should never be underestimated. There is also the rhythm of religion. Being hungry and fasting are two different things: Ramadan brings a kind of relief from hunger and Eid is a rare moment of joyous celebration shared by the inhabitants of the camp and the surrounding Muslim Kenyan community. Off-stage too are international conferences, flying visits from Angelina Jolie (no one seems to know who she is) and texts and calls from those few who have made it through official channels to Canada, Australia and the US. A few young men, calculating that they have nothing to lose, have survived the long treacherous journey to the Mediterranean and across it, and call, out of the blue, from a port in Sicily.
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The formal exit options have been reduced over the years and the operation of the resettlement lottery only enhances the sense that the whole refugee system is managed by a distant and fickle deity. A group of women get all geared up to accept the offer of an Indian philanthropist to travel to the Barefoot College in Rajasthan to be trained as “barefoot” solar engineers. They fill in their forms for UN passports and wait for a year. Nothing happens. Even when the Christian/Muslim couple Monday and Muna, who have suffered appalling persecution, are finally granted “emergency” resettlement in Australia, it’s hard to feel totally celebratory. Because you know how much violence they and their children have experienced and how close to the edge they have been, you can’t help worrying, as they board the plane, whether they will really be alright. So much damage has already been done. Can you dare to hope that exile in Perth will repair that?
In 2013 the Kenyan government declared that the camp must close and its inhabitants go “home”, but no one really believed this. Apart from anything, the sugar-smuggling barons would surely not want to lose their lucrative business. Dadaab is still there, even while the world’s attention has shifted to Syria, and it shows no signs of going away. You can get a bird’s-eye view of it from Google maps. To understand what goes on in it, read this disturbing and compelling book.
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