by Ben Rawlence
The town of Dadaab clings to the flat red plain a hair’s breadth above the equator. Thorn trees stretch in a stubborn thicket for hundreds of miles in every direction. Here, the main road from Nairobi to Mogadishu makes a short dog-leg through what was once a sleepy Kenyan border settlement, established in 1954 as a borehole by the British. In the local dialect, the name Dadaab means ‘the rocky hard place’, because two inches below the red sand are sheets of diamond-hard stone. Those first inhabitants had no idea how appropriate the name would become.
Vehicles approaching from the south, from Hagadera and what they call in North Eastern Province ‘down Kenya’, are halted on the crumbly ochre road by a pathetic chicane of bent metal spikes in view of a little hut from which bored police officers glare at the baking road. As the minibus slowed, Guled’s heart rate picked up but an officer simply waved the refugee bus through. Behind the checkpoint, on the left, Guled noticed the police camp with its scrubby trees, wooden sheds and broken chain-link fence. On the right, he saw three rows of razor wire spaced with spotlights. Aloof, behind its blast walls lay two square miles of heavily fortified compound housing the operations of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the other aid agencies that supply the camps. Ahead, a cluster of low buildings made from metal sheets, wooden spars and, in a few cases, concrete, crowded the edge of the high street.
Opposite the heavy white-steel gates of the UN compound, Guled dismounted one minibus and was directed to another. Dust briefly whirled about his head and stung his eyes and then the vehicle was off, through the funnel of shops down which the wind blows a steady blast of sand. On the right were the government offices with their barbed wire and police guard and the abandoned bus of the deposed dictator Siad Barre, still rusting where he left it twenty years ago beneath the lilac jacaranda tree, its bulletproof windows cracked like icy puddles and birds nesting in the gun turret. A little further on the road arced past the town dump, where, like customers at a garage sale, stinking marabou storks pick through the acre of debris thrown by the wind into the thorn trees all around. On the very edge of town, painted on the variegated brown of the endless hostile scrub was a single stripe of black tarmac, the airstrip.
Most foreign visitors arrive here by plane. And it is from the air that the scale of the refugee complex is best appreciated. Spread over thirty square miles, the camps look like huge black-and-silver moons shot through with a web of red veins orbiting Dadaab town. The red is the grid of unpaved roads, the silver is the glint of tin roofs in the punishing sun and the black is the ubiquitous building material of the desert: the acacia thorn. But it is a perspective that few refugees ever get to see. For the inhabitants, the size of the camps is not so easily grasped. From the southern camp, Hagadera, to the northern one, Dagahaley is, for someone with no bus fare, a walk of several days. There were no fences around the makeshift city that Guled could see: there was simply nowhere to go. On four sides for hundreds of miles in each direction, the desert burned. North and east was war and south and west was Kenya: forbidden. The road south was choked with roadblocks manned by greedy police. Within and between the camps, though, there was freedom of movement.
At the airstrip, Guled started as the minibus was suddenly lost in a red cloud. At around eight every weekday morning, the United Nations and the aid agencies make their daily commute out of their fortified compound into the camps. The powerful vehicles cover the four miles north to Ifo quickly, engulfing in a fine red mist the herds of goats that totter forth each day in search of grazing and the battered refugee vehicles that ply the tracks between the camps. When Ifo was built, UN bulldozers had cleared the land without thought of the tree cover, and now it was a dustbowl.
Through the shifting dust and the fractured windscreen of the minibus, Ifo camp came into view. The first sight lifted his spirits, a football pitch on the outskirts! Beyond, roofs of huts peaked above densely thatched thorn fences and out of the alleyways in between, figures emerged, female mostly, covered head to foot in hijabs. The road spilled into a clearing next to the football pitch beneath a huge elevated water tank that towered out of the thorn bushes. It was the original borehole for the refugees that had made the one in the town run dry. In 1991 water was ten metres below the surface of the plain. In 2011 the engineers had to go down two hundred metres to find it. Next to the borehole was the UN field office although all that was visible to Guled was a high concrete wall and a huge steel gate. He would come to know it well. The sun was already high, and hot. Lines of people pressed into the narrow shade thrown by the wall, as they waited to present their grievances to the officials who would soon be installed on the other side of the red welded metal. The residents of Ifo had plenty to complain about.
The overcrowding here, as in the other camps, was acute. After twenty years, the camps were in need of a doubling in water capacity and shelter. Health services were at breaking point. The place where Guled had come seeking sanctuary was, according to Oxfam, a ‘public health emergency’, and had been for several years. It was a groaning, filthy, disease-riddled slum heaving with traumatized people without enough to eat. Crime was sky high and rape was routine. And the population was about to explode again. On the day Guled arrived the camps held nearly 295,000 people. Twelve months later, at the end of 2011, there would be half a million.
Guled’s minibus plunged into Ifo camp, through a knot of tracks weaving in and out of the warren of sandy roads, past tin plates on steel poles marking the names of the blocks: A5, D6, A6. The roads were lined with great hedges of thorns, towering above head height and punctured with the tin gates to people’s compounds until the road tumbled into the chaos of the market. Here, it rumbled along the narrow bumpy alleys thick with people and strewn with rubbish, until finally it came to a stop at the edge of the maidan, a wide open space about the size of two soccer pitches where people gather on important events.
In the rainy season, the maidan becomes a lake, but it was now a sheet of hammered sand across which the dry season twisters raced. People walking across covered their faces. On one side is the dusty, pungent livestock market of Lagdera where the camp’s riotous herds of goats are divided into bleating lots in pens made of thorns. Looming over the other end is the telecoms tower. Variously powered by shards of solar panels, a whirring wind turbine and a hulking generator all encased in barbed wire, its tall red-and-white beacon is the camp’s lifeline to the outside world.
Ifo camp had a mobile signal but since al-Shabaab confiscated his, Guled had no phone. He had no way of contacting his friend Noor and no idea where he lived. He wandered hungry and aimless around the huge market heavy with the stench of decomposing meat and vegetables, in and out of the narrow alleyways between the stalls made of flattened steel sheets – it was a market made from scraps. But Guled was surprised to see that you could buy everything: food, clothes, radios, generators, mobile phones, long blocks of ice. He would come to learn that some of it, like the ice and the pasta, was manufactured in the camp, but that most came from Somalia on trucks like the one on which he had hitched a ride. The sun blistered on the tin roofs. The market was all bright light and, beneath the roofs, inside the stores and under the sacking, impenetrable shade. His eyes constantly adjusted, smarted; it made him dizzy. And everywhere he thought he felt the eyes of al-Shabaab, in the shadows, watching him: ‘That bad thing in my brain makes me think that everybody is looking at me. I know it is not true. But I think that they look at me different … sometimes they do.’
At prayer time he went to look for Noor in the central mosque. Squat and low, it had been built of mud and thorns nineteen years ago and painted green and white. It sat on a bend on the edge of the market where donkey carts nodded in the ruts of the road and the ceaseless pedestrian traffic of the camp poured past in a river of colour. Most of the inhabitants were, like Guled, Sufis, the moderate mystical kind of Islam full of syncretic additions with room for traditional wisdom and remedies. But thirty
years of investment by Saudi Arabia in the Horn of Africa was paying off. Wahabism, the strict literal Islam of mistrust and division that has flourished in the fertile grounds of war-racked Somalia, was winning converts in the camp. Most al-Shabaab members practised a variant of Wahabism. Guled’s instincts were right, they were here, although the militants had bigger concerns than tracking down a scrawny deserter from the mujahedin; Dadaab was full of runaways. Al-Shabaab’s presence in Dadaab was a watchful one. It didn’t have the strength or the desire to start kidnapping refugees and picking a fight with the UN and Kenya. At that time, it saw Dadaab primarily as a place to get medical treatment and stock up on food. All that would change though with Kenya’s invasion of Somalia ten months later. Then, Dadaab would become a battleground and one of the first bombs would be placed here, outside the Sufi mosque, targeting a police car: the apostates and the infidel invaders all together.
Dadaab felt very different from Somalia. In Mogadishu, Guled had been accustomed to ‘Shahad’; according to religion and custom, if a stranger was in need, people shared, unquestioningly. In Ifo he felt only hostility. The inhabitants eyed him nervously. Guled had come from a place of fighting and fear; as far as they were concerned, he was capable of anything; he was a murderer, a terrorist, a bandit, until vouched for otherwise. Then, in what he felt was a second act of divine intervention, he saw a face he recognized passing in front of a shop.
‘Noor!’ he called. A small boy in borrowed clothes turned towards him. The two boys embraced. Guled couldn’t stop smiling with relief. They had been at Shabelle primary together in Mogadishu and he had helped the boy in the days when he had work and money. Now the tables were turned. Finding a friend was, literally, a lifeline: according to the Somali custom of sharing, Guled would not go hungry so long as Noor had food. His friend showed him around and, slowly, the camp began to make sense.
He learned how to distinguish Noor’s small hut of sticks covered with mud and roofed with plastic in block C3 from among the identical huts divided into compounds by thorn fences and arranged in huge rectangles – what the refugees called ‘the blocks’. The blocks are marked with tin labels and separated by narrow alleys just large enough for a car to pass down. The alley on which C3 was situated was also home to Horseed primary school, a white concrete structure. Thus it was a little wider than the others, its rutted tracks holding stagnant puddles of sewage that turned green in the heat; at each intersection a small tin box had been constructed by enterprising refugees with capital – a corner shop selling small amounts of kerosene, matches, sandals, the things the UN didn’t hand out for free. At one end of the alley was the market, and at the other, nearly a kilometre away past countless geometrical blocks of huts, the road simply stopped, giving out on to the wild bush.
Noor explained to Guled that as a new arrival he was supposed to register with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees – to claim asylum – in order to be given a ration card, personal items like a blanket and a bucket, and a plot and a tent to sleep in. Tents didn’t last though, and after a year most people built their own hut with the twigs and the mud of the plain. In the meantime, Guled slept in Noor’s hut and shared his rations but Noor couldn’t help him with what he really wanted: money to call home. When he asked about work, Noor laughed. Guled learned that employment in Kenya was forbidden. Like many governments anxious about asylum seekers, Kenya didn’t want Somalis taking Kenyan jobs, so all formal work with a decent salary, with the agencies and the UN, was reserved for Kenyans. Most of the camps’ economy is informal, however, and in the grey economy it was possible to get work in the market, driving, butchering, teaching in the private colleges.
The other way the refugees raised cash was by selling the food rations that the UN issued every fortnight. Guled was lucky. Registration of new arrivals had only just opened again for the first time since 2008 when the Kenyans had declared the camp full. If he had come a month earlier, he would have been unable to get the ration card that entitles residents to food, education and health care and would have been entirely dependent on sharing with Noor. Five days after they had met, Noor escorted Guled down the alley, through the market and along the wider, busier roads of section A to the UN office beside the water tower on the outskirts of the camp that he had passed before. He left him with others to line up in the sliver of shade cast by the wall before the sun got too high. An hour later, Guled filed through the red-steel gate and joined the lines of men on the benches beneath the tin-roofed shelters inside the fence. In a concrete block whose cracked roof was home to dozens of birds and whose walls were replete with warnings about services being free, and corruption illegal (in English, Swahili and Somali for the benefit of the 20 per cent that were literate), a UN official took his name. The woman asked no questions about what had happened in Somalia. ‘Insecurity’ was the reason Guled gave for his flight and, after a medical, a photo and a fingerprint, he received a laminated ration card and the information that there was no plot or tent for him. They were reserved for families. Due to the overcrowding, single people were simply absorbed into the compounds of people they knew or assigned as lodgers in the compound of someone else. Noor would not be happy. And indeed, after two weeks he would find him an alternative arrangement.
All people arriving from Somalia are treated as prima facie refugees. The UN operates on the assumption that no one would willingly become a refugee – an assumption that failed to take account of the hunger and deprivation among the Somali nomads of northern Kenya. In the early days, although not fleeing war, many ethnic Somali Kenyans claimed asylum too. To be added to the distribution manifest one need only appear to be Somali and state that you were fleeing conflict. In the UN vocabulary Guled was ‘family size 1’ and he would collect his rations once a fortnight.
On his appointed day, Noor showed him the way out north across the maidan to the large white warehouse complex on the opposite edge of the camp to the UN. Inside several perimeters of barbed wire was the distribution centre for Ifo. Each camp had its own. The centre looked like a cross between an airport hangar and a prison: a line of nine huge, numbered, white warehouses dusted with red sand like a sugared cake. Painted along the side of each warehouse were letters ten feet high, although upside down on one, announcing the beneficent owner: WFP, the World Food Programme. Thousands of people passed through the chain of warehouses every day. The ‘food cycle’, as it is known, is like a machine. And every fifteen days it turns over, feeding the whole population.
Two blue welded-steel gates, lazily guarded by armed police and aid agency staff, faced a wide open area in which the sand swirled in circles around a single tangled thorn tree that had somehow escaped the hatchet. Several hundred men and women squatted on the ground in lines in the hot morning sun, waiting to be called to collect their food. For the poorer ones among them, their last square meal would have been several days ago. According to the fundaments of Dadaab’s economy, with only rations for income, the price of anything in the camp is hunger. Some of the women in the line wore their cards protectively on strings around their neck and in their fists they clutched empty rice sacks, plastic bags and jerrycans, waiting to be filled. Gripping his new blue ration card with its days and distributions marked out like a contraceptive pill packet, Guled joined the line.
A policeman with a stick and a machine gun marched up and down keeping the ‘clients’, as they were called, seated, docile, ready to be corralled through the system, ‘processed’, like sheep being dipped. It was a ritual humiliation. After an hour in the sun, the policeman waved them up.
Through the blue gate the men thronged the entrance and pushed into the warehouse that was fenced into two parallel cages: one for each sex, about a thousand people in each. The women lined up calmly but the men were all bunched down one end pushing and shouting, their voices echoing in the huge hall. The mood was febrile and Guled hesitated. A turnstile regulated the outflow but a security guard had opened the fire exit and a tide of men was stampeding thr
ough into the courtyard beyond. A soldier watched the men stream past, his gun hanging limp by his side.
In the middle hall the men swarmed around the bulletproof windows, shouting and arguing. Behind the glass, World Food Programme staff received the ration cards through a small slit, like bank tellers, checked them against the manifest and returned them, punched: the bearer duly authorized to collect their rations. The mob pressed all around. Guled darted in among the bodies.
His card punched, he moved into the warehouses to collect his food. An old man wearing a hi-vis jacket directed the refugees into different sheds. ‘Number nine!’ he called, waving towards a hangar, the one that he would later learn was famous for corruption. Guled entered the huge dark warehouse with his plastic bags and presented his card to the two black-veiled girls writing down the numbers in a ledger at the door. At a small welded hole in the locked red-steel cage flanked by piles of white sacks of food with international logos, a woman in a hijab dipped a cup into a sack of rice and Guled held out one of his plastic bags. At the second, a wiry man dusty-white from head to foot, scooped cups of wheat flour from a bin. At the third, a woman gave him a spoon of salt. The last two windows yielded a cup of beans and a cup of oil that a scowling woman poured into his jerrycan, sucking her teeth as it spilled.
The final stage, outside the cage, was the checking. A drawn man with thinning hair, pointed beard and dark glasses all dusted with flour, snatched the bags of each refugee in the line and placed them on an electronic scale. The mandated amounts were written in green pen on a huge white board mounted on the side of the cage and he evened up the flour, rice, beans and salt with sharp stabbing motions of a tablespoon. All eyes watched the numbers flicker and still. He was fast. Blink and you could be cheated. There was much shouting as people shuffled continually through. The scales were hot with friction. The whole operation was close and fierce. The weigher’s feet rested on a concrete lip around the base of the scale – the result of lobbying by the community to keep feet away from the scales and decrease the opportunities for the workers to cheat the refugee clients. As Guled’s food was weighed he watched the man’s toes flex in their plastic sandals but they didn’t touch the scales. Watching too were two supervisors, well dressed in clean shirts, scarves and nice shoes, also in sunglasses. They were smiling. There was a game here, if you could spot it.
