City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  For over a month Guled had trailed around the bus stops and garages asking for work that he knew how to do: driving, but without success. For a young man without connections, a newcomer to boot, the labour market in Ifo camp was all but impenetrable. He was desperate to raise the money for Maryam’s fare. When he could afford to call, the voice on the other end of the line sounded increasingly frantic, frustrated with his slow progress.

  Near his new lodgings, Guled discovered another small market where, untroubled by the mafia-like controls of Bosnia, he was able to begin his apprenticeship as a porter. Opposite the hospital is the food distribution centre for the whole of Ifo camp where Guled had collected and sold his rations. By the exit gates is a battered-steel turquoise box with a narrow slit in it barely wide enough for a single sheet of paper. It reads, for the benefit of the literate, in English and Somali: ‘Complaint/Suggestion Box, Ifo camp’. And if you knock, it rings hollow. Next to it, in a rough line like a beauty contest, the porters jostled for business. Those with big families could not carry all their rations, so they traded some of their food in return for help with transporting it home. It presented another chance for a boy with only his strength to sell to earn a little extra.

  According to the laws of supply and demand, the food sold by the refugees is among the cheapest food in all of Kenya. WFP can source less than a fifth of the monthly 8,000 tonnes of food locally. The rest must come across the sea and up the long dusty road from Mombasa in great clanking convoys of trucks that take three days to reach this burning spot. In the rainy season the journey can take six weeks. The majority of food is in-kind donations, surplus wheat and maize from the USA. It weighs heavily on the market price for the whole region. A family in need of some cash like Guled for a phone call or a finger of sugar will sell a few kilos here to the traders. Next to their scales, large white sacks printed with WFP or USAID ‘not for resale’ steadily fill up again on their way to fetch higher prices inside Somalia or back again, to Nairobi.

  For the food that stays in the camp, Guled discovered that the rule of the market is ‘one kilo per ton’. The customers give the porters one kilo of rice or flour per fifty-kilogram sack transported. A fifty-kilo sack is called ‘one ton’ and it is the same as the entire food parcel for a family size 7. Guled watched the porters carry and did some calculations in his head. If he worked hard at portering, he thought, he could raise the fare for Maryam to come within a week. But first he had to lift the sacks.

  Now, boldly, he walked up to the other boys and tried. The smaller family sizes, 3 and 4, up to twenty-nine kilos, he managed okay. But family size 5 and above, his body let him down. Thirty-five kilos was over half his own body weight. He watched in awe as other boys shouldered fifty and staggered off to walk perhaps a kilometre to someone’s home. Guled was slender but he was determined. He came back the next day and tried again. And the next, for a week. No advance on twenty-nine kilos. ‘Is this the friend of Noor?’ The other porters made fun of him. ‘Why is he killing himself?’

  In the end, Maryam ran out of patience. When he confessed to his mother-in-law on the phone the kind of work he was doing she worried that he might injure himself and told him not to do it again. ‘Don’t break your back,’ she warned him. ‘We’ll pay for the trip.’

  Several weeks later, on 11 January 2011 Maryam was suddenly there. When she stepped out of the packed minibus there was something different about her, he thought. She was a big girl, but her curves were changed somehow: her body announced her secret.

  ‘You’re pregnant!’ he said. ‘You didn’t tell me!’

  Maryam grinned. She was five months by then. But her smile didn’t last. The poverty and destitution of Hawa Jube, the place that Guled had described in such positive terms, shocked her. It was a bad start to their new life. Guled’s small room of mud and tin in block N9 was barely big enough for the furnishings he had managed to scavenge in anticipation of her arrival: a second-hand mattress that he laid on the earth, and a mosquito net. And now, Maryam informed him that her mother, persuaded by Guled’s description and anxious for her daughter, had decided to come too. When she arrived in a month’s time, he feared he would have to sleep outside.

  The weather made Maryam uncomfortable; she was having a difficult pregnancy. She hated the heat and the dust. She drank water constantly and demanded Guled bring her juice – that cost money. Most of all, she mistrusted the increasing clamour of poor and desperate people from unfamiliar clans who were her new neighbours in N Zero. Like Guled, she had seen displaced people in Mogadishu in the cathedral, in the makeshift camps. They were beggars. She didn’t consider herself one of them.

  Maryam was registered along with 9,861 other newcomers in January, 9,285 in February, and many more arrived unofficially. These were historically high numbers; if they didn’t slow down, soon there were likely to be riots. Yet still the people came. The drought was unrelenting: the sand blew in ever tighter circles and the sky acquired a tinted brown colour behind which the sun glowed white with menace.

  8

  A Friday in Nairobi

  In the green hills of central Kenya, far from the dry red plain of the north, a light rain fell. In the capital, it slid down the glass sides of the skyscrapers and trickled along the neat concrete pathways of the offices of the aid agencies. It collected in the potholes of the streets. After twenty-eight days of record heat peaking at thirty-two degrees, the downpour on 18 March was a blessed relief. From the air-conditioned offices in Nairobi, it was difficult to imagine still-parched Dadaab, where the temperature was hitting highs of forty-five and the UN staff in the camps were struggling to cope.

  As the warnings from Dadaab reached Nairobi, the agency people watched the rain slide down their windows and contemplated the situation across the region. Somalia was too dangerous for them to work, even, in most cases, to visit. They relied on reports from their partners and sub-contractors in the ‘field’ whom they regarded with varying levels of mistrust. The reports from the field were not good. For six months, since August 2010, the news from Somalia had been getting steadily worse. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Somalia had been broadcasting an impending crisis since June and the acute malnutrition maps coming out of the Famine Early Warning Systems (FEWS) offices were blanketed red. The next shade, black, was famine.

  The FEWS Food Security Alert for 15 March 2011 said: ‘substantial assistance programs should be implemented,’ and warned that ‘large scale contingency planning should begin immediately given that the failure of the March–May rains would result in a major crisis.’

  The agency people forwarded the email to their headquarters and to the donor countries but nobody, it seemed, was listening. The aid they asked for didn’t come. In Nairobi, they had meetings and worried about what to do.

  ‘The map of Somalia turns red every year,’ one of the more experienced among them said. Crisis in Somalia was a normal thing: ‘all we can do is hope for the best.’ The warnings had almost ceased to have any meaning; in political circles distant suffering had long ago become simply another kind of noise. In London or Washington or Geneva, an official who had actually read the FEWS alert email said that the latest warning ‘was not useful to unlock resources’; the rich governments needed numbers, lives on the brink. The timing was inconvenient, hadn’t they seen the news? On 11 March, an earthquake and tsunami had devastated Japan.

  Some of the agency people in Nairobi felt bad they couldn’t help. Others got angry and went in search of things to blame: ‘It’s because of the US Patriot Act and the OFAC sanctions that criminalize us for paying fees to al-Shabaab,’ they said. Headquarters didn’t appreciate the compromises that had to be struck in order to work in these areas. Or, ‘It’s because of Haiti – the world can’t cope with more than one disaster at a time.’ Or, ‘It’s because the industry is geared around disasters, a famine averted doesn’t generate profile.’ But the cynical ones didn’t bother to find excuses, for they had heard it all before: early warnin
g was a waste of time – there would have to be people dying on television before the money from rich governments would flow. And when it finally did, it would come in a flood. And the markets for the local farmers would collapse entirely. The same thing happened every time.

  What the aid workers didn’t stop to consider was the complicity of some of their number in the looming disaster. Foreign aid has always been a key ingredient in Somalia’s conflict economy, an object of taxation and fighting. The year before, a UN monitoring report had accused the WFP of colluding with Somali NGOs in diverting over half of official assistance. The price of the agencies’ corruption and complacency was now being felt. The US had stopped funding the WFP in Somalia as a result of the scandal. Now there was suspicion in some quarters that the UN was simply crying wolf.

  As the battle of Mogadishu pounded on and AMISOM and the TFG slowly pushed back al-Shabaab street by street, the city that had so recently emptied of people fleeing the fighting now filled up again: hundreds of thousands ran headlong from the countryside into the war in search of help. The displaced constructed plastic and paper huts in the settlements as Guled had done and watched as the urban warlords and fake NGOs took the lion’s share of the aid for themselves and sold it in Bakaara market. Some agencies were so desperate to be on the frontline that they were indiscriminate in their distributions, sometimes giving over three-quarters of supplies to the very warlords fuelling the conflict in order to reach their ‘customers’. They turned a blind eye, wrote down their losses to ‘corruption’, ticked their boxes and trumpeted their impact while, back home, their over-enthused cadres shook people down in the street for more cash.

  Meanwhile, in the countryside, in Bay and Bakool, Gedo and in Juba regions, the animals grew thinner and the people too. The European Union had spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years on irrigation and ‘food security’ projects in the riverine areas all, it seemed now, without any effect. By the end of March the ground was still dry and food prices were up 130 per cent. The land groaned with a great unease as people gathered up their possessions and readied to flee. The UN said 2.4 million were at risk: a third of the population of the whole country.

  FEWS sent another warning saying, ‘famine possible if April rains fail,’ but still the rich governments did nothing. The technical parts of the humanitarian system were working, delivering the warnings, but the political side was either sceptical or asleep. The agency people in Nairobi didn’t know what else to try. They’d sent eleven warnings and requests for funds since August 2010. But there was no glory in a famine averted. So they did what they usually did on a Friday.

  At five o’clock sharp, they left their cool offices and their computers glowing with warnings and got into their cars – so loud on the outside, so quiet on the inside – and the doors of the vehicles closed with a luxurious ‘thud’. Their drivers piloted them through the streets wet and slick to some house party or restaurant glittering with laughter and money, and the lights of the city sparkled in the puddles.

  9

  Maiden Voyage

  By May in Somalia, it was clear the Gu rains were not going to come. Over 20,000 people had arrived in Dadaab during the past two months. N Zero and Bulo Bacte now had over 15,000 residents each. The hospital in Hawa Jube was struggling to cope and had called in reinforcements to deal with the drought victims. The stabilization centre that normally looked after one or two children was suddenly full. And then the extra ward they had cleared for the malnourished kids was full too. Among the starving children, Maryam was having a long and complicated labour.

  Guled paced the narrow hospital courtyard in the moonlight as he listened to the sounds of the maternity ward, the disembodied cries into the night. The sleepy G4S guards watched him go up and down. Finally, on 9 May, a baby girl weighing 4.3 kilograms was delivered safely by Caesarean section. But instead of being grateful, Maryam was furious. She felt she had been cheated of a natural birth.

  ‘No lifting,’ the doctor told her.

  ‘How I am supposed to live?’ she complained to Guled. A woman in the camp needed her strength: cooking, laundry, fetching food rations. ‘When you have a C-section you are disabled,’ she said. She blamed the climate, the heat and dust of Dadaab that had caused her to drink so much and that, she thought, had made the baby too big. And she cursed her decision to come.

  Maryam and her mother struggled to see the benefits of the camp. ‘It’s only the bullets that are the problem back home,’ Maryam complained. In Mogadishu, the fighting was still intense, but once a week or so, irregular trucks carried people back there. Going home to visit relatives, to do business, to check if a house was still standing. ‘At least in Mogadishu we had a washing machine!’ she said. And the muttering about going home began.

  Half a mile away in Bosnia, Mahat was unhappy too. There was a new gang in town. Seven young boys who had helped each other to purchase shoe-shining equipment were steadily cornering the market. At the end of the day the seven of them rented one motorbike to take them home to N Zero. ‘We are the kalamashorto!’ they called out as they rattled past. Mahat didn’t know the meaning but he was grudgingly impressed. ‘They are young and tough. They know how to make business,’ he conceded. ‘If you work hard, the world will love you.’ Mahat was forced to charge as little as five shillings ($0.06) for buffing the eternal dust off a pair of shoes.

  The Imams in the mosques were preaching compassion, telling the people to help the indigent newcomers who were coming to beg in the market every day. But Mahat wasn’t feeling charitable. ‘I cannot help them if I am near to begging myself,’ he said. ‘I was wondering at them, why not work instead of begging?’ Many of the wealthier traders felt the same. When the new arrivals who slept among the thorn bushes of N Zero without enough water to drink, let alone wash, appeared in the market, they held their noses against the smell and turned away. There was one shop owner, though, who didn’t. He was Professor White Eyes.

  ‘When I saw a mother and father carrying seven children walking barefoot in the market, I felt like crying,’ he said. ‘I felt bad and so I resolved to help them. They go all round at the beginning and then at the end they come to me because they know that I would give them a few extra onions, or a potato.’ White Eyes had several reasons to be sympathetic. He knew what it was like to be marginalized. He was from a minority clan, the Habr Ade: ‘Our whole tribe could fit in one car!’ And he had a close and personal relationship with nasib – luck or fate. Up until the age of seven he had been completely blind.

  When, as an infant, his eyes crusted over after a measles infection, he heard his mother say, ‘It’s better for him to die than to go blind.’ But after a while he stopped hearing her voice. His grandmother fled with him to Dadaab. Several years later, he was sitting on the sand listening to children playing when he felt the skin on his right eye cracking and a little light seeping in. He tried to pull apart the other and, to his joy, it split open. Of course, there was no money for spectacles, but if he sat very close to the blackboard and squinted he could learn to read and write.

  His eyes are off centre and still partly cloudy, as though holding a tiny splash of milk. His doctorate he earned through his first hand study of survival in the ways of Ifo camp; he is, he wants everyone to know, a ‘professor of daily bread’. Ever since he left school, because doing homework by torchlight hurt his eyes, he has been a fixture of Bosnia. From humble beginnings fetching water, he progressed to wheelbarrow work and then selling ice creams from a mobile fridge: ‘tip-tops’ bought in bulk from a factory in Bosnia. ‘The ladies of Somalia, they love it so much!’ His talent for talking to the women meant business boomed.

  With profits of 1,000 shillings a day ($12) he rented a shop and opened the grocery. Officially, all the land of the camp has been leased from the host community by the United Nations for the benefit of the refugees, but long ago the majority clans monopolized the permits for stalls in the market and a property market evolved just like in any Wi
ld West town. Professor White Eyes rented his space from one of the major businessmen and traded in a specialist niche: serving the lower-caste clans who were happy for a chance to patronize the business of one of their own. Even shopping in Bosnia is a tribal affair.

  While life at the bottom of the food chain for Nisho, Mahat and Guled was made harder by what the aid agencies were calling ‘the influx’ of drought victims, for those who didn’t depend on smuggling or their own cheap labour, it was a boon. More people meant more business. White Eyes was saving money for a dowry. He had in his sights a strikingly beautiful, illiterate girl called Habibo whose mind he intended to shape. If the influx kept up like this, he thought, she might be his wife by the end of the year.

  Nisho, meanwhile, was rapidly losing patience with the market. ‘My back will give out soon,’ he told his friends, but the real reason was something else. Portering was fine for the small expenses of daily life, but it couldn’t cope with unforeseen events like the expenses of marriage or a medical bill. Nisho’s mother was in a bad way again and the witchdoctor’s treatment would be expensive.

  Nisho’s mum is a short, crooked woman with a misshapen head that sits unevenly on her neck. Her speckled eyes are set deep in her skull as though driven in with a stave. One of them doesn’t fully open. She was fifty-one years old then and she shared the compound with her son. When, in the night, she shouted to herself or to other people, ‘What have I done to you? Why do you want to kill me?’ and banged the window or the door of their hut, Nisho had to calm her down and remind her that there was no one there. ‘It’s just Satan,’ he said, or, as she preferred to think, ‘it’s just shetani’ – spirits. In the daytime Nisho sometimes tied her by the wrists to a neem tree in their compound to stop her running away. Once, he found her three miles away in the bush.