by Ben Rawlence
After the second baby, Hodan – ‘prosperity’ – was born, Mohammed filed suit; he wanted his beautiful young wife and his child back. Muna’s family’s honour was at stake. Negotiations between the families lasted months. Death was frequently invoked: Muna threatened to commit suicide and Mohammed said he’d kill her himself if he didn’t at least get his child. In the end, Muna’s clan gave way and, as the custom dictated, when Hodan could walk, the child went to live with the father in Hawa Jube. Leaving Umaima with her mother, Muna ran to the main UN compound in Dadaab looking for a job that required employees to sleep on site, inside the razor wire, away from a husband who continued to stalk her. The woman that caught Monday’s eye in the kitchen of GiZ who smiled coyly at his jokes was in fact broken with grief at her stolen daughter and intent on revenge.
The staff quarters in GiZ were a low square of simple rooms with green numbered doors and wired windows surrounding rough grass where laundry dried. Muna stayed in number M26. Monday stayed in M9. Their rooms faced each other across the grass and Monday would often make his way over the quadrangle to sit in her room and talk. Gradually, Monday pressed his case. He had a winning smile and he was, Muna told a friend, ‘Very tall … Very black.’
‘I love you,’ Monday said early on, with the disarming openness of the Sudanese. ‘What have I got to hide?’ he said with his big booming laugh. ‘He was a good maker of stories,’ she thought. But when he came and told them in her room, and she explained that there would be problems with her family, problems he could not imagine, Monday was blasé: ‘We will run away to Sudan,’ he said.
Then, the way Muna tells the story, she simply decided to let him have his way, saying, with audacious naiveté, that she believed after sex he might leave her alone. It was only once, she insists, and they were unlucky. Monday, however, remembers things slightly differently: ‘She fooled me!’ he said. ‘She is very clever!’
When she started getting sick, at first she claimed it was malaria and Monday bought her medicine. When she didn’t improve, Monday insisted on taking her urine to the clinic in Dadaab. After he came back with the result and challenged her, she told him the truth: that the greatest insult to her family would be to have a Christian baby and she had done it to shame them. Monday was not pleased. But he had a good Catholic boy’s sense of responsibility and he promised to stick by his girl. He had no idea of the price he was agreeing to pay.
That the relationship would be frowned upon was clear to him. But he underestimated the scale and zeal of the culture wars that have gripped Somali society since the rise of conservative Islam during the war. After the terrible ethnic cleansing based on clan that characterized the ignition of the Somali civil war, clan identity had become both supreme but also more fragile. Before, a woman traditionally married outside the clan, to reinforce the clan’s ties to others. But with the violence coursing along clan lines, communities looked increasingly inward. A community under threat is rarely known for its tolerance. To marry outside the clan was now a scandal; a Christian in-law was unthinkable.
Muna, on the other hand, knew the zealots very well; she was related to them. If she failed to sneak out of Monday’s room before daybreak, she would often have to spend the whole day hiding inside, peeing in a bottle to avoid being seen. The wooden chalets of the staff quarters were not designed for keeping secrets. The woman who lived in M8, next to Monday, had put two and two together and the rumours were beginning to thicken like soup.
Christine called Muna into her office, in a small wooden building next to the kitchen. Muna was now always late to work, sometimes not showing up at all. Christine had issued warnings, and counselled Muna. Then she began to see some changes. ‘Muna became temperamental. Sometimes she wouldn’t feed, sometimes suddenly she wanted meat.’ She saw Muna as her own daughter and sat her down. ‘I am suspecting that you are expecting,’ she said. ‘Be sincere, Muna, please.’ Muna lied.
Leaving the office, she went straight away to her family’s round fenced compound in Dagahaley camp, where her mother was surprised to see her. On the hard-baked sand between the kitchen made of sticks and the well-mudded house, the two women faced each other. Twenty years in the camp had been unkind to the older woman. She had the humped back and sideways shuffle of someone to whom life had not kept its promise. Her hennaed toes were split. Her face was cracked and two bottom teeth were missing. She had pale-brown skin and wide-set, light eyes that glowed with personality: she too had been a deadly beauty, once.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be working?’ she asked her daughter.
‘I have a leave,’ Muna lied again. ‘I am sick, I have got malaria.’
It was a half-hearted attempt.
‘Really? I heard you got a Christian pregnancy,’ her mother said.
‘Where did you hear that?’ Muna said.
‘People called me on the phone.’
‘It’s not true.’
‘You’re lying! We’re going to take you to the hospital to be checked.’
‘Fine,’ said Muna.
She was indeed a clever woman. The second urine sample that her mother took for testing was in fact that of a neighbour. Having mollified her mother, Muna went back to work at GiZ. Lying, however, was not in Monday’s nature and when he was confronted by his boss about the rumours, he confessed. From there the issue, as they say in the camp, went ‘international’.
The Somalis working for GiZ called Muna into the office and advised her to have an abortion. They even offered to collect contributions to pay for it: ‘Don’t say we didn’t warn you,’ they said. Others were more forceful: ‘You can say you were raped, then we can go and arrest him!’ But she thought that God might be annoyed with her if she killed the child and, besides, Monday’s religion forbade it. One night, unknown men broke down the door of Monday’s room. He was not there, having been warned that the Somalis would try and kill him. After that, the managers of GiZ sent him home. ‘If you die here it will be a problem’, they said. And so, he had found the incentive work of interpreting for the new arrivals instead. Christine sent Muna home to her family’s compound then too, falsifying her attendance sheets and forwarding her salary. But Muna was even less safe there than Monday.
In public, Muna took to wearing big clothes and a full niqab, covering her face: what they call in the camp ‘ninja’. People called her foetus a ‘mutant’ and Muna’s own brother threatened to kill her: ‘You have ruined our family’s name!’ he yelled, sending her scrambling with her six-month bump over the fence behind the toilet. She ran to the Sudanese block in Ifo, S3, where Monday lived and that’s where she was hiding now: afraid to go out, watching for a mob or a hit man.
Block S3 is inhabited by the tall, austere Dinka people from South Sudan, their black-blue skin welted with scars called keloids. The Dinka are bigger and stronger than the Somalis but they have built a tall fence around their block all the same – their church of mud and sticks has been burned down by a Somali mob three times. This was a new phenomenon. The rise of al-Shabaab over the last few years had shifted the centre of gravity in Somali society towards harsher strains of evangelical Islam like the Wahabis of the market, and the camp was not immune to such currents. Preachers were now regular fixtures on the Maidan on Fridays and in their speeches, Christians were increasingly vilified as scapegoats for the country’s troubles. Recently, the little cosmopolitan island created in the camp had become more and more volatile.
The Sudanese put a guard on Monday’s gate at night and deputed twelve warriors to sleep in the compound, spears by their side. ‘They will kill me first,’ Monday told Muna, when he got back from the long days at the reception centre. ‘You will not die alone.’ Now, though, as Muna’s term neared, there was a new threat doing the rounds. Christine had told them of a plot hatched by the Somali nurses who worked at the Hawa Jube hospital to assassinate Muna’s baby with a lethal injection in the delivery room, the moment the infant was born.
12
Live from Da
daab
On 20 July 2011 the United Nations finally declared a famine in southern Somalia and the food security map blinked black. It was the worst famine in the region for decades. Up to 1.2 million people were at risk of starvation and 12 million needed food aid, among them 2.3 million Somalis. In July 40,434 arrived in Dadaab, peaking at 2,000 a day, and thousands more were on the way. Suddenly the sleeping donors found their cheque books. The UN started airdrops inside Somalia. One hundred tonnes of tents were shipped to the camp. The wheels of the emergency business began to slowly turn and the NGO Oxfam accused the rich governments of ‘wilful neglect’. It was a famine that should never have happened.
The situation in the camps, according to MSF, was, ‘catastrophic’. Fully equipped emergency feeding stations in Hawa Jube were only just coming on line and the three camp hospitals were filled with women and children clinging to life by the thinnest of threads. The mortality rate was seven times over the emergency threshold. Half of the children and over a third of the adults arriving from Somalia were seriously malnourished, and one in five was on the brink of death. And then measles struck in N Zero. Every spare inch of the grounds in the hospital in Hawa Jube was crowded with tents and the wards were stuffed with as many beds as they could fit. The air inside the green and white buildings was thick with the cloying sweet smell of malnourished flesh and the earthy rot of death.
One nurse, a veteran of the 1992 famine when the camps were first established, said he’d never seen anything like it. Two years later he would still be unable to talk about that time: ‘You don’t want to remember those things,’ he said, tears running down his face. Every day they lost one or two children in Hawa Jube alone, but the greatest challenge in dealing with the new arrivals was convincing the wary mothers accustomed to medicines of herbs and roots that intravenous drips and needles were not going to harm their children. Many refused the treatments, tore off the oxygen masks and pulled out the drips and then the staff had to write the name of the child in the ‘death book’. All of this alongside the six hundred or so normal daily admissions, and the thirty women delivering babies, that you’d expect for a city the size of New Orleans. The hospital staff worked for fifty-six days straight then had two weeks off. ‘Your brain is fried. It’s not working actually,’ said the nurse.
On 19 July, tipped off that the UN was about to declare a famine, the US television network ABC News launched a campaign called ‘A Cry for Help: Disaster in the Desert’, ushering in two weeks of intense and disturbing coverage of the emergency. The media frenzy began. By 25 July the UN compound was crawling with journalists. Isha’s neighbour was interviewed by some white people with a large camera. She didn’t know where they came from. They didn’t give her any food. Every day at the reception centre, Monday saw another crew from another country, eager to film the thinnest children, the ones with the rapid breathing and bulbous eyes, skin shrunk to their skulls, bones light as balsa wood. They toured the hospitals and did pieces to camera in front of the long lines huddled by the tents. The doctors at the hospital hired a public affairs officer to deal with the visitors and were forced to spend two hours of their precious time each day preparing and giving briefings. They even had to seal off the intensive care unit because on some days there were more journalists than patients. Even so, one intrepid German photographer broke in through the window to capture the all-important deathly shot.
The roads in the camp were a constant fog of dust as the private vehicles hired out at up to $250 a day rattled around. The market was loud with goods unloading and vehicles arriving, ten-wheelers boiling up the long road through the desert from Nairobi. Hundreds of new incentive workers like Monday had been hired to deal with the influx; everyone was an aid worker now. One of the young men who was making thousands of dollars a week working as a fixer for the media crews overheard them calling the emergency ‘Haiti part two’; the nickname spread like fire in Bosnia, among the older refugees and those able to retain a sense of humour despite the tragedy.
In the midst of all the activity, Muna decided to risk an excursion. Although she was heavily pregnant and walking was tough in the forty-degree heat, she set out from block S3 to the UN Ifo field office. Somalis in block D6 that neighboured S3 had discovered her presence and the daily torrent of insults hurled over the thorn fence had become intolerable. She gambled that she would be safer if the UN knew where she was. With Umaima by her side, she waddled slowly to the UN office to lodge her complaint. She had grown up under the suzerainty of the UN and the Department for Refugee Affairs (DRA) and, for better or worse, she believed they would protect her.
It was the middle of the morning and there was the usual crowd outside the UNHCR field office shouting through the metal grille in the wall, pressing to get in. One of the UN staff had even stepped outside, trying to calm them down. As Muna walked along the road with Umaima directly in front of the building, she didn’t see her brothers and sisters coming.
‘You are beautiful and strong!’ one of her sisters shouted. ‘But you married a Sudanese, why did you do that?’ Her family hit her head and then her body, until she fell on the road. Then other women joined in. ‘Prostitute!’ they screamed. The women continued to hit her while the crowd outside the UN office stared in amazement until staff came rushing out and her attackers ran away.
At first, Muna wasn’t sure if it was the pain of the beating or of something else, but, three days later, on 29 July, after a long and difficult labour during which they had to cut Muna twice, a bruised but healthy baby girl was born a little early. Christine had arranged for her to give birth in the health centre reserved for citizens in Dadaab town with Dr Naila, a GiZ doctor that she knew and trusted. If she’d gone to Hawa Jube, Muna might have found herself on television – one of the many mothers and children in the background, mixed in with the famine victims in the maternity ward.
One mother who gave birth the week before in Ifo recalled a room crammed with fifty beds and even the floor space between them occupied. Although it was punishingly hot during the day, at night the desert temperatures dropped. That was the time the nurses feared. They stocked the wards with heaters to keep the malnourished children warm. Some of them, the new mother remembers, ‘were very thin, smelling bad’, sleeping on the floor next to her. Two beds away, a little boy, about one year old, called out one night and then was silent. His mother said, ‘It is over,’ and the other women in the ward listened to her quiet crying in the dark. In the end, an estimated 260,000 people died in the famine, half of them under five. Reports afterwards placed the blame firmly on the delayed response by the international community. But, as the rest of the world was finally waking up to the humanitarian tragedy of the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals, the older refugees were focused on an entirely different scandal: the birth of Muna’s mongrel Christian-Muslim child. The famine was an obligation, an inconvenience and a business opportunity; it was, in that sense, part of daily life. But the mutant birth, as far as the elders were concerned, was an insult and a crime. And they were bloodthirsty for a sacrifice to assuage the sin against their own, most beautiful, flesh: Muna. ‘Have you heard?’ ‘What did they call it?’ ‘What’s its religion?’ ‘God will punish them.’ ‘It’s wrong.’
Monday and Muna named the dark and chubby infant Christine Abuk Omulkher. Christine for the woman who had given Muna her job and helped them so much; Abuk was Dinka for Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Omulkher was Somali for ‘God with us’, despite what the mob might say. After three days, Muna was discharged and the new young family locked themselves inside the house in S3. They feared for baby Christine’s life. They didn’t sleep. And they trembled behind the Lost Boys, their spears glinting in the moonlight.
Although no longer boys, those remaining in Ifo were still, in many ways, waiting for their adult lives to begin. Their homeland of South Sudan had gained its independence, but the Lost Boys were unwilling to trust the fragile peace in the world’s newest country. So they spent their days dozi
ng like leopards along the low boughs of a mango tree at the entrance to the block, next to the stagnant green pool that spilled over from the communal tap. The tree had been planted twenty years ago when the first Sudanese had come to Ifo, but it seemed as though little else in their lives had changed. Time in the camp was monotonous, and therefore elastic. ‘Something you are used to, you don’t take it seriously sometimes,’ said one of them, called William. He could have been speaking for the whole refugee population.
Those who had come of age in the camps, like Muna and Monday, who had seen so many of their peers resettled abroad, lacked respect for the present: as though one’s actions in the here and now had no relation to the great hereafter, abroad. Life was only a process of waiting. And this was their problem too: in such circumstances, people are more inclined to act without consequences, without limits, to be caught by a hedonism of the senses or the indulgence of emotion, or the violent righteousness of religion. Nothing had any permanence, there was no building anything, since both the people you loved or the people you hurt could soon be gone. The older refugees with a grounding in school or community had a better chance. But still, in such a situation, life can lose its meaning. Hence the temptations to slip into khat and drink, or into ideology, or further, across the border to join al-Shabaab.
Of all the fears of the Sudanese, al-Shabaab loomed largest. Its alienation was something the Lost Boys well understood. But it was a fear with no face. No one in the camp admitted to being a member of the group. There was only rumour and the occasional story of a relative who had gone missing, ‘back to Somalia’, with a raised eyebrow or a knowing grin. Someone in the community had once had a phone call warning them not to mention the name of the group and that had spawned a new vocabulary: ‘those guys’. It is a story of rising religious tensions the world over. Under threat, the Lost Boys could not differentiate between the conservatives and the terrorists: to them, Muna’s zealous family and ‘those guys’ were the same thing.
