City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  After a week, Monday and Muna relaxed a little into their new routine in S3 and Monday ventured back to his work as a translator in the reception centre. The UN needed all the hands they could get and Monday needed the money to supplement the family’s rations. He wasn’t paid for the days he didn’t attend.

  On a hot, still afternoon, the Lost Boys having drifted off to their own business, Muna was preparing food. Umaima was playing in the compound outside and ten-day-old Christine was asleep on the bed in the house. Muna was happy. She had a man who looked after her, who brought money, and she felt at home among the gentle Sudanese who didn’t judge her, whose liberal values were more in line with those she had imbibed at school in the camp. Then she heard Umaima scream.

  ‘Mama! Mama!’

  She rushed outside to see a Somali boy holding Umaima to his chest while another came at Muna with a knife. ‘We’re taking her away, you’re poisoning her,’ he snarled. Three others stood around, menacing. Muna turned and ran, scaling the six-foot-high thorn fence of the compound with uncommon agility for a woman who had just given birth. She started shouting. She had left baby Christine in the house, she prayed they wouldn’t look inside. Just in time, the Lost Boys came running down the alley with their spears. The Somali boys dropped Umaima on the sand and ran.

  Monday came rushing back from work and they called the UN protection team for Ifo camp. Five miles away, in the main compound, the staff who answered the phone were overloaded. Not just with the emergency, but with all the visitors that had decided to come and witness it. Now that Dadaab was world news, it wasn’t just the journalists; celebrities had started coming too. It was 9 August. The previous day, the wife of the US Vice President, Jill Biden, had visited. On 11 August it would be long-time UNHCR supporter and Goodwill Ambassador, Angelina Jolie. Later that month, ministers from various countries arrived as well as the Somali-Canadian rapper K’naan, US political wife Cindy McCain and the actress Scarlett Johanssen.

  K’naan was the only one Muna had ever heard of. When K’naan visited the hospital on 23 August, Professor White Eyes abandoned his shop in Bosnia and ran all the way there to try and glimpse possibly the most famous Somali on the planet: ‘The man that I only see on screen,’ he said, ‘I needed to see face to face!’

  In spite of the celebrity visitors, the harried staff of the UN immediately moved Muna, Monday and the girls to a part of Ifo called ‘Transit’. It is the place where, historically, people were housed while awaiting a plot somewhere else in the camp or a plane ticket out. Over time, it had been increasingly used as a holding pen for refugees at risk. Transit is a fenced-off area on the edge of the camp across from Ifo’s police post and two of the Ethiopian blocks, E1 and E2. Green thorns have strangled the broken chain fence encircling rows of tents and the two latrine blocks for hundreds of people. There was a single G4S security guard asleep in a tin shack by the gate. Muna and Monday were assigned a tent next to an older woman who had HIV/AIDS and her children and another younger, beautiful woman with large gleaming black eyes who greeted them in a sing-song melancholy voice and said her name was Habiba, but everyone called her Sweetee. Later, Monday would claim that from the first time he saw her, he knew Sweetee was trouble. He would blame her for all the problems that came after. Although it was supposed to be a temporary safe haven, Transit would become their home for the next four years.

  That night, Muna struggled to sleep in the tent on the hard ground. She missed her bed from Monday’s place. The noise of so many people in such close proximity was disorienting, like sleeping on the deck of a ship sailing through the desert night.

  Meanwhile, inside the heavily fortified UN compound in Dadaab town, the normal staff who service the camp had been overwhelmed by a tripling of capacity as reinforcements and journalists swelled their ranks. Each night journalists set up their lights and their cameras for the evening news bulletins. White people in identical khaki combed their hair and powdered their faces. CNN’s Anderson Cooper broadcast his whole show, 360 Degrees, ‘Live from Dadaab!’ pacing up and down in the UN car park. In the background, the white 4×4s with the big blue UN logos were lined up in their sheds, resting after a hard day’s work: a clichéd symbol of the heft that the international community is capable of deploying, when it chooses to do so. Finally, the famine relief poured in. It had taken television to bring it here.

  13

  Billai

  The little aluminium pot perched on three stones above a meagre fire. There was not enough firewood to go round, and Isha and some other women from N Zero who had gone looking for kindling had met competition from locals on the plain. They retreated to N Zero beaten and bruised. The aid workers who came to the outskirts, when they came, told the newcomers they’d be issued with firewood when they were relocated to the new camp, Ifo 2. But when would that be? the people asked. The aid workers didn’t know.

  Isha’s children sat in a circle and watched the pot boil. She and Gab watched with them. He had got the message from the boy in Rebay that his family had left for the camps and he had joined them at last. The animals hadn’t made it. He had borrowed money and paid for a lift. But he was not yet registered and the food was stretched thin. It was interminable, the cooking, Isha hated it. Every now and then one of the children would peek under the lid. ‘Has it cooked? … Has it cooked yet?’ Isha teased them, trying to make a joke of it. Every day the younger children complained. She was grateful though for the elder ones, they understood.

  Now it was Ramadan and the stronger ones among the refugees had begun to fast and even some weak ones. An old lady who collapsed and was taken to hospital said, ‘What’s the point? I have no food anyway, I might as well fast and die clean!’ Fasting made the waiting worse. For more than a month they’d been living in N Zero, waiting in line for food, waiting for the food to cook, waiting to move to Ifo 2. And every day N Zero grew.

  Clanking through the huts, churning up dust, water trucks now came on rounds for those on the outskirts of the camp. The dust, pushed up by the wind against the sides of the huts, settled in clothes, in hair, on the skin. They gave out three litres of water per person per day, but they didn’t reach every part of N Zero every day. Seventy thousand people were now living, without toilets and without running water, outside the formal bounds of the camp. Isha conserved her water carefully to afford her a wetted sponge once a day with which she could remove the film of dust that permanently coated her children. It made her angry. Dadaab made no sense to her.

  Next to N Zero, the brand new complex of Ifo 2 lay empty. When the new arrivals complained that the water given out by the trucks was not enough, they were urged patience. There were four water towers in Ifo 2, the humanitarian staff said, enough for the basic international minimum of twenty litres per day (the UN right to water says thirty to fifty), three schools and hundreds of latrines. But when will it be open? they asked, ‘Soon,’ the agency people said.

  ‘Talking, talking!’ Isha grumbled. She was right. After an international outcry, Kenya’s Prime Minister, Raila Odinga, himself promised that Ifo 2 would be operational by the end of July. But, at the beginning of August, it was still closed. Odinga’s public excuse was that his announcement had not been approved by cabinet and the matter required collective approval. The truth was that local MPs, habituated to profiting from misery, were holding the process hostage.

  In return for their approval for new land at Ifo 2 and for the other camp south of Hagadera called Kambi Os, the MPs wanted generous contracts for their own firms and a second, brand new, UN compound, on the other side of Hagadera camp at a place called Alinjugur. The UN knew these manoeuvres for what they were and vainly tried to resist. The sole purpose of a new UN compound would be the opportunities for grabbing part of the $25m it would cost to build and the contracts needed to clean, cater and run it. But, collapsing under the weight of the desperate new arrivals, the UN blinked first. The MPs got their deals and the refugees, at last, after nearly four years of negotiations, g
ot their new camp.

  Ifo 2 was meant to be state of the art. The UN had spent a lot of time developing a new product: Interlocking Stabilized Soil Blocks (ISSBs), bricks made of mud, that could be used to build cheap houses in refugee camps. It had planned to build 15,000 such houses in Ifo 2 but only managed to construct 116 before the Kenyan government visited in December 2010 and ordered the building stopped. The houses looked too much like houses, better even than houses that Kenyans lived in, said the Department for Refugee Affairs, not the temporary structures and tents that refugees were supposed to inhabit. It would embarrass the government. So, when Isha’s family was eventually relocated from N Zero, she and the other new arrivals moved from their makeshift huts into even more temporary UNHCR dome tents laid out over ten square miles in great squares and long white lines stretching into the haze of the horizon.

  The geography of a refugee camp is about two things: visibility and control – the same principles that guide a prison. The refugee camp has the structure of punishment without the crime. The crime is implied. And, by and large, the refugees, docile, disempowered, do as they are told; they hesitate before authority and plead for their rights in the language of mercy. Ifo 2 had wide roads for police patrol vehicles, long avenues of tents that hid nothing and no private space. Into the huge grid of blocks, the new arrivals poured. All that was left of the temporary stick city of N Zero was the bare skeletons of abandoned hut frames. And within days, even these were gone for firewood.

  Isha’s plot and a tent were in block M2 at the far north-eastern corner of Ifo 2 on the windblown outer edge of the camp. Along the northern perimeter, there was a road separating the camp from the denuded plain of roughly chopped stumps, with a shiny new white plate that announced the name: ‘Forest Road’. A timid police car could occasionally be seen patrolling Forest Road but it was not a popular beat. The real forest was to be found inside Ifo 2, in the thorns planted in the sand to demarcate the boundaries of each ten-metre-square plot that was allocated for families sized 4–7. Isha and Gab and six children made eight but Gab had arrived after the plots had been allocated. She took her time preparing her home. She found a sturdy thick thorn for her live fence, a once common species called Commiphora. It was the nomad’s friend. The bark is used to treat malaria, the resin for disinfectant, the burnt sap is an aphrodisiac and the amber ‘tears’ that weep from the trunk are the base ingredient for myrrh. The wise men who visited the baby Jesus in the stable likely came from the plains of the Horn of Africa.

  In the corner of Isha’s plot was a square tin box for a toilet like an upended coffin, the sticker with a Turkish flag still intact. Everything in Dadaab is ‘donated by’ or ‘provided by’ or ‘funded by’, as if to remind the refugees that they have nothing of their own. Even the police cars are ‘donated by UNHCR’. Isha wondered for whom the notices, written in English, were intended?

  Now that the world had recognized the famine as a crisis, everyone wanted to help, but only so much. Humanitarian agencies had requested $2.4 billion for the emergency. At the beginning of August they had received less than half that amount. Europe and the US, Canada and the Gulf States led the contributions, but even Kazakhstan and Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip donated.

  The biggest surprise of the famine – it made the traditional donors nervous – was the massive response from Turkey. The Turks – the ones who put the sticker on Isha’s toilet – were popular for several reasons. Because they distributed cash directly to the refugees – the 2,000 shillings ($23) that they gave Isha when she moved into her new tent was the first money she had handled in the camp and the first time she had seen the Kenyan currency. And because, with their frenetic building of latrines, schools and mosques and the unloading of huge quantities of food, they were, after the UN, the second biggest employer of incentive workers in Dadaab.

  The enterprising Nisho, only too keen to stop hauling potatoes at the market, was among the first to get himself hired. The mention of Turkey would afterwards always send him into raptures, shouting and pointing at the sky. ‘I will never forget the help of the Turkish government! I will always pray for them!’ But they hadn’t only provided him with a job. ‘My wife is very beautiful,’ he would say, smiling and looking down, abashed. ‘I was married by the grace of Turkey!’

  The hub of the Turkish aid operation where Nisho worked during the emergency was a new mosque erected on the deforested no-man’s-land between N Zero, Hawa Jube and Ifo 2. It was a huge building made of wood and iron sheets that looked like a giant tin foil sculpture topped by a weathervane of three loudspeakers rigged together on a flimsy pole. Whatever the intended name of the mosque, it was obliterated immediately by the success of the porters’ nickname for the place: Istanbool.

  During Ramadan the crowds spilled out of the corrugated iron walls and into the large fenced area surrounding it. Nisho was often to be found among the worshippers kneeling on the plastic mats with their backs to the wind and the sun. He had a lot to be thankful for and a lot to pray for too. The Turks had given him a red T-shirt with the Turkish flag on it and soon he had progressed from portering to measuring and distributing food. He had made good money from the famine, 2,000 shillings a day, enough to water his imagination and allow a seed, long dormant at the back of his mind, to germinate: ‘I was thirsty for women at that time!’

  With his own savings from the famine and pledges from relatives, Nisho amassed what he considered to be an impressive dowry of 70,000 Kenya shillings (about $800). Thus armed, he dispatched his uncle to go and speak to the parents of a girl from Ifo 1 whom he had been trying to seduce in the market. When his uncle came back from the meeting with the bad news, Nisho was heartbroken. The family had wanted 500,000 shillings ($6,000). ‘I will never marry, not in twenty years,’ he wailed. He was a virgin. He feared, rightly, that if he played around and got a girl pregnant, he would have a whole clan on his neck. But depression submerged his spirits only briefly. When he went to work at Istanbool the next day, looking at the malnourished new arrivals collecting the food, he had an idea. In Ifo 2, a starving bride would be cheaper.

  The following Friday he summoned his confidence, telling himself with characteristic drama (he was not an orphan), ‘orphans have to have a big stomach and a big head,’ and he took a walk among the wide grid of blocks of Ifo 2. Down the rows of tents desperate people wearing sheets, rags, some nothing at all, peered out. Nisho was continually shocked at the state of the new arrivals, but, holding fast to the idea that he was poor and not in a position to help anyone, he didn’t part with any of his hard-earned money to people he didn’t know; he contented himself with praying for them instead. Five blocks south of Isha’s place, near a new metal sign that read ‘S1’, he spied a pretty girl whose luminous beauty was undiminished by her torn clothes and skinny frame. Billai would have been beautiful anywhere, anyhow. Nisho made a joke. She was terribly shy and hid her face but he managed to make her laugh. They talked. Nisho was jumpy, words bubbling up out of him as they do when he is nervous or high. His desire was naked, so close to the surface he couldn’t hide it, so he decided not to. After ten minutes he said, ‘I love you.’

  ‘You’re mad, just go away,’ she said.

  ‘I’m serious!’ he pleaded.

  She went back inside her tent. Billai’s shyness was proper. Somali girls are famous for making an art out of womanhood. Karen Blixen, in Out of Africa, remarked on her Somali employees’ ‘exquisite dignity and demureness’. In Billai’s case though, it was also, in some measure, fear of her own tongue. She had a kinship with Nisho in that she too struggled to conceal her emotions. The anger in Billai was quick and overflowing; she had a contempt for the world and for her situation. She had been happy in Somalia, but the war and the drought had torn her from childhood too fast and she was full of sadness and regret.

  Nisho returned the next day. And the third, and the fourth. On the fifth, he changed tactics. He had done his research. Billai was also from the Rahanweyn clan and
they were, distantly, related. She had come to Dadaab in a large group, walking for a month from a town called Salidley. They had been more than ninety-three when they left. Some of them had died along the way, but there was a new addition too: one woman had given birth three days’ walk from the camp and arrived into the health centre with the umbilical cord still hanging from the infant.

  Billai and her family were very malnourished but they were improving slowly. Recovering from malnutrition takes a long time. In the last days of August, the levels of malnutrition in the camp were still well above emergency levels. Thousands of children were still in supplementary feeding programmes and over a quarter of all children showed signs of wasting. The food rations were supposed to last two weeks but were, on average, gone within ten days. Not enough.

  When Nisho visited Billai, he pressed his suit with sugar, vegetables, whatever he could do to assist. He talked to her older sister and explained the clan links between their families. And that, or perhaps the groceries, decided it. Billai and he were officially courting. She was fifteen years old. For the young shy girl with only one set of clothes, the relationship made the disappointment of the camp bearable. Everyone in southern Somalia had heard of Dadaab and believed it to be a proper camp ‘with everything there’, she said. Instead, she found ‘nothing’. Under less pressing circumstances, Nisho might have thought twice about a bride so disdainful of his beloved Ifo camp, but no sooner had Billai’s family agreed to allow their daughter to begin talking to him than things took an urgent turn.