City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  Tawane’s compound on the edge of E5 had a corrugated-iron gate painted in the colours of the Jubaland flag. From here, the view of the rubbish-strewn maidan was partially obscured by a single, well-chewed thorn tree. Inside were three donkey carts with steel and wooden boxes fashioned on the back. In red letters on each was the word ‘MEAT’. Tawane’s family had done well in the camp. They ran a chain of butcheries. A donkey blinked lazily, the rope tying it to the post of the thorn fence gently rocked. Lodged inside the fence were the accoutrements of the family: a kettle, a radio, a comb, children’s shoes, clothes and toothbrushes. A thick blue cable snaked through the trees connected to a large satellite dish and a small house washed in pale-blue colours; inside was the family television set. Five goats lay in a pen made of thorns in one corner. Children played on the dust in the other. Tawane’s grandmother was asleep in the shade of the neem tree. Hanging from the washing line, out of the way of the dogs and cats, was a small plastic bag of cubed camel meat. It would be dinner.

  This was the tranquil domesticity for which Idris had struggled half his life and to which he clung with the force of the traumatized. Tawane, though, had the luxury of taking it for granted. And now he had a chance to prove himself, to break free of his parents’ anxious caution. His habitual longing for resettlement that throbbed like a dull ache at the back of his head, dissipated temporarily in the drama of the crisis: his energies were now focused on the opportunities that would flow from his present role. All his life, he had needed the UN; now they needed him. His talk acquired a note of bravura as the new power flooded his veins. ‘I have been to trainings on democracy. I know what it is about,’ he declared. ‘I am an in-born leader!’ He was in his element.

  18

  Kheyro

  The refugees who came to the camps as babies were the youngest of the ’92 cohort. Muna was one of these. Kheyro was another, although the trajectories of the two young women could not have been more different. While Muna had dropped out of school for love, Kheyro had struggled to stay enrolled because of the demands of providing for the family; she was often called on to help her mum and had fallen behind. Aged nineteen, she was only now in form four, poised to complete secondary school. The timing of the suspension could not have been worse and her hopes of graduation hung in the balance.

  In a rented house near Ifo secondary school, Kheyro and the rest of class 4B watched developments in the camp with rising anxiety. The exams for the Kenyan Certificate of Secondary Education had begun on 18 October, the week after the kidnap. After the suspension, most of the fifty trained Kenyan teachers stayed away and more of the thirty-five untrained refugee teachers had to be mobilized from the camps to invigilate, supplemented by police. The authorities would not suspend or delay the exams for any reason. Fear of ‘leakage’, they said. For the students of 4B, this was the most important month in their lives so far: the KCSE has been their sole aim for the past four years, the culmination of the effort they’d put in long before that to become one of the 2,500 children in the camp to graduate primary school each year and one of the 500 to win a coveted place at secondary school. At the start of the school year, eleven months ago, they had elected a committee and a chairman and contributed 500 shillings ($6) each per month towards the cost of renting a house together, where they would have light (two bulbs between forty-three of them), tea, food, and peace and quiet for studying during their voluntary examination purdah.

  Kheyro and her fellow students bent their heads over their exam papers in the low classrooms made of tin, broiling in the afternoon heat. Paramilitary police walked up and down the rows of desks and accompanied students of both sexes for their two minutes in the toilet, their rifles hanging loose as they searched the stalls. In the evenings, the form four pupils regrouped in their rented house and caught up on the news of what had happened while they had been cut off from the outside world.

  Every day the radio crackled with new advances: Kenyan airstrikes kill seventy-three militants; Kenyan forces take border towns; France, Denmark and US pledge support for Kenyan invasion; forty-five al-Shabaab fighters ambush Kenyan convoy. And every day, the Kenyan military spokesman, a plump, soft-cheeked man with a mischievous gap-tooth called Major Emanuel ChirChir, tweeted updates as the war unfolded along the border, in locations the students knew. On 28 October events came closer to home: a landmine hit a police vehicle just outside the town of Garissa, a hundred miles further inside Kenya.

  The girls prepared the food for the evening meal and then they all went back to studying. The exam was more than their life. The students carried with them the hopes and expectations of whole families.

  Kheyro’s mother, Rukia, had fled Somalia in 1992, walking for ten days with the infant Kheyro on her back. For nineteen years in the camps, as her young family had increased, Rukia had scavenged firewood from the desert and carried it on her shoulders in the hope that one day her eldest, educated daughter would be able to look after her in return. Kheyro’s father had disappeared in Somalia and the family had no other relatives to assist them in the camp. A cousin of Rukia’s, Ali, whom people nicknamed ‘Ero’, white-haired one, had come from Ethiopia recently with his son, Weli, but they were poor and struggling themselves and unable to assume the traditional duties of a male relative and take Rukia and her children under their wing.

  Kheyro had a serious face with two large front teeth that took an effort to cover with her lips, and she felt the burden of her mother’s effort keenly. It was the accumulated weight of nineteen years of wood: wood that had purchased two batteries for her torch instead of three kilos of rice; light that enabled Kheyro to study at night. Wood sold at ten shillings ($0.15) per load that went towards the cost of a school uniform (a white veil 2.5m square and a blue skirt) at 1,200 ($18). When Kheyro had got in to secondary school, she had waited at home for eighteen days, elated to have won a place but ashamed to be unable to enrol for lack of a uniform and ashamed that her mother had to sweat on her behalf. All for the exam and the possibility it opened up to everything else: an incentive job, money, even a chance to leave.

  There are two official routes out of Dadaab to the rich world. One is the resettlement lottery, weighted towards the longer-staying refugees and the vulnerable. For this, the names of the lucky ones selected to go to the few countries that agreed to have them – USA, Australia, Canada, UK, Germany, Norway and Sweden – are posted on the tin wall of the Horseed Hotel in Bosnia market on top of the brightly coloured murals of amazing foods unavailable inside. By now, the list had shrunk considerably from the old days and most people only passed by the hotel to check out of habit. Kheyro’s mother, Rukia, was one of these, so was Nisho. The other way out was the KCSE.

  Every student who has won a place at one of the six secondary schools in Dadaab dreams of Canada. The World University Service of Canada (WUSC) offers around ten scholarships to young men with a grade B or above in the KCSE and ten young women with a minimum of C-plus – an effort to redress the balance in favour of the few girls that make it that far. Every year that the name of you or your family does not appear on the painted tin wall of the Horseed Hotel, the importance of the escape route of studying increases. Some paid ‘morning bribes’ to teachers, going early to school for extra help. Others have gone mad in the heat: ‘Your head can get full up with reading too much,’ said Abdi, a student in Hagadera. ‘The temperature of the sun is too high, it is best to do mathematics in the morning, before it’s too hot.’ Others have committed suicide with the pressure, or the disappointment. Kheyro was vigilant in allowing nothing to upset her course. ‘I will be hard-working and get a C-plus,’ she vowed.

  She knew almost nothing about Canada, but she devoted more energy to imagining it than Somalia. ‘If I was in Somalia now, I would not have got an opportunity to learn,’ she said, disdainfully. Like their militant brothers in Nigeria whose very name ‘Boko Haram’ (‘western education is forbidden’) was against the idea of secular education, al-Shabaab had done much to con
trol or shut down schools in Somalia: banning certain subjects like English or science and appointing hard-line religious instructors or, in some cases, closing secular schools altogether. In its view, education was a religious practice, not a scientific one. The group well knew that their ability to grow and recruit depended on a fresh supply of unenlightened minds.

  ‘I am not afraid of being lonely in Canada,’ said Kheyro. She planned to buy a goat to stem the homesickness. And if the goat was not allowed to live in the house, she would buy another house for it, she said. Like her family, Kheyro was a pastoralist at heart. But the war threatened Kheyro’s plans. She was thinking a lot. Worrying about failing, and being trapped in the camp. Worrying that the exams would be cancelled altogether. That was her first fear on 5 November when she heard about the bomb.

  The night before, she had returned home for Eid-al-Adha, the feast of the sacrifice, when Abraham prepares to kill his own son only for God to relent and replace the boy with a lamb. She woke in the dark at five and left the mattress on the sand that she shared with her two sisters in their own mud hut. Next door in the hut with the UN plastic tent on the roof that they had put there when the rains came, Rukia slept on in the bed that she shared with Kheyro’s eleven-year-old brother, the only man in a household full of women. The boy cannot sleep with his sisters. She prayed and then took a broom to sweep the kitchen. She gathered some of the firewood that lies in a pile next to the kitchen and the fence and lit a fire for tea. The other girls had filled the jerrycans from the tap stand in the block the previous evening and Kheyro poured a little of it into a saucepan and set it to boil. She released the goats from their pen adjacent to the compound and took them to the corner of their block where the old man, the herder, collected them with others into one huge flock and drove them out onto the plain in search of grazing. For this, the family paid him fifty shillings per month, per animal.

  As the low morning light fingered the sand through the twigs of the kitchen wall, Kheyro made breakfast: tea with njera, a kind of pancake. When the family had extra money they bought milk, and sugar, never meat. Kheyro could not remember ever eating meat. She crossed her hard hennaed feet on the mat, eating and drinking alternately while her sisters helped themselves. They called her by her nickname, Misaal. Rukia had lost five babies before Kheyro lived and, in awe and wonder at the miracle, she nicknamed the child Mithal – unique, an example. The way the Somalis say it is Misaal. At six-thirty she went to the little tin stockade above the concrete dome with the hole in it that is the family’s pit latrine and, taking a bucket of water, she had a bath.

  The news came later that morning. A police car had struck a landmine buried in the sand beneath a cooking pot outside the Hagadera police post, on the main road to Dadaab. The bomb failed to explode. But Kheyro knew that didn’t matter. Every day the teachers moved with their police escorts between the camps. If they refused to come that would be the end of everything she had worked for.

  That year in Kenya, 411,783 candidates were sitting the KCSE. Only a quarter in North Eastern Province were girls. Kheyro was in a minority already. 1.3 million shillings allegedly changed hands nationwide to facilitate cheating in the KCSE, an illicit advantage for some that would raise the average and thus hurt the performance of the poorer majority. The odds were overwhelming against her, even without the insecurity.

  Two days later, on 7 November, a car carrying exam materials was attacked near the border post of Liboi. Al-Shabaab was choosing its targets carefully: in the gathering war with Kenya, as it had been in Somalia, secular education would become a battlefield. Kheyro and her fellow students tried to focus on their studies not the radio and braced themselves for the worst. But the Ministry of Education held its nerve for one week more. The exams finished, on schedule, on 14 November. The first successful improvised explosive device (IED) attack in the camps hit the following day.

  19

  Police! Police!

  On 15 November Tawane was eating lunch at home when he heard it. The explosion was so loud he thought it was right outside his gate. The ground shook and the sky seemed about to fall. The radio had been announcing clashes in Somalia daily and army spokesman Major ChirChir had warned residents of ten towns across Somalia to expect airstrikes, tweeting that they would be ‘under attack continuously’. He also claimed that donkeys were being used to transport weapons and thus ‘large movements of donkeys would be considered al-Shabaab activity’. The war was now here, in Dadaab. After a while, Tawane’s phone started up. Everybody was calling him. But still he stayed inside, waiting. It was the first time he’d heard the bang of combat and, for the first time in his life, Tawane was deeply, viscerally, afraid.

  When he finally made his way to the site of the blast – the strip of road between the truck garage and the police post where Guled had arrived almost exactly a year before – he found the whole place teeming with people and the two-metre crater cordoned off. A landmine had caught the back of a police Land Cruiser that had been at the head of a convoy of ten agency vehicles returning to Dadaab. A month after the kidnap the suspension of services had finally been lifted and aid workers were beginning to get back to work again. Two G4S security guards, who had been travelling inside the police truck, were badly injured. It was their blood that stained the sand.

  Services were immediately suspended again. And Tawane spent his days going round and round the agency compounds, taking the bus from Dadaab and then walking in the sweltering heat between the offices designed for people who always travelled in cars. He arranged temporary contracts, discussed security, planned deliveries of fuel and medicine. But the situation was desperate. The mortality rate in the understaffed hospitals crept up and children that might have lived were dying.

  The UN leaned heavily on the police to beef up security. Negotiations with the agencies to resume services again were tough but yielded tentative, limited, advances. After two weeks, some of the braver organizations went back. But then, on 5 December, came the second bomb, in Ifo this time.

  That morning, Guled was in Hawa Jube collecting money wired by a friend in Mogadishu. Until the kidnapping, Guled had had a good famine. There had been a stampede of agencies giving out things in the camp. Desperate to demonstrate their reach and impact they had indiscriminately distributed extra food tokens, clothes, blankets, stoves, plastic sheets – all of which could be liquidated for cash. Another friend of his had come from Somalia, and there were new neighbours in the compound in N block. They had even received two goats for slaughter from the Turkish. It had been a party that day. But things were different now.

  With the declaration of war, the flow of aid had dried up so only the food rations and skeleton health services remained. And the invasion had added another complication, extra checkpoints on the roads inside Somalia: the Kenyan army was making the most of the invasion to impose another layer of taxes. Life was cheaper when al-Shabaab was in charge over the border. Since the invasion, the price of sugar had jumped from 100 to 150 shillings a kilo. Guled had been forced to call home for help.

  He was waiting in line outside the M-Pesa shop, the Kenyan money transfer service, when he heard the blast. The line dropped to the floor all together as though they were merely limbs of one animal. The shop’s wire grille snapped shut and the customers who were inside burst onto the street, still crouched against the noise. When they stood up, they saw black smoke climbing into the sky above the road to Dagahaley in the west. A vehicle was on fire. Moments later, they saw three police cars speeding down the road towards Hawa Jube, very fast.

  ‘Police! Police!’ the crowd began shouting. Everyone scattered and Guled ran for home.

  Nisho was racing along the same road, in the other direction. He had been in the market when he heard the blast. People said it had come from Ifo 2. His first thought was Billai. She was with her sister that day. Nisho dashed past the new, two-storey school that had been built in the centre of Ifo 2 and down the blocks towards Billai’s family’s house. When
he got to the house, his new wife and his in-laws were safe. They were more concerned about him: ‘Hide! Hide!’ they said. But Nisho, ever excitable, rushed instead towards the bomb site. He shared a birthday and a destiny with the camp; if something happened here, he needed to see for himself. But as he moved along the road, he met police running towards him. He paused. They were not running for him but chasing two men who disappeared inside one of the galvanized Turkish toilets. Ifo 2 is flat and the buildings thinly spaced. It is not a convenient place to evade the law.

  The police caught the men and dragged them onto the road. They laid them on the ground and jumped on the bodies. Then they left them bleeding and unconscious. Nisho watched the beating from the doorway of his sister-in-law’s house. ‘Hide! Hide!’ the women repeated. ‘Only God protects,’ he told them. Within minutes an ambulance arrived to collect the men and the police left. They didn’t enter the compound. Finally, ignoring the protests of Billai and her sister, Nisho was able to go to the site of the explosion itself.

  At the road, he saw the bodies of two officers, a male and a female, laid on either side of a tree. There were body parts scattered around, blood and bones. The vehicle itself was a tangled mess. The steering wheel had lodged in the roof, the mine had ripped a jagged hole in the floor like a tin can and the windscreen was gone. The gear-shift hung in space and the bonnet was buckled in half. Looking at it, there was no way the driver survived, Nisho thought. He was right, he didn’t. Three others were lucky to escape with major injuries.