by Ben Rawlence
As 2012 arrived, Kenyan forces took the Somali town of Fafadun and al-Shabaab ambushed a vehicle in Afmadow, killing eleven. Airstrikes across the southern part of the country continued. Tawane’s family urged him to stop his work. Everyone was telling him to run away from Dadaab. Fish’s mother was the same. Years ago, she had seen her husband killed in front of her eyes; on the walk to Dadaab, she had lost three children, including an infant six days old. She had paid a price to keep Fish alive and he was more precious to her as a result. When people said to Fish, ‘You and Tawane will be next,’ she told him. ‘Leave this shit alone!’
Fish didn’t wait to find out if the grapevine was right. There were urgent discussions with the UN protection team and the field officer for Hagadera but there were no solutions, and so Fish arranged his own movement pass through contacts at the Department for Refugee Affairs and, in the early dark one morning, boarded the bus to Nairobi. In a plastic sticker across the windscreen was painted in capital letters, the word ‘FIASCO’.
Fish had never left the familiar heat and squalor of Dadaab. He was nearly thirty years old. Named in honour of a grandfather who owned a large and famous restaurant on the beach and yet didn’t like fish, he had walked to the camps out of the civil war like Tawane, aged nine. He should not have needed a movement pass at all. Having married a Kenyan Somali girl who worked for the UN Refugee Agency, he was, technically, entitled to Kenyan citizenship, but neither of them knew their rights. They thought Fish could not travel to Bhasham’s home area of Garissa, so they got married in Hagadera and she came to live with him in the camp, in effect consigning herself – and the two daughters they would have – to refugee status. The curious choice was not unprecedented. Many Kenyan Somalis presented themselves as refugees for the free food and services; North Eastern Province was harsh and the government largely absent. And Dadaab was the largest economy of the region. With similar entrepreneurial panache to Tawane’s, Fish used $500 sent by a relative in Norway to set up a small cinema – a TV in a shack – on which he showed international soccer matches. With the income from the cinema plus both of them working – she for the UN and he for the agency CARE – they were among the camp’s elite. But Bhasham had died of ulcers the year before and while Tawane hesitated about leaving his family, Fish settled his young daughters with his mother and fled to the city.
Having informed the UN and the NGO camp managers of his plans, Fish thought they might have suggested a safe house or hostel where he might stay, but they only wished him safari njema – good journey, in Swahili. This put a lot of pressure on the 9,000 shillings ($110) in his pocket that he had saved from his 6,800 shilling a month incentive salary from CARE. He knew no one in the city and had no idea of the cost of anything, beyond a vague notion that it was more expensive than Dadaab. As his bus approached ‘down Kenya’, the tall buildings, green hills and huge highways inspired fear rather than awe. Fish spent the whole twelve-hour journey worrying about where he would sleep that night.
He emerged into the filthy streets of Naroibi’s Eastleigh just as the sun was setting. For Fish, the night had always been a time of dark. But here, people walked in streets lit with electric lights, shops stayed open and people worked beyond dusk. Suddenly, ‘nights were days and days were nights!’
The predominantly Somali neighbourhood of Eastleigh was an incredible mass of life. Thirty per cent of Nairobi’s city tax revenues come from here. A hundred thousand shoppers visit the district every day. Goods for sale were piled by the side of the road – oil drums, piles of stones, bags of concrete; cobblers bent over soles, rows of worn shoes arranged on sacks, the sales-girls reclined on one arm, chatting and watching the traffic go by. Large Kikuyu women sweated beneath a tin lean-to, dirty T-shirts pulled tight over multiple straps, their bare arms jousting fires with hot pans of frying cassava. A young pretty girl jumped down from a metallic green minibus that glowed hot white inside from LED lights, a stick of maize in her mouth. She was the conductor and she waved commuters on and off.
The brick skyscrapers tottered overhead and beneath them ruts in the road as deep as cars were filled with stagnant liquid: green, black and stocking blue. And all the time, a constant stream of sassy Kikuyu girls, veiled Somali women, men in white kanzus and street boys with glue bottles jammed between their bottom teeth and lower jaw flowed between them. There were signs in Somali, English, Swahili, Amharic. Children crowded around a video-game shack and a ring of people in the dirt road surrounded a trickster brandishing his three cards.
When the colonial government founded the district in 1921 and assigned the areas of the capital along racial lines, Eastleigh was zoned for Asians. But after independence, Somalis – who saw themselves as akin to Asians in the racial hierarchy, or at least above the Africans – took over and it became known as ‘Little Mogadishu’. With the boom in Somali piracy, and an estimated $100m in drug money laundered though Kenya every year, real estate in Eastleigh was expensive. But the rest of Nairobi feared the area, the rich people didn’t come. For the poor, though, the separate city that the Somalis had carved for themselves was a dynamic economy supplying the cheapest goods (many of them arriving via the camps, hurried along by Nisho) and they needed it.
Fish was overwhelmed. He was also desperately hungry. On the corner of 12th street was a restaurant called ‘Silver Park Hotel’. He ordered food and braced himself for the bill. A plate of rice and meat was 120 shillings ($1.5). In Hagadera it was 80 shillings ($1). Not so bad, he thought. He asked the waiter’s advice for a good place to sleep and parted with another 700 shillings ($9) for a bed in the Silver Park. In the morning he bought some phone credit and called home and Tawane. The friends were used to checking up on each other every night, sharing confidences and the latest threats. Tawane missed him, he said. He was more alone and more at risk than ever.
The youth chairman of Dagahaley and the overall coordinator of youth activities in the camps, Abdullahi, had also gone to Nairobi. He had received calls from unknown numbers, warning that he would die. But the final straw came one evening when he was standing on the sandy street outside his house and three men carrying AK-47s asked him, ‘Where is Abdullahi?’ They had his phone number, but it seemed they didn’t know what he looked like.
‘I don’t know that guy,’ he said and stepped quietly down a side alley, his heart rapidly climbing up his throat. He had had more luck than Fish with the UN, who had given him a stipend to survive in the city, but still the voices called him on the phone. He wanted the UN to repatriate him to Somalia. ‘The goodness of Somalia,’ he said, ‘you take your gun and defend yourself.’ Not like the camp, where the only protection the UN can really offer is to help people at risk to flee somewhere else. The youth leader for Ifo had run away too. As the only one left, Tawane was now, by default, the youth coordinator for the whole camp. His family’s protests had grown to fever pitch. But patiently he carried on with his work; supplying the food, the fuel, the medicines, checking his phones, varying his movements, saying his prayers.
Fish, meanwhile, had exchanged one terror for another. He had only 8,000 shillings left. At this rate, he’d be returning to Dadaab in a week. Without any idea where to get money, where he would sleep, or how he would eat, he did what any refugee who can does in such situations: he called his friends abroad.
Abdikadir had been Fish’s dear friend in school but he had got lucky. Eight years earlier he had been resettled to Colorado, USA. When Fish told him of the insidious cold in Nairobi, Abdikadir laughed. ‘You should try this place!’ Now Abdikadir had completed his masters and he worked as a trader in a stock exchange, winning and losing thousands of dollars every week. ‘Gambling is haram [sinful] in Islam, actually,’ said Fish, ‘but I am happy for him.’ The $50 Abdikadir sent him was the first American bill Fish had seen in his life. He was to get used to them. The guilt of escaping Dadaab and the custom of helping your age-mates makes for a potent charitable cocktail. Every Somali in the West sends home a huge percentage of w
hatever they get. During the two months that it took Fish volunteering in a restaurant on 11th street until they trusted him enough to make him a waiter and pay him, Abdikadir kept him going.
Fish stayed only one night in Silver Park. He had always made friends easily and Eastleigh was no different. The second night, a man he met in the hotel offered him a mattress on the floor of his room – in effect one quarter of an apartment that had been divided with plywood – in return for a share of the rent. There were two beds and a mattress in a space two metres by four and in the top corner, crammed against the ceiling, a box of wires like a snake’s nest from which emerged seventeen black cables. It was the tenant’s internet business. From his single D-Link box, he supplied seventeen homes with ethernet cables for a 1,000 shilling per month fee. For another 2,000 shillings ($25) a month, Fish rented the mattress on the floor. It was a windowless room at ground level near the toilet. The walls were entirely bare, grubby with the routine of men and work. It was a vessel for sleeping, nothing more. Everything spoke of transience. The inhabitants lived in their heads, in the future, elsewhere. In that sense, it was just like the camp.
Opposite Fish’s mattress, behind a plywood sheet for a door, the incessant drip of the shower head mingled with the permanent trickle of the adjacent communal urinal and the tap where women and girls filled buckets for transportation up into the building’s mysterious higher storeys. Each floor was strung with wires and the courtyard so choked with laundry that little natural light made it down to the concrete floor. There was no privacy and his budget was 140 shillings per day ($2), but it was different. Fish had the refugee’s appreciation for solid walls and concrete underfoot and he liked it, even if he wasn’t entirely welcome.
There were around 50,000 official urban refugees and who knew how many more illegally from Dadaab in Nairobi, mostly in Eastleigh, but a refugee card is no protection against police harassment. The Somali inhabitants of Eastleigh had grown used to the constant shuffling of ID cards and papers and the regular, reluctant, handing over of notes to grinning police who laugh and joke even as they rob. For the refugee, like the nomad, the city is hostile.
Still, Fish was out of Dadaab. Nobody knew him here. Even with the routine bribes, at 500 shillings a time it was a cheaper freedom than that on sale in the camps. And to Fish, Eastleigh was opening up a whole new world. He liked the ‘Obama Studio’ hair salon and the ‘Big Mack Two’ restaurant, and even the shebeen where they brewed changa’a, the urban moonshine, its condensing pipes cooling in the toxic ooze of the stinking gully. In the afternoon, the western light caught the yellow walls of the precarious towers with their treacherous balconies stuffed with laundry, jerrycans and sacks of charcoal; it glinted on the roof of the petrol station on the corner of Jogoo (‘Cockerel’) road (where they diluted the fuel with water) and caught the shifting mass of commuters walking down the hill from town after work, tinting tired faces a shining dusty gold. It sometimes felt as if he were part of some grand urban drama of the twenty-first century, and it spurred his dreams. Soon, he would enrol in college for a diploma in business administration and extend his permission to stay in the city, legitimately.
‘When you come, you worry: how will the city treat you?’ So far, the city was being kind.
21
We Are Not Here to Impose Solutions from Afar
A sky of perfect blue curved over the city as London enjoyed an eerie spring ten degrees centigrade above average. People muttered about climate change while removing their cardigans to eat sandwiches in Green Park. And in the Long Room of Lancaster House, suited representatives of fifty-five countries assembled to discuss a dusty war in a hotter place; where climate change was not a guilty pleasure but ‘one of the drivers of conflict’. The London Conference on Somalia of 23 February 2012 was the twentieth international conference convened in as many years to talk about peace in the country. As is the way with international conferences, this one, too, promised to be different.
White men on horses gazed from the oil paintings depicting colonial adventures as the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, opened the five-hour meeting. He acknowledged that international engagement on Somalia for the last twenty years had been ‘sporadic’, and outlined what he saw as opportunities and challenges. ‘We are not here to impose solutions on a country from afar,’ he said. The fact that the final communiqué of the meeting had been leaked to the press ten days earlier somewhat undermined his assertion, and the thrust of its conclusions could be easily deduced from the seating plan. David Cameron was flanked by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, the largest troop contributor to AMISOM, the African Union force that controlled Mogadishu. Then came Hillary Clinton representing the USA, and the Turkish foreign minister. Thirdly, the invaders of Somalia, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and Mwai Kibaki of Kenya. The Prime Minister of Somalia, Abdiweli Ali, was relegated to the fringe. If the people of Dadaab had been watching, they would have been shocked, and then they would have laughed.
In the run-up to the conference, UK Foreign Office officials acknowledged in private that Ethiopia and Kenya were pursuing their own interests in Somalia and were mostly uninterested in peace. ‘But the narrative that Ethiopia and Kenya are helpful on Somalia is accepted as fact at the top,’ said one in a moment of honesty. In short, the West needed people to talk to, even if those people had reasons to be opposed to a peaceful, united Somalia. During its brief thirty-year history before the 1991 collapse, Somalia had waged war twice against Ethiopia and Kenya to try and unite with their kinsmen living inside the fictitious borders of those two countries, borders negotiated in that very building. The irony! But such basic questions are not for international occasions; they must remain afternoon fodder for the tea-shops of Dadaab and Mogadishu. A cartoon in a Somali paper had it right: the leaders gripping knives and forks around the Lancaster House conference table and the map of Somalia a steak.
President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya had no need to talk of borders; to him that was history. He reserved his patrician monosyllables for an attack on Dadaab: ‘The refugee camps are overcrowded,’ he noted, rising in his grey pinstripe suit, probably tailored down the road in Jermyn Street. ‘[They] have caused huge environmental degradation, have led to growing tensions with host populations and are infiltrated by extremists. Therefore, the humanitarian actors should now take advantage of the areas secured from the al-Shabaab to resettle these populations.’ He wanted the refugees to go. It was the Jubaland Initiative in action.
The Kenyan government seems to have an institutional antipathy towards the Somalis. Not at the level of the individual, but a memory inscribed in forgotten dusty files, of Garissa Primary school where hundreds of Somalis were interned and killed in 1980, of blood-soaked tarmac at the Wagalla Airstrip where thousands were executed in 1984, of a litany of collective punishments against whole communities that continues to this day. It is the fear of its own crimes metabolized into hate.
Until very recently, there was no such thing as Somalia, only Somaliweyn – the Somali people – and the land belonged to God alone. The journey that the refugees had made across the plain, barely a century ago, would have crossed no borders. But ever since the colonial treaties of the 1890s, made under those same chandeliers in Lancaster House, the Ogaden was now part of Ethiopia and Dadaab was in Kenya. Fully one quarter of Kenya and one quarter of Ethiopia is traditional Somali grazing land. A third of the people of the Somali nation reside outside the borders of the state.
Kenya has always feared the fifth column of people whom it had denied the right to secede. When it watched the desperate people crawling across the desert when the rains failed, the Kenyan government saw not indigenes moving upon their ancestral land but invaders. Invaders, indistinguishable from its own Somali population.
The status quo in Dadaab is dependent upon not recognizing the refugees as humans. Because to do so would be to acknowledge that they have rights. And to recognize those rights would be to occasi
on a reckoning with history that would be too traumatic. It would see the land that the camps occupy as ancestral Somali land. It would render the border that makes the refugees foreign a sham. And it would make the conditions under which they live a crime. Such a reckoning would tear the very state apart. And so the refugees must, at all costs, be demonized. Kibaki was only stating what was necessary.
Kenya has had its own problems with home-grown terrorism in response to its terrible record, so focusing on al-Shabaab and implicating the refugees was also useful. It was a move the other African leaders present knew well: all of them struggled with marginalized and brutalized insurgent minorities of their own. Domestic uprisings such as the one in northern Uganda or those in the Oromia, Gambella or Ogaden regions of Ethiopia were best addressed, they all agreed, through the lens of the ‘war on terror’. And for the Somali President, simplifying the complex and shifting clan alliances with al-Shabaab into a single terrorist threat was an essential part of maintaining international support.
‘We are scared,’ he said in his remarks; ‘today we are looking for security.’
His wish was granted: the key outcomes of the London conference were military. More troops, more training, more guns, more money. The Kenyan, Ugandan and Ethiopian contributors to AMISOM pledged more men while the internationals supplied the weapons and the finance. Some efforts were made to impose a financial management board on the Somali government but it resisted the plan. A UN report that followed the conference explained why: between 2009 and 2011 over 70 per cent of development funds allocated to Somalia had gone missing. A year after the London conference, another report noted that the Central Bank of Somalia had been turned into a ‘slush fund’ from which most withdrawals were for private purposes. At the same time, the UK would quietly admit that nearly a million dollars of aid had ended up in the hands of al-Shabaab. Just like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and many other wars, the wiles of Somalia resisted the efforts of the West to press guns and money into the ‘right’ hands. Somali troops trained and armed with foreign cash switched sides all the time, as did the politicians that controlled them. The only ones enforcing any kind of stability in Mogadishu were the Ugandans and Burundians of the AMISOM peacekeeping force. And so, when faced with AMISOM’s regular killing of civilians and their casual consumption of women and girls in their fortified airport base, the Western powers felt obliged to politely look away.
