by Ben Rawlence
As she waved them off, Billai was sad. Her world was being torn in half. She had come to Dadaab with one family and now they were leaving her in the hands of another. She wasn’t sure she’d made the right decision to stay. Despite advances by Kenya and AMISOM in southern Somalia throughout January and February, al-Shabaab was still in control in her small hometown, but the family was poor, and with little to give the insurgents, they had little to fear. In some sense they looked forward to the security of a stable government. At least back in Salidley a woman could sleep without fear of being raped.
Shortly after Billai’s family had gone, the sheikhs called everyone to the football field beside the thorny graveyard for mass prayers to end the rape epidemic. Nisho and Billai went. For them it was a personal matter; Billai’s friend Selma, who had undergone the ordeal with the torch, would be there too. For two days residents of Ifo 1 and 2 had been fasting. By ten o’clock in the morning, thousands filled the plain, spilling among the graves, onto the road and into the fringes of the bush. The turnout was impressive, mobilizing far more than the Kenyan general election campaign that was nearing its climax. People had had enough: families had nowhere else to turn. God was their last resort.
Selma had been taken to the hospital by her family, but, after a brief examination, she was discharged. There is a rape survivors’ clinic at the Hawa Jube hospital and a well-funded counselling office although few women avail themselves of their services. After two months, the family brought her back. Selma was pregnant. When interviewed, she said she had conceived from the rape. The elders called another meeting and decided that to mitigate the shame, Selma must be married to the boy that had previously tried to seduce her. Since the rape he had shown no interest, but on the day of the mass prayer he was also present on the football field. He was now her husband.
Up to the temporary loudspeaker system stepped Sheikh Mohammed, the leading moderate cleric of the camps. He wore a red-checked head-dress in the Saudi style and a white jellaba over black socks and shoes. In his hand he clutched the tools of his trade: a wooden staff, a Koran and a mobile phone. The crowd bent their heads and murmured in response, ‘Aleykum Salaam.’ In a commanding voice, he led the prayer and then he called down a curse on all those perpetrating the crimes against the women of the camps: ‘May God punish them and take them to hellfire. Let them die soon and may their flesh be torn to pieces. May they surrender!’
As the prayers ended and Nisho walked back to B block, there was a commotion by the little makeshift shops on the road from Hawa Jube to Bosnia, where the drivers usually bought their damp bundles of khat wrapped in banana leaves. Kenyan Police Reservists (basically volunteers with guns) had discovered two men with five-litre jerrycans filled with ammunition. The oncoming crowd was unforgiving. Armed gangs were blamed for the rape scourge and the men were severely beaten before real police arrived and took the wounded bodies to hospital and then to jail. Some days later, groups of vigilante refugees turned over several suspected gangsters to police. Prayers of thanks were given in the mosques for what was taken as a sign of God’s providence, but was more probably due to the traditional fear of a sheikh’s curse that still carried weight in the camps. In any case, the episode seemed to bring the rape crisis to a close and the number of attacks fell after that. For Billai’s family though, and for Selma, it was too late. A few days after the prayer, Selma and her new husband went back to Somalia, too, preferring the uncertainty of the war to the shame and the memories that were ever present in the camp.
∗
A month passed. The rains stopped. The Hagar came again. Billai’s mood would not lift. She hated the dust storms brought by the wind. From the unceasing struggle in either mud or dust, there seemed no respite. Without her family, Ifo was empty. Staying in the camp seemed harder when considered against the alternative of a life back home, even one under the authority of al-Shabaab. To accept the limitations of Dadaab one needed to imagine that the alternative was worse. And as conditions in the camp deteriorated further, the demands placed on the imagination stretched credulity. For a young girl with an independent mind, it was almost impossible.
But for Nisho, joining the in-laws back in Somalia was not an option. He had no income there, and no hope of one. He earned something in Ifo, even though inflation and insecurity were rapidly depleting its value. One day in April, Nisho brought the 200 shillings profit he had made in the market back to their home in block B: the humble compound, the small mud house with its tarpaulin roof, bivouac kitchen covered in sacks, cardboard boxes and plastic bags and the laundry drying on the sparse thorn fence. Billai flew into a rage. With her green polyester veil trembling about her, she threw the money back in his face.
‘How much do things cost?’ she screamed. ‘Milk? Sugar? Shall I cook my own body?’
Nisho tried to explain that it was the market that made the prices go up and not him. But Billai did not want a lesson in economics. She wanted money.
When he fought with Billai, Nisho usually went next door into the little lean-to made of sticks and a plastic sheet, to mull over his troubles with his sidekick, Mahat. Mahat had problems of his own. His mother had found a new man, a ‘turnboy’, working on the refugee minibuses that connected the camps, whom Mahat had hoped might fund a uniform and exercise books so that he could return to school. But when he approached the man for money, he told Mahat he had none to spare. It pained Mahat to see the man spending money on other things and so he had taken again to sleeping at Nisho’s place.
On an old and sunken mattress in the lean-to, the two boys lounged and chatted late into the night. ‘She may divorce me because of poverty, if it continues like this. I know she will ask for it,’ Nisho worried. ‘I was married by the grace of Turkey last time. So if she runs away where will I get another one from?’ If he took the long view, and placed all his troubles and his poverty in context, Nisho might have discerned a grim pattern; one that had no relief. Hope lived within a shorter time frame: it was less depressing to find cause and effect in current events. And so Nisho’s life was a routine lament about the mysterious secret machinations of the economy that affected the ebb and flow of trucks into Bosnia, and thus the relative harmony of his domestic situation. This time he placed the blame for his marital tensions squarely on the election.
The northern counties had voted as one for ‘Jubilee’, as the new Kenyan government was being called, although ‘voted’ is not the right word. Business and politics in Kenya are inseparable. People said that the sugar trade, control of the northern smuggling routes, had been mortgaged to buy the election. Now the cartels had to make their investments pay. And this was Nisho’s problem. The sugar trade was haywire. Competition didn’t take place on the terrain of products and pricing, or even through the ballot box. Instead, gunmen came to town. Fifteen attacks hit Garissa and North Eastern Province in the first five months of 2013. Masked assailants opened fire in restaurants, threw grenades at police cars, shot public officials in broad daylight, and machine-gunned ten at the Holiday Inn in the middle of Garissa town.
Nisho didn’t care who was President. He paid little attention when the vastly expensive computerized voting system collapsed amid accusations of corruption, nor when the final result was announced several days later, against a backdrop of a large electronic screen displaying numbers that did not add up and about which none of the attendant journalists asked any questions. It mattered little to him that the Jubilee coalition had won. The rest of Kenya was divided between those who believed the poll was genuine and those who agreed with leading anti-corruption campaigner, John Githongo, that, ‘It was stolen massively, and stolen well.’ But Nisho was less bothered about corruption than its consequences. And he drew connections that the analysts in Nairobi didn’t see.
The stain of sugar was all over the election. The new mayor of Nairobi, Evans Kidero, was a former managing director of Kenya’s largest sugar producer, Mumias. A newspaper report that nervous editors refused to publish claimed tha
t the one billion shillings he used to purchase the nomination and the election had been acquired by slowing production at Mumias as part of an orchestrated cornering of the market. Aden Duale, the first-time MP and sugar scion from Garissa, emerged as the House Majority Leader in parliament, his inexperience apparently no bar to the role. The refugees nicknamed Duale ‘Aden Bomb’, since they blamed him for the insecurity in the camps. Whatever sugar deals had been done in order to pay for the election, it was not good for the economy of Bosnia.
‘Before Uhuru came to power, I used to unload seven vehicles a day,’ Nisho complained. ‘Sugar, rice, pasta, milk, shoes, mostly from Somalia. Now it is only one.’ Nisho sensed a plot. Indeed price fixing between the cartels was common. Since the Kenyans took control of Kismayo, the cost of a fifty-kilo sack of sugar soared from 4,000 shillings ($50) to 6,000 ($70). In the market, a kilo had jumped from 90 shillings to 130, and from there inflation galloped ahead. The price of a sack of maize had doubled too, from 3,000 shillings to 6,000. That was why Billai stomped around amid the blackened pots in the compound of B block and why Nisho feared going home at the end of a long day.
The day after Billai threw money at him, Nisho told his fellow market porters of his wife’s attitude. It turned out he was not alone. Everyone was suffering from the fall in income. Among themselves, in their porters’ association, they agreed to raise the price of their labour. That day they unloaded a vehicle but, afterwards, the money in Nisho’s hand was the same. He was nostalgic for the old days, ‘when Ifo was Ifo’, he said. In the evening, when he went back to the compound and tried to explain to Billai, she exploded before he had even finished, hurling the money at his chest.
‘If you throw money at me again, I will report you to your relatives!’ he said, but his threat failed to interrupt the torrent of her words. Nisho raised his voice instead.
‘If you don’t shut up I will divorce you!’ he shouted. And then he was out of the house and in the lean-to with Mahat. Mahat was struggling for work too, but he tried to console his friend and mentor. He put it down to the windy season. When the monsoon blew north, it was always bad for business, he said.
‘Maybe the population of the camps is decreasing too,’ Mahat speculated. ‘I’ve seen so many going home from Ifo 2.’ He had been spending more and more time there, pushing wheelbarrows a sweaty mile across the scrub to earn twenty shillings ($0.25) a time. At a tap stand in Hawa Jube, he had met a very pale girl, ‘whiter than a white person’, he told Nisho. Amina was fourteen, her breasts had just started to show. He wanted to marry her when he grew up. Nisho promised to help him with the dowry, even as he cautioned his young friend against the terrorism of womankind.
∗
What Nisho attributed to the irrational vagaries of the female species was in fact a problem familiar to many married couples in the camp. Romance places heavy demands on the future. Making the intolerable situation of the camp into a tolerable domestic reality for the present was a gymnastic trick that broke many marriages and tested reserves of patience. Frustration found a ready outlet in domestic violence: quarrels (and bruises) were for some a regular part of daily life.
Monday and Muna were suffering from the tyranny of an uncertain horizon and their strategies for coping with the wait were not complementary. The delay was slowly destroying them.
Guled and Maryam were also struggling. In January, during the hottest period of the year shortly after Maryam’s mother had gone back to Mogadishu, a baby boy had arrived. That birth too had been by Caesarean and this time the doctor advised Maryam not to carry anything on her head for two years. The necessary daily jobs of the camp such as fetching water were beyond her, and she no longer had her mother there to help out with housework and with money. Without work and unable to assist, Guled lived under a cloud of shame, a shame for which Maryam appeared to have little sympathy. Going home became the only topic of conversation and when he tried to explain his fears about al-Shabaab in Mogadishu she told him he was exaggerating. To Guled, it just seemed that Maryam was becoming more difficult. What Nisho had in mind, though, in his warning to Mahat was the famous story of Professor White Eyes. It was a tale that the men of the camp repeated with glee for it seemed to confirm, from the perspective of a humiliated male, the essential wickedness of women.
At first things between him and Habibo seemed good. White Eyes had eventually found a job well insulated from the climatic and political ups and downs of the economy: running a grinding mill in Bosnia that turned the surplus yellow maize of America’s Midwest into cornflour from which refugees of every community – the Sudanese, the Congolese, the Ethiopians – could make their traditional dishes. The tall Anuak from Gambella in Ethiopia with their hair braided into electric patterns were the most demanding customers: they liked the mill to be spotlessly clean. So he cleaned, and he oiled and maintained the machine, earning himself another new nickname: kawaingris, meaning ‘spanner’. It was in honour of his ability to open anything, to adapt to any kind of life.
Early on, he nearly lost a hand in the mill but soon he got the hang of it and every day he brought 200 shillings home to block E2. His wife Habibo wasn’t happy but she said nothing. White Eyes thought he had a partner who would help him in solving life’s problems, perhaps in saving a little to start another business, to provide for the coming family that he longed for so deeply. But Habibo had other plans. For nearly a year he wondered why his wife was not with child. He knew that the problem could be with either of them, so he kept quiet and persisted in his hope, until one day he overhead a fight. Habibo was quarrelling with their neighbour over a pair of shoes. Habibo had borrowed the shoes but not returned them and now, it seemed, they had found their way into the communal pit latrine. Habibo was pleading innocence.
‘You cannot be trusted!’ screamed the neighbour. ‘You are a liar and a cheat. You even injected yourself and cheated your husband!’ White Eyes’s heart missed a beat. He pretended he hadn’t heard. Later, he sought out the neighbour, apologized on behalf of his headstrong wife and promised to buy her new shoes. Then he broached the real issue: ‘In the name of God, what were you talking about injections, tell me the reality?’ he begged. The neighbour was only too happy to oblige.
Habibo had been going to the hospital in secret to have contraceptive injections, without telling her husband. The neighbour had seen her more than once, while White Eyes had been at work; she even offered to introduce him to the doctor who had injected her. He was furious. He vowed to take a knife and slit the throat of the doctor. But then he calmed down and took the bus to Hagadera camp to stay with a friend. After a week, he returned to confront Habibo. At sunset, when she laid down to sleep next to him, White Eyes asked her for an explanation. She didn’t try and lie.
‘I am not going to give birth in this fucking refugee camp!’ she said. It was, of course, an entirely rational choice. But although many women might have agreed with Habibo’s attitude, few had the temerity to insist on it. She had turned out to be not at all the pliant young girl of White Eyes’ imagining.
In the morning he told Habibo to pack her clothes and marched her back to the house of her family. When he met her father in the compound he took a pen and paper out of his pocket, asked the father to call two witnesses and signed three times that he divorced her.
‘But why, what happened?’ the father asked when they were done.
‘Ask her,’ he said. And with that, he rushed back to work at the grinding mill. For weeks he was, he said, ‘out of service’, like a mobile phone switched off, his battery empty, his heart most thoroughly broken. Confined to the endless stony present, another marriage had bit the desert dust.
28
Becoming a Leader
Next to the youth centre in Hagadera is an octagonal building built half of brick and half of timber, roofed with tin sheets and with steel mesh for windows. Stepping inside out of the glare of the sun, in the momentary black before your eyes adjust, it seems like a cage. It is called the
CARE social hall, named for the agency that built it. Outside, a line of young boys sat on a low wall, the ruins of a previous humanitarian venture. One wore a Gabon football shirt, one was dressed in Real Madrid, completing his outfit with a pair of shorts and women’s platform sandals with little plastic heels. Another was more ragged: no shoes, dirty shorts and a green T-shirt whose faded message was no longer legible. Their eyes flicked from side to side as an electric piano, speakers, table and chairs were carried in and set up. There was going to be a rare show and the boys were not going to miss it.
It was nine a.m. A gang of birds occupying two low trees next to the hall made a loud chorus of ‘boo-wop, boo-wop’. Tawane was inside the office, making last-minute changes to his speech. Two girls and two boys sat at the controls of the computers in the centre, delicately, reverentially, stroking the mouse back and forth, while members of the youth umbrella bustled about organizing. From the hall came the squeal of a distorted electric piano and then the clash of a drum machine and the screech of feedback. The musicians were warming up. After another hour and a half all was ready.
In the hall, about forty well-dressed young people, earnest and freshly barbered, sat on a circle of chairs facing a high table upon which lay the piano and a microphone. A large woman in a blue hijab got up to open the meeting and beside her a tall handsome man in a shiny brown shirt prepared to translate. It was Fish. Back from Nairobi, he had immediately returned to the fold of the ’92 group while he considered what to do next: whether to stay with his daughters and his mother in the camp, or whether to try and continue with his studies. As the best English speaker, he was central to the youth umbrella’s internationalist ambition to conduct the proceedings in English. As the meeting’s opening remarks slipped into a soporific rhythm, a boy in a sparkling white kanzu with pomaded hair made eyes at a slim girl in a yellow polka-dot dress and a brown veil. She looked down first and smiled later.
