City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  Before, people had been accustomed to travelling to the camps and staying with relatives for a week, re-registering their cards and then returning to their farms in Somalia or to the city with their fake ID or their Kenyan resident’s permit bought with a bribe. But now the UN was getting wise and had planned a new system, the ‘biometric’. A crack team of consultants for the World Food Programme flew in to oversee the rollout of the new biometric system. WFP was also facing a funding crunch (something they kept to themselves at that point); it needed to cut costs and that meant reducing the number of people it was feeding.

  For months, hundreds of temporary workers had bent over hot computers from six a.m. to five p.m., as noisy crowds filed through another set of enormous warehouses, wire stays squeaking in the wind and loudspeakers popping and crackling at the long lines of people baking and waiting in the dust. They took fingerprints as well as photographs and only holders of the new machine-readable cards would be allowed to collect the rations. The established refugees didn’t like it: they considered collecting food a waste of their time. Many among the middle classes hadn’t been to the food distribution warehouses in years, decades even, they simply rented out their card to a shopkeeper who paid them a percentage of the value of the food. And then there were the brokers who had bought up the cards of people leaving the camp and ran a business collecting and wholesaling relief food far and wide; some had as many as a thousand cards each. The biometric, the UN hoped, was going to put an end to all the cheating. The refugees, however, saw it as part of the same over-arching plot: to relentlessly squeeze them until they went back to Somalia.

  On 18 July the verification process for Hagadera had been completed and 21,991 who hadn’t shown up were struck off the register. A similar number had been removed from the lists in Dagahaley, Ifo 1 and Ifo 2. UNHCR staff were confidently predicting that they would reduce the official size of Dadaab by 20 per cent. When the UN announced that by 1 September the old cards would not function at all, the non-resident refugees had panicked and the camp was full. Every bus arriving from down Kenya and each shack and tent was bulging with visitors trying to get their cards reinstated. ‘If we simply stopped all the buses arriving from Garissa and Nairobi, we could reduce the population of the camps by half!’ laughed one UN staff member.

  They came from all corners, from as far away as Mogadishu even. Dadaab is a major part of the coping mechanisms for the vulnerable across a whole region. Guled wished that Maryam would come so she could sign over her card to him. He thought about asking the block leader to vouch for him saying that his wife had had an operation and that he must collect the food for her, but the man had a habit of discriminating against people not from his clan. ‘The soil belongs to us,’ he was known to have said; like most of the block leaders, he was a member of the dominant Aulihan, a powerful influence in the camp. It was the block leaders that had threatened some refugees not to use the new system and had stymied cooperation with the UN. They represented the vested interests, the brokers holding all the fake cards. But the UN was standing firm.

  ‘We are men of steel!’ the UN staff joked over beers in their Pumzika bar. The authorities were braced for trouble.

  From Salidley, six months after he had taken his remaining family north, Nisho’s father-in-law returned to secure his card. He looked older and greyer, but he was happy and well. He stayed a week, sleeping in the house with Billai and Nisho and talking in the evenings: stories of freedom, of cultivating your own food, milking your own animals, and of tragedy. The village had pooled their resources for their first season back but all their collective crops had been eaten by a plague of birds. Nisho had had to send his father-in-law the fare for the vehicle to come back to the camp.

  To allow a family member to collect food on your behalf – and to maintain the expatriate posture of one foot in Dadaab and a life elsewhere – you needed an excuse. The most popular one was to claim that you were looking after elderly relatives and so were unable to attend the distribution. This was the story that Billai’s father adopted and it worked. To Nisho’s relief, Billai’s aunt who was still in Ifo was now mandated to haul the sacks of food for a family size 8 to the market instead.

  After a week, the old man returned to Somalia leaving behind him a potent legacy of imaginings. There was peace, he said, under al-Shabaab. ‘Somalia is better than anywhere,’ he said and encouraged his daughter and her new husband to return too. Billai had wanted to return with her father, ‘just to visit,’ she said. ‘Do what you like,’ Nisho had told her. In his view, peace under al-Shabaab was a mirage. It may look like that to you, he told his father-in-law, but not to me. He pretended no power to compel his wife, but he was saved instead by the aunt who, divining something, advised Billai not to travel. Her father went back to Salidley alone but soon he was blessed with news instead: Billai was finally pregnant.

  It had taken ten anxious months for her to conceive. They had both worried that something might have been wrong, but now Nisho’s natural bravado was unchecked: ‘I have shown my manhood!’ he announced to Mahat. The happy news had emerged when Nisho, curious that Billai had gone from using one lemon to three or four with dinner, had discreetly approached the aunt. A single glance from the older woman had confirmed it.

  ‘This is a normal thing, don’t worry,’ the aunt advised Billai. ‘Let it not bring a change in your behaviour, continue with your life. Everybody goes through this.’

  But Billai had insisted on some changes all the same. If Ifo was going to be her home and she was going to raise a family, she wanted a proper house, not something rented. So that was why Nisho now spent his afternoons digging in poles and mudding walls, laying rafters and nailing down tin sheets for a roof. The site of the new house was a semi-circle of ground right next to the old one. As families have grown up and multiplied in the older camps, compounds have been subdivided many times. The UN long ago ceased trying to police construction. Nisho had grumbled about it but he was happy, he paid no mind to the talk of return. Until the UN bulldozed his house and dragged him from the wreckage, he was going nowhere. Pride shone in his face as he bounced around the building site in his dirty LA Lakers T-shirt scavenged from a friend. ‘5 is better than 1,’ it read.

  Next door, Mahat was building too. When he had heard that Nisho was moving he had begged some poles and dug a barrow of mud with a friend and together they had made a bedroom for him in Nisho’s new compound to replace the lean-to. There was a gap in the mud, a kind of window, so the breeze would still whisper through the sticks. Since he had resigned his latest job, he spent a lot of time there lying hungry in the shade.

  For a while he had joined the mill working for Professor White Eyes and it had seemed that the upswing in the economy would benefit him too. At six a.m. he would start in the small tin room of the grinding mill on the back alley in Bosnia, clean the ancient green metal of the machine and then spend the whole day gradually becoming coated in the dust of maize until five p.m. Before Ramadan there was one break, for lunch. The food was muwfo, a mixture of maize and wheat flour ground in the machine, like a chapati but bigger and fatter, eaten with vegetables but never meat. One plate between three people. Not enough, Nisho advised Mahat.

  If he had been paid more, Mahat might have persevered; 100 shillings ($1.25) a day he could have accepted. But often he only got 50 shillings ($0.65) after White Eyes had deducted petrol, lunch and the other expenses of running the mill. White Eyes claimed Mahat earned 150 shillings ($1.8) a day, but Mahat says he never saw that kind of cash. One day during Ramadan, sitting in his new room, he discussed the situation with Nisho. He told him the hours and the pay and the food, and said he felt discouraged.

  ‘Just leave it,’ said Nisho. And the following day, without a word to White Eyes, Mahat stayed at home instead. That had been a few weeks ago. Eid – the end of Ramadan – was coming, people in the camp were weak now, after a month of fasting during daylight hours and praying through the night, at two a.m. and five a.m. F
or Mahat, accustomed to skipping lunch, to have his hunger sanctified by God was a relief. Towards the end of the food cycle, even the evening meal was hard to come by: Mahat’s stepfather had been laid off from the vehicle and his mother did not work, so the rations never lasted the full two weeks. Another reason why he found himself increasingly at Nisho’s.

  Ramadan was also a time when the militias came calling, trying to tempt people with the promise of food and a noble cause to fight for back home. But their presence in the camp made people feel uneasy. The refugees spoke disapprovingly of ‘the children’, as al-Shabaab had come to be called. So the outlaws spread their message surreptiously, on the fringes of the mosques and madrasas; they didn’t have enough support in the camp to attempt to take recruits by force: there would have been uproar. Nisho took a strong stand against the extremists. Mahat, too, was unimpressed. He was tired of sitting idle, but the camp had instilled something in him, a sense of ballast perhaps, a value for his own life, or just a sufficient dose of cynicism to vaccinate him against the glamour and the lies of war. None of his friends was inclined to join either; they were more interested in going back to Somalia to farm. When some of them boasted to others of their plans, Mahat’s girlfriend, the pale child from Hawa Jube, came to him flushed with anxiety.

  ‘Are you going to Somalia?’ she pressed him. ‘If you do, will you marry there?’

  She was in primary school and fourteen years old, but they had already been spending time together hidden in the lean-to or in the compounds of friends, and she was worried that people might have begun to notice. For their generation, there were no restrictions among themselves on what they could do in private, but once a relationship was public, a young person’s virtue was on the line. He reassured her that he was going nowhere, he had no plans to flee; his remaining family were here and he had neither land nor contacts back in Somalia. Even though he was jobless, there was nowhere he could imagine being better off.

  On 4 August, at a conference of countries contributing troops to AMISOM – the African Union peacekeepers in Somalia – President Kenyatta once again spoke of the need for the refugees to go home. But in the dusty north that the president had never visited, the words struggled to find meaning. For Mahat, Ifo was home. If anything, he felt more fatalistic, less motivated to shape his own destiny since the Kenyan government appeared to be intent on shaping it for him.

  Without work, he was hungrier but happier. ‘I was getting money but my body was dying,’ he said of his time at the mill. The dirty jobs in the market had made him black, he said, because the sun was cooking him. Now he was improving his lifestyle, becoming healthier. ‘I am coming back to normal, my skin is getting lighter, when people see me they say, “You are shining, what have you eaten?”’ Away from the struggle of the market, his brain was more settled and he was, strangely, putting on weight. Idleness suited him.

  What he really wanted was to go back to school, but he still hadn’t found a way to pay for exercise books and a uniform, the hidden costs behind the rhetoric of ‘free education’. The religious schools were cheaper; there was no uniform and you wrote on a slate. And that had given rise to a new idea for Mahat: to become a sheikh.

  His family were not particularly religious but, when he was younger, a dedicated uncle had taught him to recite the Koran and the practice had sharpened his memory. In the quiet, hungry days of Ramadan he had begun again and by the end of July he could recite 40 suras of the 114. That was around three hours of chanting. Nothing compared to the five or six needed to sing the whole book. There were legions of boys younger than him who would be competing with each other soon at Eid but if Mahat stuck at it and avoided getting the pale girl pregnant and being forced back to the market to look after her, he might be in with a chance next year. Meanwhile, the annual dilemma of Eid-el-Fitr approached.

  In the new hut, Mahat and Nisho wondered where they could find meat to celebrate. In a few days’ time, God willing, a sickle of a moon would appear to signify the end of Ramadan and those with means in the camp would feast and those without would try and get themselves invited to the house of someone who did. All Nisho’s resources had been taken up with the construction. Mahat had nothing but the oversized clothes and decaying pink flip-flops that he wore; even if he had a few coins, the priority would be a gift for his sweetheart. The Turkish Eid of the camel when Nisho and Billai were married was now two years ago; the memory had calcified into legend. There would certainly not be another feast like it for them this year.

  Nisho and Mahat were not alone. Many, if not most, in the camp would not be feasting. The annual drive to raise money for the unfortunates in the new camps of Ifo 2 and Kambi Os had begun. In the mosques, the sheikhs told stories of people breaking their fasts with bark from trees, or soup made from stones. And the wealthier refugees, moved and ashamed at this time of alms-giving, donated over 200 sacks of rice. The madrasa teachers in every block were charged with the task of identifying the vulnerable ones. The really desperate had nothing to hide, they were known. If one could afford to dissemble, to maintain a public pride despite a howling belly, then one was not considered needy. Mahat was hungry but he would never consider himself worthy of charity; hunger was normal. Nisho, too, was a master at keeping up appearances. When asked where he would be feasting for Eid, his reply glittered with multiple truths: ‘We are only waiting for the moon,’ he said.

  34

  Eid el-Fitr

  The night of Wednesday 7 August was murky and black. A crisp wind transported a curtain of perpetual cloud across the sky, veiling the drama of the crepuscular moon and creating a problem for the mullahs whose job it was to spot it. A breeze at night was a superstitious thing; the dark desert became huge and frightening, full of the possibility of criminals, monsters and magic. Just after nine the news went around that the new moon had been sighted in Garissa, and in other parts of northern Kenya. But an hour later, the radio struck a note of doubt. The Chief Kadhi of Kenya said on air that there had been no confirmed sighting of the moon and asked Kenyans to defer their prayers until Friday. In Dadaab and elsewhere though, the faithful did not wait. That year, in Kenya, Ramadan ended in confusion.

  The morning of Eid, in Dadaab town, rang with excitement. By nine o’clock the street was a parade of women in finery, men in pressed and shining kanzus and children in box-fresh outfits and shiny new shoes. Shops were flung open to the milky sky as sweaty hands exchanged dirty notes for all the last-minute preparations for the festivities. The town was quivering with commerce. Children raced across the road shooting each other with that year’s toy of choice: plastic guns that emitted a sound and flashed red when fired. No one commented on the irony apart from the town madman who pointed his finger and pulled an imaginary trigger at the kids. He was enjoying himself.

  A man of bottle-green eyes and ageless features, with grey-brown hair that seemed matted with tar and wrapped in a rag headband of a matching hue, he wore tyre sandals and a tin can attached with string to his shorts which he held to his ear and chattered into as if it were a mobile phone. Leaning on his knotted stick, he wandered down the thoroughfare gathering soft drinks from every shop. On this day, no one could refuse. Outside one of the shops a disabled man in a wheelchair was sipping a gift of Fanta too. The businessmen and shop-owners themselves were shaved and oiled and dressed in expensive silk, dispensing largesse and gleefully pressing hands and praising God. Feast days were a time for politics too. The businessmen, forgetting their sins and whatever ugly compromises underwrote their fortunes, went with the crowd to Ifo, where the mass prayer was being held.

  On most days of the year, the Kenyans from Dadaab town disdained the camps and restricted their contact to essential business. But on Eid, a festival whose unique power and excitement lay in the huge numbers of people praying together in one place, the well-dressed host community piled into minibuses and trucks and joined the refugees on the plain at the edge of the camp where the sheikhs had hoisted a loudspeaker into a tre
e.

  Nisho had heard a rumour in the market in the days before that the Wahabis were planning to usurp the location of the mass prayer. That, this year, they would have more adherents than the traditional Sufi majority. But while the rate of converts joining their sect was picking up, Sufi dominance was still total.

  At ten o’clock, lines of men facing the north rippled into the distance as far as the eye could see. Mats covered the ground. A bare patch of sand separated the men from the women who lined up in an equally uncountable mass. Tens of thousands of people, arms by their sides, standing, silent. An army of glittering, shimmering colour in the weak morning light. In the expectant silence, the birds sounded like a riot over the rhythmic cough of the generator that powered the speaker. Then it crackled into piercing life with the call to prayer and the incantation from the sheikh. The response from the massed umma was a soft wave of sound breaking over the heads of the worshippers as the lines knelt, folding like fabric, five times.

  The sheikh uttered the ritual blessing giving thanks for the end of Ramadan, and then it was done. The vehicles that had been parked randomly to one side in the bush started up and the moving crowd looked, from a height, like water, spilling and breaking on the plain. Dust rose gently in a powdered mist and hung, shifting in the breeze. The lucky ones moved off to compounds rich with the smells of roasting meat and the chalky tang of sacrificial blood drying to a crust on the sand.

  Nisho was tired, he hadn’t slept. He had been offloading sugar and potatoes all night, but he was happy. There had been many trucks and now he had 700 shillings ($9) in his pocket for the big day. From the prayer Nisho walked through the bustle of Bosnia in his best clothes: a T-shirt with buttons at the neck, clean grey pinstripe trousers and big red-leather sandals. Beside him, Mahat was smiling in a new shirt that a friend had given him over his dirty vest, trousers with no button that flew open at the waist, held together with a webbing belt in rainbow colours borrowed from Nisho and dusty espadrilles that were his new footwear of the moment, until they too disintegrated and he begged something else.