City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  There were beeping horns, a flood of men dressed in white and down the alleyways boys and girls jostled around the juice- and sweet-sellers, eager to spend the festive coins they had been given by parents, neighbours and relatives. In the thick of an alley was White Eyes, passing out little plastic bags of juice fist over fist from a huge blue cool-box. Ever the opportunist, he had bought a vat of concentrate for 500 shillings and was selling the bags at 20 shillings a piece; he was making a killing. The children tittered and pressed around like birds pecking at seeds. Within twenty minutes, he had sold the lot.

  An hour later, Professor White Eyes joined the crowd of men drinking tea with Aden, a businessman from the market who had a low hut in block E2 near the police station with wire windows and a USAID tin door. In a stroke of eleventh-hour luck, Nisho and Mahat had been invited to come and feast. But it was also an awkward coincidence. Mahat had not seen White Eyes since he had failed to show up at the grinding mill for work. But the ebullient professor made no comment on the incident and Mahat maintained a shy quiet sitting on a rush mat in the corner as White Eyes regaled the guests with a parable about Ifo while they waited for the women of the household to prepare the food.

  He told a story of a woman who demanded gold for her wedding but when the parcels of gifts arrived on the day, there were fine clothes and other things, but no jewellery. Outside, drums were playing, people were waiting for the bride to show her face. She called the husband-to-be on the phone and asked, ‘What happened?’

  ‘I couldn’t afford it,’ he said. ‘I am a poor man!’

  ‘Then I am not leaving the house!’ she said and switched off her phone. Her mother tried to persuade her, others came, but the lady would not budge. The groom was in a fever of embarrassment.

  ‘There’s a saying,’ White Eyes said. ‘Bring gold or leave my ass alone.’ His male audience collapsed with laughter and knowing.

  He told how, while the stubborn bride remained inside, the family debated what to do. The clan was expecting a marriage. They decided that the groom must marry the lady-in-waiting; the bride’s best friend, and so the next day there was another wedding, another camel was slaughtered and the best friend and the man were married. When the jilted bride heard what had happened, she left her house in a rage and went to the police, paid a bribe and had the man arrested. But his family paid another bribe to have the man released. Later, the man and the best friend were resettled to America and the proud woman married someone else, a cook, who slaughtered not a camel but two goats at her wedding.

  Everyone laughed. It was a familiar theme, the vindication of a poor man’s worth, and an example of a universal myth essential for social harmony: that social mobility is possible, even in Dadaab. White Eyes’ choice of story was telling. He had marriage on the brain. He was dressed in stonewashed jeans of a crazy pattern with the word ‘fashion’ embroidered in velour along the leg. His love of vivid colour had resulted in a multi-coloured shirt of exploding starbursts and large puffy trainers with the name ‘OAT’ printed to look like ‘CAT’ pasted a brilliant white. Such finery on Eid could pass without suspicion. But he was in fact dressed for a wedding, a secret one, in Hagadera, later that day. He had already phoned his friend and told him to prepare the mullah. This time, he later explained, the girl called Fatuma was not hazardously beautiful and she was partially educated, sufficient to tame any natural anarchy although not enough to encourage independent thinking: ‘She failed Standard 8 and she wants Mr White Eyes!’ he laughed. The catastrophe with Habibo had not dented his optimism.

  Outside the hut the clatter of pans announced the presence of the women preparing the food for Aden’s guests. The compound of a relatively rich man in Dadaab differed little from that of a poor one. The walls of the huts were still made of mud and the roof tin, although there was a satellite dish and a television. The codes of wealth in the camp are more evident in electronics, clothes and food. Aden had a wide range of outfits and, on that day, he wore bright-blue Adidas slippers.

  Aden served more tea and the conversation turned, as it invariably did when Somali men were gathered together, to politics and tribe. White Eyes was forceful again: ‘I don’t believe in Somaliland, in Puntland … these federal states. I believe in one country!’ Nisho meanwhile sang Rahanweyn traditional songs to himself in the corner as a kind of theatrical protest at the topic, but he got animated at the mention of federalism.

  ‘I need Ahmed Madobe!’ he said. Nisho was not from the Ogadeen clan of Madobe, the new President of Jubaland. His enthusiasm was based on sugar: Madobe was Kenya’s proxy and he was a kingpin of the sugar trade. Jubaland was good for trade and for Bosnia market, he said. It was the perspective of someone with no intention of going anywhere else. While the others talked about what was good for Somalia – an inexhaustible subject – Nisho’s point of view was firmly rooted in Dadaab. Having made his point, he lost interest and went back to singing once again. Mahat pressed himself into the corner, smiling and saying nothing.

  White Eyes droned on, heedless of his own proverb, ‘speaking without thought is like shooting without aim,’ until the turgid political talk was broken by the arrival of food. A woman’s voice called from outside the hut and Aden rose to ferry in the dishes: the women would not enter the men’s house. They would feast separately, in the kitchen, on the poorer cuts of meat or the leftovers. Aden laid out a thermos of soup, two huge platters of chips and spaghetti, a bowl of pilau rice with roasted meat mixed in and a stew of goat, juice with ice in a glass jug and bananas piled high.

  White Eyes continued trying to make his points as the talking unravelled and concentration settled firmly on the food. Nisho zeroed in on the meat, helped himself to a large joint and set to work. Quiet descended and two circles of hands made a blur of the food scooping it up and away. Ten minutes later, all the guests were reclining, flecks of rice scattered on faces and the floor while Nisho, back hunched, steadily chewed through the pile of meat remaining. Someone made a comment.

  ‘I am a porter! I need to eat a lot,’ Nisho snapped and then let out a long burp for effect.

  White Eyes though was quiet; he was late. His phone rang and a female voice could be heard on the other end. Soon after, he made his excuses and scuttled out. Nisho was still eating. When he finally finished, the others rose and soon the party was over. Aden was expecting a female visitor and most of the others had girlfriends to go and see too. Nisho had begun to fall asleep amid the empty plates but he dragged himself up and went home to Billai who had shared a more simple meal with her aunt. Mahat went to visit the pale girl at Hawa Jube.

  Also in Hawa Jube, Guled was visiting too. ‘My wife is away,’ he told himself. ‘A man cannot stay alone’ – a common saying among the boys of the camps to justify things that religion forbade. On this most sacred day in the calendar, the camp was at its most profane, crawling with furtive couplings.

  Across the camp in Hagadera, White Eyes’ friend had failed to arrange a sympathetic sheikh. The mullah refused to do a secret marriage without the girl’s father present and, ‘because I was feeling hot,’ White Eyes said, he had to scramble an alternative back in Ifo, a sheikh called Hibil. Hibil was well liked by the youth for his willingness to perform ceremonies in a rush for a fee and in a simple hut he sat the couple down: a man nearing thirty in a multi-colour outfit and a girl of eighteen covered in a hijab of dark cloth.

  ‘Name?’ said Hibil. They told him.

  ‘Block?’ They answered.

  ‘Do you need this woman?’

  ‘Yes,’ said White Eyes.

  ‘Do you need this man?’ the sheikh asked Fatuma.

  ‘Yes.’

  Then, Nincah, the practice of reciting verses over the couple’s joined hands, and they were man and wife.

  One block away, in E1, Muna wasn’t eating anything. She was spending Eid with a group of her friends but their feast consisted of khat and brandy. They were sitting in a house that was a cross between a hut and a tent, with a mud
wall and partial roof of tin but bordered on two sides with the remains of an antique UN tent. Thorns poked through the roof where a single yellow bulb burned. On the canvas in pen someone had written ‘L.R.G.’ and, beneath, an explanation of the initials: ‘Life Research Group’. On the ground against one wall was a foam mattress, a plastic chair with broken legs jammed into the dirt and a sack of potatoes. Scattered around were jerrycans that served as chairs. On a charcoal stove in the corner was balanced a kettle full of tea from which the toddler Christine could now pour herself a cup. The ground was covered with the shredded stalks of khat and empty bottles of spirits as well as a child’s bottle. The air was thick with conversation and cigarette smoke.

  The house belonged to Muna’s new boyfriend, an Ethiopian called Gemekis, a raggedy-looking guy with few teeth, a straggly beard and a pot belly. He was a veteran of Dadaab since 2001 and spoke Somali, Swahili and English as well as his native Oromo and Amharic. He wore a baseball cap and a T-shirt with the word ‘DAWGZ’ in large letters on the back. He was one of the chief members of the Life Research Group who spent their days in khat- and alcohol-fuelled analysis. Another was Sweetee and another Amina, a Somali woman with an enormous afro that she refused to cover who lived next door and who now poked her head into the hut. She was dressed in a tight-fitting patterned green jump-suit and she wanted to know if anyone had seen her child. No one had. Muna wore a red skirt and a figure-hugging black T-shirt. When Umaima and Christine whined that they were hungry, she handed them some of the money that Monday had given her for Eid and sent them to the restaurant at the edge of the block. Then she got back to chewing.

  She had been staying in the house a month, ever since Monday broke the door and Gemekis’s teeth searching in a rage for Muna. ‘You are taking my wife!’ Monday shouted at him. But that day she had been somewhere else chewing khat with Sweetee.

  ‘You say I am friends with all these men!’ Muna screamed at Monday. ‘Felix, Gemekis, who else? You broke his teeth so it must be true. Now, I will make it true!’

  Gemekis wanted to report the assault but her friends in the police station warned Muna, ‘If we arrest Monday, your case for Australia will be destroyed, better you sort it out among yourselves.’ So, reluctantly, Gemekis dropped it and Muna went to live with him, a move that enabled her to sell her tent in Transit for 1,500 shillings, a useful amount of khat. She sat there most days, on the mattress, and her survivor friends would join her. Sweetee would come mincing and delicate and Hamdi would bounce down on her huge haunches and cackle with her burnt voice about how she had slept with ‘him, him, him’, and lament that she didn’t know the name of the father of the black child that she roughly clutched in her pale hands like a handbag. ‘I call him Obama, but who will pay for him? If I knew!’ It was the same routine every time.

  Next to the sitting area was a bedroom with a lock on the door. Inside were two beds, a shelf held up with wire and clothes on a string. On the one solid wall above the bed was a Bob Marley calendar, a drawing of a heart inside which were the words ‘Gemekis and Muna’ and a photo of a Mongolian boy in an oversized suit beneath the legend: ‘Happiness is a thing to be practised like the violin.’ Muna was feeling high that day, but not just from the khat and alcohol: this Ramadan, her prayers for release from Dadaab finally seemed to have been answered.

  A few weeks earlier, Gemekis had accompanied Muna and the children to the UN compound in Dadaab when she had been called, along with Monday, to the Ban Ki-moon hall for their pre-departure interview with the Australian immigration officials. Muna always liked going to the UN compound: ‘the UN is good for the eyes,’ she said. After the unrelenting brown and dust, its trees and flowers were pretty to look at and a welcome relief. Gemekis had a job there as a handyman and he went to work while Muna joined Monday outside the hall and Monday looked away refusing to meet Gemekis’s gaze.

  The interview was conducted via video conference. A young blond man asked Muna and Monday questions about their problems in the presence of their children and two interpreters and they told him their story just as they had told it countless times before. They made a kiss for the Australian even though they had spent the whole morning waiting in silence not talking to each other and had already come to a private arrangement that when they got to Australia they would live in separate houses. Monday had recently taken his complaint about Felix arresting him for personal reasons to the police chief in Dadaab and, after examination, Felix had been transferred. The couple were on bad terms but they managed to smile at the Australian man while he told them, Muna recalls, that ‘everything is freedom’ in his country; that the lady President had no religion and that you can be Christian or Muslim, without problems. He said they would call, that the family would be leaving soon.

  One week later, the family had a medical. Monday worried that Muna had HIV/AIDS from the men she had been sleeping with. Her mother was worried too. ‘She looks like her father,’ she said, ‘only bones moving, too thin.’ The old lady was unmoved about her going so far away. ‘Let her go,’ she said. She would have preferred her sons to have been taken since they could be relied upon to send her some money, but of Muna she had no such expectation. ‘A man has spoiled her,’ she said.

  The doctors vindicated Muna: she didn’t have AIDS. They only told her not to get pregnant, since that would invalidate the resettlement process and they’d have to begin again with the new family member. Muna smirked: there was little danger of that, she thought. But when Eid came, she still tried it on.

  ‘I need money for Eid, the kids need clothes,’ she told Monday on the phone.

  ‘I’ll send something,’ said Monday.

  ‘And what about me?’ she asked.

  ‘Are you my wife?’ said Monday. She laughed. So did he.

  Afterwards, though, Muna regretted his generosity. She knew that khat was bad, that it was compromising her ability to care for the children. Monday had even suggested that she let him look after them. She vowed that after Eid she would go and stay with her sister in Nairobi, get herself clean before she went to Australia.

  ‘If I stay here, I will not stop khat, my body will finish,’ she said. Everyone in E1 chewed and they were generous with their leaves. She needed distance from Dadaab. ‘No chewing, no smoking, no drinking,’ she said as she lit a cigarette and watched the smoke drift upwards into the shadows of the tent lit by the single grubby bulb in the middle of the day. And then she remembered something.

  ‘I heard in Australia there is khat too. Oh no!’

  35

  Solar Mamas

  It was the third Eid that Isha and her family had celebrated in the camp, since their long, desperate walk from Baidoa. They were stronger now. The children were in school. Isha had managed to start a business reselling snacks for small change and life in the camp had stabilized, but she spent Eid alternately gripped by feelings of excitement and worry. A few days before the end of Ramadan, she, too, had been touched by the season’s blessings. Her block had chosen her for what she called ‘My chance … my golden opportunity.’ While a few people in her block had returned to Somalia, driven by the insecurity and the squalor of the camp, Isha had stuck it out, and now she and her neighbour Hawo were going in another direction: to India.

  A tall, brown-skinned man with white hair and steel-rimmed glasses had come and given a speech. His name was Bunker. He informed the people of M2 that because their block, isolated as it was on the corner of the camp, bordered by hyenas on two sides, had suffered disproportionately during the rape crisis, they had been selected for a programme to provide them with solar street lights. Not the ubiquitous portable lamps that leaked out a kind of weak bottled daylight but large, solar-powered lights lining the street. There were a few such lights in the camps, but the UN could not afford to install them everywhere. The day before the tall Indian man came, a UN staff member visited to explain the idea to the block leaders. The Indian needed women, he said. They should be illiterate grandmothers willing to go abroa
d for six months to be trained as solar engineers. When they returned, the community would contribute money to a solar fund to pay them to install and maintain solar power in the block.

  The project was the brainchild of Indian philanthropist Bunker Roy who ran an institution called ‘Barefoot College’ in Rajasthan, India. Inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Barefoot believed that the village should be the site of technology and innovation and that literacy was not a prerequisite for learning. Several generations of ‘solar mamas’ had already been trained using limited language, hand gestures and visual copying from Peru to Pakistan; there was even a Hollywood documentary about them. Isha thought it sounded neat but many of the other women in her block were suspicious and weren’t interested. Heedless of the Indian’s selection criteria, the elders simply chose two women, neither of them grandmothers: Isha, because she was the only woman who could read and write in the block. And her neighbour, Hawo, who was truly illiterate and only spoke Mai Mai, Nisho’s native Rahanweyn dialect, because her husband had four wives and he could spare her.

  When Bunker showed up with his UN entourage to conduct the formal briefing and selection the following day, he decided it would not be appropriate to go back on the community’s decision. Isha never got the chance to tell him that her children were too young to make her a grandmother and she could read and write perfectly well. In block D2, which was famous for crime, and in M2, renowned for rape, Bunker gave two rousing speeches to hundreds of residents and answered questions from the community. He was brusque.