I do understand. At least, I understand as much as is possible for someone who’s only been here a few hours. I’m in Dagahaley in the remote north-eastern province of Kenya, one of three neighbouring settlements that make-up the world’s largest refugee complex, known as Dadaab. There are more than 290,000 people here, in a 50 square kilometre space metered-out in 1991 for just 90,000. They’re mostly Muslim Somalis, arrived from the African state just 100 kms away that’s known internationally for siding with the USSR during the cold war and the beserk clan conflagration that began with the failing of the Soviet project then the subsequent rise of the savage Islamist force ‘Al-Shabaab’ who, since 2006, have caused the nation to collapse into ever-unholier depths of mayhem. Its capital, Mogadishu, is one of the world’s most dangerous cities (fans of bad films might know it as the setting of 2001’s Black Hawk Down) and its effectively government-less state is largely responsible for the current pirate menace.
Every child born in that place is pulled from the womb to be immediately met with the worst news of it’s life: it’s a citizen of Somalia, condemned, more than likely, to an existence marked by danger, atrocity and mourning. Which is why many of the good people – and, in amongst them, some of the bad – flee in cars and busses and occasionally on foot, braving bandits and corrupt, violent Kenyan police, to come here. In the absence of a resurrection of sanity in their homeland, they hope for resettlement somewhere – anywhere – else. These are the things I understand about the miraa-fiends crowding me on this ordinary Wednesday morning. But it’ll take many more days before I’ll begin to understand the rest.
I leave the shadowy miraa-house and squint against the world of light that exists outside it. This isn’t the light I was expecting. I thought the sun would cast down hard in a merciless assault, but there’s a softness to it; a pale pinkish tint that disguises the brutality of the heat. There are even clouds, beneath which the large market of Dagahaley is humming to itself noisily in the many self-assured tones of commerce. There are shouts, footfalls and flick of worn banknotes being counted. There’s the Al Ainusham Cosmetics shop; the Noor photo studio; the Dahab Cyber Café; the Dagahaley school for secondary and primary learners [“Motto: If you can dream it you can do it”]. There’s a bureau de change built from mud and sticks and an ice-factory of corrugated tin. The sight is unexpected – there are no obviously starving people, there isn’t that sour, ripe, sticky stench of heat-swollen decay. There’s life in Dagahaley and, to my surprise, it doesn’t look too much like hell. Until I round the corner, that is, and see the first rumour of it, subtle and silent yet undeniably there.
It’s just a building – not even that: a rough wooden structure perhaps fifty feet long. Its roof is cheap metal and its walls are barbed wire, which gurns and swells and sags where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people have clung to it. There’s a door made of dented rusted iron and, behind that, six runs of a kind you might expect for pigs in a slaughterhouse. Except these are for people – hungry refugees queuing for the rations they’re provided with every fifteen days by the United Nation’s refugee agency, the UNHCR. What makes it so growlingly ominous is its grim, thoughtless cheapness combined with its hinted purpose: the control of large numbers of humans.
They’re queuing outside it now – not as many as usual. On a normal morning, 18,000 pass through here, but this is the last day of the month’s second distribution. These are the ones who’ve been turned away before. On registration, every refugee is issued a ration card, so precious that most carry theirs around their neck on string. It contains details of the quantity of food to be issued along with their identifying number, which is checked against a manifest. But sometimes those numbers go missing from their list.
To the left queue the men, surly and slender, some in traditional kefiyeh that casts shadows across their cheeks and eyes, which stare at me in expressions so void-like, it feels as if my gaze is being sucked back into them. The women, in colourful hijabs, grip their ration cards; hold them out in front of themselves like protective talismans.
Finally, the door opens. It’s females first, one worker tells me, because “women are more orderly”. The lucky majority whose numbers are found are pushed roughly by the arm into one of the six runs. The rest stand and look uselessly about them, having learned by now the futility of pleading mercy with the vast unseeing bureaucracy above them, represented here by a list of digits on some paper and three irritated low-employees.
“I have a card for six people,” one woman tells me. “But a new baby had to be added and now I’m not on the manifest. This is the second time I’m not on it. Almost one month of food has been lost. I have to beg from neighbours.”
“Why aren’t you on it?” I ask.
“That is something I cannot explain.”
“Can’t you complain to the UNHCR?”
“They’re very busy there. The gate is very strict. Sometimes you cannot even go in.” Someone else adds, “If you have to go to the UNHCR, in the lost time, we fear the food will run out. It will be stolen.”
Behind us, a raw heave of anger. I turn to see the door being forced closed against a man in a Manchester United football shirt who’s trying to punch his way inside. Calm is restored quickly and more women are pulled into the system. I follow one of the runs. It continues around a corner into a great dark shed composed of cages which are filled with workers, sacks of flour, pulses, cornmeal, salt and cans of vegetable oil. Each refugee takes a bag and has it filled through a hole in the wire to receive their calorific total of 2100 per family member per day. It’s chaotic – hands and arms and sacks push through the hole; the floor and the workers are covered in flour: one carries a calculator he’s protected from the stuff by sealing it in a sandwich bag. And then, another fight. The men have started filing in. One is demanding more flour than he’s due. He hits the server around the face once, twice, three times – fat, ricocheting slaps around the jaw. He’s pushed back. Nobody reacts with alarm: this is normal. The worker who was assaulted starts to laugh. He’s laughing.
***
“I have to ask my father if he can afford the expenses of the wedding,” Ali tells me, leaning on his hips. “It’s a very big deal of money. Almost US$1000. If he tells me, ‘I don't have for you’, well then, I am a man.” He prouds his little chest up and tries to look severe. “I will try my best to pay. I'm expected to pay, inshallah.”
“Who are you in love with?” I ask.
Ali laughs. “It's my secret!”
“Is she very beautiful?”
He shrugs.
“A bit.”
In fact, Ali might be being optimistic about his costs. In the camp’s early days, entire weddings cost as little as 15,000 shillings (US$200) and the groom’s family usually slaughtered a goat for the feast. But since the resettlements began, expectations have gone haywire. Refugees who moved abroad without their lovers returned here to marry, in order that they could take their spouses home. But they came back with money. Camels were slaughtered, each one costing up to 50,000 shillings (US$650). Word spread. Now all the girls want their special day anointed with the blood of a camel.
Five minutes away from the market, I find an area that’s protected by more barbed wire: the place for refugees deemed to be at risk. Everyone else lives in ‘the blocks’ – primitive communities of mud, twig and recycled tin that fan away from the market deep into the desert. Conditions there are often barely survivable, but here things appear worse. These people live for years in tents; cook under wigwams of sticks and scavenged plastic and cardboard that look simultaneously pitiful and sinister – all boney and witchy and mean.
“I have a story to tell,” says a man in a grubby t-shirt. He’s standing too close, his eyes roving in jittery arcs. I want to avoid him: he’s clearly insane. “But this is a story that cannot be told in public,” he says, turning away for me to follow, tapping his way delicately with pointed toes.
It turns out that 30 year-old Dires Malikie is not mad but blind. His answer to my question “Why are you under protection?” takes more than an hour.
“I was an English teacher in Ethiopia when I was dismissed for being of the wrong tribe. I went back to university to study law. The election of 2005 was disputed and all students were apprehended by the government under charges of agitation. Soldiers came to our dormitory at night. At first I thought it was friends joking with us but they beat us with gun butts, sticks, everything. They sent soldiers who cannot speak our language, so they cannot understand our pleas for mercy. This force is called Agazin. They’re trained by Koreans. These Agazins can continue beating you with no sympathy, with no humanity, without stopping. For them beating you is like breaking a useless glass.
“I was placed in a large cell that was so packed with people I couldn’t move. Everyday we were called separately to be beaten; to confess. They put a gun in my mouth and used electricity. The pain, even words cannot express. I begged, ‘Please, you are hurting me, in the name of God’. But when you beg they take it as if you’re insulting them. If you confess, you’re killed. After three months I didn’t confess and was released after signing a document saying if I was found with any anti-government activities I’d be killed.
“I couldn’t return to university so I started a music group called Wagagen - it means ‘Twinkle’. A song we played was reported as agitating people to fight against the government. It was not true, but I was arrested. My wife and I escaped to Dadaab.
“In this place, walls have ears. We’ve seen people can be killed in the camp, for reasons both political or religious. That is why I want to have good privacy. We are Christian. We are here alone with 99,000 Muslims. They abuse us. They throw stones. If I put a cross round my neck I would be killed instantly. We are isolated. Even if we cry, there is no one that will hear.
“Me and my wife were once very deep in love. Now it is fading away because whenever the food is finished, the only way we can end our anger is by quarreling. When you’re a refugee, you cannot go backward, you cannot go forward. You have nowhere to go. For us the grave is only 100 metres away from where we’re sitting now. There's no solution. We don't hope anything for our future.”
“Do people sometimes commit suicide in the camp?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says. “Even my wife is one example. I found her with a rope.”
“What would you do if she succeeded?”
“My only choice would be to do the same.”
Is it true that if Dires wore a crucifix he’d be killed ‘immediately’? Is there really an elite torture squad ‘trained by Koreans’? It’s hard to know: dreadful myths and rumours thrive in this place, growing in size and madness as they germinate between minds. Médecins Sans Frontières, the medical NGO who are hosting my trip, have to educate against the belief that Aids can be cured by sex with a virgin. If you walk past the slaughterhouse, where camels are deconstructed in a violent carnival of blood and innards at dawn every morning, the butcher Dahir will swear that marabou storks have a sixth sense for detecting death. There are rumours amongst the devout that the women of Nairobi dress in brief skirts that expose their pubic hair. More than one person stops me to frantically insist that the UN are conspiring to starve them all to death.
When stranded in a place like this, your instinct for reality must quickly suffer. Panic and paranoia throttles caution and optimism and truth takes on a rare and fragile quality; becomes hard to grab hold of, like a fleeting scent. That these people are fleeing nightmares can only exacerbate their susceptibility to these crazy stories. After all, when the events you’ve lived through are unbelievably horrific, why shouldn’t you believe in horrors?
***
But danger also comes from that primordial system of suspicious falsehood that afflicts much of the rest of Africa and of humanity: prejudice. People discriminate on grounds of religion, tribe and nationality; on clan seniority; on whether their lips and nose betray them as a bantu or cushite racial type; on how long they’ve been in Dadaab (one recent incomer was told, “You are a new arrival. You are nothing here”); even how far away they live from the market. It’s true: many people in Dadaab are as cruelly stupid as they are on the rest of the planet.
But the principle fear that pesters the daily wellbeing of everyone is surprising: bureaucracy – the omnipotent machine that grinds silently above them, in all it’s terrifying majesty. A refugee must submit themselves entirely to vast organisations for almost everything: sustenance, shelter, protection – even hope. These conglomerations are typically short of staff, funds and effective power. The refugee frequently experiences them not as you might expect – as saving angels – but as endless queues in the heat-stroking sun, hardened officials, aggressive security guards, senseless diktats posted on notice-boards. There’s corruption. Mistakes are made, decisions reversed, explanations rarely given. Take, for example, the case of Ahmed Mursal…
I meet the forty year old in the dwelling he shares with another family. Like most of the residences in these blocks, it’s kept defiantly clean. The rough rectangle of land is perhaps twenty metres by twenty, portioned off behind bush-wood fences. Each small building is a room. The walls are built from gathered twigs or mud bricks, which are smothered in a layer of more mud and cow dung to aid waterproofing. The doors are flattened vegetable oil cans sewn together with wire. The ‘sofa’ in the living area turns out to be yet-more cleverly sculpted mud with a sheet draped over it. Outside, there’s a doomstruck goat. In the branches of a tree – where, in kinder worlds, you might expect to find leaves, blossom or fruit – strands of plastic, blown in by the desert wind, flutter uselessly. Twelve people live here.
Ahmed’s face has taken on some of the qualities of the wall that he’s leaning against: it’s a weathered landscape of craters, cracks and ditches and you find yourself intimidated by what it silently tells you of it’s uneasy survival. Ahmed was a farmer, born with no feet and only a thumb and forefinger on each hand. When the clan wars blew into his village, his father and brothers were shot by militiamen: machine-gunned in their home. Helped by fellow Somalis who were fleeing to Dadaab, he arrived in 2000. He’d been here six years when he heard of a US resettlement scheme for the disabled.
“I passed all my exams and interviews,” he says. “I was lucky enough to be selected. I felt alive! I dreamed of a job and a modern house with all the facilities - cooker, refrigerator and a big bed. I was taken to the airport transit centre in Nairobi. We stayed there for three months. One evening we were given our tickets, they were checked and we were told we were ready to fly. We were taken inside the airport. Then we were told, ‘Sorry, we don't have your names’. I cried that day. We all did. We felt like dying.”
Before he left, there had been a huge party to celebrate Ahmed’s resettlement. Three months later, he stepped off the bus at the same spot he’d so hopefully departed. Why did this happen? Nobody has ever told him.
Back in the market, seventeen year old Asha Haji is walking past the lines of new arrivals, sat in the hot sand, waiting to be registered by the UN. It should’ve opened six hours ago. Three guards armed with billy-clubs and loudhailers seem constantly in the process of moving these people – numbering in the hundreds – around. It’s impossible to know why: it seems absurd. First they’re moved here, then further to the left, then back over there again. People protest. Billy-clubs are raised. There are shouts, shoves, they move – they’ve no choice. It’s like some perverse exercise routine: these incomers are being got into psychic shape for the refugee life ahead of them, which will be mostly characterised by discomfort, hunger, powerlessness and suppressed, pointless rage. Asha passes them by, barely noticing. It’s like this almost every day. Besides, she’s got other things to think about: she’s on her way to the police station.
Two months ago, Asha’s husband stole a mobile phone to buy miraa. Then he disappeared. The phone’s owner insists Asha has it. Last night he beat her. Her mother-in-law agreed with her attacker and threw her and her two young children out of their home. She kept all her clothes as a ransom.
“Is it true?” says the Kenyan police officer. His ‘station’ is a concrete room, which is flanked by empty prison cells. He sits at a dented metal desk, the only light coming from the glassless window behind him, through which the wind bullies the pages of his huge ledger in which he carefully writes the details of all the crimes reported to him with his pen. He’s menacingly effeminate and his thick green uniform is several sizes too big for him. He makes no eye contact, always apparently focusing on the space immediately in front of his fingertips. He talks with measured pauses and pursing lips, his humanity vanished entirely behind his clothes and words and formal manner.
Asha sits, her seven month old on her hip, and obediently answers his questions.
“What is the name of your husband?”
“Abdul Raman.”
“And where is Abdul Raman now?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Two months ago.”
“Your husband is missing for two months. Is it true?”
“Yes”
“Is it known where he went?”
“No”
“Have you made a missing person report?”
“I was not aware of the procedure.”
Long pause for gravitas.
“According to the laws of Kenya, if somebody goes missing (dramatic pause) for two days (dramatic pause) it must be reported to the police. Such a report has not been made. Is it true?”
Forty minutes later, when the interview finally comes to an end, I ask the policeman what will happen now. His chin rises and he glowers powerfully at nothing.
“We will arrest them, sir! We shall deal with them according to the laws of Kenya!”
Asha, when I ask her, is confident of a just outcome. She hasn’t spoken to the people I have who are more familiar with the rules. They say it costs 3,000 shillings to have someone arrested and beaten by the police. If the arrestee hands over a further 1,000, they’re released without charge.
***
It takes six days of wandering before I catch a hint of the final truth of this place. When I first saw Dagahaley’s market area I was surprised by the absence of obvious misery. But I’ve since come to realise there’s a weakness in our powers of imagination that can prevent us empathising with refugees. If we see blood, guns or instruments of torture, we can immediately picture all the relevant agonies. But theirs is a slow species of horror: one that you can’t easily witness or photograph. It’s a sufferance of time, of monotony, of stuckness. Even most prisoners have a release date; a target to fire their hope at. But many of these people have been stranded for 19 years with no clue if or when they might be resettled. I only fully sense how this might feel when the pilot of the UN jet that’s taking me home finally turns on his engines. I experience an intense cascade of emotion I wasn’t prepared for. It’s relief, of course: I’m moving, making progress, experiencing change. I’m suddenly in a state dreamed of by millions of displaced people on every continent. I’m unstuck.
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Words & photos copyright 2005-2010 Will Storr
