by Ben Rawlence
Photo by Jonny Donovan
Taking a tent to a refugee camp is like taking coals to Newcastle. But when I visit, space is at a premium in Dadaab. I phone the UN compound, they are full. They even have staff sleeping in tents. There is no room at the World Food Program base either. All the private hotels in town have been commandeered by charities rushing to help in the wake of Somalia’s worst drought in a generation. I try a small Kenyan charity with a room that they sometimes rent out to visitors.
“Sorry, we’re full,” says the kind woman on the phone.“It’s famine season.”
I ask if I could pitch a tent in their compound.
“I’ll ask,” she says, “but no promises.”
It’s not only the refugees who must fight for a sliver of desert to sleep on, it seems.
The next day there is disturbing news: two Medecins sans Frontieres nurses have been kidnapped on the outskirts of the refugee camp. Gunmen shot their driver in the neck and drove them over the border into Somalia. The Islamist insurgents, al-Shabaab, are the prime suspects. All humanitarian assistance work is suspended. All visits to Dadaab are cancelled and some international staff have begun evacuating. My space problems are over. But another is beginning.
The next morning as I pick my way across a street thick with mud and garbage and dotted with pools of slurry in the Somalia neighbourhood of Eastleigh towards the bus called G-coach, I think I can detect a change in the atmosphere, a sharpening of the air, like a crisp winter morning when the ice hardens the sounds. It makes me jumpy. I keep my eyes low and avoid what I think is the threatening gaze of Kenya’s fifth column of Somali immigrants and asylum seekers – more than a million live inside Kenya now – but on reflection their stares are probably just incredulous; a white visitor a day after the Western embassies advised people of a kidnap threat in all Somali areas; Northeastern province as well as Eastleigh, and I’m going to both. The coach is choked with the scent of women’s perfume mixed with diesel rising up from the exhaust and eventually we lurch off, through the Nairobi traffic and out onto the highway, east, to the desert.
It is not only famine season, but also the rainy season. After the worst drought in a generation, the Horn of Africa is enjoying its first rains for three years. All along the road the sand is covered with a fine filament of iridescent green and pools of water clog the bush. Thorn trees that normally scratch the sky with their brown claws are covered in soft felt-like leaves that goats and camels nibble happily. The G-coach charges through a rainstorm and rumbles into the town beneath a washed out pink sky.
Dadaab is a small, normally dusty, town in Northern Kenya, 70 miles from the border with Somalia. The world’s largest refugee camp complex surrounds it. Originally built for 90,000 who fled the collapse of Siad Barre’s dictatorship in 1991, over the years it has swelled and the record influx of 2012 brought the total to half a million. At the peak of the emergency in August 1300 refugees were arriving every day. Since then Dadaab has been overrun by aid agencies, the United Nations and every international charity you have ever heard of, and many you haven’t. World Food Program trucks crawl past. People throng the high street, the shops look full and busy and the dusk is heavy with the rhythm of generators coming from the aid agencies’ compound. The UN, and other aid agencies are separated from the rest of the town by a security barrier, watch towers and twin rows of razor wire that now seem justified.
I have never been present at the beginning of a war before. Alone in the small charity compound that first night, I listen to dozens of trucks grumbling through the night towards Somalia: Kenya has declared war on al-Shabaab. My fortnight of research has become all of a sudden more treacherous and more expensive.
In the bright morning sunshine, the desert looks different than the last time I was here. No longer the inviting endless brown adventure. Even the sudden greening fails to soften its new hostile edge. The armed escorts that I hire from the military camp have upped their rates, predictably and they jump into the car snappily, attentive. On the road there are no white UN jeeps, the huge ponds of rainwater are not merely inconvenient but treacherous traps and the woman walking with her children along the road begging for a lift is a liability my driver wants to avoid. I don’t insist.
Arriving at the camp, we pull up next to dozens of young men sat as always under the acacia thorns that shed a little more bristling shade than usual. It is early but they are already chewing khat, the Somali narcotic weed. Their close cropped hair seems somehow sinister, their black eyes that follow me wherever I turn feel hot on my back and the smart pressed premier league football shirts, Arsenal, mostly, look to me in my fearful state like some horrible joke.
In the market, only a few shops are open beneath the neem trees. Business is down. The kidnapping has brought a halt to all but essential services – emergency health care and food distribution. Kids taunt my soldiers while I try and have a conversation with the proprietor of a mobile phone shack.
“There is no problem. Dadaab is very peace. The security situation is exaggerate,” he assures me whilst looking over my shoulder at the soldiers patting down two men with long beards and skirts. The residents fear a “sweep” of the camp that the military has announced to try and flush out al-Shabaab sleepers from the genuine refugees.
“Shabaab likes the rain,” he says with a smile. He is explaining the soldiers’ actions to me; the terrorist are harder to track in the rainy season, but it sounds to me like a wind-up, as though he knows something.
- the drought ends in the war-torn Horn of Africa leaving a flooded street in Dadaab refugee camp
The refugees don’t like the rain. It turns their city of tents and corrugated iron shacks into a slippery mess. Pit latrines collapse, mud huts melt, diseases spread: Dadaab is like a Petri dish in the wet. Sure enough, several days later I contract cholera, possibly a result of the floods and the raw sewage that sluiced down the streets of the camps. I begin to wonder what I am doing here anyway. Is any research project worth risking one’s life for?
On the way back to Nairobi I pass through roadblock after roadblock. My white face sails through unharrassed. Not so the Somalis. Without a ‘movement pass’ from the Kenyan government, refugees are not permitted to leave Dadaab. With the declaration of war all movement passes have been cancelled. Every Somali is now a suspect, a potential terrorist, on their way to Nairobi to blow themselves up. Soon the camp itself will become the frontline.
I breathe more easily as the city and its promise of modern medicine begins winking through the evening smog. Whilst for me, Dadaab is a hot humid, disease ridden, scary hell, somewhere to escape from; for half a million Somalis its water-logged streets are somewhere to run to, a refuge. And, after twenty years, it can even become home.
Ben Rawlence’s book RADIO CONGO will be published by OneWorld in July 2012