Dead End
I lost my identity card on the road to Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp located in northeastern Kenya.
I realized this halfway through our three-and-a-half-hour drive from Garissa city. I pride myself on being attentive when I travel, so when I started fumbling around my bag, and scrutinizing the inner pocket of my wallet where I always keep my ID and couldn’t find it, a feeling of dread and anxiety washed over me. I asked the driver to stop the vehicle and help me look for it. I asked my colleague to help me unpack my bags, and to check his too. Soon, amid dense bushes and twisting, sandy lanes, a nervous three-man hunt for a six-by-three-inch plastic card was on.
Anyone who has lived in Kenya would tell you that carrying your legal documents is a must. I do not go for a jog, dash to the kiosk or take a walk in the evening without my ID. This is especially critical in a country that is hosting almost 600,000 refugees, displaced from across east and central Africa. Over 400,000 of those refugees are, like me, ethnic Somalis; almost 330,000 of them live in Dadaab. This essentially puts me in the crossfire with authorities. Even though I was born in Nairobi and carry Kenyan citizenship, unscrupulous police officers often find an excuse to question whether I am a “real” Kenyan.
My biggest worry was that we would come up on a police roadblock, and I would be the journalist with the cameras, notebooks and pens but no documents. That would definitely arouse suspicion among the authorities. Northeastern Kenya is a tense region: a few days before my trip last December, the Somali terrorist group, Al-Shabaab, ambushed a Kenyan security vehicle and killed four soldiers. Similar attacks, targeting both civilians — in buses, churches and classrooms — had occurred incessantly over the last few years. The Kenyan government’s reaction had been to tighten security, and to call for the closure of the Dadaab camp, labeling it a “nursery for terrorists.”
In early May 2016, the government disbanded the agency that registered the refugees (and which had authorized my trip to Dadaab), and vowed to close the camp indefinitely. Lest we fell into trouble, I didn’t want us to drive any further without securing the location of my ID card. I couldn’t help but cringe at the preposterousness of driving paperless to a refugee camp.
In Kenya, the northeastern region constitutes a third of the country’s land. It is the least developed area in this booming nation dubbed as the Silicon Savannah. Driving in the wilderness, away from civilization, it is the innocuous details that stayed with me. We passed a string of towns where people lived in makeshift sheds and aqal huts built right next to stone mosques. There was the village with more toilets built by non-governmental organizations than there were actual tents. The bareness of the land was punctuated with green shrubs and acacia trees spreading into the distance; the monotony of the landscape felt like it had no beginning or end. There are barely any tarmacked roads in the region and few good schools, or even the most basic healthcare services.
And for twenty-five years now, the region has had the onus of hosting Dadaab: a five-camp complex established in 1992 after Somalia’s government disintegrated, and a raging civil war reduced the country to medieval squalor. Leaning against our Hilux 4x4 vehicle, I couldn’t help but think of how the region offered a twofer on the conflagration of Somalia and the failure of Kenya.
The previous night, I had slept in Almond Resort, a palatial hotel in Garissa complete with lush, green grass and a swimming pool. In the arid, hot environment, Almond surprises any visitor as a mislaid oasis. After I paid my bill in the morning, the receptionist had asked to take a photocopy of my ID. I gave it to him, signed the receipt, collected my bags and left.
Our driver, Bisle, was now on the phone with the receptionist. Bisle is a skinny man, talkative with soft hair and a warm smile. Bisle lived and worked in Garissa, and he arranged for someone to collect the ID from the hotel, and deliver it to someone who would be driving our way in half an hour. From the onset, he was reluctant to drive back to Garissa himself. But half an hour turned into an hour, and before we knew it, we were sitting in the same spot for two hours. Everyone that Bisle called to get the documents bailed out: they wanted to drive the next day; their bus didn’t have enough passengers to justify driving to Dadaab. My colleague Abdullahi and I agreed that we should drive to the closest township, and wait there while Bisle drove back to get the card from Garissa. It was a disappointing decision for Bisle, but he shrugged and jumped in the car to drive us to the nearest village.
We arrived in Hagar Buul early afternoon. The village was very quiet, the scorching sun slowly roasting everything under its glow. A few girls selling camel and goat milk huddled under the shade of a tree, quietly giggling and murmuring. We took our bags off the car and sat inside a roadside restaurant, where a solar-powered television was on. Four men were sitting in there, a long puss on their faces, drinking tea and chewing khat. They had chapped lips and dusty legs, and each one had a dagger and a walking stick placed not far from him. They took potshots at each other, and debated about Somali clan politics.
One of the men had the TV’s remote control and kept flipping the channels. He finally settled to watch Fox News’s Sean Hannity talk about the Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. A few minutes later, the man with the remote said, “This old man should win [the nomination].” He had a bulge in his cheek from the khat in his mouth.
“No, no,” the man sitting on his right, clearly not feeling the Bern, said. “The lady should win. She deserves it.”
The two got into a kerfuffle about leadership, women and American democracy, and soon enough, the Sanders supporter started flipping channels. He finally settled on the Russia Today channel, which was advertising a documentary about members of Kenya’s Masaai community visiting Russia, titled “Masaai: From Sand to Snow.”
We stayed in Hagar Buul for three hours while waiting for Bisle to drive to Garissa and back. As the afternoon progressed, the men got more comfortable, moving from the chairs and onto mats. Every time the call to prayer rang, they would take ablution, gargle water in their mouth, spit the green phlegm of the khat, and face Mecca. Piety and prayer preceded many things in this sleepy hamlet. And then, they got back to chewing, listening to Somali music, and watching news on Al Jazeera.
The men also offered Abdullahi and I sweet tea made with camel milk. Just as Bisle called to say he was close by, I heard my stomach rumble. I decided to leave the shed and take a walk in the village to conceal the growling, embarrassing noise of my tummy. I was clearly having a Hump moment, my stomach not corresponding well with the camel milk, and I hoped to spend it alone.
Shortly afterwards, Bisle arrived waving my ID and smiling from the car. We left the men to their khat, and drove through the rough terrain. The labyrinthine roads to Dadaab open up like jagged lanes that resemble healing scars. As the car sped towards Dadaab, I rolled down the window and the wind blew in gusts.
By now, we had spent almost a whole day on the road for a trip that was supposed to take less than four hours. But more than anything, the trip was a precursor to the kind of lives led by the refugees we were going to see. They were stateless immigrants who for two-and-a-half-decades had not left a 20-mile stretch. They had had the option of either staying in this forgotten outpost or going back to their war-torn homeland, Somalia — as Kenya was now demanding them to do. I, on the other hand, had the luxury of coming and going.
With my ID tucked inside my wallet, I thought hard about that privilege, the luxury of going anywhere and everywhere I want whenever I want. I looked back to see the sun sinking below the horizon as the car hurtled towards Dadaab.
