Ben Rawlence - City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the Worlds Largest Refugee Camp

The White House, Washington DC, 31 October 2014

The members of the National Security Council were arranged around a grey table in a grey room without windows. On the walls, photographs depicted a sporty-looking President Obama on a recent trip to Wales for a NATO summit. The officials attending from the Africa desk were a middle-aged white man leaning back slightly in his chair; a younger one in a tight new suit who hunched forward and stared at a notepad; a short blonde woman who sat perfectly still throughout the whole meeting with her hands in her lap so that her impassive face appeared to float above the surface of the table; and the chief, a well-dressed woman in tweed skirt and matching tan shoes, expensive, who smiled and nodded and said little, just like the rest of them.

I was there to brief the NSC about Dadaab, a refugee camp located in northern Kenya close to the border with Somalia. Since 2008, when al-Shabaab, an al-Qaida-linked militant group, assumed control of most of Somalia, the Horn of Africa has been at the fulcrum of what policymakers like to call the arc of instability that reaches across Africa from Mali in the west, to Boko Haram in Nigeria, through Chad, Darfur, Sudan, southern Ethiopia, Somalia and on to Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Afghanistan in the east. Extremism in Africa has been rising up international agendas as terrorist attacks have mushroomed. Twelve months earlier, al-Shabaab had attacked Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. And six months after our meeting, al-Shabaab would hit the headlines again with the slaughter of 148 students at Garissa University College in the north of the country. After both attacks, the Kenyan government claimed the gunmen came from Dadaab and vowed to close the refugee camp, branding it a nursery for terrorists. In essence, the NSC wanted to know, was this my experience? The US is the main funder of the camp.

I had spent the previous three years researching the lives of the inhabitants of the camp and five years before that reporting on human rights there. How to describe to people who have never visited, the many faces of that city? The term refugee camp is misleading. Dadaab was established in 1992 to hold 90,000 refugees fleeing Somalias civil war. At the beginning of 2016 it is twenty-five years old and nearly half a million strong, an urban area the size of New Orleans, Bristol or Zurich unmarked on any official map. I tried to explain to the NSC officials my own wonder at this teeming ramshackle metropolis with cinemas, football leagues, hotels and hospitals, and to emphasize that, contrary to what they might expect, a large portion of the refugees are extremely pro-American. I said that the Kenyan security forces, underwritten by US and British money, weapons and training, were going about things in the wrong way: rounding up refugees, raping and extorting them, encouraging them to return to war-racked Somalia. But I sensed that the officials were not really listening. I was asking them to undo a lifetime of stereotyping and to ignore everything that they were hearing in their briefings and in the media.

My friends, the refugees in the camp, had been so excited to hear that I was going to the White House! Here I was, at the pinnacle of the US policy-making machine, poised to exercise my influence, yet floundering. Raised on the meagre rations of the United Nations for their whole lives, schooled by NGOs and submitted to workshops on democracy, gender mainstreaming and campaigns against female genital mutilation, the refugees suffered from benign illusions about the largesse of the international community. They were forbidden from leaving and not allowed to work, but they believed that if only people came to know about their plight, then the world would be moved to help, to bring to an end the protracted situation that has seen them confined to camps for generations, their children and then grandchildren born in the open prison in the desert. But the officials in the grey room saw the world from only one angle.