Prologue

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 attend-
ing 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 ful-
crum 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
1

WBRT: Prepress/Printer’s Proof

 2 City of Thorns

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 ter-
rorists’. 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 Somalia’s 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, foot-
ball 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 pin-
nacle 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 sub-
mitted to workshops on democracy, gender mainstreaming and
campaigns against female genital mutilation, the refugees suffered

WBRT: Prepress/Printer’s Proof

 Prologue 3

from benign illusions about the largesse of the international com-

munity. 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.
‘If what you are saying is true,’ said the young man in the tight
suit, ‘what accounts for the resilience of Dadaab for so long?’ He
meant why had all the young men in the camp not joined al-
Shabaab? I had once asked that question myself. I thought of
Nisho, the young man who works as a porter in the market, his
face clouding into a scowl as he stormed out of an interview when
I asked why he had not joined the militants: they paid well and he
was poor. The very question was an insult. To him, and to all the
refugees he knew, al-Shabaab were crazy, murderous criminals. I
thought of the former child soldier Guled and the many like him,
who had fled to the camp to escape the extremists, not to join
them.
But the young official persisted: ‘The picture you describe: a loss
of identity, no work, hostile political environment, deteriorating
conditions – these sound like the conditions for radicalization . . .’
The terms of the conversation seemed to allow for only two kinds
of young people: terrorists and those at risk of becoming one.
‘Poverty does not necessarily lead to extremism,’ I said. In my
head, images of the proud Imams defending their traditions against
the murderous corruptions; of the determined youth leader
Tawane, risking his life to provide services for the refugees when
the aid agencies withdrew for fear of being kidnapped; of Kheyro,
working to educate the children of the camp for a pittance; of
Professor White Eyes broadcasting his reports on the camp radio.

WBRT: Prepress/Printer’s Proof

 4 City of Thorns

How could I convey their towering dignity, their courage and

independence of spirit when they only featured in the official
mind as potential terrorists?
‘Right, right,’ said the chief. There were no further questions
and the meeting came to an early conclusion. I had fallen into the
liberal lobbyist’s trap: if the youth were not at risk of being radi-
calized, then perhaps the NSC didn’t need to worry about Dadaab
after all; the refugees could be safely forgotten. Such official atti-
tudes have created a false debate: both those for and against the war
on terror must make their arguments on the terrain of radicaliza-
tion; as though young poor Muslims face only this choice.
Outside, it was bitterly cold. At the rear of the White House,
the balustrades of the twin white staircases were draped with black
cloth and a giant inflatable pumpkin bobbed above the gently
curving lawn. The First Lady was preparing for a party. Overhead,
a helicopter carrying her husband buzzed the rooftops. I had once
been a student of his, had sat across the table and shared Christmas
dinner and stories. Looking up at his helicopter from the sidewalk
of Pennsylvania Avenue, he was as far from me now as were the
sands of the refugee camp. The refugees seeking sanctuary in his
ancestral country saw themselves in his story and yet the most
powerful man on the planet was no more able to help the most
vulnerable than anyone else. His country would not accept the
exiled Somalis, at least not in any meaningful numbers, and nor
would any other.
At a time when there are more refugees than ever, the rich
world has turned its back on them. Our myths and religions are
steeped in the lore of exile and yet we fail to treat the living exam-
ples of that condition as fully human. Instead, those fleeing the
twenty-first century’s wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and
elsewhere are seen as a potential fifth column, a threat. Each year
far too few are officially referred by the UN and given asylum in

WBRT: Prepress/Printer’s Proof

 Prologue 5

other countries. Thousands instead resort to the illegal route,

paying traffickers for a spot on the boats or scrambling through
holes cut in fences. I sympathized with the young NSC official
struggling to make sense of the refugee experience. It is a wonder
that so many die in the sea, reaching for another life, and not for
a martyr’s ending. But they are the few. Millions more, the vast
majority, remain in camps. And through our tax contributions to
the UN, we all pay billions of dollars to keep them there. In
Dadaab that means funding schools, hospitals and shipping 8,000
tonnes of food per month into the middle of the blistering desert
to feed everyone.
This book is a glimpse into the strange limbo of camp life
through the eyes of those who allowed me into their world and
shared their stories. No one wants to admit that the temporary
camp of Dadaab has become permanent: not the Kenyan gov-
ernment who must host it, not the UN who must pay for it, and
not the refugees who must live there. This paradox makes the
ground unsteady. Caught between the ongoing war in Somalia and
a world unwilling to welcome them, the refugees can only survive
in the camp by imagining a life elsewhere. It is unsettling: neither
the past, nor the present, nor the future is a safe place for a mind
to linger for long. To live in this city of thorns is to be trapped
mentally, as well as physically, your thoughts constantly flickering
between impossible dreams and a nightmarish reality. In short, to
come here you must be completely desperate.

WBRT: Prepress/Printer’s Proof

WBRT: Prepress/Printer’s Proof
 PART ONE

Ma’a Lul – Famine

WBRT: Prepress/Printer’s Proof

WBRT: Prepress/Printer’s Proof
 1

The Horn of Africa

In the lands of the Somali, it had barely rained for two and a half
years. From the dagger point of Cape Guardafui, the very Horn
of Africa aimed at the belly of Yemen, to the hills of Ethiopia in
the west and the plains of Kenya in the south, the year 2010 was
dry. The nomads and the farmers saw the clouds scudding east
from the Indian Ocean over the red plains and the yellow hills, but
no rain fell. They saw their animals weaken and their crops strug-
gle to stand with the weight of the dust, and they began to worry.
There are three seasons here: the Hagar, Jiilaal and Gu. The
Hagar is the windy season, from May to September, when the
Indian Ocean monsoon blows clockwise taking the cool water
from the southern seas up the coast of East Africa, around the
curve of Arabia, Iran and Pakistan to Bombay, the ancient trade
route of the Swahilis. Since at least 1000 BC, the dhows have
sailed east in March returning in September, riding the anti-
clockwise currents that take the now warm water south again.
With the monsoon, India is only three weeks from the coast of
Somalia. Against it, the journey can take three months and is often
fatal. Thousands of miles from the coastal ports of Bossaso,
Mogadishu and Kismayo, trade in the interior of the Horn of
Africa still keeps time with these natural rhythms.
Once upon a time, when the climate was predictable, the Hagar
would come to an end with the short rains, Deyr, in October that
would give way to the steady accumulation of heat and dust that
9

WBRT: Prepress/Printer’s Proof

 10 City of Thorns

was the dry season, Jiilaal. If God willed it, the heat would build
and build and turn humid, eventually breaking into the blessed
rainy season from March to May: Gu. Then the thorn trees would
spring immediately into a luminous green. Overnight, the sand
would grow a light fuzz of grass. The camels and goats of the
nomads would turn fat.
Sometimes the Gu didn’t come. Then the heat that built and
built had nowhere to go. When the Hagar arrived again, it swirled
the desiccated sand into little twisters that had a life of their own,
getting into everything. The skin on the animals shrank and the
nomads watched the sky, full of fear of the abaar, drought.
Sometimes the Gu failed for more than one year and that usually
spelled trouble. In a part of the world where man’s struggle with
nature for survival is so finely balanced, famine and war have
always gone together. Now the Gu had failed for two years in a
row and the short rains were perilously late.
Under a hardening sky, the people grew uneasy. In the coun-
tryside, the land had nothing to give and so the inhabitants had
nothing to offer their rulers in tithes or taxes. Across most of
South-Central Somalia, the rulers were the Islamic extremist
group al-Shabaab. It needed all the taxes it could get to fund its
‘massive war’ to drive what it saw as an infidel government backed
by the United Nations out of Mogadishu and into the sea. Militias
press-ganged truckloads of men away from the farms and forced
them to the battlefield, and they took the meagre harvest as
‘Zakaht’ – a contribution to their holy war – and the people went
hungry.
To make matters worse, al-Shabaab had banned all food aid that
bore the US logo and ejected the World Food Programme from
its territory. At the same time, the US Office of Foreign Assets
Control put sanctions on al-Shabaab: this meant jail sentences for
aid agencies that paid the militants for humanitarian access which,

WBRT: Prepress/Printer’s Proof

 The Horn of Africa 11

after twenty years of war, was the norm for delivering aid in
Somalia. And the few aid ships that did sail risked the infamous
pirates. So, in what agencies had been calling a ‘perfect storm’
since the drought began two years earlier, the people of Somalia
would face one of the most telegraphed emergencies the world
had ever seen largely without assistance.
In the city, the ‘Battle of Mogadishu’, as al-Shabaab’s offensive
was known, intensified street by street with trenches, snipers and
indiscriminate shelling. The militants’ war effort drew all the men,
resources and even children into the fight just as the twisters of the
eternal Jiilaal sucked the dust of the hard-baked plain into the air
and lent everything a brown tinge. The coming tragedy would be
played out in sepia.
After so much death, it was a wonder anyone remained in the
country at all. No one really knows the population of Somalia but,
during the past twenty years, somewhere between one third and
one half of the six-to-eight million inhabitants had fled their
homes. There were over one and a half million refugees abroad,
many of them in the camps of Dadaab. The people who still lived
in Somalia were the ones without the bus fare to flee, the ones
with property to guard or money to make, or the ones who had
simply lost their minds. Many were afraid to take the risk of run-
ning into the unknown and held to the adage, ‘better the devil you
know’. Many more were so inured to the roulette of war, it had
simply become the landscape of life. Guled was one of these.

WBRT: Prepress/Printer’s Proof