Hopehood across the frontier: permanent transience at Kakuma refugee camp
Gerawork Teferra participated in global and oral history research through Princeton University’s Global History Lab and History Dialogues Project. He has lived in Kakuma Refugee Camp since 2011. This is an excerpt from an article entitled ‘Pseudo-permanence in permanent transience’, prepared as part of History Dialogues, which will appear in Africa Today in 2022. Pseudonyms are used to protect respondents.
Kenya has received more than half a million refugees since 1991. However, except for two instances of group resettlement, very few refugees received resettlement opportunities. During the last decade, for instance, only 37,522 people have been officially resettled, despite many more arriving. Kakuma camp, however, has become known as a ‘resettlement hub’ and, as I show in this post, the lives of residents are affected by such perceptions. I discuss how refugees move from the hope of surviving to a new, dream-like lifestyle which the term “hopehood” encapsulates. In doing so, I argue that though hope has served as an instrument to enable people to endure prolonged encampment in an enclosed place, unrealistic hope has separated residents from reality, so that chasing a rare chance of resettlement becomes itself a mode of life.
In most discussions among camp residents, two captivating words are common—a ‘case’ and a ‘process’: ‘Do you have a process?’ Or ‘How is your case?’ are questions that dominate conversations. A case is an individual’s reason for an asylum claim or ‘vulnerability/insecurity’ that expedites resettlement. If somebody asks, ‘How is your process?’ they mean to inquire how close to resettlement you are. This chimes with Bram Jansen’s observation in his book on Kakuma that conversations about resettlement are ‘among the most notable occupations and ordering mechanisms in the camp’.
With few exceptions, camp life starts at the reception centre, a place where false hope sprouts in a desperate mind. Refugees who are already settled go to reception to meet new arrivals, who commonly ask: ‘For how long have you been here?’ The other side answers with a smile that has its hidden meanings. It cannot be explained but takes years of experience to understand the messages and layers of emotions these smiles embody. The experienced refugee explains the registration and eligibility process, rations, life in the community, and the resettlement process, and advises new arrivals on what to say and how to act. For their part, new arrivals think over and over again what to eat and dress, how to act, and what convincing reasons to mention during eligibility interviews to expedite processes—a point where one unconsciously joins the life of hopehood. Equipped with such information, and conceiving new-fangled hope, new arrivals experience their first interview, after which they leave the reception centre and join the camp community.
The subsequent unpredictable processes within the camp continue to create enough space to parcel out fantasies and false hope, serving as an ‘ordering mechanism’. Following registration, eligibility interviews take place, then waiting for the eligibility decision starts, which often takes years or decades. If a refugee receives a positive decision, then registration for an Alien Identification Card follows, which can also take years to get. The eligibility process for resettlement, which is reserved for a very few, consists of a series of steps, taking months for a handful, years or decades for most. Even once successfully passed, obstacles might occur. Creative manoeuvring and submitting oneself to what is required become necessary skills for refugees to survive all the unpredictable, inconsistent and uncertain resettlement procedures. Though a handful benefit, for the majority such long procedures only parcel out unrealistic hope to help them endure their challenging lives in a ‘soulless artificial place’, to borrow Tim Finch’s phrase.
Fekade, who has been living in the camp since its establishment, reflected painfully when I conversed with him in 2019:
‘I tried all my best to go out of the camp from 1993 till 2011 (for 18 years), and finally I got tired and left it to God, got married and now I am waiting the chance of my children’.
The other typical example of hopehood is Jim who explained his two decades experience as follows: ‘by the time when [I] cease to be [a] refugee my time has gone ... so my effort should be for my kids—working hard to the family members who are still young to make it’. The expression ‘making it’ refers to resettlement. Will they make it? Though his tone indicates that he is not sure, the hope is deep and never lost. According to the UNHCR, almost a million children were born as refugees in the years from 2018 to 2020, their parents who live in a difficult situation like Fikade will continue to engage in hopehood, expecting fulfilment from their infants’ new life chances.
Since the hope is very strong, all actions, interactions and earnings of those in the camp are geared towards constructing how they might increase their perceived insecurity/vulnerability to expedite the resettlement process. Workers seek to convey insecurity in their job, the ill from their disease; activists, agents, or missionaries claim their mission or heroism, fathers their children’s vulnerability; hooligans from the conflicts they create, widows from divorces, the disabled from their disability. Each action and exposure (including smiles and greetings) are calculated and interpreted in relation to their significance to the hope one carries. The president of Southern New Hampshire University, during his visit in 2019, witnessed how deep and unbearable it is to cling to hope in a hopeless situation. He wrote a blog post about it in which he reflected that “we are in the business of hope”.
As months move to years and years become decades, the majority of refugees still live their camp life in limbo, yet filled with hope. Some tried to leave but barriers limit such efforts. Fari, who has lived in the camp with ten family members for more than a decade, recalls that the one-room shelter provided was not enough to accommodate them. The family decided to construct another shelter in their plot with used iron sheets, but the authorities, highlighting the temporary nature of their presence, did not allow them to construct it. This is how Wright and Plasterer (2010) quoted the response of an official:
The refugee situation is seen as a temporary situation, so we don’t want them to have very permanent structures, permanent programs that will draw refugees to the camp instead of encouraging them to go back home. That’s how we see it, but the fact remains that some refugees have been here since 1992!
Such forms of discouraging permanence together with day-to-day life challenges, force refugees to find ways to escape encampment. Lam, who had also lived in Uganda and Congo camps, and finally came to the assumed ‘resettlement hub’ candidly stated:
the only hope in the camp is resettlement, reparation and few strong do business and send children to schools… I met my community member [who] lived 20 years (in the camp)…. they are waiting to die, have no case for resettlement.
Though such families don’t seem to have a case for resettlement, the struggle to have one and the hope that arises from it always accompanies them. The transiency pushes residents to make all possible efforts to ‘have a case’ that expedites ‘processes’ of resettlement. Such continuous but futile effort to legally escape encampment continues to proliferate unrealistic hope, such hope and accompanied actions and submissions, in turn, order the complex interaction within the camp and beyond.
To sum up, Kakuma camp, located in an extremely remote area, at the frontier of human lives, has created a space for refugees to change their worries of prosecution, war and disaster to a new way of life—hopehood. While hope is a good instrument to endure prolonged confinement in limbo, filling the void with hopehood may eventually lead to ‘ennui, apathy, and trepidation’.
The header image shows the cover of the book I am hope: Poems by refugees, published by the Lutheran World Federation.
