All tagged Kakuma refugee camp
Refugees living in camps are often not perceived as historians for ‘historically explicable reasons’, to borrow Bonnie Smith’s phrase. They do not do the things historians do because they cannot: they cannot consult archives, they cannot access university libraries (or, often, libraries at all), they cannot depend on reliable internet and computer access, let alone the funding, research support, training, social networks, and material resources that underpin the research and writing of academic history. It is as though encamped refugee and historian have been defined as mutually exclusive identities. A person residing in a refugee camp cannot be a historian because a historian, quite simply, cannot be a person residing in a refugee camp.
What if we were to disrupt this tautology? To redefine what being a historian means?
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.
