McClatchy blog: Somewhere in Africa

October 18, 2007

'My clan is refugee'

A stunning photography exhibition opened this week in Nairobi. The aid agency CARE International is exhibiting a series of images documenting daily life in the refugee camps of Dadaab, in the harsh scrubland of northeastern Kenya. The camps opened in 1991 to take in refugees from a coup in Somalia, and today they continue to grow. They now house some 160,000 people -- mostly Somalis, but a few hundred from Sudan, Congo, Rwanda and Ethiopia as well.

It's one of the largest and longest-existing collections of refugees anywhere in the world, and when I visited last October, the most striking thing was how much the camps moved to the rhythms of everyday life. There are markets, restaurants, even pool halls where some enterprising residents have hooked up TVs to show Premiership soccer matches. It's not an enviable life but -- contrary to the mental image conjured by the term "refugee camp" -- it's not totally bleak, either.

Above photographs by Erin Lubin

The exhibition is titled QAXOOTI -- the Somali word for refugee -- and it's devoted to showing almost prosaic snapshots of days and nights in Dadaab: a mechanic working on a car, kids in school, girls playing by a water pump and, in one of my favorite images, a young man peeking his head into a barber shop doorway.

Exhib_9

Photograph by Shravan Vidyarthi

In Somalia's deeply entrenched social hierarchy, your clan can mean everything, but the people of Dadaab -- victims of 16 years of clan warfare -- have had enough of that. The exhibition is subtitled, "My clan is refugee," a line apparently uttered by a child in Dadaab. Last year, CARE estimated that 400 children were being born every month in the camps. Many of the photographs feature these children, who are growing up and going to school in the care of aid agencies.

The images, captured over the past several months by some of the best photographers working in Kenya, are worth a close look. (The show was curated by photographer, and longtime McClatchy contributor, Evelyn Hockstein.) I'm not sure whether CARE, whose world headquarters are in Atlanta, is planning to take the exhibition on the road to the United States. For now, and until Nov. 3, the show is exclusively in Nairobi, at the Alliance Francaise in the city center.