A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) by Jonny Steinberg Read Free Book Online

to carry Yindy out of her house and to take her across the border into Kenya, to a town called Liboi.

Liboi
    Liboi is a border town in the dust lands of the North Eastern Province of Kenya. Before the Somali war, it was home to some ten thousand people, the majority of them Somali speakers, the remainder an assortment of Kenyan military and civilian personnel. Many made a living, in one way or another, from the steady traffic of people and things that crossed the border post with Somalia.
    When war broke out, people from across southern Somalia fled toward Liboi. Asad was one of countless numbers who massed on the Somali side of the border and waited. Realizing that the tide could not be turned and that its borders would have to open, a doubtful and ambivalent Kenyan government invited the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to hastily establish a refugee camp outside Liboi. Two nongovernmental organizations, Doctors Without Borders and CARE International, were contracted to hurry in to provide medicine and food.
    When the camp at Liboi opened, people teamed across the border. In no time, the camp’s population grew to more than forty thousand. And so the UNHCR set up another camp in a nearby town called Ifo, then another outside a town called Dagahaley, then a fourth camp at Hagadera. Collectively, they became known as the Dadaab camps, the name of the district in which they fell. Among them, they came to shelter about one hundred sixty thousand people.
    Liboi is closed now and is thus perhaps the least well known of the four camps. But when one goes back to the reports written about it in the early 1990s, it feels as if one is reading in dry officialese a description of hell.
    Water was perpetually in short supply. At one time during Asad’s stay there, it was reported that refugees were dying at a rate of more than a hundred a month, many of them children under the age of five, many of them of thirst. Food, too, was scarce. Although each family was given a ration card, there was never enough to go around. Each family would send a member to queue at midnight to wait for a ration distribution that began at six o’clock the following morning.
    If the UNHCR did not distribute enough food and water, neither did it provide adequate security for the thousands of strangers who had been thrown together. Report after report speaks of an epidemic of rape in Liboi and other camps. Some say that clan divisions determined who raped whom; others that when Bantu Somalis began arriving at Liboi in October 1992, their women were raped as punishment for coming to take scarce rations. Other reports complain that the UNHCR turned a blind eye to the obvious fact that the camp was awash with firearms. The popping of gunfire would ring in the night, it was said, and continue at regular intervals until morning. Anything was possible, it seems, no matter how diabolical, for whoever could gather sufficient force.
    It is interesting to compare the reports of nongovernmental organizations and international newspapers with the memory of somebody who was a child there. It is not that Asad’s recollections of Liboi contradict the official documentation. He confirms everything I have read. His presiding memory of Yindy during this time was her pervasive fear, especially at night, when the most terrible fate might befall one. But in the Liboi preserved in Asad’s mind, these deprivations and anxieties are a background hum. He has instead taken with him from that time something else entirely.
    —
    Very early, perhaps on the day Yindy and Asad came to Liboi, a white woman who worked for Doctors Without Borders noticed the short, crippled woman and her young child. Yindy was taken away to the military hospital—Asad does not remember for how long—and when she returned her leg had shrunk back to its normal size, and it no longer oozed yellow pus.
    Asad smiles at the memory of the white woman. It is, in part, a smile of gentle