Growing Up in Exile : An Ethnography of Somali Youth Raised in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya
Chronic violence has characterized Somalia for over two decades, forcing nearly two million people to flee. This ethnography studies the experience of protracted exile of Somalis who were raised in Kakuma refugee camp, in Kenya, and are now young adults. Their experience is relatively uncommon, although increasing numbers of people spend long periods in camps conceived as temporary, due to the length of conflicts and the normalization of excluding populations deemed undesirable. I explore how young people perceive their living environment and how growing up in exile structures their view of the past and their country of origin, and the future and its possibilities. In doing so, I regularly shift perspectives from the specificities of the context to the global environment, to understand how people’s experience is shaped by (and shapes) the social, political, economical and historical dynamics in which it is embedded. My observations can be summarized into a few broad statements: regardless of how long it has existed, the camp is and remains a space of containment; conceived as a rationally organized space to manage populations, the camp becomes a messier social world where new practices develop; young Somalis display agency and interpret their experience in a way that makes the present bearable; frustration grows when Somali youth complete their education and struggle to establish themselves as adults, catalyzing their determination to leave Kakuma. Indeed, although refugees have been living there since the early 1990s, the camp remains a space of transition. Although there have been a number of studies on refugee camps in Kenya, no study has focused on the experience of Somali youth raised in a refugee camp. I argue that this experience is traversed and shaped by tensions between constraints and opportunities, mobility and immobility, isolation and connectedness, victimization and affirmation of the subject, citizenship and refugeeness – and by conflicting temporalities. This ethnographic study highlights the fact that notions such as conviviality or the multiplicity of people’s belongings developed in the literature on interethnic cohabitation in cities or the ethnic identity of migrants, help us to understand the camp experience. This research also shows that, far from being powerless victims, people actively contribute to finding solutions to their exile.
Migrations transnationales Kenya Kakuma Somalia Refugee camps Humanitarianism Asylum Youth Transnational migrations Anthropology of forced displacement