ABSTRACT: Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Burundian refugees living ... KEYWORDS: Burundi, camp, displacement, emplacement, Nairobi, refugee, ...
Staying out of Place The Being and Becoming of Burundian Refugees in the Camp and the City Simon Turner
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ABSTRACT: Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Burundian refugees living clan-
destinely in Nairobi and living in a refugee camp in Tanzania, the article argues that displacement can be about staying out of place in order to find a place in the world in the future. I suggest that the term dia-placement describes this sense of not only being out of place but also being en route to a future. Burundians in the camp and the city are doing their best to remain out of place, in transition between a lost past and a future yet to come, and the temporary nature of their sojourn is maintained in everyday practices. Such everyday practices are policed by powerful actors in the camp and are ingrained in practices of self-discipline in Nairobi. Comparing the two settings demonstrates that remaining out of place can take on different forms, according to context.
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KEYWORDS: Burundi, camp, displacement, emplacement, Nairobi, refugee, Tanzania,
temporality
Taking my point of departure in an ethnographic exploration of Burundian refugees in camps in Tanzania as well as living clandestinely in Nairobi, I argue in this article that displacement is not only a disruption into people’s lives but can also be a strategy in and of itself to plan for the future. The 100,000 Burundians living in a camp in Tanzania are not there of their own free will and they see their future and fortune elsewhere. Those among them who make the dangerous journey to Nairobi have made a choice and are seeking a future outside the camp. However, the future that they are seeking is also elsewhere, as Nairobi for them is also a non-place between the past and the future, where they do not want to put down roots but are preparing for a future either in Burundi or in Europe or North America. In order to understand the meanings of displacement and emplacement for these refugees, I argue that we must view displacement not simply as a traumatic experience that must be overcome but as a strategy in itself. Killing time in a refugee camp or hiding on the outskirts of a big city is to live in a non-place (Augé 1995), in liminality (Turner 1967), or as an exception (Agamben 1998). However, as much as this is a parenthesis in time—strung out between a long lost past and an unknown future—it is also a space of opportunities and new beginnings (Jansen 2008; Turner 2004a). In other words, disruption and displacement can produce a powerful position. As mentioned in the introduction to this special section, we must not assume displacement as disempowering, just as we must avoid the opposite trap of assuming that transnationalism and mobility are virtues. Instead, we may perceive displacement as a disruption into what SteConflict and Society: Advances in Research 2 (2016): 37–51 © Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/arcs.2016.020106
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phen Lubkemann (2008) has called “lifescapes,” which may well be mobile projects. Likewise, emplacement may not necessarily be about putting down roots and belonging to a place but instead be perceived as taking control over life projects. In this article, I explore how individuals and groups maneuver in the exceptional space, making the most use of it as a disruptive non-space. I explore the complex relationship between “being” in Nairobi and the camp and “becoming” someone in the future. On the one hand, they engage in mobile livelihoods in their present place of being, while on the other hand they attempt to avoid becoming too involved, as they prefer to prepare their future by remaining liminal in the present. In other words, the article argues that displacement creates a sense of disruption that those who are affected by it simultaneously attempt to overcome in order to inhabit the new space in which they live while also remaining in—and maintaining—a non-space—a space that is not to be inhabited but is there for the future alone. These refugees are not concerned with becoming embedded in Nairobi or the camp. Rather, they create lifescapes that span the past and the future. In other words, they remain displaced in the present in order to achieve future emplacement. Finally, I argue that this tension is highly contentious and that different groups among the refugees struggle to define the space. Creating and maintaining a non-space is a powerful tool through which to govern and control those who have been displaced. It is my intention through this investigation of two non-places to contribute to an understanding of how temporality and temporariness affect notions of displacement and emplacement. Temporality plays a role in the sense that refugees living in camps and clandestinely in cities are living for the future more than for the present. Life in the camp and on the outskirts of the city is temporary by nature, and the question is how refugees inhabit and make use of temporary spaces—if at all. By comparing the refugee camp and the city, I intend to explore concretely how notions of displacement and emplacement are created, contended, and policed in different contexts of temporary places. In order to explore these questions I draw on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a refugee camp in Tanzania in 1997–1998 and six years later among Burundians living clandestinely in Nairobi. Although originally part of two different research projects—one exploring issues of governance, politics, and masculinities in the camp and another exploring diaspora politics and conflict—it became increasingly clear to me that it made sense to analyze the two together. Rather than being two autonomous and comparable entities, however, we can perceive of them as two dimensions in a connected system for the simple reason that many of the refugees whom I interviewed in Nairobi had also lived in the camp. I was, in other words, de facto doing a longitudinal study, following a group of young Burundians who had left the camp and gone to Nairobi—some of whom I have in fact met since, back in Burundi. By way of comparison, there was also another group of Burundians living in another part of Nairobi. I managed to find this group due to having two different entrance points into the city— two different key informants and research assistants who led me to two different social worlds. When doing fieldwork in Nairobi, I would follow personal networks, snowball sampling, as informants would suggest others to meet. Interestingly, the networks in the two parts of the city appeared to be completely disconnected and they hardly knew of each other’s existence. It was only because I had two assistants and hence two very different entry points into the camp that I discovered them. One was someone I knew from the camp and with whom I had kept in touch by e-mail over the years. He had settled in Kawangware on the western outskirts of the city. He introduced me to a whole community of refugees, eking out precarious lives as undocumented migrants. The refugees living in this part of the city often came from the camps and had only little knowledge of the neighborhood where they lived but had an extensive knowledge of the network of Burundians living clandestinely in this part of the city. I got in touch with the sec-
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ond group living near the city center through a Kenyan friend of a friend who knew nothing about Burundi in particular but who knew his multiethnic neighborhood well. He had a hair salon and knew that there were many immigrants in the area. He introduced me to individuals he believed to be Burundian, although often they would turn out to be Rwandan. They had no connections to the Burundians from the camp and had arrived in the city in search of a better life there. They blended in and had no dreams of return. I will touch upon this group in the article because their strategy in trying to become embedded and emplaced in the present in Nairobi rather than elsewhere in the future presents an interesting comparison with the other Burundians who are the main focus of the article. Their presence provides a backdrop for the analysis.
From Displacement to Dia-placement According to the Oxford English Dictionary the prefix dis- can mean negation, separation, reversal, removal, and expulsion from. So to be displaced is not simply to move from A to B, but to be denied a place in the world, to be separated from one’s place, to experience removal and expulsion—something that is linked to loss and a situation in which one is not the active agent but rather the object of others’ force. I propose that the term dia-placement may better capture the position of the Burundian refugees studied in this article. The prefix dia- from Greek dia (through) can mean through, across, and apart. Dia-placement, then, is about being in a place that one passes through on the way to another place in the future. Dia-placement is also about remaining apart in order to move forward and remaining out of place in the present in order to find place in the future. Much literature acknowledges that displaced people are not simply displaced, but they are also busy emplacing themselves—putting down roots. Concretely this means that the new places where they live are also given meaning—whether refugee camps (Agier 2011; Horst 2006; Turner 2010), villages, or cities (Malkki 1995; Sommers 2001). Emplacement, in the sense that it is used in migration studies, connotes not only getting inside a new place but also a reversal of displacement, regaining what was lost. While displacement has connotations of force and involuntary movement, emplacement is usually associated with agency and with voluntary creation of identities. Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving (2008) argue, however, that emplacement might equally be forced upon subjects. Lubkemann (2008) similarly questions the natural linkage between force and displacement and argues that populations during conflict may equally suffer from forced emplacement. In other words, we need to question the assumptions about agency and force in our conceptualization of displacement and emplacement. Another strand of thinking critiques the sedentarist assumption that place always matters, and claims that displaced people—in line with other migrants—are not bound by place but engage in mobile livelihoods (Folke Frederiksen and Wilson 1997) and forge transnational ties (Al-Ali 2002; Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Bauböck 2003; Glick-Schiller and Wimmer 2002; Guarnizo and Smith 1998). Arguing against what it perceives as “methodological nationalism” (Glick-Schiller and Wimmer 2002), transnational “theory” claims that we must not assume the nation as the ordering principle of societies just as we must question the taken-for-grantedness of the people–place–identity trinity (Amelina and Faist 2012). The debate on theoretical nationalism has, however, taken what Jansen and Löfving have termed a “programmatic tendency.” They argue that many studies that want to destabilize the link between nation and identity, “are not so much descriptions of as much as calls for new forms of subjectivity” (Jansen and Löfving 2008: 5).
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I will not contend that some displaced people manage to live mobile and transnational lives, transgressing the fixity of nation-states and place. However, it would be as much of a mistake to assume so as to assume that nation, place, and identity are stable. My own empirical findings show that there may be a third way of relating to displacement, where displaced people make use of being displaced as such. This means that they are neither trying to become emplaced nor are they merely mobile and transnational. Liisa Malkki has made a similar argument regarding camp refugees who are purposely trying to remain dislocated in order to be able to remain “pure” (Malkki 1995). Stepputat (1992) found similar mechanisms among Guatemalan refugees in camps in Mexico, where the camp elders resisted the youth leaving the camp to work in Mexican towns. The rationale is that it is important to remain displaced and resist emplacement in order to be able to return in the future. It has been argued that the “myth of return”—in particular among first-generation migrants (Anwar 1979; Bolognani 2007)—had a similar effect of keeping migrants from envisioning a future in the place of residence, often creating conflicts with the second generation (Bolognani 2007). For refugee populations the myth of return may become more mythical because it also involves expectations of a different future back home (Zetter 1999). We also see from these cases that such a position of “displacement-as-strategy” is not just a cultural habitus; it does not emerge out of the practices of the individuals but needs policing and defending—either by parents or by social, religious, or political leaders. In this sense it is ideological. The transnational approach focuses on the practices of migrants and assumes that identities flow from practices and that place is therefore less relevant than in hegemonic “sedentarist theories.” I argue on the contrary that for these displaced people, place (and often nation as well) is of utmost importance for their being. It is in the name of the lost place that they work hard on remaining “out of place.” On the other hand, I propose a more radical notion of being out of place than the transnational literature. While proponents of transnationalism argue that migrants inhabit “transnational space,” they in fact describe a situation of emplacement where migrants inhabit a place—only they expand this place beyond the geographical limits of the concrete nation-state. I argue, on the other hand, that the camp and the city become non-places, places where emplacement is impossible and/or undesirable. Hence, my argument also differs slightly from postcolonial conceptions of a hybrid or diasporic “third space” (Bhaba 1994; Gilroy 1987, 1993; Hall 1990), for while the Burundians in Nairobi are indeed “neither here nor there,” they are not creating a hybrid, diasporic identity either. Rather, they seem to be putting their present life “on hold” in order to achieve fullness of identity in the future. My point therefore is that we need to explore temporality—and in particular concepts of possible futures—in order to fully understand present place making, senses of belonging, and the making of identity. A main contention in this article is that moving out of one place does not mean that one automatically moves into another place. Often one ends up in a kind of non-place. What, then, is a non-place? Marc Augé’s term covers some of the qualities of such places, namely the fact that they are transitory and lack the history and symbolics of lived places (Augé 1995). The camp and the outskirts of Nairobi differ from Augé’s late modern non-places in some aspects, however, because these are places for the leftovers of humankind: l’homme jetable (Balibar 1998), naked life (Agamben 1998, 2000), or the undesirables (Agier 2002, 2011). These places are not the chosen non-places of the business-class traveler, but the forced non-places of the refugee. Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the camp as the nomos of modernity is an obvious way of conceptualizing these places (Agamben 1998). However, the idea of the camp as a space of exception is too broad, once one enters the camp and explores the lived experience of the camp (Turner 2005). Being framed as bare life, refugees still make sense of the non-place they inhabit, giving the place meaning, giving it hierarchies of power, politics, and violence. However, it remains
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exceptional, and the camp never becomes a city (Agier 2002). The question to pose in this article, then, is how the camp and the city are related as similar but not identical non-places for the undesirables. How does this shape the dialectics between settling in and remaining outside? The refugees in the camp are contained and secluded away from normality while at the same time being made visible as objects of humanitarian governmentalities (Turner 2005), giving them a sense at once of being in the eye of the storm and the forgotten debris of international realpolitik (Turner 2004b). The Burundians living clandestinely in Nairobi on the other hand are subject to—and maneuver within—other kinds of social invisibility. They are no longer pushed to the margins of the country—to the Tanzanian bush or the arid lands of Northern Kenya. They are in the metropolis of Eastern Africa, the city of fortune, hope, and modernity. They are in Nairobi because it makes them “connected” to the rest of the world, as they always explained when I asked why they kept on struggling against all odds. At the same time, however, they are socially and legally invisible (Turner and Vigh 2007). As irregulars they do not exist in the eyes of the Kenyan authorities or the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). This, as we shall see, is a position that they savor because it lets them plan for a future beyond the city. The place occupied by the displaced is a temporary place—and if what was lost is to be retrieved, it is necessary for the place of the present to remain temporary. Once it becomes permanent, all hope for the future is lost. In other words, the city and the camp are experienced as disruptions into their lifeworlds and their response is dual: since they use displacement and disruption as a strategy toward future emplacement, they also become embedded in displacement.
The Camp—Preparing a Future When I first met Gerard in Lukole Refugee Camp in Tanzania, he was in his late teens, curious to speak to the foreigner, practice his English, and tell me about the political problems in his home country. He attended the post-primary school in Lukole Refugee Camp. It was called a post-primary school because the Tanzanian authorities had not permitted secondary schools in the camp. The camps for Burundian refugees who had fled the violence after 1993 were meant to be as temporary as possible, which meant that any sign of “putting down roots” was discouraged by the Tanzanian state. For the same reason, refugees were not allowed to move beyond a four-kilometer zone around the camp, preventing them from taking jobs and doing business with local Tanzanians who saw a great labor resource and market potential in the 100,000 refugees who had landed in this remote area (Landau 2003; Whitaker 2002). Later, the authorities also prohibited refugees from growing vegetables within the zone. The Tanzanian state perceived the Burundians on Tanzanian soil as “matter out of place” and did its best to contain them and make sure that they returned as soon as possible. It was believed that they would return as soon as their home country was safe, if only they did not put down roots in Tanzania. UNHCR and international relief nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had a slightly different take on this liminal space, as they believed that the refugees needed to be kept activated in one way or another while held in the exceptional space of the camp, in order not to become apathetic receivers of alms—creating the dreaded relief mentality (Turner 2010). Therefore, they did their best to engage the refugees in various activities; theater troupes teaching hygiene, vocational training centers, and women’s self-help groups. Despite the many projects assisting refugees, they were not able to support the post-primary school because the Tanzanian authorities perceived this as a sign of permanence. Instead, parents and some donations from churches funded the school.
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A group of parents, who had themselves held semi-elite positions in Burundi,1 had established the school in order that their sons and daughters did not lose out on opportunities in the future—when they would return to a radically transformed Burundi. The school ran a Burundian curriculum and was in no way intended to help the students integrate into Tanzanian society. While many refugees felt that they had learned a lot of life skills in the camp due to hardship, and learning “tricks” from Rwandan refugees and NGOs, the educated elite felt that their lives had ground to a standstill while their peers back home were moving forward. I encountered numerous young men and women who had fled Burundi while attending secondary school and who had now lost out on four or five years of school. For them, life in exile was a nonlife and they felt that the bracketing of time would also affect their future options when returning to ordinary life. The parents who started the school wanted to keep their children up to date so that they were on a par with their peers upon return. While they desired the bracketed time because they did not want to be assimilated into the present of Tanzania, they still wanted to make use of this “time in brackets” to prepare for the future. Gerard had always been a hardworking and entrepreneurial boy who studied hard at school but in his spare time also organized a vegetable garden outside the camp in order to make an income. He tried to engage his schoolmates in the vegetable patch but they were too lazy, he claims, so he carried through with it on his own. In the afternoons after school he was not just engaged in homework and his vegetable garden. He also attended secret military training exercises in the bush run by the CNDD (Conseil National Pour la Défense de la Démocratie), which was the dominant of the two rebel groups that were active in the camp at the time. It was only years later in Nairobi that the refugees openly told me about the military training in Lukole. Although I spent over a year in Lukole, they never openly admitted to being engaged in military exercises. Political and military activity was strictly forbidden in the camp, and the Tanzanian authorities and the UNHCR perceived young men like Gerard as either criminals or child soldiers in need of assistance. In Nairobi—far from the caring and controlling gaze of the relief agencies, hiding from the local authorities and partially free from the surveillance of the dominant rebel groups—they were more open to talk. The boys themselves were eager to join the rebel group and fight the “evil Tutsi.” Gerard explains it to me six years later in Nairobi: Even before starting secondary school I was [in] active training. Luckily I was clever, so they didn’t send me to Burundi to fight. Instead I stayed in the camp where I trained other kids. Almost everyone was involved. And they were not forced. Even the very young boys. Some of the adults were saying to me: “You are intelligent. You should not just be going to fight and become a simple soldier. You should study and become a big man when you return.” But I wanted to fight for my country. I would rather die with a weapon in my hand than die of hunger in Lukole.
This caused a dilemma for the parents. On the one hand, they were heavily engaged in clandestine politics and strongly behind CNDD—much to the dismay of the supporters of its rival rebel group, Palipehutu (Parti pour la libération du peuple hutu), who did not dare send their children to the school. On the other hand, they were worried about their sons’ homework and they were not interested in their own sons becoming cannon fodder in the guerrilla war just across the border in Burundi. They foresaw a greater future for them as “big men” in a liberated Burundi. This led a group of parents to decide to send their sons to Nairobi where they would be out of harms way. Gerard’s story reveals the many facets of displacement and emplacement, taking place in the camp. It is easy to see the camp as an Agambenesque space of exception, the “nomos of modernity.” This is certainly the picture we get when we see the attempts by the Tanzanian state to keep
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it outside the ordinary and create a state of exception. The Tanzanian state is able to uphold its sovereign power by deciding on who is inside and who is outside the Tanzanian state and by attempting to avoid blurring these boundaries, which are constantly threatened by the refugees when they dig gardens and barter their produce with Tanzanians or when they board minibuses and go to the local town to buy goods or sell labor. Tempting as this image of the refugee camp is (Diken and Bagge Laustsen 2003, 2006), it does not cover all the dimensions of the camp because, among other things, the refugees are also exposed to a caring regime of biopolitics by UNHCR and relief agencies. Although these agencies agree with the Tanzanian state that displacement is exceptional, and although they promote repatriation as a “permanent solution,” they perceive displacement as disruptive and dislocating and do their best to dampen the negative effects on the refugees’ “mentalities” while in the camp—in order that they may better integrate upon return. This is the rationale behind many of the programs on refugee participation and community development; the refugees are assumed to be traumatized by loss and need help to get back on track in order to face the future back home. For the relief agencies, displacement creates dislocation of identities and in particular of communities and they embark on a number of programs to minimize these dislocating effects. They are not, however, emplacing the refugees in the present in Tanzania but rather preparing them for a future. Gerard’s story also reveals that emplacement takes place through day-to-day practice, despite his desire to remain out of place. In digging Tanzanian soil, Gerard is literally connecting to Tanzania and becoming rooted. And Gerard is not alone: entering the camp is like entering a Tanzanian city with restaurants, bars, hairdressers, and bicycle taxis creating lived space. Going to school and doing military training is also on one level a way of creating lived space. However, there are other dimensions to these activities. The elite who organize the military training and who send their children to post-primary school are not doing so in order to become emplaced in Tanzania; they are doing it for a future in Burundi. They are actively using displacement as a resource, keeping their sons outside the Burundian national territory while preparing them for a future inside Burundi. They are using displacement in the present as a means to shape their future “back home,” aware of the transformative character of the liminal space of the camps (as also the liminal sites in van Gennep’s original terms were). Furthermore, they are not merely preparing their sons’ prospects of a bright future if and when they return; they are also trying to make this return happen. Through their political strategies, which include armed resistance and using the camps as platforms for the rebellion, they are trying to shape the future of the homeland and actively changing the conditions of return. The dislocated non-place of the camp, which concretely means that they are beyond the reach of the Burundian state, allows the creation of collective, political identities that actively work to change the future—not in the camp but in Burundi. The camp—and in particular its dislocated nature—becomes a political resource. Furthermore, as mentioned in the introduction, it becomes a political asset that needs defining, defending, and policing so that, in particular, the youth do not become too tempted by life “in” Tanzania. For the same reason, the political elite in the camp detests the refugees who simply are concerned with “doing business,” who are becoming too emplaced, and who may even lose interest in changing things back home in Burundi. The tensions between becoming emplaced and remaining what I call dia-placed came forth when the government of Tanzania decided in early1998 to round up non-Tanzanians living “illegally” in Tanzanian villages. In this “flushing out” operation, which was obligingly but not convincingly condemned by international human rights organizations, everyone who did not have Tanzanian ID papers was given the choice to return to Burundi or move to the camp. I interviewed these villagers within a week of their arrival in the camp. Many of them had lived in Tanzania for decades and had married Tanzanians, they spoke virtually the same language as the
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local Wahangaza people, and were deeply shaken by suddenly being pointed out as foreigners and put into a camp. Some had lived in Tanzania while still tending their fields across the border in Burundi. They perceived of themselves as peasants and artisans in the border region between Tanzania and Burundi—moving across the border according to security and livelihood opportunities, living in the present rather than for the future. They were at once emplaced and were adapting what has been termed “mobile livelihoods” (Olwig and Nyberg Sørensen 2002; Stepputat 2004) because their mobility was a means of being embedded in the present. Obviously, they were unhappy about being rounded up into the camp—displaced from the livelihoods that they knew. Displacement was, in other words, not linked to crossing borders but to being forced into the camp. Their transnational practices were, in other words, a means of becoming emplaced, and it was only when they were prevented from transnational mobility and physically emplaced in the camp, that they became displaced. Interestingly, members of the political elite in the camp confided in me that they were pleased that the refugees had been rounded up and put in the camp. Now they had the opportunity to teach the newcomers about the politics of the home country and make them more attuned toward a future return, they explained. As long as they remained in the villages, they were only interested in their own lives here and now, whereas they would be more open toward the political struggle for the collective future if they were in the camp, according to this rationale. The political elite was creating a pure non-place where its inhabitants had to look forward toward the future. In the camp the refugees could be reminded of the collective loss that the Hutu had suffered and what they therefore should strive for in the future—rather than focus on their present livelihoods. Displacement and emplacement are, in other words, not simply the result of movement. They depend equally on the temporality of living in the present or for the future. The camp as a site in which to live for the future is a result of its position as a seclusion site and a state of exception. Meanwhile, this exceptional space has the paradoxical effect of at once being a space to produce apolitical “bare life” while also creating a highly politicized space where political actors are creating a space for the future. Politics emerge in the camp as a means of recuperating the non-space created by the international relief agencies (Agier 2010; Turner 2010). However, control over the camp by the political entrepreneurs ends up reinforcing the sense of a space that is tightly controlled and constraining for the individual refugee. It was this saturation of political tensions that constrained the opportunities of young men like Gerard because it limited his choice of futures. Although it was admittedly members of the same political elite who sent their sons to Nairobi as part of a grand master plan, Nairobi for these young men—as for many others—became a way out of the confines of party politics. It became a means to open up the possibility of multiple futures beyond the camp and beyond the city.
Nairobi—A Gateway I was fortunate to meet Gerard again in Nairobi, six years later. He was by now a young man, living together with two other young men in Kawangware, an area that was dominated by interim shacks and houses, hosting migrants from up-country and from places like Rwanda and Burundi. The three of them shared a single room in a building made of corrugated iron. Apparently, a man called Simeon came from Nairobi to the camp to choose twenty-five boys and one girl to follow him to Nairobi to study. The circumstances around his background or purpose never became quite clear to me, although several other young men in Nairobi told me about Simeon and the 26 girls and boys. Possibly he was working with a church organization, as these are some of the few organizations that support clandestine refugees in Nairobi. In general, the
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Burundians in Nairobi were vague in telling me the details of those who assisted them. Rather than talk of NGOs and churches, they would mention individuals who arbitrarily and by “the grace of God” chose to assist the refugees. Elsewhere I have argued that this keeps them in a situation of passionate suffering, which helps them hope for a different future (Turner 2015). In other words, the apparently arbitrary nature of Simeon’s activities supports a conception of the place as uncertain and hence with unknown opportunities. Of the 26 to arrive in Nairobi, many returned after a year because they found life too hard in the city. The young men in Kawangware lived off alms and odd jobs. They had no refugee documents and were therefore constantly vulnerable to harassment by Kenya’s notoriously corrupt police, and the “education” that they received was second rate at best. Despite these conditions, they had still chosen to live here rather than in the camps because “you are more in touch in Nairobi,” they would say. Nairobi may not be a pleasant place to live, but it opened up opportunities—or at least promised the dream of opportunities—to do better in the future, either back home in Burundi or far away in Europe or America. Gerard and his friends claimed that they had become more open-minded in Nairobi because they were in touch with more people from different “tribes” and with different opinions—as opposed to the camp where the political leaders controlled all opinion. They complained that they had a reputation among the other Burundians in Nairobi of being “political” because they came from the camps. There were rumors that Simeon was a political leader and he was recruiting rebels from the camp. However, Gerard emphasized that they were studying in order to be able to help build and lead their country in the future. One thing that he did not like about life in Lukole was the politics. He might have been active in military training, but he several times told about incidences where he was reprimanded for being out of line with the dominant politics. He appreciated life in Nairobi because politics did not control everyone and everything. Samuel is older than Gerard and the other young men in Kawangware and he has not lived in the camp in Tanzania. I met Samuel in his flat near Dagoretti Corner in Kawangware, where he lived with his wife and two children. He worked as a teacher at one of the schools for Burundians and Rwandans in the area. Although he had no documents, he explained that the alternative was to live in the Kakuma refugee camps in northern Kenya: To stay in a town is good, because [in Kakuma refugee camp] I cannot have faith. Because I cannot educate my children to become (atheist), because the church is helping us. But in a camp you cannot be free in mind, psychologically. To be given one kilo of food, of wood … of what? And to stay there … you can become … I don’t know, you can become a devil. To be in a camps is a good thing if they let me come in Nairobi and visit my people, let me teach, let me do my business, let my children be free to take school, so that when they are in their own country they can get a chance to be a deputy, a governor, or a good teacher is what we want nowadays. You cannot make me go back to ancient times. Things are evolving, going up, changing.
It is important for Samuel to prepare himself and his family to return to Burundi one day and to provide the family with opportunities for the future by staying in Nairobi even if it is less secure than life in Kakuma camp. In Kakuma one might have the legal benefits of being a refugee and the material benefits of food and firewood but no freedom and thus no opportunities for the future. He needs to move, to visit “his people,” to teach, and first and foremost to give his children a good education, otherwise he will remain stuck in the “ancient times” while the world moves on—“evolving, going up, changing.” His hopes for the future are to return to Burundi and for his children to get important positions in a new Burundi as governors or deputies, and in order to enhance his odds, he has to stay in touch and keep evolving. Freedom is about being
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able to make such choices while the lack of freedom in the camp leads to losing faith and becoming like a devil. Furthermore, Samuel seems to be afraid of being “forgotten” in the isolation of the camp, of becoming “nobody” to the world: When I go in a camp in Kakuma you cannot do something you want. I want to become someone before I die. In Kakuma you are limited, the knowledge you will get is not enough to expand your knowledge. So the camp is like a simple prison, you cannot feel free. So what to do when the world does not want you? You do what you can do to survive.
The camp is a prison in many ways, preventing him from various activities, and at the most existential level it prevents him from “becoming someone.” It takes away his being and leads to “social death” (Hage 2003). Even though Samuel would physically be able to survive in Kakuma, this is not a life worth living to him. “I want to become someone before I die,” he claims, and in order to become someone he needs social relations, mobility, education, and access to different kinds of information. “I hear BBC, France, American, English … I can hear everything from international talking. Every time I am hearing from the radio what is happening.” In the camp he would be trapped in a continuous present without a future. Nairobi provides him in other words the possibility to shape his own destiny, to change and to develop because it provides freedom and because it gives the option to “stay in touch.” Most of the Burundians in Kawangware emphasized the fact that they were better positioned in Nairobi to stay in touch with the outside world through the Internet as an important reason for staying in the city. Staying in touch is about keeping one’s future options open, trying to navigate in relation to possibilities and options in the future. These options might be jobs, scholarships, money from relatives abroad, possibilities to go abroad, or keeping up with developments in Burundi in order to monitor the future options for return. In Kawangware, in other words, there were a number of young men and fewer young women who were determined to succeed despite the odds. They had left the camps in Tanzania with a purpose—namely, to improve their education and hence their future options. Even those who had not been able to pursue their studies in Nairobi due to financial difficulties and lack of legal documents, preferred Nairobi because it meant freedom and “being in touch” and ultimately the possibility to shape oneself and hence one’s future. Nairobi offered them a space to remain disembedded—in time and space—while allowing them to emplace themselves in a larger life project that projected itself into the future and into other places. Nairobi became the place of dia-placement. As opposed to the camps where they would either have no future, as Samuel explains, or where political factions controlled these futures, they had a sense of being able to shape their own futures in Nairobi. This act of remaining disembedded in the present while navigating toward an unknown future (Vigh 2006) did not come on its own account, as a result of forced displacement. It needed active maintaining and performing. Gerard and his friends maintained this life of disembeddedness through daily practices of sacrifice and perseverance.
Sacrifice and Perseverance Gerard and his friends were adamant not to put down roots and become emplaced in Nairobi. Nairobi was harsh and unwelcoming, but rather than leave the city and go to the camps, they made a virtue out of necessity. In Nairobi they had to renounce the daily joys of life: They rarely ate meat and they did not drink, dance, or have girlfriends. Often refugees would explain to me that “We Burundians like to work hard” and that the refugee camp made them “lazy.” Laziness and idleness, they claimed, cause people to become rebels or even devils. For them it was the
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toughness of life and the daily sacrifice that made Nairobi the right place to prepare for the future. In this sense, Nairobi became a site of diaplacement—a transit to somewhere else. Gerard would explain in great detail how they made ends meet. The rent was 1,200 shillings a month and the household income was 2,000 shillings, leaving the equivalent of $17 for all other expenses. Gerard was obsessed with perseverance and with accumulating new knowledge. For him, life in Nairobi was about sacrificing and meeting the challenge in order to succeed in one thing: to get an education—to gain knowledge. Gerard appeared to be the unproclaimed leader of the boys with whom he lived. He would let the other young men from the camp live at his place and he organized reading sessions in his tiny room. He also tried to encourage them to “persevere” when they were almost giving up. An important institution in Gerard’s life was the Pentecostal church. Most of the Burundians in Kawangware were active members of one church or another—Baptist, Pentecostal, Catholic—just as different church groups ran the schools and “universities” for students from the Great Lakes, and many of the conflicts among the Burundians in Nairobi were connected to the different churches with mutual accusations of fraud and opportunism. The church gave Gerard a sense of hope for the future and encouraged him and his fellow Burundians to persevere, to keep on struggling for an education, and to keep faith in the future. Religion gave these young men and women hope, and hope for a better future was essential for survival in such conditions (Turner 2015).
Becoming Emplaced There was another sizable group of Burundians living in Nairobi. They lived in the more central, urban areas of the city, between Majengo, California Estate, and Eastleigh, among Swahili traders, Congolese and Somalis. They were often Muslims from Bujumbura and they were embedding themselves in the present, tailoring, hairdressing, and trying to hide their Burundian identity, in much the same way that the young Burundian men, whom Sommers writes about, did in Bongoland (Dar es Salaam) (Sommers 2001). They had virtually no interaction with the Burundians in Kawangware. I met Didier and his wife in their flat in California Estate. They grew up in Bwiza, a Muslim and Swahili neighborhood in Bujumbura, dominated by an informal economy and low levels of formal education. Bwiza became known during the 1990s because it was one of the few places in Bujumbura where residents did not take part in the ethnic violence. Didier explains how he hitched a lift with a lorry going from Bujumbura to Nairobi via Kampala. Upon arrival, he went to the mosque where he was given food and allowed to sleep for the first few days. Later his wife followed. Now he owns a small tailoring business in California Estate and his wife works in a “kioski.” Their friends are mostly Rwandan, Burundian, and Congolese, although they also mix with Kenyans. They have no documents and have to regularly pay the police “small bribes.” In fact, Didier preferred staying in Kenya when there was less focus on corruption because it was easier to stay in the country and do business without papers back then, he claims. He is in Nairobi because his livelihood options were limited in Burundi and the economy here is stronger than in Tanzania and Uganda. Tanzania is too political, he adds, insinuating like many other Burundians here, that the competing Hutu political parties control everything in Tanzania. He also prefers Nairobi because there is free health care and free schooling for his children. Asked whether they would like to return, Didier and his wife at first claim that they cannot because there is not yet peace. Later, his wife explains that even if there were peace, they cannot go back and “start from scratch.” “Our children are at school here in the Anglophone system.” They cannot go back to Burundi.
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Didier and his wife, like many Burundians in Majengo, are emplacing themselves in the here and now. They try to hide from the authorities by speaking Swahili and wearing Muslim attire, and in general try their best to “blend in.” This is easier to do in Majengo, California Estate, and Eastleigh, where a large number of the inhabitants are immigrants like themselves. So although they rarely mix with Kenyans, they can still become part of the urban, multicultural, Swahili fabric of the East African metropolis. Through mobile livelihoods they are becoming emplaced in the sense of making their lives part of the place that they inhabit. They agree that “Burundians like to work hard” but rather than suffering in the present in order to obtain some unknown benefit in the future, they work hard in the present to obtain concrete rewards in the immediate future, as opposed to the indefinite rewards of an unknown, distant future that their follow Burundians are waiting for in Kawangware. They build up a small tailoring business and they benefit from the health care and the schooling that Kenya offers them and their children. And while they have dreams for the future, these dreams are not dependent on remaining out of place in the present.
Concluding Remarks Although Kawangware and the camp were both places of dia-placement, they differed in two ways. First, the refugees in the camp were actively trying to change their future through violent, political action. They were using the non-place of the camp to organize collectively and to change their own destinies by fighting the regime in Bujumbura. In Kawangware the non-place was more individualistic. Every Burundian had to work hard on gaining knowledge as well as to persevere and make individual sacrifices in order to create better selves for a future Burundi. Second, the transitory, liminal spaces of the camp and the city were also different in character: The refugees perceived the camp to be isolated and heavily monopolized by the political elite. Nairobi, on the other hand, was often highlighted as open. Nairobi was the chosen destination of many Burundians because you could keep “in touch” with the world through e-mail, because other Burundians would be in transit, and because you could be in touch with Kenyans of all tribes. In other words, you could hide and be invisible in Nairobi and you could use Nairobi as a stepping-stone to something better. In Nairobi, the Burundians were not only out of place, they were also—ideally at least—in an open-ended place. In practice this was, of course, difficult, since they all were dependent on each other and on the rival churches in order to survive, which meant that to some degree they were “rooted” in local hierarchies of power. While remaining out of place was impossible in practice—whether in the camp or the city—it functioned as an ideal to strive for. In the camp, the political elite made sure that this ideal was upheld, while in Nairobi the individual upheld it through sacrifice and self-discipline. Dia-placement or the use of displacement as a means to remain outside the present in order to retrieve what was lost in the past sometime in the future can, in other words, take different forms. In the camp, it took the shape of a carefully policed seclusion site where the initiands are guided through to the next stage. A political elite makes sure that emplacement is limited and nurtures collective narratives about a lost past and a desirable future worth fighting for. The camp is at once a pure exception from the national order of things—a prime example of Agamben’s “permanent exception” where bare life exists (but does not live) as bios outside of polis— and a place that is hyperpoliticized by the refugees themselves. This may seem a contradiction, or we may see it as two different movements pointing in each direction, as the agency of the refugees resisting their objectification by relief agencies in a heroic double ontology of structure and agency. I would argue instead that it might be a paradox but that it is inherent and that one
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springs from the other. In other words, it is precisely the displacement and dislocating effects of the camp that are the resource of hyperpoliticization. Displacement and emplacement are not extremes on a continuum. In Nairobi, Burundian refugees remain outside the national order of things. But rather than be grouped by the state into a camp, secluded from the national territory in an exceptional space, they hide in the urban jungle of the city. Here, they can go below the radar and live a life as denizens—neither here nor there. And while some Burundians in Nairobi decide to use this opportunity to emplace themselves in the pulsating, ever-changing multicultural parts of the city, together with the Congolese, the Somalis, and the Waswahili, others choose to live invisible lives, parallel to the rest of the city, lives where they are preparing themselves for something else—elsewhere. For them Nairobi is a non-place, not because it is secluded and hidden away as the camp, but because it is a stepping-stone, a bridge, a portal to somewhere else, either in Burundi or in Europe and North America. I have argued for a new angle to the emplacement–displacement debate—allowing us to conceptualize the traumatizing effect of displacement as a strategy. To this end we need to consider the temporal aspects of displacement. Displaced people may become emplaced in the present, but the traumatic and dislocating effects of displacement entail the loss of a past and can therefore point toward a future recuperation. Dia-placement—to live in a non-place—means to live between a past lost and a future yet to come. It means to live a life of becoming rather than being.
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SIMON TURNER is Associate Professor at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies, Uni-
versity of Copenhagen. For the past two decades his research has focused on conflict and displacement in the African Great Lakes region. He is the author of Politics of Innocence: Hutu Identity, Conflict and Camp Life (Berghahn Books, 2010).
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NOTE
1. The question of the Hutu elite is difficult, as it was very small after decades of marginalization. The majority of this elite fled to Europe or to capitals in the region. The elite in the camp had usually held some public position in Burundi and had some kind of formal education—most often secondary school.
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