BOOK REVIEW
Author: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Title: Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement.
Publisher: Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2024.
Series: Theory In Forms
Pages: 412
Review: G Oluoch-Olunya
Origins, Partitions, Borders, and Migrations. It is through these four snapshots, offering multiple and interlinked perspectives, that Architect AbdulFatah Adam imagines Dadaab. His dual Somali/Kenyan sensibility sharpens the view from Somalia, his invited countermapping sitting in counterpoint to, and lending added clarity to Anooradha Siddiqi’s initial focus on Dadaab as a fixed humanitarian construct, as an immobilized and sedentary settlement. What was envisioned as a temporary encampment, a humanitarian emergency response, has seen more than three generations born in what Siddiqi refers to as ‘emergency subjecthood’.
Once the largest hosting camp by the UNHCR, this refugee Complex – it has been given purpose by designers and builders – was segregated from the rest of Kenya. A beleaguered history of tensions along the North-Eastern border (the 1963-1968 Northern Frontier District -NFD- Shifta war that seeped into subsequent decades) prompted containment policies, restricting movement, and complicating Somali transition to Kenya. Associations with banditry sat uneasily with the UN’s insistence on humanitarian accommodation. This historical complexity was exacerbated by attacks in Westgate in 2013, at Garissa University in 2015, and at Dusit in 2019. Planned and executed from Dadaab by the militant al- Shabaab, any intended transitioning into integrated settlements has met with understandable hostility on the ground. International pressure (drawing on the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees and subsequent protocols, and closer to home the 1969 OAU Convention on Refugees, both ratified by Kenya) saw the enactment of the Refugees Act (2021), an Act of Parliament to provide for the recognition, protection and management of refugees, and with a new framework for local integration that saw the Kenya Government announce the phasing of camps to municipalities.[1] Following through, the World Bank has recently offered Kenya Sh46 billion ‘for second phase urban centres improvement plan’, in which a ‘USD 50 million grant will support implementation of the Refugee(s) Act and help integrate these communities with their host communities, through establishment of two special municipalities at Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps. The World Bank will also provide USD 1 million for technical support.’[2]
This is a significant shift in policy towards a community whose ‘permanent impermanence’, whose ‘existential and representational ephemerality’ continues despite international negotiation. And yet legitimate Kenya Somali, separated from greater Somalia by colonial border are, after all, bound by clan. The Kenya Government threat to close the camps in 2017, for instance, saw renewed commitment by the international community to keep the camps open, in situ. But what does this new promise to secure refugee futures mean? Siddiqi argues that the colonial condition is immanent in the humanitarian. The book examines the transience of this fractured migrant, and the anchoring of architectures that shift the precarity of refugee into a permanent state. Even as this space is located outwith the State, it also mimics the State, organising internally, for instance through elections and governance frameworks. Siddiqi could only speculate in her research, ending on the note of partitions; of the precarity of ‘how we may live together, owing each other debts, and together building common heritages, knowledges, and futures’ (320), even as she willed an attendant ‘restitution and repair’ (316). The enfoldment into municipality and the ‘normalisation’, even inclusivity, that the World Bank proposition suggests may serve to anchor those for whom belonging has been elusive. Whilst in the 1980’s most refugees fleeing instability anticipated relocation to the West, it is the explosion in numbers, and this spectre of permanence that has perhaps driven Britain, most controversially, to outsource its refugees to Rwanda.
Siddiqi notes this exponential growth of the population in the camps. Some ‘grew tenfold to more than 148, 000 people between 1989 and 2010, well in excess of the rate in the North- Eastern Province.’ Other camps planned to accommodate 90,000 were by 2011 hosting
460, 000 (9). She remarks ‘The astonishing population of the Dadaab camps, the third largest grouping in Kenya after Nairobi and Mombasa’, going further to problematise the confinement and marginalisation that may have occasioned this implosion (14). To complicate matters, shared identity markers and kinship affiliation ease the intermingling of the refugee population with the local; ‘speaking Somali, Boran(a), Kiswahili, and English; practicing Islam; sharing familial lineage, and adhering to communal economic approaches’(15). There are advantages to be gained by this fluidity, which include the all-important ration card, as well as receiving other goods and services offered by aid agencies.
It is this imbrication, these tightly woven overlaps that override what may appear as a ‘visual frailty-dwellings covered in recovered textiles and sheet metal fragment, dusted red by the earth and wind.’ These are the tents, the ‘tuquls’ visualised by local artist Deqa Abshir on the book cover, and which once symbolised traditional life, here modified. They sit in sharp contrast to the ‘equally dazzling substance-an array of satellites and their dishes, aeronautic fleets resting on tarmac, all-terrain vehicular convoys, aluminium and polyvinyl chloride water storage towers, hydraulic extraction machinery, and the large settlements themselves-anchors hard infrastructures in the earth and sky.’ (17) Ultimately, thinking with Dadaab’s socio-spatial and historical contexts as she theorises Dadaab as humanitarian settlement, Siddiqi takes us from these architectural experiences to a riveting intellectual history, but always bearing in mind that Dadaab is ‘driven not only by abstract forces of relief and development’; it is about being, in the philosophical sense, in the camp¾it is about actual people.
This book is the culmination of 12 years of academic and environmental research in East Africa and comparative spaces, interviews with hundreds of residents, many conversations, and encounters. It carries these years lightly, successfully conveying the richness and depth of a sustained engagement, evolving a cogent theoretical lens. That the book signals, in the ‘Afterword’, spill-over to an interactive exhibition opens up urgent avenues of multi- and interdisciplinary exploration and shift. Collaborators include local Cave Bureau, engaged in conceptual work with an aquifer to harness past practice for future use. Without the Merti aquifer, without water, there would be no camp. It is significant as part of ‘enabling infrastructures’ that maintain Dadaab. The GoDown Arts Centre is curatorial and archival partner for such aspects of the work going forward. These partnerships speak to Siddiqi’s collegiality, and care. Her practice and process, evident in the book, is incisive yet sensitive, empathetic to and respectful of the dignity of her subject, and contexts. She offers a beautifully realised book, not only visually, but in its meticulous detail, and depth of its concerns. It does not attempt to answer all questions, maintaining an undercurrent of slippages and loose ends that are the hallmark of life itself. Siddiqi succeeds, ultimately, in establishing an important reference point for future thinking around architectural histories, refugee studies, migration, and more, issues as urgent when she started her research as they are today.
[1] Mary Wambui, NMG Online,May10, 2023.
[2] Dudley Muchiri, Daily Nation, May 8, 2024, p. 40.
This review was first published in Jahazi Vol12 Issue1.
‘Dadaab Commons’ exhibition opened on Saturday March 15 at The GoDown Arts Center, Kayahwe Road, Kilimani, and runs until Easter. It features insights and works by artists Deqa Abshir, Elsa MH Mäki, Peterson Kamwathi, James Muriuki, AbdulFatah Adam, Yvonne A Owuor, and Cave Bureau. It is curated by Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi in partnership with the GoDown.
*The book is available at Cheche Bookshop.
