My Refugee Journey

I have a very personal motivation which drove me to write this book. I am a third-generation refugee so it is important that this book commences with my refugee story. Inspired by my own embodied history of encampment in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, this book chronicles my daily struggle in the camp to demonstrate how the camp fits into the global neo-colonial project in Africa. The physical presence of the police who patrol Kakuma camp day and night sometimes with armoured vehicles, is reminiscent of a colonial camp. This meant that Kakuma camp as I experienced it, was locked in a constant state of emergency. By and large, the camp symbolises a global apartheid, and a segregated ghetto, characterised by inequalities. In this space, I only existed in constant present, a life of limbo, a life of nowhere. As a space of containment, the camp functions as an extension of border externalisation as it camouflages the symbolic violence it reproduces in this exclusionary space. I discussed these issues using a decolonial approach to deconstruct the camp’s ‘mystical humanitarianism’. By deploying a decolonial critique, the book makes a valuable contribution to the field of refugee studies, which is insufficiently dominated by voices either without lived experience of the camp or work that is inadequately attentive to such knowledge. By drawing on the anti-colonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Pierre Mbembe, and Julious Nyerere, etc, I argues for an Africa without borders or encampment.