NAIROBI LETTER:Going back home is not an option for many of the 100,000 displaced people in east Africa's largest city
‘GOD I hate coming here,” says the taxi driver, clunking across another pothole.
The streets, more sludge than tarmac, are jammed with ramshackle vehicles, and it takes about 10 minutes to move 100 metres on the main road.
It’s been raining, and the wheels of the car keep disappearing into the mud.
“It’s filthy,” the driver says. “Clients don’t like dirty cars.”
As Nairobi’s suburbs go, Eastleigh isn’t a favourite with taxi drivers.
But if you are one of the city’s 100,000 refugees, this is the place to see and not be seen.
In search of a better life than Kenya’s overcrowded and squalid refugee camps in the arid north of the country, Ethiopians, Somalis, Sudanese and Eritreans come here to stand on their own two feet and disappear in the anonymity of east Africa’s largest city. And when they come to Nairobi, they invariably end up in Eastleigh, “a city inside a city” as the locals call it.
Coffee houses pump out the familiar sounds of the lyre and other stringed instruments used in Eritrean and Ethiopian music, while burka-clad women compete with Sudanese barrow boys for the skanky pieces of footpath protruding from the flooded streets.
It’s a bit like a star wars convention.
But facing extortion, exploitation and harassment, it’s not an easy life. Rape is common and women are often forced into prostitution to make an income.
According to a new report by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the UK’s Humanitarian Policy Group and the Refugee Consortium of Kenya, many urban refugees are unaware of their rights and do not register with the authorities.
Others claim it forces them to leave their neighbourhoods and travel across town, which increases their exposure to abduction or abuse by the authorities, something that many are already well used to.
“There is a lot of police harassment,” says Kellie Leeson, country director of the IRC.
“It’s a very easy way to make money from them. Here there are even Somali groups who make monthly collections to pay the police to stop harassment.”
The committee was originally set up in the 1930s, when Albert Einstein suggested that scientists, intellectuals and political leaders should be helped to flee Nazi Europe.
However, as the world urbanises, it increasingly finds itself helping an ever-growing number of refugees who are moving to cities in the hope of finding a sense of community, safety and economic independence.
“A lot of people didn’t know that this was an issue” says Leeson. “This population falls through the cracks as donors tend to just give money to refugee camps. But over 50 per cent of the global population lives in urban centres. The same goes for refugees.”
Alemaywa Idossa (32) from Ethiopia is one such person.
“I get arrested in Nairobi all the time,” he says, sitting in a seamstress shop above an electronics store. “The police want money, 1,500-3,000 Kenyan shillings a time. If I don’t have it, they say that I attempted to take their gun.” You’d wonder why he wants to stay in Nairobi at all.
“We have to live close together because of the security forces,” Tsegaye Gudeta, another Ethiopian, explains.
“In the last two months we exposed agents kidnapping people. We know of two people who were abducted. They are facing death sentences in Ethiopia. Here, at least, we can look out for one another.”
Trained as a teacher, Gudeta can’t afford the $3,000 needed to become a Kenyan resident and work. That’s one reason, says the IRC, that refugees are often characterised as freeloaders.
“There is a perception that refugees are always taking,” says Leeson. “But they do contribute. They are not just a burden. They are fleeing something, they are not here just to mooch off the Kenyan government.”
Munira Jundi (26) is one such person. She fled Ethiopia when she was accused of inciting the Oromo people in the south of the country against the ruling regime.
Her crime, she says, was teaching secondary-school students in their mother tongue. “They forced me to have sex with them.” She says on one occasion she was gang raped by four prison warders.
“They beat me, fired over my ears to force me to get information.” She says they finally dumped her on the road, leaving her for dead.
Going back to her own country is not an option, at least for now, and that means Nairobi is home for the foreseeable future.
“The camps are not secure,” says Idossa.
“It is better to stay here and die of starvation than go back there.”