City of Thorns Quotes

“The agencies tried to give the few incentive positions they had to women to encourage what they called ‘gender balance’ and, apart from those who chose to hustle in the market for a pittance, the remainder of the male population had no ability to provide for their families. They felt emasculated and camouflaged their injured pride in khat and idleness. There was little in their world that they controlled and so the one thing they sought to master, above all else, was their women. Muna”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp

“Those who had come of age in the camps, like Muna and Monday, who had seen so many of their peers resettled abroad, lacked respect for the present: as though one's actions in the here and now had no relation to the great hereafter, abroad. Life was only a process of waiting. And this was their problem too: in such circumstances, people are more inclined to act without consequences, without limits, to be caught by a hedonism of the senses or the indulgence of emotion, or the violent righteousness of religion. Nothing had any permanence, there was no building anything, since both the people you loved or the people you hurt could soon be gone. The older refugees with a grounding in school or community had a better chance. But still, in such a situation, life can lose its meaning.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“Despite the bad luck life had dealt him, he still had faith that tomorrow could indeed bring into being a new world.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“beauty contest, the porters jostled for business. Those with big families could not carry all their rations, so they traded some of their food in return for help with transporting it home. It presented another chance for a boy with only his strength to sell to earn a little extra.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“Isha was familiar with the bleeding gums, the inflamed limbs, the cramped pain of drinking, the torture when the empty stomach eats itself. When the mind achieves a lucidity departed from the body, perhaps closer to God, and the world acquires a glassy sheen. Isha knew the lethargy like an old friend; when the brain shuts down and desire sleeps and the love between a man and a woman goes. Maybe the man says ‘they are your children’ and leaves, but a woman cannot abandon her children. The people of Rebay looked at the sky and worried. They looked at each other and they had nothing to say. Before, when someone told a story, they stood. But a hungry man will just sit and cry. Hunger keeps you awake. You cannot sleep. It was said that the mind of a hungry person goes gradually mad.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“When he asked about work, Noor laughed. Guled learned that employment in Kenya was forbidden. Like many governments anxious about asylum seekers, Kenya didn’t want Somalis taking Kenyan jobs, so all formal work with a decent salary, with the agencies and the UN, was reserved for Kenyans. Most of the camps’ economy is informal, however, and in the grey economy it was possible to get work in the market, driving, butchering, teaching in the private colleges. The”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“In Ifo he felt only hostility. The inhabitants eyed him nervously. Guled had come from a place of fighting and fear; as far as they were concerned, he was capable of anything; he was a murderer, a terrorist, a bandit, until vouched for otherwise.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“The place where Guled had come seeking sanctuary was, according to Oxfam, a ‘public health emergency’, and had been for several years. It was a groaning, filthy, disease-riddled slum heaving with traumatized people without enough to eat. Crime was sky high and rape was routine. And the population was about to explode again. On the day Guled arrived the camps held nearly 295,000 people. Twelve months later, at the end of 2011, there would be half a million. Guled”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“Back in 1992, the camp originally held ninety thousand Somali refugees fleeing the civil war. They had reproduced. Then others had come: more waves of Somalis, as well as Sudanese, Congolese, Ethiopians, Ugandans and Rwandans seeking asylum whom the Kenyans had shipped out to the margins of their country. And they too had had children. Three generations now called this giant cosmopolitan city made of mud, tents and thorns, home. That morning, 1 December 2010, Guled was the newest arrival in the largest refugee camp in the world.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“Al-Shabaab seemed right about many things. The newsletter said that international aid was brought to ruin Somali agriculture and to make people dependent on foreign food; both had indeed been side effects of the relief effort. They said that the West wanted Somalis to be held in ‘camps, like animals’, which could be an accurate description of Dadaab. Most of all though, it was the rhetorical question posed in the newsletter that had the biggest impact among Guled’s traumatized generation: ‘Why invade a country that has been fighting a civil war for a decade and a half the moment they have decided to live in peace?’ The Islamic Courts Union had brought peace. It had been wildly popular and Somalis resented the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion. ‘The United States cannot abide a situation in which Islam is the solution,’ the newsletter argued. And to many that seemed like the truth. The”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“But Ethiopia and America were nervous of an Islamic government and the US and other nations sponsored Ethiopia to invade Somalia and dispatch the ICU. This they did in 2006 with astonishing speed, force and cruelty, pounding Mogadishu to rubble and blazing a trail of looted homes, massacred civilians and raped women across the country, while those who had paid for the invasion looked away. With”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“In the city, the ‘Battle of Mogadishu’, as al-Shabaab’s offensive was known, intensified street by street with trenches, snipers and indiscriminate shelling. The militants’ war effort drew all the men, resources and even children into the fight just as the twisters of the eternal Jiilaal sucked the dust of the hard-baked plain into the air and lent everything a brown tinge. The coming tragedy would be played out in sepia. After”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“After so much death, it was a wonder anyone remained in the country at all. No one really knows the population of Somalia but, during the past twenty years, somewhere between one third and one half of the six-to-eight million inhabitants had fled their homes. There were over one and a half million refugees abroad, many of them in the camps of Dadaab. The people who still lived in Somalia were the ones without the bus fare to flee, the ones with property to guard or money to make, or the ones who had simply lost their minds. Many were afraid to take the risk of running into the unknown and held to the adage, ‘better the devil you know’. Many more were so inured to the roulette of war, it had simply become the landscape of life. Guled was one of these.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“No one wants to admit that the temporary camp of Dadaab has become permanent: not the Kenyan government who must host it, not the UN who must pay for it, and not the refugees who must live there. This paradox makes the ground unsteady. Caught between the ongoing war in Somalia and a world unwilling to welcome them, the refugees can only survive in the camp by imagining a life elsewhere. It is unsettling: neither the past, nor the present, nor the future is a safe place for a mind to linger for long. To live in this city of thorns is to be trapped mentally, as well as physically, your thoughts constantly flickering between impossible dreams and a nightmarish reality. In short, to come here you must be completely desperate.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“Millions more, the vast majority, remain in camps. And through our tax contributions to the UN, we all pay billions of dollars to keep them there. In Dadaab that means funding schools, hospitals and shipping 8,000 tonnes of food per month into the middle of the blistering desert to feed everyone. This”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“At a time when there are more refugees than ever, the rich world has turned its back on them. Our myths and religions are steeped in the lore of exile and yet we fail to treat the living examples of that condition as fully human.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“Poverty does not necessarily lead to extremism,’ I said. In my head, images of the proud Imams defending their traditions against the murderous corruptions; of the determined youth leader Tawane, risking his life to provide services for the refugees when the aid agencies withdrew for fear of being kidnapped; of Kheyro, working to educate the children of the camp for a pittance; of Professor White Eyes broadcasting his reports on the camp radio. How could I convey their towering dignity, their courage and independence of spirit when they only featured in the official mind as potential terrorists?”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“I thought of the former child soldier Guled and the many like him, who had fled to the camp to escape the extremists, not to join them. But”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“I thought of Nisho, the young man who works as a porter in the market, his face clouding into a scowl as he stormed out of an interview when I asked why he had not joined the militants: they paid well and he was poor. The very question was an insult. To him, and to all the refugees he knew, al-Shabaab were crazy, murderous criminals.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“Raised on the meagre rations of the United Nations for their whole lives, schooled by NGOs and submitted to workshops on democracy, gender mainstreaming and campaigns against female genital mutilation, the refugees suffered from benign illusions about the largesse of the international community. They were forbidden from leaving and not allowed to work, but they believed that if only people came to know about their plight, then the world would be moved to help, to bring to an end the protracted situation that has seen them confined to camps for generations, their children and then grandchildren born in the open prison in the desert. But the officials in the grey room saw the world from only one angle.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

“I tried to explain to the NSC officials my own wonder at this teeming ramshackle metropolis with cinemas, football leagues, hotels and hospitals, and to emphasize that, contrary to what they might expect, a large portion of the refugees are extremely pro-American. I said that the Kenyan security forces, underwritten by US and British money, weapons and training, were going about things in the wrong way: rounding up refugees, raping and extorting them, encouraging them to return to war-racked Somalia.”
― Ben Rawlence, City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp