Ben Rawlence (Radio Congo) has written an intimate yet searing document of human pain. Suffering drought, poverty, war and violence that has torn their homelands apart, hundreds of thousands of Somalis and other Africans arrive at Dadaab, a United Nations refugee camp near Kenya's border with Somalia. Instead of relief, they find themselves overwhelmed by destructive forces they had hoped to escape. As the UN struggles to maintain habitable conditions in the camp, Western governments are more concerned about the camp's religious radicalization than its dignity. "At a time when there are more refugees than ever, the rich world has turned its back on them," Rawlence writes. "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."
The portraits that Rawlence paints resonate deeply. There is Guled, the soccer-loving teenager forced to be a child soldier under Al Shabaab; Nisho, a porter and son of a former Somalian dictator who has known only life inside the camp; Monday and Muna, lovers who incur the wrath of their families for daring to cross clan boundaries; and Tawane, the youth leader whose efforts to improve camp life are at odds with his desire to leave and resettle in the West.
City of Thorns depicts the desperate struggle of Somalians divided by war, politics and colonial greed, and Ben Rawlence writes deeply and movingly about the suffering incurred by inhabitants of the world's largest refugee camp. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant