"I figli sono la nostra pensione". Diversificazione dei modi di sostentamento, sicurezza sociale e vincoli di parentela tra i rifugiati dell'Africa orientale
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4218
Gli stereotipi che circolano sulla povertà e sulle condizioni di vita nei campi rifugiati rendono difficile comprendere le scelte di alcuni rifugiati quando si muovono da un luogo all’altro all’interno dell’Africa, tra insediamenti di rifugiati, città, campi di rifugiati e viceversa.  Certe scelte che ci appaiono incomprensibili rispondono in realtà a una logica chiara e fanno parte di forme diversificate di sicurezza sociale. Gli studi recenti sulle teorie delle migrazioni hanno enfatizzato l’importanza del ruolo attivo del gruppo di parentela nella decisione di iniziare un percorso migratorio, ma questo articolo rivela una dinamica molto più complessa soggiacente a questi movimenti all’interno dell’Africa: una visione della diversificazione della gestione delle risorse per la sussistenza che va al di là della mera realtà del dislocamento forzato o dell’opportunità di acquisire lo status di rifugiato. Questo articolo prende in considerazione le traiettorie migratorie nel corso di diversi anni di alcuni giovani attraverso il Corno d’Africa e certe nazioni dell’Africa orientale dapprima come migranti forzati obbligati da eventi incontrollabili e poi come rifugiati che migrano secondo i loro desideri nei limiti delle possibilità esistenti. Oltre alla guerra che ha causato originariamente la migrazione, la mobilità di questi giovani risulta dalla negoziazione tra le capacità di iniziativa che personalmente mettono in campo e i vincoli imposti dalle ideologie di parentela.
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Francesca Declich
Anuac
“Children are our pension”: Livelihood diversification, social security, and kinship constraints among East African refugees
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
9
Thematic section: Kinship ties on the move
2020-07-29
2020-07-18
2020-07-29
2020-07-29
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Francesca Declich
2020/07/29
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4218
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University of Urbino, Italy
2239-625X
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en
181
“Children are our pension”: Livelihood diversification, social security, and kinship constraints among East African refugees
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                                               2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 159-181




“Children are our pension”
Livelihood diversification, social security, and kinship constraints
among East African refugees
Francesca DECLICH
Università di Urbino




ABSTRACT: Stereotypical ideas about poverty and life in refugee camps make it difficult
to understand the choices that individual refugees make when moving from one place
to another within Africa, including from refugee settlements to town, to refugee camps
and vice versa. Certain choices which individual migrants make, and which may appear
incomprehensible, respond in fact to a clear logic and represent, as it were, diversified
forms of social security. Recent trends in migration theories have emphasised the
importance of the positive role of the group of kin in the decision to set out on the
migration path, but this article reveals a much more complex dynamic underlying such
movements within Africa: a vision of livelihood diversification that goes beyond the
stark reality of forced displacement or the opportunity of acquiring refugee status. The
article will take into consideration the migratory trajectories of a number of young
persons, across the Horn and some eastern African nations, first as forced migrants and
later as refugees migrating at will, as observed over a period of years. Over and above
the war that initially prompted migration, the movements of these young people result
from negotiating the demands of individual agency and the constraints imposed by
kinship ideologies.

KEYWORDS: TRANSNATIONAL FAMILY; KINSHIP; TRANSLOCALITY; SOCIAL SECURITY; SOMALI BANTU.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Francesca Declich
“Children are our pension”: Livelihood diversification, social security, and kinship constraints among
East African refugees
2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 159-181.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4218
160                                                                      FRANCESCA DECLICH




Preamble
   In this article, I have chosen to present some sections of the life histories
of young refugees I have known in many places of Africa, Somalia, Kenya,
Tanzania and the US during their almost life-long forced migration, starting
in Somalia in approximately 19931. In these cases it emerges that translocal
householding is a livelihood strategy that allows diversification.
Notwithstanding the pattern of the livelihood strategies, individuals
negotiate their own position in the network by juggling the demands of
kinship constraints and individual aspirations. I believe that information
gathered diachronically can best show the way household strategies are
designed, how people negotiate their position within them, as well as how
certain policies may have a direct impact on the lives of the people and on
their chances of finding ways to integrate in a new country.
   Pursuing the idea that migration paths are often decided by groups of
neighbours, communities or families that from home prompt the migration
of group members (Stark 1991; Massey et al. 1993: 457), envisaging that a
successful migration can produce benefits for their relatives at home, some
trends within the mobility studies emphasize the category of the
transnational family (Bryceson, Vuorela 2002; Evergeti, Zontini,2006;
Goulbourne, Reynolds, Solomons, Zontini 2010; Razy 2011). However,
studies on migrations from Somalia and Somaliland have shown the
entanglement of crisis and opportunities that may prompt the setting up of a
network which will support a subsequent migratory chain (Declich 1997;


1. Funds for fieldwork came through the years from various sources at different times: the
World Bank Scholarship Program, the IFRA (French Research Institute for Africa), a post-
doctoral grant of the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples, the Urbino Unit of several
PRIN research projects funded by the Ministry of Education, University and Research in
Italy. I thank Professor Isharia Kimambo from the Department of History of the University
of Dar es Salaam who was always happy to answer my questions, Barbara Harrell-Bond -
then director of the Refugee Studies Programme (RSP) now Refugee Studies Centre in
Oxford - for introducing me to the authorities of the Ministry of Home Affairs in Tanzania
and the officers of the Tanzanian Ministry of Home Affairs who understood the importance
of a long term ethnographic approach and the many officers who facilitated the fieldwork. A
very early version of this article was presented at the second AEGIS (Africa-Europe Group
for Interdisciplinary Studies) Conference on African Studies, in Leiden, The Netherlands, in
July 11-14, 2007 in a panel organized by Eva Evers Rosander and Gunilla Bjeren entitled
“Family Dynamics and Migration: Tensions in Gender and Generational Relations”. I thank
the participants to the workshop for their feedback. I am also grateful to two anonymous
reviewers for valuable suggestions.


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“CHILDREN ARE OUR PENSION”                                                               161


Declich 2010; Moret 2018)2. Network contacts between urban and rural areas
may be crucial to the refugees’ chances3, as they are in contexts where no
displacement is involved (Greiner 2011: 614-615). My position is that
translocality is a better word than transnationality to describe livelihoods
that count on mobility as an opportunity in this part of Africa (Sørensen,
Olwig 2002; Declich 2018b: 8-16). From an ethnographic point of view
translocality must be seen as “an embodied practice of living far away from
one’s original place of birth, either continuously or at regular/irregular
intervals or as a state of mind involving an imaginary of spatial and social
mobility” (Declich 2018b: 8-9), a concept based on material cultural
practices, rather than as a framework for interpreting global history or a
research perspective (Freitag, Von Oppen 2010: 1-21). Connections between
translocality and kinship have been highlighted by scholars of Africa
(Heintze 2010), as has the usefulness of translocality to describe livelihoods
that implied long haul mobilities favoring trades and cultural exchange in
this part of the world (Engseng 2006; Miran 2012; Verne 2012) as well the
crucial role of translocal urban-rural networks to enhance the chances of
livelihoods in South Africa and Namibia (Steinbrink 2009; Greiner 2011:
611). Scholars have also found it rewarding to adopt a translocal perspective
in tackling mobilities (De Bruijin, Bikerman 2011: 42) and stratification
within migration in Africa (Greiner 2011: 607). Translocality has been very
common as a livelihood strategy and was practised in many different ways by
Somalis (Colucci 1924; Schlee 1989; Little 1992; Weitzberg 2017) and other
groups in Africa (Greiner 2011: 610). Yet, if pastoral livelihoods naturally
imply translocality, that may seem less obvious for non-pastoral households,
in which, nevertheless. exchange of goods and wealth between individual
people who travel to seek for new opportunities and constitute a resource for
the household of origin is a form of livelihood strategy that has also
developed via individual travelers and is embedded in households’
individuals’ life cycles. The manner in which individuals and groups
navigated the distances has always implied complex domestic arrangements
and these were maintained in various ways, for instance, through serial
marriages or polygamous marriages (Declich 2016). In the receiving
countries after migratory paths were implemented, migrants could act
according to different rules thus also improve their living standards, though

2. Since submitting this article, other contributions on this aspect have been published, one
concerning Somalis in Uganda and others referring to the entire Horn of Africa (Iazzolino,
Mohamed Hersi 2019; Schmidt, Kimathi, Owiso 2019; Scharrer, Carrier 2019).
3. A recent monography describes the borough of Eastleigh in Nairobi also in this sense
(Carrier 2017).

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162                                                            FRANCESCA DECLICH


not uniformly (Declich 2018b). To understand the real nature of the socio-
spatial structure of the social networks necessary in mobility, it is crucial to
highlight the translocality of many livelihood systems that implicates not
only pastoralists, but also, for instance, people living between rural and
urban (Lohnert, Steinbrink 2005: 99) or practising transoceanic trades
(Declich 2018b). In the large humanitarian crises of the Horn, refugee camps,
– although totalizing institutions (Goffman 1961) which sometimes dissuade
people from moving ahead to seek other chances, keeping them at times
almost as hostages in between camps by offering at least basic benefits –, are
also seen as one among other opportunities, offering chances to find jobs
and to improve life, albeit not always successfully (Getachew 1996; Turton,
Allen 1996; Declich 2011; Jansen 2016). Notwithstanding, while it is
important to highlight the characteristics of refugees as specific social
actors, entangled within a set of international and domestic legal constraints
and the enforcement of public international practices that bound their social
space, I believe that conflating all practices concerning the mobility of those
who hold the status of refugees in the same “pot” of refugee issues may hide
rather than highlight human diversity and the capacity of different
communities to act in original ways and to engage their unique social and
cultural capitals. Especially for Somalis, who have lived without borders for
centuries before nations were even imagined in Africa (see also Weitzberg
2017), the mobility skills developed over centuries and the social security
mechanisms that go along with them must be highlighted. Thus livelihoods
based on translocality, persisting and adapting to the conditions of a
historical period in which national boundaries exist, can be seen as part of
endogenous resilient skills rather than as new features prompted by the
“national order of things”, in Malkki’s (1995) definition. The idea is to count
on categories constructed as much as possible inductively through an emic
perspective rather than shaping them deductively and verify them in the
field4.
   This article deals also with some of those forms of social security and their
diversification in contexts of poverty where people are accustomed to deal
with mobility. How certain living standards can be guaranteed in Africa in
contexts of rural poverty and what can guarantee such standards is one
question. Travelling to other places may provide chances of social mobility.
Possibilities of resorting to social networks as well as obtaining even

4. Analysis on how social and cultural capitals can be invested and transformed
within migrations into economic capital (Moret 2018) may lead to fascinating
results but follow this latter approach.


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“CHILDREN ARE OUR PENSION”                                                      163


minimal financial credit are crucial in coping with shocks that could come
from any sort of misfortune or occurrences that may lead to more poverty. A
recent study of the middle class in Kenya provides food for thought. The
middle class in Kenya has been defined as “that social class which can, over
time, mobilize resources to maintain a certain social status” (Kroeker 2018:
275); that class diversifies forms of security arrangements by not relying
only on institutionalized forms of protection (i.e. salaries) but also engaging
in “informal social security arrangements, such as solidarity networks”
(ibidem: 283) to secure their status.
   Lower classes, on the other hand, do not have secure access to salaried
jobs. The trend Somali Bantu refugees follow, coming from rural areas where
refugee settlements are placed, is to seek opportunities for salaried jobs for
any of the extended family and to weave those social relations that can help
to cope in situations of stress which can occur at any time, like occasional
draughts, illnesses, etc.; those social relations often entail engaging in trade
with urban contexts. My argument here is that networks and resources that
were found mostly in urban areas when Somalia was not ravaged by wars,
can be found today also in large refugee camps like Dadaab and Kakuma too,
where international support also provides extra educational services and
employment opportunities for people lacking other entitlements but the
refugee status. Those refugee camps, thus, become further opportunities
which sometimes appear very promising, yet are relatively new ones in the
panorama of otherwise different existing options.
   Who actually makes the choices to pursue one or other alternative path,
to what extent does kinship network enforce certain decisions and what are
the constraints under which young people, women or men, take the decision
to migrate? Reinilde Sotiria König and Martina de Regt (2010: 1) have
clarified the intersection of gender, intergenerational ties and tensions
existing in the dynamics of transnational migrations from Africa to Europe.
Ada Engebrigsten (2011: 311), in her study about Ali’s disappearance, has
emphasized that sometimes the decision to move, if temporarily, is taken
out of customary loyalty to one’s kinship network rather than to one’s
individual inclination. In this article, I would like to show the interweaving
of personal strategies and social constraints in some decisions of young
refugees to move within East Africa and beyond by presenting the view point
of both, the children and the parents. I will also show that, in contexts of
poverty pervaded by a subsistence economy, certain kinship ideologies pave
the way to access “wealth in people” (Guyer 1995) and constitute ways of
reproducing the group.


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164                                                                       FRANCESCA DECLICH


Methodology and issues
   This article is based on data gathered over several years through
ethnographic fieldwork that became multi-sited as I followed refugees who
were forcibly displaced to Kenya, Tanzania and the US as a result of the
outbreak of war in southern Somalia in 1990. In 1993 I started a follow up
anthropological research fieldwork under the umbrella of the Refugee
Studies Programme in Oxford5, initially with a visit to Dadaab camps in
Kenya, thereafter with prolonged stays at the refugee settlement of Mkuiu in
Tanzania, in Dar es Salaam and later in the resettlement area of Chogo.
Fieldwork entailed living together with the refugees in Mkuiu and with some
of their relatives who had migrated decades earlier to Tanzania - fieldwork
which I carried out for some months every year until 1998 6. After the
resettlement of Bantu Somali refugees from the camps in Kenya to the
United States, fieldwork led to the US with groups of refugees who had
moved into two American towns, San Diego (California) and Buffalo (New
York) in 2000, 2009 and 2012. Ethnographic fieldwork has therefore entailed
the intimacy typical of social anthropological methodologies which would
not have been the case had I merely been interviewing people, even if more
than once, in a sociological perspective in multi located places.
   In the meanwhile, by getting in touch and living with refugees in different
countries, it became clear that the borders of the group that I was studying
were melting day by day on contact with new societies, cultures, forms of
education and countries. Yet a way to keep track of the ongoing changes was
to spend time in the receiving countries with people I had known before in
Somalia, so that I could hear at first hand the transformations they were
noticing. Some formal interviews were carried out, fieldnotes were taken and
interviews were videoed. Some issues dealt with in the interviews were about
how the people were coping with the new life in the receiving country, which
were the changes and, of course, observations about the life cycle within the
households.
   In so doing, I realized that the possibility of meeting the same people in
the field year after year and seeing the results of their choices over such a
sweep of time is a privilege that anthropologists may enjoy through their
research work. This certainly lends weight to the information gathered,
which, in Geertz’s words, allows “thick descriptions” as opposed to “thin”
ones (Geertz 1998: 8-11). Simple interviews with people only recently known

5. At the time I was a Research Fellow at the RSP.
6. Research activity, however, did not stop as there were several different focuses to follow
and I was able to keep meeting people in Tanzania until 2016.


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“CHILDREN ARE OUR PENSION”                                                            165


could not easily arrive at the same depth of understanding7. This is a
prerogative of the ethnographic approach in which data are collected over a
long period of time, through repeated meetings at different levels and on
different aspects of people’s lives - sometimes through intuition and
empathy more than preformatted intention - to produce denser, more
substantial descriptions of what is studied. This sort of understanding of the
situation came into its own when talking with the people about their recent
movements as refugees.
   Therefore, the results of this study have been partly produced by events,
because the forced migration occurred after the initial fieldwork in Somalia
had been completed, partly by the opportunity to go again in the field when
the events were taking place8. Yet, having followed over a number of years
how people’s lives have unfolded between and across asylum countries, I was
enabled to reflect on the relevance of diachronic anthropological research to
understand not only processes of change (Peel 1987; Christomalis 2006:
377), but also socio-cultural mechanisms that drive people’s choices under
specific constraints. Hearing about the pressure of constraints from the very
people engaged in making their choices differs greatly from gathering
explanations of those decisions years later, when the people involved have
had the intervening time to ruminate.

Agency and kinship ideologies
   Although individual agency can never be underestimated, not all choices
can be made neither are they available under certain constraints. Lack of
economic resources as well as the parents will regarding one’s marriage are
still severely restricting young people’s choices in rural Africa and
elsewhere; these bonds can either be accepted or they can be overridden by
some ploy, which may, however, not lead to success. Kinship ideologies
including arranged marriages are still an important strategical move which
parents resort to in order to set up their children’s lives so that they will
deliver grandchildren and, in so doing, ensure their own old age. For
teenagers and young adults, these two constraints become crucial and they
can drastically change the course of these young people’s lives. I shall thus
analyze the choices made by some young people concerning important

7. I would like to thank the people I have interviewed who also became friends thanks to
their long-standing commitment to my research work. I cannot mention all their names
here for privacy concerns.
8. This commitment to multi-sided fieldwork, and the chance, which may not materialize, to
get research funds for pursuing the collection of this kind of data can be demanding.

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stages of their life, their studies and their marriages, their accounts of why
they made certain decisions, and also the barriers they had to overcome. I
have dealt elsewhere with the trap encountered in their journeys in western
countries by young Somali Bantu refugees entangled in kinship ideologies
entailing arranged marriages (Declich s.d.). The issue of marriage and having
children in exile can be seen from different points of view. Some migrant
women attempting to reach Europe are able to use their unforeseen
pregnancies outside kinship relations as tools to navigate the migration legal
frames (Kastner 2010); others in Egypt take the chance to rearrange their
marriages from a different perspective when they are in exile (Al-sharmani
2006: 58); on the other hand, Sudanese male ex-refugees now living in the
US navigate their marriage ideology by offering very high bridewealth to
seek wives in the refugee camp of Kakuma, thus beating any competition
from local male refugees (Grabska 2010).
   A traditional concern for parents is that children are part of their
“retirement insurance,” they are their main social security. The idea of
locating children in several places where they can become rich and have a
good life is a very conscious strategy that more than one person expressed
during my research work. A father did everything for his first child to become
a doctor, which he achieved. Another, with fewer financial possibilities, paid
for the training for his child to become a driver, because that is considered a
respectable job for somebody who could not pursue his studies. This is done
clearly not simply to set the children up in life: before the displacement from
Somalia, it was customary that children, as soon as they were able to work
and marry, would bring goods and money to their parents. Nowadays, it is
still expected that children will do that. A fifty-five year old Somali Bantu
refugee mother in Tanzania told me in despair: “Here in Tanzania
everything is a mess. When children marry and go away, you would expect
them to come home and greet parents with gifts, bringing something on
every visit. Here, though, they cannot make it, they come and ask you for
food because in town they may not have been able to earn any money... In
Somalia it was different because the food could be seen, [in the fields and on
trees] you did not need money to buy it.” Of course, the wishes of parents to
control their children according to a traditional mindset do not always
become reality.
   However, considering the overwhelming parental pressure, young people
need to be very determined in their decisions; within this kinship ideology
young people are also scared to incur in their parents’ curse.


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“CHILDREN ARE OUR PENSION”                                                             167


Context and individual stories
   I was in the Somali Lower Juba region in 1988, before anybody ever
thought the Zigula would have to flee from their villages9. The civil war in
Somalia started at the end of 1990 and since 1993 I have carried out follow-
up research and fieldwork with them as refugees from Somalia in Kenya and
Tanzania. Some of their stories, which I shall describe, are not exceptional
and may be considered representative of many of those I met during the
multi-sited fieldwork which started on the Jubaland in Somalia (1985) and
continued, on and off, with visits to the refugee camps of Dadaab in Kenya,
the Mkuiu refugee settlement (Mkuiu), the resettlement location of Chogo
and the town of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. My most recent visit was in 2016.
   Their forced migration began after 1990, when life in the villages was
made impossible by the militias making their way south from Mogadishu,
looting the rural communities of the Middle and Lower Juba, stealing the
harvests and thus pushing the civil population towards the town of
Kismaayo in search of support. As very little food was available, those who
could afford to attempted to leave the town of Kismaayo and went by car and
on foot to the refugee camps of Dadaab, in Kenya. Many households were
divided between members who stayed and other who fled. Some of them
succeeded, others died along the way.
   In March 1994, more than 10,000 Somali Bantu lived in the three refugee
camps of Dadaab: Ifo, Dagahaleey and Hagardeera (Declich 2000: 27).
Individuals had different life trajectories. Many spent years in the refugee
camps; of those some decided to wait in the camp in case of a chance to
resettle in the US, others opted to sell their refugee cards and try a new life
in Tanzania or Kenya. People moved individually or in groups. Most often
households did not travel all together but, if possible, tried to keep their
chances alive in more than one place, leaving some behind to look after the
fields or for lack of money to travel as a single party. In June 1992 a group of
Somali Bantu Zigula arrived in Tanzania and, in consequence of their
petition to be received by the country as a group returning home after
deportation, were allocated the refugee settlement of Mkuiu, in the Handeni
region (Declich 2010: 175). Some years later in 2002, the refugees of Mkuiu
in Tanzania were transferred to a permanent settlement, Chogo, in
Tanzania. In 1999 the Congress of the United States had approved the
resettlement of more than 13.000 Somali Bantu from the Kenyan refugee
camps of Kakuma and Dadaab and in 2003 the transferral from Africa started

9. The Zigula are an enclave of Bantu language Kizigula speaking farmers who live along the
Juba River in the middle of a Cushitic language speaking pastoralists dominated area.

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and the Somali Bantu were offered asylum in many different states of the US.
The process of resettlement was scheduled to be completed in 2006 (Eno,
Eno 2008: 198). Since then, through the persistent work of Omar Eno and
Dan Van Lehman, who set up a project in the US to facilitate their
integration, many associations of Somali Bantu have been funded. The
associations have the task of representing the members of the community in
any requests they might formulate collectively and of organizing some social
services.
   While this group of refugees from southern Somalia found year after year
humanitarian protection and places to live in Tanzania and the US, the lives
of the youngsters followed different trajectories, depending on their age, the
place where they happened to be received as refugees and the network
available. Children who arrived in the US at school age were included in the
local school, while those beyond school age, even by one year, lost their
chance to enter public schools, to be educated with other schoolmates and
were included in programs for work and study10. Conversely, those who were
of the right age to attend school had the chance to study in public schools
and, thereafter, if interested, to compete for university degrees.
   Mariam arrived in San Diego after having lived in the refugee camp of
Dadaab in Kenya. She remembers very little of Somalia as she left when she
was a very little girl. When I met her in San Diego she already had a child.
However, she was in her fresher year of university, studying to become a
nurse or a medical doctor, and her child was looked after by her mother who
was getting some payment from the social services for nursing her. She had
big aspirations for her future: after graduating in medicine she wished to go
back to Africa to help improve the medical services there. When she talked
about Africa, though originally from Somalia, she always referred to Kenya,
where she attended most of her studies, apart from the last years of
secondary school in the US. Halima, on the other hand, when she arrived was
already twenty years old. Due to her age she could no longer enter secondary
school. Much as she would have loved to study, she could only be engaged in
a joint program of job and educational training which, however, did not lead
to a secondary studies diploma. She was, furthermore, pressed by her mother
to get engaged to a man she did not want to marry. As a result, she escaped
to Arizona with a man she liked and had three children.

10. The provision of social service was different in different states because the agencies that
deal with third level assistance to refugees in the various states may follow their own
procedures (work with their own modalities). My observations relate to San Diego, in
California, and Buffalo in NY state.


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   In Tanzania, school age children started attending primary schools in
Mkuiu and those who achieved a sufficient score were later sent to different
types of secondary schools according to the marks they had obtained, as
happened with the other Tanzanian youngsters. Tanzania offered the same
chances to refugees and Tanzanians, with some better facilities being
available to begin with for the refugees in order to fill the initial learning
gap; but the country could not offer secondary school for all. In that very
decade, between 1993 and 2003, when people moved between Kenya,
Tanzania, and the US, and the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) provided humanitarian aid for them, opportunities were
very variable for individual refugees, depending on whether they happened
to be in the right place at the right time. Some had much greater
opportunities than others. The openings available to children in those days
were very unequal because much depended on occasional opportunities: a
child whose mental capacities had been impacted in infancy by severe
hunger during the war in Kismaayo could find herself in the US a few years
later, studying in a school and receiving special care. Others, maybe children
with brilliant minds and sharp intelligence, could be stuck in a Kenyan
refugee camp with no chances to continue their secondary education
because they did not have a refugee card and they had to work to support
themselves, or marry at a young age in a resettlement area in Tanzania
because their command of English was not good enough to pass the exams.
   According to the humanitarian aid machine, had all the Somali Bantu
waited in the refugee camp at Dadaab for ten years, they would have all been
in the US by the end of the resettlement process which started in 2003. Yet,
the offer of resettlement arrived almost ten years after the refugees had
reached the camps, escaping from the war. Living for ten years in a refugee
camp, waiting for chances to be resettled somewhere else, can be very
demanding. There is a flourishing literature on the psychosis, in Somali
language denominated bufis, generated by the years waiting in refugee
camps in the expectation of being resettled in the US or other Western
countries (see for instance Horst 2006; Oka 2014; Rawlence 2018). By the
time the process of resettlement to the US started, many of those who were
still healthy after the war, who had some minimal network opportunities to
decide otherwise, or sufficient invention to conceive of alternatives, had
moved from the camp to somewhere else in East Africa to try and lead a
normal life. The implementation of the first resettlements to the United
States for which refugees were first brought to the Kakuma camp for
preparations, became a pull factor and some people went back to live in the
refugee camps again, possibly in Kakuma.


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170                                                                        FRANCESCA DECLICH


Young refugee: options and choices
   Arbay and Mohamed were still kids when I first encountered them in 1988
in Somalia, and a bit older when I met them again in Tanzania as refugees. In
the 1990s and after 2000, whenever I went back to the refugee settlement at
Mkuiu in Tanzania for fieldwork and to meet friends and acquaintances of
the southern Somali Bantu group who had been able to reach Tanzania,
Mariam updated me on the well-being of her children.
   One year Mariam informed me that Arbay had not been able to pass the
Form 4 exams with a sufficient score to gain a scholarship to continue her
studies: her command of English was not good enough. She had studied in
the secondary school at KwediBoma, and, still under the umbrella of the
humanitarian aid provided for the refugees, her school fees had been paid
through the programme. At that point, however, as she had not met the
standards required to pursue her studies, she could not continue attending
secondary school unless her parents could pay the fees. As the parents could
not afford it, she could not continue studying in Tanzania, which was what
she really desired to do. For this reason, she had spoken with her mother and
father, Osman, managing to convince them that, as she wanted to study
computer science, she could go to the refugee camp at Kakuma in Kenya, a
2-day journey from Mkuiu in Tanzania, where this would be possible. This
was also a way to avoid marriage before completing further studies. Her
father would have pushed for her marriage had she continued to live in the
village11. Thus Arbay’s journey was arranged and she went to live on her own
in Kakuma in 200612. She stayed initially at an uncle’s place, and started
studying computer science.
   At the time, Arbay’s decision seemed to me a little weird. She had arrived
in a peaceful country, Tanzania, in a place where she had been able to study,
so why go back to a refugee camp now? Kakuma, in addition, is a very hot,
arid area, with scarcity of water, where no productive economic activities
such as agriculture are possible: choices and options, from my point of view,
prospects, as I saw it, were really limited. Later I realized that she had a
different view of the case. Somebody had told her that Kakuma refugee camp
offered the chance of continuing education until a later age than usual. She

11. This is quite a common problem in rural Africa as the alternative to studying is considered
proceeding with one’s life by marrying.
12. Although her declared age was approximately 17, in fact she was 21. There was no
General Register Office in Somalia where she lived and her age was registered for the first
time from memory in the refugee settlement. Thus, ironically, unlike her fellow Zigula
resettled in the US she had been able to study in Tanzania although she was older than her
school mates.


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“CHILDREN ARE OUR PENSION”                                                      171


also envisaged getting a refugee identity card and, while studying, waiting
for a possible chance of resettlement in western countries. Moreover, this
choice would help her to avoid marriage, which she was not prepared to
undertake at such an early age. In Tanzania, in secondary schools, children
are taught that studying helps them in getting better jobs in the future and
that marriage can be delayed. The options I had imagined were different
from the ones a refugee girl in Tanzania had in mind. Indeed, other people I
interviewed had done something similar. In fact, Zeynab, Mariam’s sister
who lived in Dar es Salaam, had found a way to send two of her children to
the Kakuma refugee camp. In her case, the elder boy, an eighteen-year-old,
sadly died of cholera; the second, after having lived there for several months,
decided he wanted to come back to Dar es Salaam. He could not stand the
weather, the sand, the scarcity of water, and the hardship.
   This time Mariam had a different story to tell. Arbay’s younger brother,
Mohamed, had not passed the exams for the second year of secondary
school, and this year the humanitarian aid had been withdrawn, therefore
Osman and herself would have had to pay the fees for the secondary
education of their own children. She and her husband could not afford it and
so Mohamed could not continue studying. He kept reproaching them with
helping Arbay to study and to go to Kakuma while they were not helping him
to carry on with secondary school. He saw with envy his own school mates
continuing their secondary education, destined to become teachers. One day
Mohamed and a male friend disappeared from Mkuiu. In the morning the
parents could not find him and were desperate as they did not know where
he had gone. Two months later Mohamed’s travelling companion returned
from Mombasa to inform them that Mohamed had fallen ill in Kenya and
needed some help. The two boys, neither of whom could continue studying
because the humanitarian aid was no longer available and their families
could not afford to fund their studies, had escaped from the resettlement
village of Mkuiu in order to seek opportunities in Kenya. As it happened,
Mohamed had received information from a former school mate that there
were jobs available in Mombasa and, in fact, in Kenya he had found
something considered pretty good: he was working in a large shop selling
radios, telephones and other electronic goods. He did not see any interesting
future in that refugee settlement where young people, in his view, could only
marry and start farming small pieces of land. If he could not study he needed
another project to pursue. Mohamed’s father, Osman, went to Kenya and
recovered his child so that he could be treated for the tuberculosis he had
caught. When he arrived they thought this might be AIDS for he was very
week. Mohamed’s act of rebellion ended there and he was obliged to try and


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172                                                            FRANCESCA DECLICH


find a job for unskilled and uneducated workers in Tanzania. His resentment
was comprehensible but, irrespective of their poverty, the parents saw that
he was not really good at school, like Arbay. Mohamed’s decision was not to
escape to the closer town of Dar es Salaam, where several of his relatives
live, but to reach a more distant place like Mombasa following his friend’s
suggestion.
   The stories of the two children reflect many of the constraints that young
refugees in asylum encounter and which they have to negotiate their way
through: in particular, kinship ideologies and lack of opportunities, most
often due to poverty, may clash with personal aspirations.
    Arbay did not travel away alone, abandoning her ties; her journey to
Kenya was not an escape. She won over her parents, with the help of her
mother, by presenting her trip to Kakuma as a chance for the entire
household. If she managed to pursue her studies in Kakuma, the entire
family would benefit. If she were to be resettled in the United States, she
would be able to support them forever. She presented herself as an
opportunity for the parents and succeeded in being selected for the trip
instead of her brother. In fact, she had always been very good at school,
which was not the case with Mohamed, and her parents decided to let her go
to Kakuma despite the fact that she was to travel on her own. The parents,
within their limited economic means, were trying to arrange the lives of
their children in such a way that the investment they had put into raising
them could produce wellbeing in the future. Mariam, who had been left
motherless, and got married at a very young age in the early 1970s, once told
me: “Well, when I got married I said to myself: ‘let me have as many children
as possible as they will make my future’. Because, of the ten or so children
you may have, one or two can make it good and will be able to help you when
you are old”. Other parents force their children into marriage because they
do not believe in education, which was the case of a very bright girl at school
whose father not only would not let her study but got her married to a
husband of his choice.

Years later…
   Let us pick up the story of Mariam’s two children a few years later. In 2010
Arbay was studying for a diploma in Early Child Education (ECD) in the
Kakuma refugee camp and was to be sent to Canada to study for a degree. In
the refugee camps there may be offers of education for older persons and
during that time food items and non-food items are delivered to the
refugees. Thus studying is possible if survival is ensured. In the U.S. people


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“CHILDREN ARE OUR PENSION”                                                      173


who have passed the age for studying are offered unskilled work opportunities
and those who have too little education may find difficulty in getting back to
study afterwards. As they will not earn enough to support their future
studies, they will need to find a benefactor. In Tanzania, Arbay was not
offered a choice. She was brave in her decision to leave Tanzania alone for a
refugee camp. Her parents ended up proud of her when she completed her
diploma and hopeful about her prospects.
   As it happened, she didn’t succeed in going to study in Canada, possibly
due to the high competition, yet managed to become a teacher in a nursery
school set up by an NGO in Kakuma. At the end of 2018 Arbay returned to
Tanzania to see her parents - her mother had had a car accident - and
brought her 3 children to visit Chogo. They stayed there for a month and a
half until they had to go back for the children to start school. She is now
married to a man who is currently doing his second year studies in Nairobi
and he’s also competing for the chance to be offered a study option in
Canada. Should he succeed, they would both be resettled together with their
children in Canada. Alternatively, they will continue for the time being in
the refugee camp where they have spent the past twenty years improving
their education, raising their children and cultivating aspirations. Both are
also waiting for possible resettlement in the US, Australia or Canada. As
things stand at the moment, Arbay is not particularly wealthy; she is not
helping her parents from abroad. However, she still represents the
possibility of a change in her parents’ standard of living and the prospect of
an easier old age.
   Mohamed works as a small trader in a marginal borough of Dar es Salaam.
He’s been married since 2010 but refuses to spend much time in Chogo as he
gets angry at living in what he feels is rural isolation there. He is still
unsatisfied as he believes he has missed his chance in life; he cannot live too
close to his mother and father as he always grumbles, so he works in Dar es
Salaam.

By way of concluding
   These are only a few of the many stories of this kind that could be
gathered in the resettlement villages of Mkuiu and Chogo. Arbay is not the
only girl who went back to spend her life in a refugee camp, or, rather,
decided to go back to a refugee camp in order to complete her education or
improve her chances, after having lived part of her life in Tanzania’s
resettlement villages. For instance, I have heard of more than one woman
who got married to men who were in the refugee camp in Kenya (Dadaab)


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174                                                             FRANCESCA DECLICH


and then left Tanzania to join them. Conjugal ties are constantly maintained
between camps and across distances; marriages are arranged as before and
celebrated now in one or other resettlement area in Tanzania or Kenya.
Although borders can prove troublesome, they do not put a stop to
livelihood strategies that come from afar and connect villages with areas
that are perceived as offering economic as well as networking opportunities
and the possibility of better living standards. Neither have they stopped
parents from thinking of their children as opportunities that must be placed
in the best possible position to pay back the investment made while raising
them. Parents try whenever possible to place their children in positions that
can enhance their chances of a better life, disregarding the distance and the
borders. When, in the 1990s, some of the Somali Bantu Zigula arrived in
Tanzania, they crossed the borders on foot with other people going from
Kenya to Tanzania for the markets; simply speaking the local language made
this possible. Arbay claims that one of her arguments to convince her
parents to let her go was that “she could not stay in the same places as her
parents if there were no longer chances of education, because if you are
educated you will survive in any country you go to.”
   In contexts of first asylum or resettlement, rural livelihood diversification,
as defined by Ellis (1998), becomes livelihood diversification according to
the opportunities (Sørensen, Olwig 2002: 9-10). Yet, diversification of
livelihood opportunities is a copying strategy in the context of refugee
camps, as rightly observed by Horst (2006), but is not necessarily a new
strategy originating from the condition of being refugees. On the contrary,
for the group focus of this study, it stems as a continuum from previous
livelihood patterns and it is in line with choices made decades earlier by
some members of the Zigula group, who migrated to Tanzania because they
felt discriminated against in Somalia (Declich 1997, 2010). Livelihoods have
been diversified in terms of education, labour and location of residence.
While there is no space to discuss all these aspects at length, I have
presented here some social dynamics reflecting the ideal of finding good
positions for members of the household who grow up and marry and, may
be, live in different locations. Such a strategy, that some adults pursue
consciously for their children and some young people for themselves, cannot
be pursued without tensions between the actors, and young people may need
to negotiate their own choices.
   Since some refugee camps are places where certain opportunities like
adult education/training or resettlement in western countries are available,
refugee camps are targeted in line with these choices. The process of


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“CHILDREN ARE OUR PENSION”                                                           175


creating networks through conjugal ties and arranged marriages, even over
large distances, is not a new one and the opportunities that exist in refugee
camps or countries of resettlement may increase its desirability even across
countries.
   Refugee camps are considered important resource places. Almost twenty
years ago, Marc Antoine Perouse de Montclos and Peter Mwangi Kagwanja
(2000) wrote an article that highlighted the economic importance of refugee
camps like Dadaab and Kakuma in Kenya. Based on data from the UNHCR
census, in 1998 Kakuma and Dadaab had refugee populations of 58,000 and
106,000 respectively (de Montclos, Kagwanja 2000). The supposedly
transient nature of the refugee camp had evidently already changed and the
camps had become cities and important trading centers which could not be
closed simply by a political decision. In 2015 the Dadaab refugee complex
first established in 1991 was the third largest urban concentration in Kenya.
While that year Dadaab’s population was an estimated half a million people
(Rawlence 2016) of whom more than three fifths were refugees in February
2019, according to the UNHCR, Dadaab numbered 202,483 registered
refugees, a figure which decreased for various political reasons including
measures taken by the Kenyan government to reduce the size of the camps13.
   When I asked the father of one of the women who had lived in Tanzania
and was now married in Dadaab why it was that she had gone there, he
answered: “That was her chance”. But while saying that his daughter had
seized her opportunity, in reality the father meant that, were she to be lucky
and obtain a resettlement in the US, that would improve his own chances of
a better standard of living.
   The strategy of mobility in this situation of forced migration is an old one
and isn’t abandoned in the face of obstacles like frontiers or faraway places,
provided that opportunities are available or seem available to the actors.
   While cultural scripts concerning kinship and marriage may change in
migration contexts (Engebrigtsen 2007) aspects of kinship that involve forms
of social security for the elderly seem to be resilient in these African
contexts in which other forms of social security are not available in the way
that they are in certain western countries. This difference cannot be
underestimated. A good Somali Bantu friend in Tanzania, Salim, told me
during an interview in 2010: “Children are our pension. Here in Africa, the
pension is available only for people who work in the government. For all the

13 See the website https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/horn/location/179, accessed on
20/05/2020. Somalis who have connections with the Somali clans also go to Eastleigh the
borough of Nairobi which is nick named Little Mogadishu (Carrier 2017). For a most recent
diachronic story of the Dadaab’s refugee camps see D’Orsi 2019.

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176                                                          FRANCESCA DECLICH


others the children are the only sort of retirement scheme available. Once
you are old, they are the ones who will be helping until you die” (Declich
2011). For this reason, he said, you must invest in them. Mariam, during one
of our many conversations through the years, said: “You can have many
children but only a couple of them or even just one may be successful. You
must count on those who will be. I will indebt myself up to the impossible in
order to have one of my children studying at University level”. Children are
therefore part of the chances that parents have and in which they have
invested, hoping that they will get from the children in return something of
what they have given to them. On the other hand, as has emerged from
previous studies of other parts of the Horn of Africa (see also Barrera 2011;
Grabska, de Regt, del Franco 2018), internal migrations are often due to
discomfort with the constraints that kinship obligations impose on young
people. Youngsters negotiate their way forward through more or less
rebellious action.




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“CHILDREN ARE OUR PENSION”                                                         177



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2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 159-181
                                               2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 159-181




 Francesca DECLICH is Associate Professor at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo. She
 has been Research Fellow of the Refugee Studies Centre in Oxford as well as
 Fulbright research scholar at Northwestern University and Stanford University.
 She has carried out long term ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in
 Somalia, Tanzania and Mozambique and worked with Somali Refugees in East
 Africa and the US. Her latest edited book published for Brill is Translocal
 Connections across the Indian Ocean: Swahili-speaking networks on the move. She
 recently co-edited with historian Marie Rodet a thematic issue on memories and
 migration for the journal Africa (2018) and a special issue on research films on
 slavery for the Journal of Global Slavery (2020).
 francesca.declich@uniurb.it




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Francesca Declich
“Children are our pension”: Livelihood diversification, social security, and kinship constraints among
East African refugees
2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 159-181.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4218
