Human Cargo (3 page)

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FEAR, MEMORY, AND
expectations endlessly deferred rule in the quicksands of Cairo’s refugee world. Psychiatrists say that it is important for peace of mind to live in the present, to come to terms with daily existence, and to neither brood about the past nor attach too much meaning to the future; but the refugees trapped in Cairo today, haunted by terrifying memories of loss and savagery, seduced by a longing for a world they perceive as stable and fulfilling, cannot accept the present. Cairo is a prison sentence, to be endured because there is no option. They simply wait. “The problem for refugees here,” a young man told a church worker not long ago, “is that they have no real existence: they live in their head.” Like Musa, no African will consider learning more than the few words of Arabic he needs to live: it is too potent a symbol of failure. The few lucky enough to have the desperately desired blue refugee card are not always the happiest. Gone are the terrors of sudden arrest, but resettlement is never automatic and it can take many years; the waiting
becomes almost too painful. The image of the West becomes more glorious month by month. There have been suicides, people unable to wait any longer; they have no courage left, having used it up on their torturers and the long, frightening journeys to safety. When the refugees decide to die, some do so by jumping from the balconies of Cairo’s tall buildings; a ten-year-old-boy killed himself this way shortly before my last visit.

Cairo is not just one of the most polluted cities in the world. It is dirty, intensely overcrowded, broken down, and full of rubble, with roads built up on legs above other roads in an attempt to ease the traffic jams that paralyze the city for all of the day and most of the night. Occasionally, between the brick and the cement, you catch glimpses of filigreed minarets, delicately carved porticoes and arcades, stately facades and the traces of sumptuous courtyards, earlier Cairos of the Islamic master craftsmen and Coptic merchants, when the city was a splendid place of pleasure gardens and cool palaces, and civil servants in their red fezzes strolled along tree-lined avenues where visitors drank sherbet in famous tea rooms. It is the utterly derelict nature of the city today that partly makes possible its absorption of so many refugees—200,000? 500,000? No one can say for sure. Around the city’s edges, entrepreneurs keep constructing identical cinder-block buildings in ever widening circles, always leaving the top floor unfinished, so that more floors can be added year by year. From the top of the buildings along the Nile, on the rare moments when the smog evaporates and the setting sun lights up the horizon, you can see the Pyramids in Giza, framed by the jagged edges of unfinished blocks. Wherever the buildings are most derelict, the electricity supplies most sporadic, the water least reliable, there the refugees live.

Donzo is another young Liberian, an almost jaunty good-looking Mandingo with deep regular gashes along both his cheeks. He was one of the first of the young men to bring me his testimony, for me to turn into a formal application for refugee status with UNHCR. When he was sixteen, Donzo was caught by Charles Taylor’s men. They didn’t want him for a boy soldier, but they wanted information
about the Mandingos. He had none to give. Before letting him go, a soldier took out his knife and, getting his companions to hold the boy still, carved slits across both sides of his face. Six years later, having lost his grandparents, both parents, seven brothers and sisters, several aunts and uncles, and many cousins, he fled to Cairo and went to live with eleven other young Africans on the seventh floor of what must once have been a fine apartment block. This was soon after the meeting in the offices of the African Studies department at the American University in February 2000, when the young Liberians took to living in groups, and I started visiting them at home, so that they could show me, with a mixture of pride and embarrassment, how they were coping with their lives.

In two high-ceilinged rooms with cornices and the remains of parquet floors, these eleven young men have two broken beds, two chairs, three blankets, a lightbulb, and a very old, erratic television set. The glass in the windows up the staircase has long since broken, leaving a few splintered edges. An elevator, its mahogany doors wrenched off, dangles from one rusting pulley. Rubbish fills every corner; down the wide marble stairs, chipped and blackened by filth, trickles an open sewer. The bannisters have gone. It is almost completely dark. Donzo and his companions live on $40 a month, the allowance received from UNHCR by the one Sierra Leonean recognized as an official refugee. At the beginning of the month, when the money comes, Donzo tells me, they eat rice and some vegetables cooked in oil; by the end they are down to just bread. They seldom leave the building, for fear of arrest, preferring to spend the months of waiting in the semi-dark, almost comatose with boredom and inertia. Izako, Donzo’s friend and a former customs officer, had left a wife and two children in Monrovia, after he had been tortured and raped by Charles Taylor’s soldiers: he worries, during the long empty days, over whether they are still alive. If UNHCR acceptance rates remain the same, I write in my notebook after this first visit to their rooms, seven of these eleven boys will never leave Cairo.

Asylum seekers with families, like the thousands of Sudanese who have arrived since the war intensified in southern Sudan in the
late 1990s, prefer to live in shantytowns on the outskirts, where women, whose husbands have been killed, share rooms without light or water. Tuberculosis among these families is endemic; the children have open sores and scabies; they cough and scratch constantly. They do not go to school, for school is not available to asylum seekers, and a whole generation is growing up illiterate. When the Sudanese women find work as maids, they lock their children for safety into the almost empty, dusty, boxlike rooms, where they lie on blankets on the dirt floor. Apart from the shafts of light that filter through cracks in the door, it is dark; they stay there all day. At Arba Nos, where the desert begins, three hundred Sudanese families live and wait.

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IN THE NEXT
three years, between the spring of 2000 and late 2003, I went back to Cairo four times, with Lyndall Passerini, a writer friend. We returned to help set up a legal advice center for asylum seekers to prepare their submissions and their testimonies for their interviews with UNHCR, and, with money from friends, to start a number of small educational projects among people for whom schooling is often the only symbol of a possible better future. We found the money to provide teachers for classes of young Somalis, held in the homes of those fortunate enough to have homes; to fund a nursery school at Arba Nos for Sudanese children up to the age of four, giving them food and medical care and somewhere to spend the days, so that their mothers when going out to work did not have to leave them; and to support English classes for adult Sudanese who, hoping for eventual resettlement in Australia, Canada, or the United States, knew that speaking English was a first step to getting there. But it was the Liberians who, day after day, brought us their stories and proved the most engaging and demanding students.

By the spring of 2001, exactly a year after my first visit to Cairo, a flat had been rented in one of Cairo’s poorest and most distant suburbs, two classes formed with blackboards and plastic chairs, maps of Africa pinned to the walls, and books brought out from England.
A teacher had been found, and Mohamed Bafahe, a tall, responsible young man who had been a teacher in Monrovia before having to flee Charles Taylor’s men, was appointed director of the school. Bafalie’s wife, Khalidatou, who had followed him to Cairo after being persecuted by soldiers, had been forced to leave their small son and daughter behind with her mother. From the first day the young Liberians were absolutely clear about their school: they wanted to learn everything. Asked to make lists of what they wished to be taught, they wrote down: engineering, psychiatry, car maintenance, political science, economics, media studies, philosophy, law, history, medicine, creative writing. Most could read and write, but very few had completed more than a couple of years of elementary school. They accepted with good grace when offered English gram mar, literature, and a little modern history and politics. Given their fares by bus to this distant flat, they came assiduously, though their journeys—they were the only black people in crowds of often hostile Cairenes—were frightening. Mohamed, the moonfaced boy, was attacked one day on a bus by a group of teenage boys, who beat him about the head with a stick with a nail in it. Early gatherings were polite, subdued; as the months passed, as they felt safer, the young men began to challenge and argue. They began to want things. They were always polite, but they were now also firm. In class, they asked questions, they demanded tests; they wanted, always, more: more homework, more classes, more information. They wanted the Internet and new computers, they wanted certificates, they wanted assurances that they would not be abandoned.

And, slowly, they advanced up the uncertain and interminable queue at UNHCR. By the time of my third visit, in the spring of 2002, all fifty-six had had their first interview, and five had been accepted for resettlement in the West. Their pleasure, their excitement at such good fortune, spread through the group: it had happened to five, it could happen to them all. Though they were still living on the edge of destitution and subject to casual racist attacks, the mood within the group became lighter. They gave out a sense that the future had opened again. Now, e-mailing me when I was
back in London, they tentatively asked for things, impossibly ambitious often, but a sign that they imagined a life in which they might really become engineers and lawyers. Kabineh, a short, very young-looking boy with cropped hair and a childish grin, wrote: “I am sleeping from place to place with a lot of disturbance. 2 books I really wished you could send for me: (1) mass communication, (2) Business Management.” Bility, who always wore a brown woolly hat, whatever the heat, wondered whether he could have a shortwave radio, to listen to the news from Liberia. All longed for computers.

In the autumn of 2002, something happened that changed the Liberian story. One of the young men, Amr, was arrested. For a while, no one could discover why. It became known that he had been taken to the Mogamma, a vast, ugly government building that faces Cairo’s fine Museum of Antiquities in Tahir Square, with cells for those Egypt is planning to deport. There were rumors that he had been tortured. At a first court appearance, he was seen to have bruises on his face and neck, and he appeared confused and fragile. Then it transpired that the security police had spotted him outside the Israeli embassy, decided that he had been spying for Israel, and further suspected that he was involved in a money-laundering operation. The charges were absurd; but in the precarious world in which Cairo’s asylum seekers exist, they were terrifying. If the Egyptian police could really imagine that a Muslim Liberian was helping the Israeli secret police, then which one of them might not be a target next?

Other arrests followed. One of the first was Kono, a short, thickset, phlegmatic young man of twenty, one of the group’s only two Christians. He was solid, slow moving, and very sad. I knew Kono from my first visit to Cairo, when he came to my flat one day and described his childhood. He was the only son of parents who had both worked for Samuel Doe, president of Liberia until ousted by the rebels; when the rebels closed in on the presidential palace, they arrested everyone they found with any connection to the dead president, and killed both his parents. Kono had then gone to live with a much-loved uncle and aunt, who brought him up as their son, until the day that his aunt went to the market and was captured by rebels
and raped before being killed. His uncle survived for a while longer, but then he, too, died in one of the frequent outbreaks of violence that consumed Monrovia in the 1990s. Kono was then twelve.

In Cairo, awaiting news of his UNHCR interview, Kono had decided, for reasons he was never able to explain to anyone, to accept an offer made to young Muslims from Africa to study at Al Azhar, Cairo’s Islamic university, and to take a place in the dormitory they provided for homeless students. He did not, of course, tell them that he was a Christian. However, someone informed on him. He was immediately arrested by the university’s guards and turned over to the police, who announced that he would be deported. Unusually, he was left in a corridor while arrangements were being made to take him to a prison; he escaped, and made his way to the offices of UNHCR, where an outraged young Egyptian interviewer told him that she wanted nothing more to do with him, as, having lied to Al Azhar, he was clearly a liar, and as such ineligible for any kind of UNHCR assistance. Kono disappeared into hiding.

The next to go was a wiry, bookish boy called Mustafa Kromer. Mustafa had once explained to me that as the youngest son of a man with many wives and many children, he had never been quite sure how many of the boys and girls who thronged the family compound in Liberia were his full brothers and sisters. His own mother died when he was seven, and he had been cared for by a grandmother. Mustafa was out fishing when the rebels came to Grand Capemount County in 1991. His grandmother, fearing the advance of the soldiers, took him to hide in the bush, but life was very hard and she was elderly. She died. Returning to his village, Mustafa found his father; with him and other children he moved from village to village across northwestern Liberia in search of safety. He was eleven when he saw his first killing, a cousin beaten to death in front of him for failing to answer questions from rebel soldiers. Because the rebels now advancing through Grand Capemount County toward Monrovia were led by a man called Alhaji G. V. Kromah, anyone bearing the name Kromah or Kromer was suspect in the eyes of the government forces sent out to confront them. One by one, members of Mustafa’s large
family were captured and killed. Mustafa himself was picked up with two of his brothers and taken to an army camp, where he was beaten and questioned. My record of his testimony, given to me over several weeks, runs to many pages: it is a slow, sad story of flight, violence, and the gradual destruction of a once happy and united family, as adults and children disappeared, were killed, or simply died from hunger and exhaustion. By September 1998 Mustafa was the only survivor. A family friend, finding him wandering on the streets of Monrovia, smuggled him to Cairo. He was seventeen.