In his 2016 book, City of Thorns, Ben Rawlence writes about the time he spent in Dadaab, a sprawling refugee camp in Kenya, and grapples with the misnomer the term “refugee camp” has become. “Dadaab was established in 1992 to hold 90,000 refugees fleeing Somali’s civil war,” wrote Rawlence, adding, “At the beginning of 2016 it is 25-years-old and nearly half a million [people] strong, an urban area the size of New Orleans, Bristol, or Zurich [but] unmarked on any official map.”
Rawlence, a former researcher for Human Rights Watch, describes in compelling and empathetic detail what it’s like not only to live in the camp but to know nothing else. A quarter of a century later, there are those who were born, raised, and educated in the the camp; a second generation has been born, even a third.
