‘Madmen, womanizers, and thieves’: moral disorder and the cultural text of refugee encampment in Kenya

Abstract

Kenya's refugee camps have evoked spectacular imaginaries of terrorism and humanitarian crisis. Drawing on everyday discourses and shared knowledges among camp administrators, this article reveals that these geopolitical narratives are underwritten locally by more generalized concerns about the imagined ‘otherness’ and moral degeneracy of the displaced. Refugees are thus portrayed as criminals and crooks, sexually deviant and idle, as well as ‘mad’ and uncivilized. Together, these tropes constitute a cultural text of encampment that reproduces postcolonial imaginings of difference and engrains the notion that ‘refugeeness’ equates to a state of ‘moral disorder’. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kakuma refugee camp in north-western Kenya's Turkana county. It argues that the discursive production of refugees as immoral subjects not only has practical effects for the actions of government officials and aid workers but rekindles a binary colonial mapping of the world into ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ spaces. These social imaginaries and banal discourses illustrate that the camp has not just a political but also an imaginative geography. Kakuma camp is hereby doubly excluded: from the modernity that humanitarianism ostensibly embodies and from the imagined moral community of Kenya.

Durable Resolutions

“…In everyday discourse, this is more often described as a matter of 'mindset' -an English word very commonly invoked by officials, humanitarians, and refugees who engage with them. As is often the case in humanitarian settings (Brankamp 2021b), notions of civilization and enlightenment of the morally degenerate 'other' are ubiquitous in this context. 'What is important is to educate them that some cultures should be deleted, I mean, you know, that they are no longer relevant to modern society', a government official in Kiryandongo confidently explained, before adding: 'But it is something to do with mindset, which is a process anyway.'…”

Camps and counterterrorism: Security and the remaking of refuge in Kenya

“…In the aftermath of the globally televised attacks on the Westgate Mall in 2013, Garissa University College in 2015 and the DusitD2 hotel in 2019, Kenya’s government claimed—without offering evidence—that the perpetrators had planned the assaults from the Kakuma and Dadaab camps in Northern Kenya (Mutambo, 2015; Straziuso and Odula, 2013). In popular imagination, this reinforced existing racialized imaginaries of refugees as unruly, immoral, or dangerous and camps as ungovernable “microcosms of otherness” (Brankamp, 2021: 159). Building on over a century of colonial praxis and use of camps as technologies of counterinsurgency and immobilization (Elkins, 2005; Khalili, 2013), the charge of militant “Islamic terrorism” is the latest manifestation of the Kenyan state’s perennial anxiety around, and violent reaction to, the presence of mobile, non-citizen, and ostensibly disloyal populations within its borders.…”