Heritage as Restitution: The Dadaab Refugee Camps, Kenya

Abstract

AbstractRecognizing architectures of unelected migration as sites of modern history and heritage not only expands the consideration of modernities in Africa but also constitutes a form of restitution to those who have fled insecurity and violence imposed by others. In this paper and pictorial presentation based on 12 years of archival and on‐site research, I argue that the Dadaab refugee camps and their inhabitation of the Kenya‐Somalia borderland may be understood and valued for a long history as well as a recent materiality, which has taken form in architecture, spatial practices, and territorial construction. Rather than accepting the relegation of refugee architecture to policy studies or the applied social sciences, which privilege the logics of emergency and an epistemology of the security state over knowledge stemming from people's migratory lives, this paper takes seriously the paradoxes of Dadaab as a heritage site. At Dadaab, the Kenyan government and UNHCR established relief operations in a region inscribed with colonial and postcolonial frontiers and wars, carrying a memory of detention and an imaginary of a borderland. These modern historical forces are reiterated in humanitarian settlements holding half a million registered refugees and unregistered migrants, enacting confinement in architectures figured as much by the visual frailty of dwellings dusted red by the wind and clad in recovered textile fragments as by a spectacular array of satellite dishes, aeronautic fleets on tarmac, aluminum and polyvinyl chloride water storage towers, and hydraulic extraction machinery penetrating a Jurassic‐era aquifer. These architectures signal transience even if anchored in the earth and sky, part of an ecology that once supported pastoralists and now undergirds another migratory world. My pictorially oriented paper uses these historical and aesthetic paradoxes to argue for this complex African heritage site, and with it, restitution of a fraught landscape of migration through a meaningful reconsideration of modern heritage.