Human Cargo
Authors: Caroline Moorehead
A distinguished biographer, Caroline Moorehead writes for
The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator
, and
Index on Censorship
. She has worked directly with African refugees in Cairo, as a founder of a legal advice office, in addition to raising funds for a range of educational projects. She is the author of
Gellhorn
and lives in London.
ALSO BY CAROLINE MOOREHEAD
The Collected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
(editor)
Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life
Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia
Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross
The Lost Treasures of Troy
Bertrand Russell: A Life
Betrayed: Children in Today’s World
(editor)
Troublesome People
Beyond the Rim of the World: The Letters of Freya Stark
(editor)
Freya Stark: A Biography
Sidney Bernstein: A Biography
Fortune’s Hostages
HUMAN CARGO
HUMAN CARGO
A JOURNEY AMONG REFUGEES
CAROLINE MOOREHEAD
PICADOR
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
NEW YORK
HUMAN CARGO.
Copyright © 2005, 2006 by Caroline Moorehead.
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The author would like to thank Eva Hoffman for permission to quote from
The New
Nomads;
Mandla Langa for permission to quote from
The Naked Song;
and Random House
for permission to quote from Giuseppe Lampedusa’s
The Leopard
.
Parts of the prologue are based on an article that appeared in
The New York Review of Books
in 2001.
Designed by Victoria Hartman
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Moorehead, Caroline.
Human cargo : a journey among refugees / Caroline Moorehead.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-312-42561-9
EAN 978-0-312-42561-6
I. Refugees. I. Title.
HV640.M66 2005
305.9′06914—dc22
2004054239
First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company, New York
First Picador Paperback Edition: April 2006
D 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
To
Lyndall
Prologue: The Lost Boys of Cairo
—————
1. The Homeless and the Rightless
—————
2.
Gli Extracommitari:
Sicily’s Boat People
3. The Fence: The Migrants of San Diego and Tijuana
—————
4. Fair Go: Australia and the Policy of
Mandatory Detention
5. Newcastle and the Politics of Dispersal
6. Little Better than Cockroaches:
Guinea’s Long-term Camps
7. The Corridors of Memory:
The Naqba and the Palestinians of Lebanon
—————
10. Dead Dreams: The Dinkas of Oulu
HUMAN CARGO
O
ne day a man in a country in Africa was arrested and accused of belonging to an illegal opposition group. He was sent to prison and tortured. In his cell was a very small window. By standing up very straight, in the far corner of the room, he could just see a field outside. From time to time, cows came to graze in it. As the weeks passed, he grew to recognize their shapes and colors. One in particular pleased him, and he gave her a name. From that day on, whenever she passed his window, he talked to her. He told her about his wife and children who had disappeared, about his house and his parents, and about the village where he grew up.
The day came when he was freed. He left his African country and went into exile, taking his cow with him. In his new country, he was offered an appointment with a doctor, to talk through his experiences. On the first day, he arrived in good time, leading his cow behind him. When the receptionist ushered him into the consulting room, he made sure the cow had plenty of room to follow him. Week after week, the man and his cow attended sessions together.
Several months went by. One day, the doctor suggested that the moment had come for the man to bid farewell to his cow. He replied that it was too soon. Several more months passed. Then the morning came when the man accepted that he could keep his cow with
him no longer. That day, he was extremely sad. He brought the cow with him, as usual, and then, crying, told her that the time had come for her to go home. Saying good-bye to his cow made him weep more than he had wept for many years.
The Lost Boys of Cairo
——————
Refugees live in a divided world, between countries in which they cannot live, and countries which they may not enter.
— ELIE WIESEL
W
hen Musa Sherif arrived at the house of his friend, a tailor from Sierra Leone, early in February 2000, he found no one there. He was surprised, because his friend was nearly always at home, waiting for him with his supper, but he reasoned that the tailor might have had to make a long journey to the other side of Cairo for a fitting with a client. The room looked unusually neat and empty, but his place was laid, and there was dinner in a pot on the stove. On the table sat a brown paper parcel, tied with string. Musa sat and waited. When some time had passed, he began to grow anxious. He needed to eat and leave, so that he could find somewhere to sleep that night; as a Liberian asylum seeker in Egypt he had no money for a place of his own. And, this being his only meal of the day, he was hungry. Finally, he ate, sitting uneasily at a corner of the table. Then he waited some more.
It was now that he suddenly noticed that the brown packet had his name on it. He opened it. Inside were a newly made pair of
trousers, a shirt, and a tie, folded neatly, with a letter on top. “Dear Musa,” it said. “Here is a present for you. Forgive me. I have wanted to tell you every day for many weeks now, but I have been too cowardly. I was chosen for resettlement in Canada. Today I am leaving.” Musa took the clothes his friend had made for him, put them on, threw away the frayed and filthy ones that he had been wearing for many months, and went back to the streets.
Musa is one of the lost boys of Africa. Though the phrase has come to be used for the young Sudanese separated from their families during their flight from the civil war of the 1990s, who grouped together and eventually made their way to the United States, Cairo is full of lost boys, though most are no longer boys now, but young men, from Sierra Leone and Liberia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Sudan, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Rwanda, and Burundi. Over the last ten years they have come to Cairo by a hundred different paths, on foot, by ferry, in airplanes, on trucks and trains, by camel and horseback, believing that, for all its horror, life was still worth living, that Egypt would be the gateway to a future, and that their past, as victims of the savagery of civil war and modern conflict, was somehow their passport to that future. If the lost boys have something in common, beyond a look of stunned and mistrustful defeat, a sort of hooded inwardness, it is that they have all witnessed acts of unconscionable cruelty, which they alone, out of their large families, have inexplicably survived. Fate—luck—has a particular meaning for them.
• • •
I MET MUSA
Sherif for the first time in the late afternoon of February 5, 2000, shortly after his friend’s departure for the United States. It was my first day in Cairo. I wouldn’t have noticed him, for he was one of fifty-six young Liberians gathered in the office of the African Studies department of the American University in Cairo, had it not been for his pressed, almost starched new trousers. He was also the only young man in a tie. Later, I would see him in very clean denim dungarees, and in a baggy green suit of trousers and bomber jacket, in a fashionable military color, with striking emerald
green leather sneakers: clothes, for Musa, as for many of the young men, were a symbol of possibility, of belief that there was some order in a profoundly disordered world, and still some hope of being able to make an impression on it.