Who needs fiction when fact is so gripping as to conjure a sea of upturned faces and a forest of hands at question time? Ben Rawlence’s first-hand account of the clear and present reality of life in Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world, stunned his audience into silence and bore witness to the fact that the global migrant crisis is surely the only story in town.
Dubbed the City of Thorns (also the title of his book) because they are the only plants that grow there, Dadaab, some 400 miles from Mogadishu, is now into a third-generation population, has a birth rate of 1000 a month and has grown into a city the size of Bristol. Residents have been born, married, had children and now work full-time there “just keeping their heads down” while dreaming of being resettled.
With clear-eyed precision Rawlence related from memory – he didn’t have to read – the stories of three of the young people he met there. One had been kidnapped from primary school to be conscripted to the Al-Shabab youth army, another had spent her young years cramming her exams to get a university place in Canada only to fail and settle on a teaching job in the camp, while a third works the black market and finds a young bride from the slum part of camp and is now a father twice over.
Rawlence predicted such “limbo cities” could become the blueprint for the future, and could reach post-Brexit Britain: “We’re just at the beginning and we’re going to see much much more displacement,” he warned.
The not unrelated issue of human trafficking - an “overwhelming international problem that is increasing in Scotland and about which we are in denial” - is aired in Margaret Malloch and Paul Rigby’s ambitious academic publication, Human Trafficking: The Complexities of Exploitation.
Before a subdued audience Malloch, a reader in criminology at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Stirling, quietly expressed a certain dismay about their ability to quantify the size of the problem of modern sexual and economic slavery in Scotland due to the myriad of different legislative and humanitarian agencies involved and their inability to agree on a common approach. All have different priorities, and the dedicated unit at Police Scotland keeps on changing personnel. Nonetheless, the book – with input from specialist practitioners in Glasgow - provides much-needed guidance for those working with or who will work with the growing numbers of trafficked children, most of whom are from Vietnam, China and Nigeria (though Syrians are also expected).
Since Immigration is reserved to Westminster, the disappearance of EU legislation and the anticipated weakening of the UK Government’s ability to control it post-Brexit was once again an unwelcome prospect.
The separation from his mother at age nine – albeit to boarding school rather than to a refugee camp or into the hands of a criminal gang - was also traumatic for poor little Roald Dahl, the beloved only son among daughters. He hated school, was bullied and cried himself to sleep. But the experience spurred him on to write some 2000 letters to her throughout the rest of his life and not only did his ghastly experience help him become the beloved children’s author he was, but the letters themselves have become the subject of Donald Sturrock’s unusual book, Love From Boy.
Sturrock, a family friend, was the first to get his hands on the carefully preserved bundle and his glee was clear for all to witness. But Dahl’s description of the train journey from Washington to Montreal while invalided from the RAF in 1942 – of vast menus, large comfortable beds, arriving at the Ritz Carlton to find “lettuce hearts as large as great cabbages” - might have today’s less fortunate migrants wondering where fact does indeed become fantasy.
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