Out of Africa, on to a fresh start

Portland scholar leads effort to resettle hundreds of Somali Bantu refugees

By Ben Jacklet

The Portland Tribune, Mar 28, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Back when Portland scholar Daniel Van Lehman was running a refugee camp in Kenya, he learned a memorable lesson about the Somali Bantus.

The camp had become a “deforestation machine,” he recalls. Hungry people were ravaging the local forests for firewood for cooking. So Van Lehman asked the refugees to look into setting up a nursery to replace the trees that were being lost.

Before long, the Bantus had raised 500,000 seedlings. They didn’t have any nursery materials like planting pots or tarps, so they made do with scattered bits of junk Ñ discarded milk cans, plastic bags, burlap sacks.

And while they were at it, they planted prolific vegetable gardens. “They were growing watermelons in the middle of the desert,” recalls Van Lehman, shaking his head.

For Van Lehman, it was a reminder of the ingenuity and persistence of the Somali Bantus, one of Africa’s most oppressed ethnic groups. He’s banking that those same abilities will enable the Bantus to adapt to life in the United States and in Portland.

The U.S. government recently announced that it will accept 12,000 Somali Bantus as refugees during the next two to three years. Refugee-friendly Portland, which has successfully welcomed thousands of transplanted Vietnamese, Ukrainian and Ethiopian immigrants in similar programs, was approved this week as one of 47 resettlement sites.

In addition, if Van Lehman gains the $400,000 in federal grant money he has applied for, Portland will serve as a central distribution point for information and resources to help the Bantus adjust to a new land.

The first of the 12,000 Somali Bantus are expected to start trickling into the United States Ñ and into Portland Ñ sometime this summer.

Van Lehman, 42, served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and speaks Swahili fluently. He joined the Somali relief effort in 1991, working as a field officer in the Dagahaley Refugee Camp in Kenya for the U.N. High Commission on Refugees.

One morning at the camp he heard two women arguing outside his tent. Forgetting that Somalis generally don’t speak Swahili, he asked in that language what the problem was. Much to his surprise, one of the women answered him in perfect Swahili.

It turned out the woman was not a Somali but a Somali Bantu. Van Lehman had never heard of such an ethnic group. He had always believed in what he now calls “the myth that Somalia is one land, one people.”

His subsequent research has shown that about one-third of the people in Somalia are from minority groups. And none of these groups is more persecuted than the Bantus. Their ancestors were brought to Somalia in chains from Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi by slave traders loyal to the Sultanate of Zanzibar in the 18th and 19th centuries. They have been treated as second-class citizens ever since.

Omar Eno, a Somali Bantu who is pursuing a doctorate in history at York University in Toronto, grew up with the discrimination. “A Bantu could not go to a university, could not hold a permanent position, could not intermarry people from the dominant clan,” he says. “I was the only Bantu in the classroom. Other students would not even want to sit next to me.”

War brings more hardship

1 | 2 Next Page >>

Facebook	Digg	Del.icio.us
Newsvine	Stumbleupon	Reddit