Art in Kakuma

In the misery of the refugee camp you find artists, who use painting and poetry to maintain their identity – in spite of everything .

Art on the Run is the story about a journey out in the world and a journey into the true nature of art.  About artists living on the edge of everything – put to the flight from their home countries and attempting to survive in a remote, desolate, sun-scorched corner of Africa. In the middle of all the despair they paint and write for many reasons: to maintain their identities, to fill in the years of waiting for resettlement– most of all, simply because they must.

 Like any other refugee camp, Kakuma is placed in the middle of nowhere. In Kakuma’s case, that’s the desert sand in the northern interior of Kenya, close to the border with South Sudan. The only vegetation that grows here is the nearly indestructible African thorn tree. Kakuma is in one of the hottest and most arid regions outside of the Sahara.

Daily life in the camp is characterized by riots and abuse, by rapes and crimes. People living here are frustrated, frightened and traumatized. Many of them have experienced terrible events, often as young children – the customs and boundaries defining all human societies have been damaged or destroyed altogether- in their absence and in their own despair, some people do terrible things.   Living in Kakuma is a brutal experiment in cultural disruption. 

Art, in spite of everything

The camp is enormous. It covers more than 20 square kilometres and it is far from the picture of a refugee camp as seen on the news, with ruler-straight rows of tents and huts set up in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. 

The area is divided into sectors, looking more or less like a village of the kind found all over Africa, only on a surreal scale. Every sector has its own nationality.  Long, dusty thoroughfares are punctuated by clumps of small shops, with colourful handmade signs advertising their wares.  There are schools, churches, mosques and cafes, where men meet and hang out to pass the time.

In the midst this you find art and artists. People who have fled repression and who maintain their expressions of music, poetry or painting for the pleasure of people those around them - and for their own survival.

The artists of Kakuma come from every cultural group represented in the camp, but they all have one thing in common; art helps them to survive a life that is hard and hopeless. For some of them, painting asserts the simple fact of their existence, for others, it is a way of coming to terms with terrible experiences and loss. Under the fierce sun, in temperatures that represent the high extremes of those any human body can bear, they create their pieces of art – because they must.                                                              

You can read more about Kakuma on http://kakuma.wordpress.com . Here you find "The Kakuma News Reflector", the world’s first independent online news source from a refugee camp. The site is written by journalists from Ethiopia, Congo, Uganda, Somalia and Sudan, all of them living in the camp. In the August 2011 what month edition you can read an article about Art on the Run.