Throughout the subsequent 1980s, the United States, seeing Somalia as a strategically located base between the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, granted the country hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military support. Barre used these resources to consolidate power in the hands of his closest friends, advisors, and relatives. Most of these emerging elite, urban businesspeople and politicians were part of the Darood clan in southern Somalia; all of them fueled by the wealth of foreign nations, and personally connected to the Somali government. Thus emerged class based inequality in Somalia in addition to the existing racial and ancestral hierarchies born from the trade of enslaved people and immigration. Subsequently, Bantu people found themselves at the very bottom of this hierarchy, as agricultural workers, and as formerly enslaved people and either non members, or unrecognized members of the Darood clan (Besteman, 2016).

While the governmental level experienced a dramatic increase in wealth and resources, villages like those in the Jubba and Shebelle river valleys were not invested in. Despite a desperate need for roads, schools, and medical facilities, these areas of Somalia saw only the development of foreign capitalist ventures, including a plan by the World Bank to build Africa’s second largest dam, and a USAID plan to privatize all land ownership, that ultimately ended up in the hands of elite, Mogadishu politicians and businesspeople (Besteman, 2016).

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the United States determined that Barre was disposable as an ally, and promptly cut aid to Somalia. In that same year, Barre’s government was disenfranchised by separate anti-government coalitions that banded together and militarized to force him feeling for Kenya in 1991 (Besteman, 2016).

Bantu people in the Jubba and Shebelle valleys undeniably suffered under Barre. However, when he passed by these valleys on his way to Kenya, his militia distributed weapons and vehicles to his supporters in the Darood clan to suppress Barre’s opponents, Bantu people were brutally murdered, raped, and dehumanized by the newly empowered pastoralists (Besteman, 2016). In response, Bantu people were forced to flee their pillaged homes in the middle of the night, as to not encounter Darood militia who aimed to keep them within the valley (Besteman, 2016). Most people, who were able, headed 40 miles to the border of Kenya, many to a refugee camps in Dadaab, in the north-east, and Kakuma, in the north-west (Crisp, 2000; Eno & Van Lehman, 2003). Our founder and executive director, Muhidin Libah, grew up in one of these Kenyan refugee camps before moving to the United States and enrolling in college in New York.

Many people died of diarrhea and starvation during the trek, and many more died of other curable diseases once arriving to Kenyan refugee camps (Besteman, 2016). Even in these camps, Bantu people were subject to discrimination and often placed in housing units on the outskirts of the camp, where residents were more vulnerable to looters and women more vulnerable to sexual abuse than their Somali national counterparts in the center housing units (Eno & Van Lehman, 2003). Bantu families were often made to work for more powerful Somali families within these camps, building homes, and fetching water and firewood (Horst, 2007).

Further, these refugee camps were particularly controlling, dehumanizing places for all residents. Many published reports of these camps concluded that, in the face of inadequate checks of power, agency staff considered refugees to be untrustworthy subjects, and would often withhold food, compensation for work, and other basic needs as a means of control (Agier, 2002; Crisp, 2000; Harrell-Bond, 2002; Horst, 2007).