Politics of Innocence by Simon Turner

Author:Simon Turner [Turner, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9780857456090
Google: dwX3-M2eIwUC
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2012-02-15T05:21:24+00:00

VILLAGE LEADER: These people who came recently don't know where to find the job. They don't know the mechanisms of the camp. These people who have already got jobs here in Lukole, charge them some taxes in order to get a job. And these people are very poor. They don't have shillings to pay. That's why they don't have jobs.

S.T.: You should complain to Tanzanian staff that the Burundians tax them shillings.

VILLAGE LEADER: Where can we go to complain? And those Tanzanians, sometimes they tax us shillings. [He laughs.]

This exchange illustrates the attractiveness of being employed by an NGO. It also reveals a perception that NGO employees made up a close-knit and impenetrable network.

Steven fits the profile of an NGO employee that attained a pivotal role in the camp. From being a secondary school student in Burundi, he became chief security guard, responsible for keeping a check on crime in a camp with a population the size of a fair-sized town and with a murder rate somewhat higher. According to their own explanations, the reasons why he and a number of other young men gained such prominent positions was in part due to their formal education and in part due to a number of personal abilities: to cope in the camp and become a ‘big man’ one had to be open, not afraid to approach a muzungu and have a certain nerve to assert oneself, they claimed.

These personal abilities were metonymically linked to the vague idea of being ‘shy’ or not, an issue that was often brought up in discussions in the camp. Not being shy epitomised the meaning of education, language and mobility in the refugees' understanding of the changes that they felt were taking place in Lukole. Those who mastered these abilities and who adapted to the changes were at the forefront of recapturing Lukole. To not be shy meant to dare to voice one's opinion in public in front of a number of foreign and ‘superior’ people. It meant knowing the new rules of the refugee game and knowing how to bend them to one's advantage, rather than being taken advantage of by the new rulers.

As mentioned in earlier chapters, ‘shyness’ was seen as a Hutu virtue. To be shy was to show good manners. An inferior was meant to be shy towards a superior, whether that was in terms of age, gender, class or ethnicity. However, as has also been mentioned, the refugees expressed an ambiguous relation to shyness. As much as it was still praised as a virtue, it was also considered a vice. This was most clearly expressed in relation to Rwandan Hutu refugees who allegedly were not shy. In Lukole, people would take pride in having learned ‘tricks’ from the Rwandans such as cheating the UNHCR. When discussing the UNHCR's coming verification exercise with a group of refugees in October 1997,6 they expected very high figures. I argued that the figure had decreased by 25 per cent in the Kigoma camps after a

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