User:Felicewaters/Making Refuge

Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine

by Catherine Bestemen

Background information: Bestemen is an anthropologist based in Maine but her work was based in Banta, Somalia, with her husband Jorge Acero. She lived in a small village in Banta. Catherine traveled and lived in Banta to do some fieldwork hoping to get her dissertation and Ph.D. in Anthropology. Can find more information on her career and research at Catherine_L._Besteman.

The focus of the book is on "Somali Bantu" who aim to establish new lives in Lewiston, Maine. Besteman describes the process by which many different groups "became Bantu" when resettlement to the United States became an option for them. She describes how the Italian colonial authorities may have been the first to use the term "Bantu" in the 1930s to distinguish the riverine farmers from the pastoralist Somalis. Yet the Somali Bantu were not an actual group but consisted of a range of widely divergent communities, many with a slave ancestry from Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, and Kenya. The Bantu then became a group worthy of resettlement in the US resettlement scheme due to their particularly oppressive past and minority status in Somalia, making them a good objective of relocation from the region. Besteman shows how the strategic actions of both various Bantu leaders and those working for the UN and Anthropological Quarterly” https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663629/summary

History


 * In 1991, Siad Barre, the Somali president dictator, fled the capital to escape advanced oppositional militias. Many villages including the people of Banta did not know the outcome of the collapse of the Somali government. It brought murder, rape, starvation, kidnapping, and torture into their villages. This has caused many villagers to flee to Kenya. After a decade and a half of many living in refugee camps in Kenya that did not know that they would have to rebuild their lives in the United States. (Rephrased pg 4)


 * “The war made farming risky and food production insecure because of the possibility of an attack in distant fields. It collapsed family coherence as militia members carted off daughters, killed fathers in front of their children, and raped mothers. It brought destruction to closely-knit communities, extended family networks, subsistence farming based on generations of deep environmental knowledge, and a social order based on family, faith, and coresidence.” Pg 4



Lewiston Maine:

Somali people experience many challenges after moving to the United States. 1.) “Their frustrations with navigating Ameri- can society, their awareness that their children were stigmatized in Lewiston, and their fears about the impact on their children of the grotesque aspects of American culture filled the room. Sitting there, I couldn’t help but reflect on the strange and unexpected journey that had brought Banta’s war survivors to Lewiston, turned subsistence farmers into accused gang members” (pg 4)

2.)