“The agency, which plans to settle the Somali Bantu in one apartment complex in the Columbia area, is seeking 20 to 30 congregations – Christian, Muslim, Jewish – to take on a six-month commitment to sponsor individual families.”
Columbia reaches out to ‘lost tribe’](http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/5781911.htm) The State News 04 May 03
More than 100 Somali Bantu to relocate from Africa to city
About 120 members of an African tribe enslaved and persecuted for more than two centuries soon will make their home in Columbia, part of one of the largest U.S. refugee resettlements in recent history. The first wave of Somali Bantu likely will arrive sometime this summer, said the Rev. Richard Robinson, coordinator of the Lutheran Family Services Refugee Resettlement Program. The resettlement of the Bantu is the agency’s most ambitious – and perhaps most risky undertaking. But Robinson said he believes when Midlands residents learn the story of the Somali Bantu, they will be moved to help the new transplants.
“When we heard about the plight of the Somali Bantu, we felt very passionate about bringing them here,” said Robinson, an ordained Baptist minister.“The fact that they had no place to go … the intense suffering they have gone through. Those things really resonated with my minister’s heart, my human heart.”
It won’t be easy.
These members of Africa’s “lost tribe” will need considerable help making the transition into American culture and democracy. Unlike Vietnamese refugees, the largest resettled population in recent decades, the Somali Bantu know nothing of Americans or the United States. Many of the United States’ most recent refugee arrivals from conflicts in Eastern Europe were also familiar with Western culture. The transition to America and South Carolina may be more complicated because of the special circumstances surrounding the life of the Somali Bantu, said Andrew Billingsley, a USC sociology and African-American studies professor.
The Somali Bantu are unique in that their suffering has extended back centuries, first at the hands of slave traders, then at the hands of masters. A rural, agricultural people used to hard labor and little reward, they have been denied education. “I think it is wise to be especially sensitive because they are African and we are in South Carolina,” with its own particular history of African enslavement, Billingsley said.One element in their favor is their hunger for peace, Lutheran Family’s Robinson said, and the American freedoms they have heard explained by refugee workers.
The agency, which plans to settle the Somali Bantu in one apartment complex in the Columbia area, is seeking 20 to 30 congregations – Christian, Muslim, Jewish – to take on a six-month commitment to sponsor individual families. Two Christian congregations, Ebenezer Lutheran Church and Lexington Baptist Church, and the staff of the S.C. Baptist Convention already have signed on to help.The agency also needs doctors willing to provide free or low-cost medical care, translators, tutors and employers willing to hire the Somali Bantu.
A JOURNEY OF TWO CENTURIES
The resettlement of this “lost tribe” of Africa will end a pilgrimage that began in the 1800s when the Bantu’s ancestors were taken by Arab slave traders from the East Africa region that is now home to the nations of Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi. They were sold on the Zanzibar slave market and dispersed throughout the Middle East and Africa. Those who ended up in Somalia became known as the Somali Bantu, where they were persecuted as slaves and as free men and women.
Although they practiced traditional African animist religion, most converted to Islam while in Somalia because the Quran forbids Muslims from holding fellow Muslims in captivity. “It was a ticket out of slavery,” Robinson said. Even after slavery was outlawed in 1930, their situation barely improved. They occupied the lowest rungs of society, received little formal education and performed the most menial jobs. “Someone has said, and rightly so, that the treatment of Somali Bantu in Somalia was almost identical to that of African-Americans prior to the civil rights movement here,” Robinson said.
The 1990 Somali civil war worsened their plight. Many had found relative peace as farmers in the Juba River Valley on the Kenya-Somalia border, far from Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu. But as fighting and famine swept through the land, their farms were plundered. Because the Somali Bantu were not associated with any clan, the rebels and rival clansmen routinely raped Somali Bantu women and murdered the men.
The majority fled to Kenya, locating first in the Dadaab refugee camp, where they remained for a decade, while the United Nations High Commission on Refugees searched for a home for the Bantu. Kenya turned them down, as did Mozambique and Tanzania, although about 3,000 who fled the war by ship to Tanzania have been given land and allowed to stay there. A few are returning to Somalia. Between 8,000 and 12,000 Somali Bantu have been approved by the U.S. State Department to resettle in about 50 U.S. cities, including Columbia. They possess few skills or material goods, and have only rudimentary knowledge of an American society they barely can envision. But in the Kakuma refugee camp where they moved last year, there are daily classes in English, studies on democracy and demonstrations of such marvels as the kitchen stove, the flush toilet and the baby diaper.
FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM
The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Church World Service refugee program, two of nine voluntary resettlement organizations in the United States, are partnering with Lutheran Family Services in South Carolina to bring the Somali Bantu to Columbia. Robinson’s organization proposed Columbia for one of the resettlement locations because housing is inexpensive and entry-level jobs are relatively plentiful.Even more important is the attitude of the Midlands, he said. “Our community has been receptive to refugees in the past, particularly in the faith community.”
To prepare Columbia for the arrival of the new immigrants, Robinson has spoken to city leaders in Columbia, West Columbia and Cayce, detailing how the refugees would make the transition into American life. He has spoken to school officials in districts where the children might go to school. And he acknowledged he has fielded some difficult questions about how far U.S. hospitality can extend, particularly during these turbulent times. The suspicion of Muslims, heightened since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, already has been raised, he said.
Critics of generous U.S. immigration policies suggest American communities may be in for more than they bargain for. They point to Lewiston, Maine, where the population of ethnic Somalis swelled to nearly 2,000 in less than two years. The city’s welfare and education resources were strained so dramatically that Lewiston’s mayor pleaded with Somali elders to refrain from urging other Somalis to join them there, a plea that earned him the ire of civil rights activists and others. …