Dadaab camp reveals long history of settlement
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Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s book, Architecture of Migration, examines the Dadaab refugee camps in Kenya, established in 1991, and challenges common understandings of these spaces.
Siddiqi argues that people often view refugee camps as temporary and lacking history, but her research reveals a complex and long-lasting settlement with deep aesthetic and social roots.
She spent 14 years conducting research, including interviews with residents like Ifo Chairlady Isnina Ali Rage and shopowner Shamso Abdullahi Farah, and studying archives across Africa, Asia, and Europe. Siddiqi’s work builds on the thinking of feminist scholars such as Sylvia Tamale and Saba Mahmood, and global Black feminists like Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and Saidiya Hartman.
She draws connections between the history of Dadaab and broader themes of colonialism, partition, and migration, noting that the camp’s origins are tied to earlier events like the East African abolitionist settlement of Freretown. The book positions refugee settlements not as temporary structures imposed on a landscape, but as products of deliberate political and bureaucratic processes that create and reinforce divisions.
Siddiqi suggests that viewing these settlements through a lens of “feeling”, a shared sense of collective identity, can help overcome the logic of partition and envision more inclusive ways of living together.
