View Coming to America Photo Gallery

For the last 12 years, home for thousands of Somali Bantu was a sprawling refugee camp of corrugated tin shacks on the dusty plains of Kenya. Food and water were scarce for the poorest of the outpost's poor. Life before was no easier; the Somali Bantu had spent the last two centuries in slavery to other Africans.

When their adopted homeland of Somalia erupted in civil war in the 1990s, insurgents murdered, maimed, and raped many of their people. The survivors, marked by trauma and bayonet scars, eventually fled to the Kakuma camp, where they awaited a new fate with 80,000 other refugees from Kenya and Sudan. Their ancestral homelands of Tanzania and Mozambique refused a United Nations High Commission for Refugees request to accept the tribe, deemed a minority at-risk population, leaving them in limbo.

The United States acknowledged the Bantu's plight, however, and agreed to immigrate the tribe of about 14,000 people to select locations of the country over the course of two years. Their arrival is notable because they are the largest ethnic group with a common story of persecution to be processed for asylum at once, says Kelly Gauger, program officer for East Africa in the Office of Refugee Admissions in the federal Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration.

As the Bantu also are one of the most technologically underdeveloped people to arrive en masse on American shores since the Vietnam era, international aid workers in the akuma camp have given the tribe a crash course in Western culture over the past couple of years. (The United States granted the Bantu asylum prior to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but the incident delayed their actual immigration until 2003.) Lessons included how to tell time, as Americans live by the clock. Instructors also emphasized the importance of reading in a country where even doors have the word “open” printed on them. And for the first time, the Bantu learned how to operate a flush toilet and understand the flashing signals of an electronic cross walk.

“By the time I arrived a year or two later, many could write their names with a pen and could count to 10 (in English) for me,” says Denise McGill, an Ohio University graduate student in visual communication who visited the Kakuma camp in October 2003.

McGill has documented the Bantu's journey from the desolate corners of the African desert to the affluent oasis of suburban America. A seasoned photojournalist, she had navigated Africa five times previously, covering the continent's AIDS crisis and other contemporary issues. McGill had been photographing families of Somali refugees in Columbus, Ohio, when she learned of the Bantu's plight, and was awarded a $5,000 grant from Ohio University's Student Enhancement Award program to fly to Kenya to cover the story.

McGill made the return trip to America in November with Muridi Mukomwa, his wife Halima, and their two small children to track the young family's settlement in Wheaton, Illinois. For 10 days, they acclimated to American life at the home of John Schoff and Jane Stoller-Schoff, one of dozens of families affiliated with a local church that agreed to serve as temporary American hosts to the Bantu refugees. The state department has a cooperative agreement with 10 organizations, such as World Relief and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, to resettle refugees like the Somali Bantu, Gauger says. It approved 52 cities around the United States for the Bantu resettlement, telling each location to plan for between 100 and 600 immigrants by the end of 2004.

As more Bantu reach U.S. shores this fall, the Mukomwa family is quickly settling in. Muridi has found employment as a cook; the children are learning English in a public school. Halima's mother has moved into the apartment building and Muridi's brother is on his way to Illinois. Their story represents several reasons why the Somali Bantu are both adapting well to American life and have been embraced by U.S. communities. The Bantu have a strong work ethic and were eager to find jobs immediately upon arrival. That's not always the case with refugee groups, who may be used to living in a welfare state, Gauger says. The United States also tried to create a strong support network for the Bantu by strategically placing extended families together in the same city, she adds.

The agencies assisting with placement of the Bantu report similar success stories. “We were predicting when they came to the United States that all of these new things would be overwhelming, but the agencies in Kenya have done a good job of preparing the Somali Bantu, so it's not as difficult as we anticipated,” says Gary Fairchild, processing manager for World Relief, a Baltimore, Maryland-based organization that expected to aid in the resettlement of 400 refugees by this fall. “They're very willing to work and learn English. They have a very good attitude.”

As the Somali Bantu begin life in the United States, McGill has been presenting and publishing her photo documentary of their journey. Christianity Today, a monthly magazine, has published a sampling of her 200 rolls of film, as well as an essay by McGill on the project. The photographer, who also recorded interviews and songs during her trip to Africa, has integrated her images with audio clips in a multimedia slideshow that served as her master's thesis, which she presented to the university in June.

McGill, who joined Gardner-Webb University as a photojournalist in residence this fall, is interested in continuing to explore African issues in her work. The intimate nature of the Somali Bantu shoot will long leave a personal impression on the photographer, who returned to the Chicago area this summer to check in with the Mukomwa family. She feels privileged to have spent time with people who were grateful to come to America and carve out a new life here.

“It's a reminder that while really bad things may happen in the world, people are making it out of those situations,” she says. “People really like getting another shot at life — and it's rewarding to watch up close.”

(Back to top)