Refugee
A Memoir
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Persecuted for his political activism, Emmanuel Mbolela left the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2002. His search for a new home would take six years.
In that time, Mbolela endured corrupt customs officials, duplicitous smugglers, Saharan ambushes, and untenable living conditions. Yet his account relates not only the storms of his long journey but also the periods of calm. Faced with privation, he finds comfort in a migrants’ hideout overseen by community leaders at once paternal and mercenary. When he finally reaches Morocco, he finds himself stranded for almost four years. And yet he perseveres in his search for the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—which always seem to have closed indefinitely just before Mbolela’s arrival in a given city—because it is there that a migrant might receive an asylum seeker’s official certificates.
It is an experience both private and collective. As Mbolela testifies, the horrors of migration fall hardest upon female migrants, but those same women also embody the fiercest resistance to the regime of violence that would deny them their humanity. While still countryless, Mbolela becomes an advocate for those around him, founding and heading up the Association of Congolese Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Morocco to fight for migrant rights. Since obtaining political asylum in the Netherlands in 2008, he has remained a committed activist.
Direct, uncompromising, and clear-eyed, in Refugee, Mbolela provides an overlooked perspective on a global crisis.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This sobering account of Mbolela's migration from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Morocco and eventually to the Netherlands connects the dots between neocolonial capitalism, African kleptocracy and wars, and the inhumane treatment of refugees at nearly every step of their arduous journeys. The son of a successful cattle breeder, Mbolela began his activism while at university in Mbuji-Mayi, in hopes of launching a political career. But when he ran afoul of the ruling powers, he found himself in exile. Traveling from Cameroon to Morocco, he was extorted, forced to sleep out in the open in a migrant settlement, and gaslit by organizations meant to protect refugees. He witnessed even worse atrocities befall the women in his company, and later leveraged his relative privilege to help others, for example using his legal status in the Netherlands to campaign for the rights of undocumented immigrants. Mbolela's matter-of-fact testimony follows the tradition of Rigoberta Menchú, and, rather than offering artistically rendered scenes to tug heartstrings, he depicts the full brunt of the repetitiveness of atrocity. But, as he writes, "it's also important to bear in mind how much energy it takes for people to keep on encouraging and sustaining one another, over and over again." His humility fuels this powerful account, and anyone concerned with the plight of refugees owes it to themselves to pick this up.
