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Halima Husseini Click here for Photo Essay: Flight to Freedom Click here for Audio Clips

Shortly after dawn, before the scorching sun rises high enough to stop most travelers in their tracks, Muridi Mukomwa holds his toddler as he trudges across the African plains. His wife, Halima Husseini, carries their youngest child on her back. Friends and relatives take turns lugging the family's duffle bag that contains all of their possessions. Their entire village walks with them to a nearby dirt airstrip to say good-bye. Perhaps they will be reunited in America, they comfort one another. "Inshallah" (God willing), is the repeated reply.

Muridi, Halima, and their two children are four of the 15,000 Somali Bantu that the U.S. State Department granted group asylum to in 1999. The Somali Bantu represent the largest group resettlement of African refugees in American history. They also are one of most ancient and underdeveloped tribes to enter America en masse since the Vietnam War era. This year, about 1,200 Somali Bantu are coming to America each month. All along the way, Christians are helping these refugees (mostly Muslims), from giving shelter and health care in a refugee camp, to helping them navigate airport escalators, to learning to cook American-style with pots and pans on an electric stove.

The Somali Bantu story begins in the 18th century, when they were sent to Somalia on the Horn of Africa to become slave farmers for ruling Muslim clans. Over the generations, a large number of Bantu slaves converted to Islam, which secured their freedom since the Qur'an forbids Muslims from owning other Muslims. But the slave label continued to dog the Somali Bantu. Those who were free were segregated deep in Somalia's southern interior, living in primitive huts as they worked their fields. The few who had access to education were denied skilled jobs. Even by African standards, they were destitute. Some Africans, especially ethnic Somalis, despised them.

In 1991, Somali clan warfare broke out and with it, the first stages of anarchy. Bandits robbed Muridi's family of sesame, corn, and mangos. "When the civil war broke out, everyone was hungry," Muridi says. Several hundred thousand Somali villagers fled. Muridi and his father once walked 60 miles foraging for food; the only thing they found to eat was raw sugar cane. But it was enough for their family to survive.

In the 1990s, Somalia slipped into brutal lawlessness as dramatized in journalist Mark Bowden's nonfiction bestseller, Black Hawk Down. Since that time, there has been no central government in Somalia. Where there was once a nation-state, there are now only warlords who break peace agreements as often as the tide rolls out to the Indian Ocean.

When the United States and United Nations troops left Somalia, Muridi's life took a drastic turn for the worse. He explains, "Everyone took his gun. And us? We don't have a gun." Nor did they have protection from any of the powerful clans. They were easy prey for further violence.

One day, Muridi was away from home on an errand when a Somali warlord's militia swept through the Bantu village burning homes, raping, and killing along the way. Muridi fled and made it to safety, but he never saw his parents again. He was 16 years old, and all that was familiar had been stripped away.

Following hundreds of thousands of Somali Bantu and others who flowed into Kenya like migrating herds, Muridi reunited with a brother and an uncle in the squalor of the Dadaab refugee camp.

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July 2004, Vol. 48, No. 7