Oru refugee camp from its entrance gate, with the former UNHCR office building in the front and with the houses of the remaining camp inhabitants (occupants) in the background.
Nevertheless, when I arrive at Oru on a hot early afternoon, I am greeted by a group of women who are sitting near the entrance and chatting with each other under the shade of a tree. Soon, a group of male Liberians comes over, and we start talking about them still being in the camp, even though the international and Nigerian support to its inhabitants has been suspended.
Oru is an occupied space, appropriated by former camp inhabitants themselves, those who have not returned to Liberia yet and through their occupation try to gain access to better means for their repatriation. The people I am talking to, are all from Liberia – about 800 of them are still on the camp site. They demand support from UNHCR for their repatriation, claiming that promises have been made which have not been kept, such as financial support and providing means for a reintegration into the Liberian society.
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Samuel Morgen, who calls himself Shadow (as a reference to his arrival at Buduburam at a young age, only with his own shadow accompanying him), is a now 29-year old Liberian refugee, who came to Ghana in March 2002, after having fled the Liberian civil wars. He was able to finish High School at the Camp, but didn’t find any occupation at Buduburam and reflects upon this time as “doing nothing on the camp was really bad”. So he decided “to go for music, writing songs and singing for other people for money or food”.
He had the chance to go to Ghana’s capital Accra, where a friend of his had a recording studio, where he worked on his first album “My Time to Shine”, followed by his second album “Peace must be real”. Samuel Morgen has been collecting money from international donors in order to establish a music studio in Buduburam, which is now used not only to record and produce songs but is known to be a meeting place mostly for young people from the camp. “People in Liberia have said, that the youth is useless. I want to prove them wrong after 17 years of war. The youth is the future. This is the reason why I organize a lot for the youth community at Buduburam, invite them here and help them to make music and educate them about Liberia–
especially those, who were not born in Liberia or grew up here in Ghana.”
Samuel Morgen in his recording studio at Bububuram refugee settlement and his studio from outside, photographed from one of the main streets at Buduburam.
Apart from hosting people at his recording studio, which is located on one of the main streets leaving the central square of Buduburam, creating an open and welcoming space even though it is small (the actual recording room is about 3sqaure meters), Samuel Morgan is promoting events on the
Buduburam camp site, for example for Liberia’s national day, when he and a large group of younger camp inhabitants perform music and organize
parties.
These observations stand in sharp contrast to the arrangement of the camp authorities’ facilities: Hospitals and schools are located in the centreof the camp, the camp management office as well as the UNCHR repatriation centrelie at the entrance of the gate, all of these facilities with excess to streets – still mud roads, but wide enough for cars to pass through. Most of these places, the UNHCR and camp management office for example, do not
have an inviting set-up but a waiting area outside the facility, from which people are called in to discuss their issues (such as repatriation,
neighborhood struggles and so forth). As restricted areas, these places enact the hierarchy of the organizational ordering of the settlement. However, as Shadow’s studio shows, the clear-cut spatial arrangements of ordering are not only shot through with the everyday routines of spatial practices needed to uphold them. They can also be turned into lived spaces of parties and music-making.
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Women of a woman empowerment school get together after a backing class; the topics under discussion here, are personal matters, as well matters of repatriation, the camp management, the dismissal of the welfare council, the role of the elders council, the issue of safety upon a possible return to Liberia, etc.
A scene just outside the camp border and the entrance area; shops and a market between the camp side and the street and the bus station. T-shirts and water is being sold on movable market stands.
An advertisement sign, advocating one of the many churches on the camp ground, promoting: “Prophecy, Healing and Financial Uplifting”.
A private house in the camp side, the woman (on the bed to the right, which is not visible in the photo) has just given birth to a child.
Thirdly, the above outlined vignettes, quotes, photos atmospheres and stories account for lived space – the representational. These can be of an obvious nature or hidden within the spaces of the camp. Obvious or hidden, but allowing for differentially enacted and lived lives and spaces to unfold, these lived spaces are made visible and tangible, these lives spaces are indeed embedded and produced nowhere else, but in the spaces analysed above and do yet differentiate themselves: The open door to a record studio then stands in sharp contrast to the perceived space of the closed door with people waiting for hours on streets, under tents and next to the cars of camp management or NGO staff members, hence turning a record studio into a meeting place for younger people and moving and questioning the
boundaries of private and public space within the camp; furthermore what is being produced in the studio finds its way out, to the central squares of the camp during festivals and concerts and even beyond through distribution via digital channels such as YouTube, connecting the practices of music
production to the production and (temporal) occupation of different spaces and the hinting at a development and reconfiguration of a political and social identity. A camp, once serving as a regular side of enclosure and inclusion, a
depoliticized space of humanitarian action, is turned through its occupation into a side of political resistance and outreach, political awareness and consciousness, turning the logics of the space around, by making it political, while leaving out any humanitarian connotation or practice. (Small) symbols and signs of the lived can be found all over camp sides: One of the small stores on the border of the camp, open to the street and the bus station, approachable by Ghanaians and bypasses and camp inhabitants alike, is hence transcending the borders of the camp, not only opening up for a different usage of space, but also hinting at and self-advocating a different understanding of refugees beyond a perception as victims and helpless masses, referring to a potentially entrepreneurial self. Both advertisements we have come across, the one for dating as well as for religious practices, fall out of the ordering and control of camp administrations and not conveying to the rules and organization of the camp, also displayed in different aesthetics (colourful and very much advertising, as well as plain black and white, born, as it seems, out of a necessity), again, just like a market stand, they show a more complex reality of the everyday of camp inhabitants and yet go beyond a potential simplification of these lived spaces as being purely liberated from homogeneous renderings: Why, for example, may we ask, does the dating advertisement specifically refer to afro-dating as the exotic, aiming at European man? The home in which a woman is giving birth to a child does similarly create a space in which the mere presence of new-born life and its existence disrupts the logic of the homogenisation of space, we have
encountered before and challenging questions of identity, country of origin and repatriation. The (different) use of (conceived) spaces of woman
empowerment schools turns them into sites of political discussion and providing a space, which constitutes its importance beyond backing, knitting or cooking classes. These examples and vignettes portray temporary
depictions, organization and productions of lived spaces. As different or heterogeneous these examples may be (and as different these
heterogeneities display themselves regarding a discussion of the possibilities of politics, as we will see), they are unified through their character of creating an otherness within and against dominant representations of space.