Radio Dadaab is a 25 minute documentary about a young journalist in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, home to 200,000 Somalis. She is reporting on drought and climate change and migration, and it’s some of the best climate justice reportage that I’ve seen in a while.
Here’s the video, with some further thoughts below.
Radio Dadaab is beautifully shot, and gives us a real insight into life in an extraordinary and tragic place. It makes a compelling case: here are farmers showing us how hard it is to grow anything. We see the dead livestock that they were depending on. We could debate the exact role of climate change in East African droughts, which we all know have happened before. But look at the landscape of Dadaab in the film. What does the prospect of increased heat mean in a place like this?
“Are we safe?” asks a teacher in the film as he explains climate change to a classroom of students. “We are not safe at all.” More heat in a place that is already hot and dry is manifestly dangerous in a way that it isn’t in a temperate country like mine. The film makes this very clear, showing how places such as Dadaab find themselves on the front line of a climate crisis they did nothing to create.
All of this is communicated through Fardowsa Serat as she makes her radio programme. There are no white celebrity interlocutors, no foreign experts. It’s a good example of letting people tell their own story, and nice work from the Environmental Justice Foundation.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the people in the film are the ones right wing populists are apparently terrified of – these ordinary people trying to make a life for themselves in a desert prison camp. Those same populists who demonise refugees are also fighting tooth and nail against action on climate change, making the whole situation worse.
“They can be like my wings,” says Serat of her work at the radio station, which gives her a voice. “They can spread the message with me.” At the time of writing the video has been watched 448 times – so I wonder if we can give further wings to it and pass it around.
The Earthbound Report 