PSU Magazine Fall 2003

Eno was in Vermont, a man and his son approached him. "We know you," the father said. "You talked to us in Kenya last year. And now we are here-in the United States!" It was at that moment that the Bantu resettlement project Eno is coor– dinating with fellow Portland State fac– ulty member Dan Van Lehman became very, very real. "Imagine you're in Kenya," he says, "talking to this group of boys. You tell them that education is so important, and that if they come to the United States they can have education and a chance for a good life. But you never know if they hear you. Then one day, here is one of those boys, right in front or you." When Eno's brother, a freelance journalist, told him he should look up Dan Van Lehman at Portland State University, Eno never dreamed that-a year and a half later-he would be working with Van Lehman on a three– year project to assist in the relocation of 12,000 Somali Bantu people to the United States. Since mid-spring, Van Lehman and Eno, who has recently joined Van Lehman as a Hatfield School of Gov– ernment faculty member, have been visiting cities that are hosting the first wave of Bantu refugee resettlement: cities like Burlington, Grand Rapids, Tampa, Chicago. Their mission: To provide cultural orientation training at Bantu resettlement sites. The project is funded through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement, for a three– year period. It is perhaps not so surprising that the paths of Dan Van Lehman and Omar Eno would cross. Eno was born in Somalia, and he was-he says-one of the less than one percent of Bantu there who go on to higher education. He did Ph.D. work at York University, Toronto, before joining the Portland State University faculty. Van Lehman, who originally went to Africa with the Peace Corps, worked with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees from 1992 to 1994 and again in 1997, and did graduate work at Cornell on the Bantu. Both have a commitment to the resettlement of Somali Bantu, a group that has been enslaved, cultur– ally and economically discriminated against, persecuted, and driven from its homelands over the course of 200 years. T he marginalization of the Bantu people originates with 18th-century slave trade in Tanzania, the ancestral home for a majority of Somali Bantu. Although the market destination of slave traders was often Asia, some of the abducted people were sold into African slavery. Early 19th-century drought and famine in Tanzania also drove groups of Bantu north to Soma– lia to seek work, where-the Bantu claim-their ancestors were forced into slavery. But by the mid-19th century, a por– tion of Somalia became a haven from slavery. The southern, lushly forested lands of the lower Juba River valley were sparsely populated, and runaways (and later, other emancipated slaves) settled here, farming some of the most fertile land in Africa The next 150 years would see Somalia change from an Arab slave-trading dominion to an Italian colony to a British protectorate to an independent state suffering through civil war. Although slavery was outlawed dur– ing the Italian occupation, the Bantus continued to carry the stigma of slave ancestry, which also included an inter– nal class stratification. Van Lehman says there are two distinct groups of Bantu people in Somalia: those descending from original indigenous people, and those who came as slaves. The second group are called "Gosha. " Since the Gosha, which is not considered an impolite term, have not intermarried with the traditionally