How one martial arts club is helping young refugees in South Sudan

Taken from the summer 2024 issue of Dazed. You can buy a copy of our latest issue here.

One stiflingly hot spring day, a 23-year-old Sudanese refugee, Esmail, sits down to tell me about his life in Doro camp, South Sudan. He’s a big name in Doro: Esmail is one of the founders of the martial arts programme, which is the bedrock of activities for more than 250 young residents of the camp. “I began the programme back home; a schoolmate and I wanted to learn how to defend ourselves when the fighting broke out,” he explains.

The call to self-defence is not hypothetical. Since April 15, 2023, when fighting erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, Sudan has become engulfed in what could be described as ‘total war’, conducted with no regard to civilian welfare. Fighting has displaced 8.6 million people from their homes; thousands have been killed in ethnic violence and shelling; and rape as a weapon of war has become rife. As armed forces resort to looting humanitarian aid and foodstuffs, Sudan has acquired another moniker: ‘the world’s largest hunger crisis’. The latest data indicates that famine is not a matter of if but when: in the worst-case scenario, 40 per cent of Sudan’s inhabitants could face famine this year.

Amid this death and destruction, Sudanese civilians flee to neighbouring countries. In a bitter twist of fate, they are often joined by those whom humanitarian actors term ‘returnees’ – refugees who sought refuge in Sudan, once a centre of trade in east Africa, who are now fleeing the fire for the frying pan.

Doro camp, in north-east South Sudan, is just one such example.

The route to Doro is a well-trodden path. This informal settlement of refugees shares a birthday with the Republic of South Sudan itself, which officially gained independence from Sudan in December 2011 after years of conflict: the celebrations of South Sudanese autonomy came hand in hand with continued fighting over the post-secession plans, which displaced around 100,000 people to Doro. Yet, 13 years of humanitarian governance hasn’t given the camp any sense of permanence.

Located just 14 miles from the border with Sudan, Doro still looks like a transitional centre rather than what has become a de facto home to thousands of displaced Sudanese and South Sudanese people. Sandbags and corrugated iron sheeting (‘CGIs’, in humanitarian talk) litter the camp, covered by plastic sheeting to reinforce their failing structures. Inhabitants of the camp all have different stories but share in the lack of options available to them: many have been there since 2011, and are likely to remain for years to come.

Esmail arrived in Doro in 2012, after fleeing fighting in his hometown of Kurmuk in the southeast of Sudan. He’s 23, and sharp, in both senses of the word. When we speak, he’s wearing a vest with a flag of the USA across the chest, two beaded chains that sit plush on his neck, and a ring in the shape of a skull. He’s quick to give me his ideas about the issues in the camp and what young people need.

Esmail’s vision for the youth of Doro falls somewhere between a call for respect for oneself and one’s community, and the essential need to defend oneself: his words wouldn’t seem out of place in a Huey Newton speech. He emanates authority; he’s come with some other young residents in the camp, who wait for him to take a seat before they do.

“There are no differences between the boys and the girls – only newcomers and not newcomers” – Esmail, programme leader

Esmail has brought one of the participants in the programme with him, a 20-year-old girl called Sandy. She’s wearing a light pink hair wrapper and earrings in the shape of a cross. While Esmail speaks, she looks down at her hands, shy or perhaps deferring to his authority. But when she and Esmail give me a demo, her countenance changes. They begin with their hands at their sides, then join their palms above their heads before erupting into movement I can barely describe, settling into a warrior-like position with a balled fist stretched out front: a jewel in one of Esmail’s rings, shaped like a tiger, glints. They then return with their hands by their sides, and bow.

“I feel much stronger and happier since I’ve started the programme,” says Sandy, “especially when I’m teaching the younger girls.” It’s a remarkable outcome: the material conditions in Doro are harsh, and prospects for the future even more so. The term ‘shit life syndrome’, used to describe poor mental health outcomes for Americans and Brits living through years of austerity, doesn’t begin to describe the reality of such camps. I’m reminded of Dr Samah Jabr, chair of the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s mental health unit, who coined the term ‘chronic traumatic stress disorder’ when talking about Palestinians’ mental health: there’s no stability, no ‘post’-trauma, in which harm can be worked through. Academics call this aspect of the refugee experience ‘liminality’; others would likely describe it as limbo.

Esmail, intuitively, seems to have hit on a solution that helps his counterparts identify themselves by their strengths – in the face of the very real risk of danger – rather than their vulnerability profile. Life in camps is marked by infantilisation. Humanitarian actors decide what food to distribute, what clothes to provide, which vocations they should train refugees on. Though humanitarians are – at least theoretically – engaged in an act of benevolence, they are also accountable to no one. In humanitarian governance, there are no citizens who can vote out the governing actor or protest its actions. There are only beneficiaries, conceived of as passive recipients rather than contributing to those around them.

Esmail’s martial arts programme acts as an antidote. The principles of martial arts, as Esmail explains to me, centre around self-control, flexibility, and inner tranquillity: I gather that he is referring to the exercises and movements themselves, although they seem to have some metaphorical bearing on the preconditions for sanity in the camp. Esmail begins his sessions with breathing exercises and shows me exercises for mobility, in addition to drills which have the dual purpose of building force and teaching participants to control their strength. In his sessions, there seems to be no differentiation between boys and girls. “The girls are shy at the beginning but then become stronger as they are no longer newcomers,” he says. “There are no differences between the boys and the girls – only between newcomers and not newcomers.”

The political radical and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon would likely identify these sessions as a form of ‘collective catharsis’, which he described as an “outlet through which the forces accumulated in the forms of aggression can be released”. Fanon himself rejected calls for pacifism on the basis that an aversion to violence only serves the perpetrator. There is something of the same logic in Esmail’s programme: the uncontrolled and unjustifiable violence that the youth have been subjected to is channelled into targeted and disciplined power. It’s a refreshing change amid some of the idealistic buzzwords that humanitarians promote – ‘community stabilisation’, ‘peace building’ – which have little bearing on the harsh and often violent reality these young people can expect to confront.

With each cohort that Esmail trains, new generations of teachers are born: an echo of what Fanon termed ‘collective psychology’ emerges as satisfaction becomes defined by the community’s health. Sandy tells me that her dream is to take her new skills back home to Sudan. As for Esmail, his dreams are perhaps more localised: he wants to take his martial arts programme out of the camp and into the surrounding areas. “And also, I really like volleyball,” he says. “I’ve learned these movements, so why not another?”