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Assignment: America's Somali Bantu

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18/06/2009

America's Somali Bantu

BBC World Service - Assignment, America's Somali Bantu

A report on life for a community of Somali Bantu refugees who have settled in Boise, Idaho

Tim Mansel reports from Boise in the United States on a community of Somali Bantu refugees who have settled there and made a new life for themselves.

Hundreds of thousands of people have fled from Somalia since civil war broke out there in the early 1990s. 
Many of them go to refugee camps in Kenya, others to Tanzania - and many have spent more than 15 years living in those camps. But one group has been more fortunate than others - the Somali Bantu, whose ancestors were taken to Somalia as slaves from southern Africa in the 19th Century. 
In 2001 the Somali Bantu were recognised as an especially vulnerable group by the United States and two years later 12,000 of them were airlifted out of the camps and flown to new, permanent homes in the United States. Assignment's Tim Mansel visits one group of them in the western city of Boise in Idaho.

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