*A few weeks ago Steven & I went to eat at our favorite burger place, Chester's. While we were waiting there was a guy busing tables. He looked African & had an accent so I asked him where he was from. He is from Somalia. I asked him if he liked the US and he said, "Ya, but i want to go home. I want to see my family." He told me that he was not able to go back because work would not let him. I did not probe much further but it got me thinking.

I told Steven what he had told me & he was kinda shocked that the young man wanted to go back home. Why would someone want to return to such a war-torn & poverty-stricken country?

But that is his home. He has friends and family back home...and he had not seen his in over 4 years.

I figured he was a refugee & I knew that there were others in San Antonio because some of the schools I substitute teach in have refugee kids from Africa. So, I looked up Somalia Refugees and that is how I found out about the Somalia Bantu refugees that are in SA. Here is what I found out:

For the past 200 years, the Somali Bantu people have been treated as second-class citizens, denied access to education and land. Their ancestors were from Malawi, Tanzania, and Mozambique, and were captured and sold as slaves into Somalia.

The Bantu were very vulnerable for several reasons:

They did not belong to any of the dominant clans in Somalia.
They lived and worked in the most productive agricultural regions of Somalia and had large amounts of food stored. As the clans fought each other, they often raided the Bantu villages for food and to gain control of these very productive regions.
The Bantu are of a different ethnicity and appearance than the dominant clan Somalis, and therefore were unable to “blend in” to any crowd. They were often the targets of violence, including beatings, rapes and murder.

Contrary to what many Americans may think, Bantu refugees did not “dream of coming to America.” Instead they wanted to return to the countries of their ancestors: Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi.

In 1999, the U.S. government agreed to accept 12,000 Somali Bantu refugees, the largest group of African refugees ever identified for political resettlement in U.S. history. During the 1990s, tens of thousands of Somali Bantu farmers fled from their villages to refugee camps in Kenya. After failed attempts at resettlement in east Africa, all parties (the refugees, camp officials, the host government, and refugee activists) agreed that these refugees could not be required to return to Somalia, and a group of 12,000 were granted P2 (persecuted minority) status, which afforded them preferential status for resettlement.

In 2004, Somali Bantus from this group began arriving for permanent resettlement in the U.S.

The refugees settled in over 50 cities in 38 states, including San Antonio.