Angry young men in camps: gender, age and class relations among Burundian refugees in Tanzania

The paper is based on more than a year’s fieldwork in Lukole Refugee Camp in North
Western Tanzania. At the time of fieldwork, 1997-98, around 100,000 Burundian
Hutu refugees lived in Lukole. They had fled Burundi since 1993 and had through
very varied trajectories ended up in Lukole, where they have limited mobility and
limited possibilities of activity. They all depend on the rations from UNHCR.2 It is the
intention of this paper to explore what happens to a community and its entrenched
social hierarchies, norms and ideologies when it is so abruptly transferred and put into
such an alien setting.