Photos document exile of millions of Somalians

COLUMBUS (AP) — A photographic exhibit captures one of the largest mass movements of people in recent history in images ranging from women carrying sacks of grain in Africa to men pushing shopping carts in California.

“Stories of the Somali Diaspora” starts in refugee camps in Kenya and moves to cities across the United States, including Columbus, Portland, Maine, and Minneapolis, home of the nation’s largest population of Somali refugees.

The exhibit by Abdi Roble, an Ohio-based photographer who left Somalia in 1989, also uses some of the pictures to tell the story of a single family.

Abdisalam and his wife, Ijabo, walked for 15 days from their home near the town of Sakow in the Jubba River Valley in southern Somalia to a camp in Dadaab, Kenya. Later they relocated to Anaheim, Calif., and eventually to Portland.

Roble shows the family in a stick hut in Kenya, on their first day in America, Ijabo undergoing an ultrasound during a pregnancy and Abdisalam filling out a job application.

Roble said he was driven to capture the experience of a people ripped from their country with virtually no belongings. It was important to document the refugees’ journey before memories fade and stories are lost.

The exhibit closes today at the Columbus Museum of Art, moves to the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis next year and to the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, in 2009.

The forced exile of hundreds of thousands of Somalis overseas dates to the country’s disintegration in the early 1990s as warlords battled for supremacy.

The crisis continues today as new fighting is displacing huge numbers of civilians. The United Nations refugee agency said Tuesday that 1 million Somalis have been displaced within the country by the most recent violence.