Black Refugees in Jordan
Investigating the experiences of black refugees throughout the Arab world
If you were to see Ibrahim Edris walk through the streets of Amman without having known him, you might think that he’s a local celebrity from the sheer number of random passersby he greets. Edris manages to find a familiar face on every block; an idling shopkeeper here, an old friend amidst the fruit stalls there, a small congregation of men chatting on the curb. His joy for these fleeting encounters never runs out. Edris’s face lights up every time he runs into someone new, smiling as he extends a hand to them alongside a warm “as-salamu alaykum, habibi,” which roughly translates to “peace be upon you, my friend.”
Though I’d only known him for less than a month, he treated me as if he’d known me for years. The first time we’d met, Edris had eagerly shown me Amman’s hidden labyrinth of Sudanese cafes and shops, which I had no idea even existed. Visiting them gave me the most cultural whiplash I’d felt since I’d first arrived in the Middle East — in the best way possible. One second, we were navigating a sea of Jordanians circulating through the bustling city center, and the next it felt as though we had been whisked to a small hole-in-the-wall in Darfur or Khartoum.
Just past the doorway of one shop, a huddle of domino players took turns placing pieces, then promptly yelling and slapping their palms on the table. Puffs of cigarette smoke wafted above them. A pair sitting in the opposite corner had their eyes glued to a flatscreen TV as they played FIFA, somehow unfazed by the commotion behind them. We whizzed from one shop to the next — first a barbershop, then a clothing store, then a small barbecue restaurant and lounge, and at each stop Edris introduced me to four or five of his friends.
“Welcome to Jordan,” one of Edris’s friends had said to me wryly.
It’s a classic phrase that every foreigner hears from locals when they visit, and although I would consider Edris’s friends locals, I’m not sure that they would agree. Although they’ve spent years in Amman, many of them consider Jordan just a temporary stop on their paths to somewhere better, a waypoint between war-torn Sudan and the vague promise of peace and stability abroad. Twelve years ago, Edris fled the conflict in Sudan, leaving his family behind and starting a new life in Jordan as a refugee without having any idea of what would come next. Nothing was the same: not the food, not the people, not even the dialect of Arabic. When I asked Edris what he missed the most about his home in Darfur, his answer was simple: everything.
Edris works at a hotel nine hours out of the day, and after his shifts, he might spend the evening improving his English at a local conversation class. Despite only learning the language for a few years, he speaks with the fluency of someone who’s been studying it for twice as long. There’s rarely a minute when he isn’t practicing. While we talked in front of the ancient Roman Theater downtown, Edris showed me hundreds of text messages he’s exchanged with his language partners over WhatsApp, filled with jokes and questions about each other’s plans for the day. He’s an avid watcher of political commentators like Roland S. Martin on YouTube, and his playlists are filled mostly with American music, with Halsey and Kanye West among his personal favorites.
“You know Kanye?” Edris said, grinning as I nodded. “He’s a crazy guy.”
I laughed. Our conversation wandered, skipping from his music taste to his studies at university to the businesses that he wants to start with a friend in Seattle. The common thread was that each represented a step towards leaving Jordan, each preparing him for a life outside of a country where decent opportunities and equality are almost a fantasy for black refugees. Living as a black refugee in Amman is a constant struggle for acceptance. To many Jordanians, Edris is not seen as the local who everybody knows, or a bright student with a passion for languages, or a creative whose mind is brimming with business ideas. He is not referred to as Edris, or Ibrahim, or Dabouq, as his Sudanese friends call him. He is simply called abu sumrah — a derogatory term that some Arabs use to address black people.
“Why do they say this?” Edris said. “I have a name.”
Abu sumrah stems from the Arabic word asmar, which means brown or tan. When it’s used to label black people, it masks their individuality, robbing people like Edris of one of the few things they retained from their home countries: their identities. The discrimination that black people face in Jordan takes endless forms, from name-calling in the streets to racist language in the products that they buy. One of the most appalling examples is the “Ras al-’Abed” snack: a round biscuit topped with whipped cream and dipped in chocolate that originated in Europe. “Ras al-’Abed” literally translates to “the slave head”, and this name still lingers colloquially across the Arab world despite some manufacturers renaming it.
The “Ras al’-Abed” name is a poignant symbol of how some Jordanians view black refugees, as nothing more than people to be used and exploited for personal gain. Edris told me about a local business owner who had promised him $1,500 for three months of work, but when the three months were up, the owner didn’t uphold their end of the deal. Edris went to the police for help, but to no avail; he was only told that they weren’t able to find the owner.
This was far from a one-off dispute. Khamis, a Sudanese refugee living in Amman, told us just how common this issue is. As we sat underneath a spectacular fireworks show that lit the night sky ablaze on Jordan’s Independence Day, Khamis described how many black refugees in the country are still not free, as they are bound under what is effectively modern slavery. They are not legally permitted to work, and as a result, many of them agree to under-the-table jobs to earn a living. If their employer abuses them or unfairly withholds their salary, there’s almost nothing they can do. Most won’t even bother going to the police for fear of being deported.
In many cases, Khamis said, black refugees aren’t aware of how bad the work conditions are for them in Jordan. In several cities just north of Jordan’s capital, women from countries like Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana are commonly employed as housemaids. The companies that funnel them to Jordan commonly lie to them about the details of their jobs, exaggerating their salary and understating the amount of hard labor that their job entails. If workers run away, Khamis said, they can even be jailed and deported.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of stories of enslaved Africans escaping from plantations in the American Deep South, running from bondage or death at the hands of their captors. It seems unbelievable that conditions not too different can still exist today. The reason why they do is that the Jordanian government doesn’t officially recognize most refugees, which exempts the country from having to provide refugee rights guaranteed under international law, such as protection from discrimination and access to education for children.
What’s more, refugees from different countries aren’t even on equal footing with each other. After thousands of civilians fled Syria in 2011, aid agencies in Jordan reallocated the bulk of their funding towards the rapidly growing Syrian population. Syrians were given priority in many Western resettlement programs, which meant longer wait times and fewer opportunities for non-Syrian refugees. These included refugees from Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea — many of whom arrived in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Syrians who remained in Jordan enjoyed legal protections that African refugees, for example, were not given.
The unfortunate byproduct of the Syrian Revolution was that not only were millions of Syrians displaced, but also that refugees in neighboring countries began to lose more of their rights and support systems. Black refugees in particular began to fade into the background, slowly being forgotten one by one.
“[There is] no equality [in] this country,” Edris said, after he told me about a Sudanese university student he’d known who had been killed by Jordanians. “It was swept under the table. The government [was] silent.”
By 2015, the situation in Jordan had worsened to the point where the government had started deporting black refugees en masse. On December 6th, 2015, dozens of Sudanese refugees in Jordan staged a peaceful protest in front of the UNHCR headquarters in Amman, pleading for better conditions and resettlement. Around 4:00 AM, police arrived, attacked the protesters, rounded them up, and then started forcing them into buses.
Khamis was only thirteen years old at the time. His older sister, curious and concerned, decided to take him to see what was going on.
“We saw people, a lot of them were women, being forced onto buses, zip-tied like criminals,” Khamis said. “There was this man holding his pregnant wife’s hand. They were both begging to be taken to the hospital because she was in pain.”
Authorities allowed the couple to leave, but over eight hundred others were deported to Sudan just days later, despite international criticism. Some refugees later said that the Jordanian security forces promised that they would resettle them. Instead, they took them to the airport and flew them back to the site of a vicious, bloody war against their will.
According to a report by the ACHRS (Amman Center for Human Rights Studies), this mass deportation violated international law. The “Non-Refoulement Principle”, which Jordan accepted in 1998, is a legal concept stating that countries cannot send refugees back to a place where they could be in mortal danger because of their race, religion, politics, and so forth.
The 2015 mass Sudanese deportation is a reminder that the existence of protections in international law for refugees doesn’t always guarantee their safety. Some refugees have taken it into their own hands to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. Among them is the founder of a non-profit organization called Sawiyan, which offers dialogue sessions, education training, and quantitative research on issues that the black refugee community faces. The founder’s name was omitted to protect his identity. Alongside 35 other non-profit organizations, Sawiyan pressured the Jordanian government to stop neglecting its black refugees through protests and talks with the UNHCR, only to face apathy at best and resistance at worst.
“The UNHCR turned their backs on us,” Sawiyan’s founder said. “We are afraid, but we can’t keep silent.”
Although new policies concerning black refugees are regularly passed in Jordan, not much has tangibly improved for them. With each year bringing new regulations and crackdowns, it seems that uncertainty is the only constant in the lives of many black refugees. For example, Sawiyan’s founder had originally planned to move to the U.S., but the recent travel bans imposed by the Trump administration have made this impossible.
For him, Khamis, and Edris, the only solution to the inequality and oppression they feel in Jordan is to leave. The best that they can do in the meantime is to carve out pockets for others like them to feel safe and welcomed, whether in a conversation class hosted in Sawiyan’s office or at a dominoes table in the Sudanese cafes downtown.
“This is a place where we can feel comfortable,” Edris had said while we stood in one of the cafes.
I felt what he was talking about. Even though I’m not a refugee myself, there was something uniquely calming about being in a space where blackness is not just accepted, but the norm. For Edris, the cafes are where he can go to just be “Edris” or “Ibrahim”, not abu sumrah, and a place where he’s known for his warm spirit and easy charm, not simply for the color of his skin.
As one of only a few thousand black refugees in Jordan, Edris knows too well what it means to be ostracized and degraded because of his African heritage. His personal philosophy on race could not be more different. When Edris meets someone new, no matter where they come from or what they look like, his approach is the same: he just gives a smile, a handshake, and a “salamu alaykum, habibi.”
View our sources for this piece here.