Being a Refugee Wasn't a Choice

Publication

Being a Refugee Wasn’t a Choice was published by Writing EDEN in 2025. The paperback edition is 204 pages and carries ISBN 9789996085130. Its principal credited creators are Charles Lipanda Mahigwe, Ruth Takondwa, and Salvador Cap Bic; P. M. Quinns contributed editorial work and the foreword, and Burning Trinity is credited as illustrator.

The anthology developed through African Youth Artistic Poetry (AYAP), a collective based in Dzaleka. Contemporary publication material describes more than fifty contributors from Africa and beyond, including young writers and people writing from refugee experience.

Themes and form

The collection uses poetry as testimony and political expression. Its subjects include forced displacement, war, identity, gender, education, belonging, colonial legacies, and the daily constraints of camp life. Dzaleka appears both as a specific place and as part of a wider account of displacement across the continent.

The volume includes several poetic forms and performance traditions associated with AYAP’s spoken-word practice. This places the book within Dzaleka’s public arts record as well as within contemporary refugee writing.

Place in Dzaleka’s cultural record

The anthology preserves named creative work that had otherwise circulated through workshops, performances, festivals, and online magazines. Some of its writers also appear in the documentary We Name Ourselves, which follows Dzaleka poets preparing for Tumaini Festival.

Bibliographic sources occasionally shorten the title to Being Refugee Wasn’t a Choice. This entry uses the wording printed on the published cover and ISBN record.