People of Dzaleka and its wider community
Gabriel Ndayishimiye
Writer who grew up as a refugee in Dzaleka after fleeing the 1994 Rwandan genocide, author of the memoir Run Elvin! and founder of the refugee-focused publisher LivenBooks.
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Early life
Gabriel Ndayishimiye fled his home during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and grew up as a refugee in Dzaleka. He has described his path as a journey “of healing and self-discovery, from a refugee camp in Malawi to a new life halfway around the world.”
Writing and publishing
Ndayishimiye is the author of the memoir Run Elvin!, which draws on his childhood and youth in the camp. He founded LivenBooks, a publisher he set up to reach the growing number of refugee and immigrant writers documenting displacement and its histories.
Later work
Reporting from 2021 and 2022 placed Ndayishimiye in London and as a graduate student in immigration and settlement studies at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) in Canada, where he took part in a peer-mentoring programme for displaced scholars. He is one of several Dzaleka writers, alongside Oliver Twist and Njamba Koffi, who have published memoirs of camp life.
References
Sources
- 1Former Dzaleka Camp refugee Gabriel Ndayishimiye authors book
Malawi24, 21 February 2022
- 2Gabriel Ndayishimiye: From Dzaleka refugee camp to re-examining protection in Malawi
Dzaleka.com, September 2021
Related entries
Culture
Run Elvin!
Gabriel Ndayishimiye's memoir of childhood and youth in Dzaleka, written as a record of displacement and as a letter from a father to his son; revised print and ebook editions appeared between 2021 and 2025.
People
Oliver Twist
Rwandan-born storyteller who spent his childhood as a refugee in Malawi and later became an Australian stage performer and author, best known for the one-man play and memoir Jali.
People
Njamba Koffi
Congolese writer who grew up in Dzaleka and Mpaka camps, published the memoir Refuge-E at twenty through a UWC scholarship path, and went on to study and work in Canada.
Education
Education in Dzaleka
Public, private, community, and post-secondary education in Dzaleka, including the Malawi curriculum and long-running scholarship and digital-learning programmes.
Place
Dzaleka Refugee Camp
A long-established refugee settlement in Dowa District, Malawi, opened in 1994 and now home to a large, multilingual community from the Great Lakes region and the Horn of Africa.
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