By: Ziba Balkhi
The suburb of Shirabad on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif city feels like a storm has just passed through. There’s dust rising from the ground in the narrow alleys and garbage is piled and strewn on in the street corners.
Dozens of children are playing in the dust of the Mazar-e-Sharif suburb. With dusty faces and blackened hands and feet, they seem oblivious to the dirt, immersed in their imaginative worlds. They are the children of the roughly 200 families of the Jogi tribe who live in Shirabad. The average family here has around seven children.
A boy with roughed up hair and unwashed clothes steps forward to show his home. It’s typical of the suburb. A small mud dwelling directly connected to the street. There’s no designated gate or fence to demarcate a space outside of the dwelling for the family to call their own.
Jogis (also known as Lolis) are an underprivileged minority tribe in Afghanistan who are not recognised as citizens. They tend to live on the outskirts of the cities and often lack the most basic life facilities. The Jogi families in Shirabad are no different – they live in seemingly absolute deprivation.
Speaking to families in the area, one of the biggest problems they face is the exclusion of Jogi children from school. Because they are not recognised as citizens, they are refused access to schools. The children never learn to read or write, leaving them with few options when it comes to earning an income. It’s an endless, brutal cycle of poverty and illiteracy.
Elders from the tribe have approached schools in the area but say that the refusal to educate the Jogi children is widespread.
When Rukhshana Media’s reporter asked the children whether they go to school, some loudly reply “No!” But others do not even know what the word means.
The children are deprived of the basic right of education as a basic right for the simple “reason” that they are Jogi. It’s discrimination without reason.
Burhan, 16, says he has many dreams. But his biggest wish is to be able to learn and study. He has not attended a single day of school in his life. He says if were allowed to go to school, he would like to be a doctor.
“Everyone wants to study. I wanted to become a doctor in the future and treat sick people,” Burhan says. “They (authorities) say, You are a nomad. One day you are here, and the next day you are not. You can’t be enrolled in a school.”
Like Burhan, the Jogi children who know what school is say attending school is their biggest wish. Some of them understand it’s a way towards ending the poverty they have grown up with.
Burhan says the elders and their tribe representatives have visited schools in Mazar-e-Sharif many times to try to let the schools accept them, but so far no school has opened its doors.
“Many of us and even our elders went to the schools to enroll us, but they always just give the excuse of, ‘You are nomads’,” Burhan says.
Burhan has no stable work. If he does work, it’s usually as a day labourer.
“I am unemployed but if I go to school and become something in the future, my work will be better and our economic situation will improve,” he says. “I am currently working as a daily labor, mainly unloading and packing the trucks.”
According to historical narratives from Jogi elders, they came to Afghanistan from Tajikistan more than 120 years ago. A group that considers themselves Tajiks in terms of descent and followers of Islam. They live mainly in the outskirts of Kabul, Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif, Sheberghan, and other areas where the men and women of the family earn their living mostly through begging, fortune-telling, and hard work as day labourers.
Burhan dreams of a day when they are treated as equals in the society and Jogi children are not deprived of education.
“They (the government) should pay attention to these things and these problems,” he said. “We all have the wish to study to build our future.”
While the Taliban has restrictions on girls attending school, the Jogis whether boy or girl are prevented from attending. Not a single Jogi child from this clan attends school in Mazar-e-Sharif and never has.
Hasina, 10, notices that other girls her age are attending school but she cannot because she belongs to the Jogi community. She is very interested in going to school and dreams of being a teacher herself.
“I would love to go to school and become a teacher in the future and teach girls,” she says.
Illiteracy is widespread among the Jogi tribe as generation after generation is never shown how to read or write. This flows on to their capacity to be employed and represented. No one from the Jogi tribe has ever been employed in the Afghan government.
Inside one of the homes in Shirabad, Zahra, 9, is gazing out the window. She gestures with a hand that she wants to speak.
“I see the girls my age wearing school uniforms to go to school. But when we tried to go to school, they wouldn’t accept us. It makes me sad,” she says.
Zahra admittedly has even seen inside a school herself, but she says she dreams of it, and when she does, she will become a doctor.
“I want to become a doctor in the future. But because there is no school, I cannot achieve my dreams,” she says.
Back outside in the Shirabad street, older children are often taking care of the younger children while their parents try to earn a living that day.
Ajmal, 11, says he also has never seen inside a school yet. But that hasn’t stopped his aspirations to teach.
“I want to become a teacher in the future and teach other children. This is my only wish,” he says.
Several Jogi parents and elders see the root of their ongoing problems as stemming from the lack of illiteracy and the total deprivation of education.
Habibullah, 28, is Hasina’s father. He is also illiterate. He works on the streets every day to support his family.
“For now, we go to market and doing heavy daily work. We do everything we can. We can’t work in the offices because we are not literate. We can’t even read and write,” he says.
Habibullah like his children had dreams of going to school. He says if he’d been able to do so, he’d probably have become a teacher.
“The people of Afghanistan do not recognize us as citizens. They know that we are Jogi people. We have many problems. I wanted to go to school, but I couldn’t,” he says.
He doesn’t want his daughter Hasina growing up like him. He insists that the Jogi children should be allowed to learn.
“Until when should we keep doing all the hard work and live and die in this (terrible) situation?” he asks.
Former president Ashraf Ghani made moves to change the status of the Jogi people. In 2017, he signed a decree that allowed them to get a tazkira, the national ID card that all other services rely on. The name of the Jogi tribe was also added to the list of electronic identification cards that were recognised in Afghanistan.
Yet despite the change, Habibullah says the discrimination has not ended. Previously, the Jogi believed they were denied the access because they did not have birth certificates. But now that the ID cards have been issued, the problem persists.
“Previously, we didn’t have ID cards, so we couldn’t go to school. Currently, we have them, but I don’t know why they still don’t allow us to use facilities or give us the means to build a school for us,” he says.
Another father in the Jogi suburb, Yunus, says he worries about the future his children are growing up in and the way the Jogis are ignored.
“We, our people, remained uneducated like this. We didn’t have ID cards at the time, but now we have them. Meanwhile, no one asks us about ourselves and whether our children go to school. Neither this government nor any other government has paid attention to our people,” he says.
He hopes one day his children will be able to enrol in schools.
“I didn’t go to school myself. But I am trying to make this one thing happen for my children. I want the government to arrange a school for us. Other schools either do not accept us or are too far from us. Our children are little, they can’t go there,” he says.
The education director of the Taliban in Balkh province, Mohammad Naeem Balkhi, denies that the Jogi people in his province are discriminated against or are deprived of education. He says, in fact, there are no Jogis at all.
“We do not have Jogi people in our area. They may be outside the city of Mazar-e-Sharif and outside the province. But inside the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, we do not have people from this tribe,” Balkhi told Rukhshana Media.
He says even if they live in tents like other nomad peoples, the Taliban can still provide a favourable environment for them to grow up and be educated.
