Thirteen years after his mother was shot and killed by a militia fighter as he, at eight years old, clung to her leg in their home in the Kaaraan district of Mogadishu, Asad Abdullahi spent the night at a lodge in Garissa, Kenya, yet another stop on his search for a place he could call home.

He was 20, newly married to a woman from another clan he would never have met had civil war not broken out in Somalia in 1991— and he had already been a refugee for more than a decade, searching for his father who had been travelling when the fighting began. The brother who fled with him somehow got lost in the crowd.

He made some money as a turn boy for a trucker in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia and then as a fixer for new Somali arrivals in the Bole Mikhael neighbourhood of Addis Ababa. They told him about South Africa and how Somalis could set up a business there.

Asad did not walk into an airline office and buy a ticket to Johannesburg; he had no papers, no ID, no visa. So he relied on passers and smugglers — people who make their money by getting other people across borders — and fellow Ali Yussuf sub-clan members, including an uncle he had never met — all the way to Uitenhage near the city of Port Elizabeth.

It was February 2004. Over the next six years he worked in spaza shops (kiosks) in several black townships in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, bought a few, and was robbed and nearly killed in several. The hazards were familiar to all Somalis doing business there.

Jonny Steinberg met Asad in 2010 in Company Gardens, the heart of old Cape Town where Dutch settlers had set up their first vegetable garden in 1652. He was doing research for what he had planned would be a book about African migrants who had fled their homes in Cape Town in the wake of an outbreak of xenophobic violence in 2008.

But when he began to interview Asad at his home in the Blikkiesdorp, a nearby township, he became intrigued by his story. They moved the interviews to Steinberg’s car so Asad could keep better watch on his shop and home, and the two spent the next year talking there several times a week.

A Man of Good Hope appears at what is an auspicious moment for the book but a very trying time for the people of Kenya, Somalia and, once again, the African migrants in South Africa.

In response to increasingly brutal attacks by Somali Al Shabaab militants, the Kenyan government has threatened to close down Dadaab, the conglomeration of several settlements in northeastern Kenya that today house more than 400,000 refugees.

Asad Abdullahi was in one of the first waves of Somalis who fled to the Kenyan border in 1991 and crossed into Liboi, the first of half a dozen camps set up by the UN refugee agency that eventually became known as Dadaab after the district in which they are located.

Unlike many at Dadaab who have remained and have had children and grandchildren there, Asad didn’t stay long. He went to the legendary place called Islii (Eastleigh) in Nairobi, still looking for his father, and then moved on to Ethiopia.

Beginning at the turn of the past century, many Somalis opted to cross the Red Sea in rickety boats to seek a better life in Yemen; today they are fleeing back. Others tried their luck by heading north to Europe, and today, despite the awful conditions of travel and the mounting death toll from drowning, they and thousands of other Africans keep on trying.

Independent Africa’s first official refugee camp was set up in southwestern Algeria in 1976 for Sahrawis fleeing fighting in neighbouring Western Sahara; many remain there to this day, preferring not to return to their home area, which was occupied by Morocco when the Spanish colonisers left in 1975. Several years later, the UNHCR set up camps in northern Cameroon for Chadians fleeing an outbreak of civil conflict in 1978. Many other camps were to follow in Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and the former Zaire.

But ironically, the first refugee camps in Africa housed Europeans — people who had been uprooted from their homes in Poland during World War II and spent years in Kazakhstan and Iran before being temporarily resettled in camps like Masinde in Uganda and Tengeru in what was then known as northern Tanganyika.

Like many reporters, Steinberg, now a lecturer in African studies and criminology at Oxford, came away with a different, denser story than the one he embarked on. He teases out details of the complex structure of Somali relationships and how knowing one’s lineage can lead to safety or danger, success or failure.

Sometimes he fears that he may be pushing Asad too far; he looks for his relatives in England and travels to small towns in the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia, following the trail of a narrative that Asad has unconsciously laid down.

Refugees are most often perceived as a mass of humanity packed into camps, trudging along roads, waiting in interminable queues for food, their individuality lost in a litany of numbers and statistics.

But A Man of Good Hope is anything but a tale of despair; it is a fascinating narrative of the modern odyssey of one man who began it as a terrified boy and relived it as a son, husband and father through serendipitous conversations with a stranger who set himself the job of listening.