The paper is based on more than a year’s fieldwork in Lukole Refugee Camp in North Western Tanzania. At the time of fieldwork, 1997-98, around 100,000 Burundian Hutu refugees lived in Lukole. They had fled Burundi since 1993 and had through very varied trajectories ended up in Lukole, where they have limited mobility and limited possibilities of activity. They all depend on the rations from UNHCR.2 It is the intention of this paper to explore what happens to a community and its entrenched social hierarchies, norms and ideologies when it is so abruptly transferred and put into such an alien setting.