UNDERCOVER: Europe Through the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea (I)

 

UNDERCOVER: Europe Through the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea (I)

Nearly every day in Agadez, a sandy, windswept town in the north of Niger Republic, West Africa, scores of trucks stuffed with African migrants barrel out of town and across the parched and cracked earth, dust swirling around their swivelling tyres, human feet dangling precariously from all sides, on a perilous multi-week journey through the inhospitable Sahara Desert into Libya in the Maghreb region of North Africa, hoping to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe, particularly Italy. Investigative journalist ‘FISAYO SOYOMBO spent 47 days as one of them, journeying from Kano in Nigeria through notorious illegal migrant hubs Zinder, Agadez and Dirkou in Niger, and al Gatrun and Sabha to Tripoli in Libya. He returns to document tales of deaths, starvation, rape, dehumanisation, mental abuse, physical assault, abductions, torture, and modern-day enslavement of citizens of Nigeria, Ghana, Niger, South Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia by Arab traffickers who treat dogs better than black Africans.

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a three-part series. You may read Part II here and Part III here.

You are the Lord, that is your name

You will never share your glory with anyone

You will never share your glory with anybody

Almighty Lord, that is your name.

This was a sombre rendition by five young men in a dingy, teeming room with a pungent smell in Rijiyar Lemo, Fagge Local Government Area of Kano in northwestern Nigeria. Three more men sat idling away by the doorway. I was the ninth, the most recent addition. In an adjoining room were girls numbering up to six, all of us awaiting the next steps in our excitingly anticipated journey to the desert.

No migrant has full knowledge of the risks awaiting them in the nearly endless, mostly fruitless odyssey to Libya, but the quintet at least possessed a sparse idea. Nobody voyaging through the desert is guaranteed to arrive in Libya physically intact. The quintet knew enough to seek supernatural intervention. Most migrants do, anyway. Over the coming seven weeks, I would meet migrants who procured incisions on their bodies, including their privates, courted prophets, or even visited native witch doctors. I understood why. I had been warned of a significant risk of perishing in the desert, languishing in kidnappers’ dens, or returning physically maimed.

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Source: Fij.ng