Continued from last week…
The elderly matron in the clinic who should be on retirement, came in to tell me to leave him alone to sleep. He had not eaten solid food. They gave him pepper soup with no meat or fish in it. I had paid for it. When I asked them for the fish, they told me he would die if he took in solids.
The Alhaji called me on the phone the night after I had checked the young man into the clinic. We sealed the cocoa ponds deal. I sent my assistant to arrange for the young haulage to Niger, from there to Algiers. I heard that they sell to people who smuggled them to Europe to make chocolates and return them to Africa. That wasn’t my concern. At my end, it was an honest business.
‘I met this girl in Agadez. Her name is Gift,’ Alex returned to his story as I returned to the clinic. Today his voice was stronger, he had eaten some tiny fish and a tablespoon of eko (cold corn pudding).
‘She’s still in Agadez working for money to return, selling herself. Her town’s girl whose name is Ose returned from Madama near the Libyan border to tell us not to venture any further. She said it gets worse as you proceed to Libya. She’s a strong girl who has passed through the desert twice living on her urine. Their vehicle she said passed as close to the horrid volcanic Air mountains as possible. They saw dead bodies along the routes and very dry bones and abandoned vehicles. They saw death in the desert. A few months ago, a fellow Nigerian returned from a hellish place called Sebha (he showed another photograph) in the southern part of Libya, a caravan city full of wicked men who know nothing but money and told us that he has been to the end of the earth, that it is a place in Libya called Sebha. If you have no money, they put you in jail there but offer you cell phones to call your relations to bring money. If money is not sent, they beat you every day: morning, afternoon, evening; and when new people arrive from Agadez, they kill five or six men at once to make room for them.’
He stopped for a long time to sip water and recover from the long story. I waited, my heart in my mouth.
‘They gave me their photos to go and tell their relations that they are still alive. They cannot afford to make phone calls. They’re saving every CFA to make the journey home.
‘One day, a Ghanaian boy returned from the desert on foot, said their van ran into a sand dune, the shifting sand, overturned and many died. Three of them were left and as they trekked the long road back, his two companions died, one after the other. He alone was left, drinking his urine and being beaten by the sun. Agadez have not seen rain for three years. After he spoke to us, he crumbled to the ground and gave up the ghost.’
‘How long were you there, in that Niger city?’ I asked him.
‘Seven months. I stayed that long because I had hope of increasing my money through work to go to Europe, but the money kept on diminishing. I was also in constant fear that I’d be robbed because the Arabos (the Tuaregs) and the Toubous, the black Libyans are very bad people, they can kill you just to take your money from you if they smelled you had money. But after …’
‘What kind of work were you doing?’ I asked curious.
‘We help them load vans with watermelons to transport to Libya. But because the vans go only when they have immigrants who they hide in the vans and cover them with cloth or tarpaulin and load watermelons on top of them, we sometimes wait long intervals. Sometimes, the Tuaregs hire boys for sex when they are drunk or high on cocaine; most
times, they just rape the boys who stand around. When you have money for the homeward journey, you don’t let anyone know, you hang around the place where the lorries or buses come from Nigerian borders and you make a booking to go back. When they have enough people they tell you. In the night, always in the night, they leave for Nigerian border?’
Because Alex was 16, I got him foster parents in Lagos. He has long since reconnected to his people and we have started a campaign of awareness to our people. Alex said, if you want to taste hell on earth, try to go to Europe through the Tenere desert in Niger, down to the Sahara to Libya. These are places where Satan lives.
Since I picked up interest in this evil, I have gone repeatedly to Iddo Park and have not only stopped a handful of travellers from embarking on that journey into hell, but I have picked up a few Alexes and many Gifts who are the lucky ones, who made the long journey from hell back to this haven, called Nigeria.
Some of them had gone as far as Brak in Northern Libya and confessed that a set of dreadful gangs called the Asma boys are actually Satan’s siblings who rape, sell, enslave, beat up, capture, torture and do whatever hideous thing you can think of to black sub Saharans on the route from Brak to Tripoli which is a whole day’s journey. It seems to get worse as one proceeds in this journey to hell. Others who made it out of Tripoli said, some suffocate in trailer trucks with tarpaulin over them and goods on top of them before they reach the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea.
Others I have listened to who made it across the sea to Italy, narrated the means and the conditions of that hellish journey.
‘A rubber boat is first pumped with air, and as many people as possible would be crammed into it. Those in the centre of the rubber can die of fuel fume when it starts leaking because of the angry waves crashing into it. Those hanging on the edges, can topple and fall into the water, no one would stop to get them. When you reach Italy, NGOs with different rescue boats will come and get migrants before they topple and drown. They are now put into concentration camps whose smells can kill the living. Food is meagre, shelter poor. No jobs. Migrants wander off from there. The Italian government pays organisations to take care of the migrants with a certain amount of money for daily upkeep. The Italian Mafians get the job and take almost all the money for themselves. If you don’t want to die in Italy, you leave the camp. The ladies go straight into prostitution while the men go into drug dealing or menial jobs.’
The End
