More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Agadez is the unwitting home of many “sinkers,” migrants who ran out of money. They can’t afford to continue, and they can’t afford to go home: stuck forever, like ghosts.
the Hoggar Mountains. When we encountered another set of bodies, I started to realize that the desert was like a mass grave for migrants on their way to a better life.
The desert is not a homogenous place: sometimes it’s sand dunes, sometimes it’s rocky flatlands, and sometimes it’s mountains and hills.
Of the forty-six of us who had been abandoned in the desert, only six reached the village. The other forty had died in the sands of the Sahara. It was heartbreaking, excruciating. We cried our hearts out. We had traveled along the path through hell for three weeks.
My goal was to continue north until I reached Tripoli, the capital of Libya, on the Mediterranean coast.
Libya is in North Africa, and most people who live there aren’t Black, they’re Arab.
But on the journey north, you adapt to sadness just like you adapt to everything else.
Sabha is another key city on migration routes, where vast numbers of migrants from Nigeria, Niger, and Ghana converge on their journey north.
He said that if I paid for part of his bus ticket to Tripoli, he’d let me stay in his house there. Once again, I walked right into the trap: the house didn’t exist. On the journey north, people are constantly trying to cheat you. Everyone’s trying to survive, even at someone else’s expense.
a “connection house,” a sordid space used for sex trafficking and the sale of alcohol and marijuana. In short, a den of vice.
merchandise. The men who smuggle them into the country
Takum is a slang word used among migrants in Libya. It’s not Arabic or English or Hausa or any other language; it’s part of the unique jargon that forms when you have people from so many different parts of the world come together in one place.
Takums come to Libya from all over sub-Saharan Africa, from countries like Ghana and Nigeria and Chad,
They aren’t used to Libya’s strict sexual prohibitions,
Her boyfriend had promised to take her to the Land of the Whites. To pay for their passage to Libya, he’d borrowed money from smugglers affiliated with the connection house, and when they reached Tripoli, her boyfriend sold her to the pimps. Now she had to sell her body to pay off his debt, but the amount she owed seemed to just keep growing. Her
I had experienced a lot of suffering myself, but I still prayed five times a day, and I still believed in God. My faith was what had made so many parts of this journey bearable.
After just one week in Tripoli, I spent four years in Benghazi; that’s how unpredictable the journey north can be.
Benghazi was beautiful, with tall buildings and expansively open public spaces. It looked like a European metropolis, and it even made Accra, Ghana’s capital city, look small by comparison.
There had been a lot of bloody battles there during the Libyan civil wars, when it was a rebel bastion against Muammar al-Qaddafi.
The city is strongly associated with anti-Qaddafi sentiment, but he ruled with such an iron fist that the people there would hesitate...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
listened to their conversations in Ashanti, which is the second-most-common language in Ghana after English.
left from Accra on my own and crossed the Sahara on foot. I’ve been working my way across Libya—I only just left Tripoli.”
in Libya. I never got used to the ways men and women interacted there, which was governed by strict rules. Taxis and buses are segregated by gender: you aren’t allowed to get into a vehicle with a woman, and if you find yourself near a woman on the sidewalk, you have to cross the street.
There is almost no concept of leisure or recreation in Libya. There are no movie theaters. There are only three TV channels, and they mostly play footage of Qaddafi railing against the United States. In our rare moments of free time, we watched DVDs
We had seen so little Western media, and sexuality was so thoroughly repressed in Libya, that Shakira’s videos seemed almost illicit. We’d never seen women like that, in so little clothing, moving so seductively.
Everywhere I went, there were hardworking Palestinians, Lebanese . . . but the Libyans didn’t work much. They got money just for having children. The more kids they had, the more money they received, because there are only five million of them occupying an enormous territory, and they have a massive amount of oil. So they were paid just for being Libyan. They are very rich people: the government has empty apartments that it makes available to anyone who wants to live there, but in Libya, they think only poor people live in apartments: everyone is expected to have a house of their own.
Many of the migrants you see on the news, arriving on the Mediterranean coast or dying at sea, depart from Libya. There, smugglers cram them onto rubber or wooden rafts and shove them out to sea. Sometimes they pack as many as four hundred people onto a single raft.
I knew people who tried to cross there, where smugglers charge a thousand dollars for passage to Europe. Often these people came back, saying they had been cheated out of their money.
Italy, Greece, and Malta aren’t far from the Libyan coast.
decided I would fly for the first time in my life. I bought a Ghanaian passport on the black market, glued in my own photo, and went to the airport.
I clutched the armrest for the entire flight, as if I could prevent the plane from falling back to the ground.
When I talk about smugglers like this, it’s not what you’re imagining. Europeans always picture hardened criminals with AK-47s like in the movies, but that’s not the case. They’re just people with connections, and together they make up a vast, loose network that shuttles migrants north. They don’t trick or pressure anyone into traveling to Europe; they’re simply responding to a demand. In Ghana, no one brainwashed me into beginning my journey; I was driven by my own eagerness to see the world. It’s true, though, that these organizations can acquire whatever documents you need, like a false
...more
Land Rovers crossed the desert at breakneck speeds. Our drivers were very skilled; they could have won the Dakar Rally. They knew the desert well and were clearly very experienced.
Algeria receives economic support from France to stop migration, so in each prison, they gave us a different name. That way, they could claim they were detaining many more immigrants than they really were, and get more money. If it weren’t for that, I assume they would have brought us straight to our destination.
As a smuggler, he had been arrested in Algeria many times, so he knew they would keep transferring us from prison to prison in order to make more money, even though legally we should have been deported.
They were unrelentingly cruel; if you’re a Black man in an Algerian prison, you have no rights whatsoever.
We formed a kind of temporary friendship while he was guarding me; it was one of the few moments of humanity that I encountered on my journey.
In the no-man’s-land between Algeria and Morocco, hidden from the world, lies the Valley, where the smuggler networks run a sort of autonomous state. They even have their own police.
One of the smugglers, named Idrisu, had been arrested by the Algerian police with over fifty fake passports in his possession.
After being released by the Algerian police and making our way back to Ouargla, we met Abbas, known locally as “the President,” a leading trafficker with a stash of over 150 passports from Mali, Burkina Faso, and other French-speaking countries.
The Valley is also home to many sinkers, those who end up penniless halfway through their journey, with no way to continue onward and no way to go back home, like the men in Agadez. Some were stuck there forever, working for the smuggler networks.
In the Valley, everyone sleeps in different areas based on their country of origin,
There, under a bridge, we met men with machetes who represented the three African smuggling kingpins: the three head smugglers who organize the clandestine ocean voyages to Europe on rafts, dinghies, and other small boats.
learning the Qur’an in school. I’d been taught that all things are predestined, that all events that
occur on Earth are part of God’s plan.
They told us that in Mauritania, we’d get on dinghies and set sail for Europe. We always traveled hiki-hiki, which is what they call the practice of crossing borders in a zigzag pattern
I couldn’t help but imagine how frustrating that would have been: to spend five years on a torturous journey through Africa only to die literally crashing into Europe. The dinghy landed
These white people even welcomed us with a certain amount of kindness: they smiled, spoke to us in a friendly tone,
lost my shoes after that first, failed attempt to cross the Atlantic and had been barefoot ever since. I’d lost all feeling in my feet.
people did tend to form groups that were based, among other things, on whether they were from former British or former French colonies. There were absurd stereotypes, like the idea that migrants from English-speaking countries are smarter than the French speakers because we were part of the British Empire, which conquered the world.
