North to Paradise

by Ousman Umar

My mother died giving birth to me. According to the traditions of my tribe, the Wala, when this happens, the baby must be abandoned because it was born under a curse. It’s left to die.

The Wala have their own unique form of identification: a small scar on the right cheek, a small cut we’re given when we’re born so we can recognize each other.

My father believed that the gods are everywhere—in nature, in rivers and mountains—and that all things have a soul. Growing up, I was always confused because I shared his religion at home and the Muslim religion in the community. Even as a child, I could tell people thought of Islam and Christianity as somehow superior to the ancestral religion.

Being spared as a child was the first miracle I experienced in my life, the first of many times I narrowly escaped death.

In Fiaso, we spent our days working the fields. If we wanted to eat chicken, we grabbed one from the poultry yard. If we wanted to eat some other animal, we’d hunt it in the jungle. At night, we set traps, and as soon as dawn broke, we’d run out to see what we’d caught. And when there was nothing else, we’d gather mangos, oranges, and all the other things that nature provides. You never go hungry in the countryside. I had it easy in my village: I was the shaman’s son, and I lived in a big house. I didn’t think about my future much. I expected that my life would be typical: I would live off the earth, tend to the animals, marry, and have children.

The houses in my village were made of clay, and the roofs were made of bamboo, branches, and other plants. We took our water from the river. Actually, there were two rivers: one female and the other male. One was for drinking, the other for washing. I’ve never tasted such fresh, crystalline water anywhere else. There was no electricity, so we used kerosene.

There was so little artificial light that at night, you could see millions of stars shining in the sky, like burning ...

With us, his children, he was distant and severe, not talking much, except to give orders: “Come do this, go do that.” He taught us not through words, but through actions, which we learned to imitate. I respected him immensely.

It’s normal to beat children as punishment there.

Children are just work mules; nobody pays much attention to them. Elders are the wisest because they have lived the longest. Since knowledge is hard to come by, the best way to learn something is to ask an elder.

seeing the white people’s movies made us long for things we couldn’t afford but didn’t need. If you don’t know something exists, you can’t want it.

But you also can’t try to shield rural Africans from all the material things the world has to offer. It’s not possible, and it’s not right.

Looking back on my childhood, I can see these lofty ideas about white people and Europe seem absurd because of course talent, intelligence, and strength have no color. But these attitudes didn’t take shape overnight: they are the product of centuries of enslavement, exploitation, colonialism, and what ultimately amounts to a white...

In our traditions, dreams are very important.

My father was a stern man. As I said, he didn’t ask for things; he gave orders. So when he told me I would go to the closest town, Techiman, to be an apprentice, it wasn’t a suggestion.

Soon after, I left home with a black plastic garbage bag that contained all my worldly possessions: four T-shirts and little else. I was around nine years old.

In Ghana, holding your arm out the window while driving a car is called “doing the seven.” Symbolically, it means things are going well for you: having a car was like achieving the American dream. A luxury. When I went back to my village, I’d always get questions like that, since I’d been around the world.

they’d also fill me in on the village rumors: “The whites are so strict that if you marry a white lady and then cheat on her, she’ll kill you, because white people all have guns.”

Workshops in Ghana operate in a very particular way: the first boy to join as an apprentice is the most senior, and each new apprentice is less important than the one before. If you’re the newest, or “last boy,” you have it the worst. You’re the first to arrive in the morning to sweep everything, clean, and prepare the tools, you’re the one they send on errands at all hours, and you’re the last to shower and leave. You eat what is left over from your boss’s meal and always go a little hungry. That’s how it goes until a new boy joins and you move up a rung on the ladder. But I never got to move up a rung because I left before any other boys joined.

In Kumasi, people mostly slept in workshops or street markets—wherever they could. Renting a room is a sign of some economic success.

you liked a girl, you had to hang around her house, like you just happened to be passing by, looking for some excuse to talk to her. Or you had to ask your friend to tell her you wanted to talk—it was a pretty elaborate ritual. Being a girl’s boyfriend just meant having a special friendship with the girl, spending more time with her. Nothing beyond that. Although many of those special friendships led to a wedding.

He talked about personal topics—how he had separated from my mother, who had gone to her village in the north with two of my siblings. This was unusual: in Ghana, when parents separate, the children usually stay with the father, as if they were his property. I was surprised to hear my father talking to me like this: he already considered me an adult.

The world was growing with me. When I lived in my village, I thought my village was the world. When I traveled to Techiman, I realized that the world was just a bit bigger. Then, in Kumasi, the world grew even more. And then, at the port of Accra, I set eyes on the sea for the first time.

But at Tema Harbor, my fascination with the Land of the Whites continued to grow: ships arrived from that mysterious country full of wondrous cargo. Fantastical cars (they were actually used cars, but to us they were new), TV sets, secondhand computers . . . The abundance of goods produced outside of Ghana, used outside of Ghana, and then, when no one wants them anymore, sold in Ghana. “Every year, the whites throw everything out and buy all new things,” a friend told me. “That’s how rich they are. They live in the lap of luxury. Everything that comes through the port is stuff they don’t want.”

I was a twelve-year-old kid living in a no-man’s-land between the port, the cement factory, and the fishing harbor. It was full of scrap and debris, a dumping site lousy with mosquitos. Somehow, though, I never got malaria; I didn’t even know what it was to be afraid of it. In my village, people went to the healer more than the doctor. For example, I think my adopted mother died of cancer, but she thought it was witchcraft. She was in the hospital for two months, but she left because she insisted she was bewitched, not sick. These beliefs have deep roots.

This was one of the many times I narrowly escaped death. The working conditions in Ghana are very poor. No one cares about their workers’ safety, and there are no laws.

We spent every day cutting huge sheets of metal with no protective gear, not even shoes, facing danger day in and day out. And we were all ages: there are no restrictions. There are many industries that exploit child labor in brutal conditions, but this isn’t always the case; many families rely on their children to help work in the fields, as I had when I was still in Fiaso. This kind of work is an integral part of the culture, and it’s not considered abusive.

the climate changed around us: slowly but surely, the landscape shifted into harsh desert. Sand, sand, sand. I had no idea that entering the desert was like passing from life into death.

My concept of time was entirely different: if you had asked me what I would be doing five years in the future, I wouldn’t have known. Long-term planning wasn’t a priority; my concern was what I would eat that day and whether I’d have anything to eat the next. In Ghana, buses depart only when they’re full; there’s no hurry, and people wait patiently until all the seats are taken. You can’t make many plans.

In the middle of the Nigerien desert, it’s the start of what migrants call the “path through hell.” That’s where I was headed. The first hurdle on the route to Europe, through the desert in the hands of smugglers, often culminating in nameless, faceless death. The border between Niger and Libya is known as “the snakebite” because if anything happens to you there, you’re a goner. It’s perhaps the most desolate border in the world, a silent place in the desert, entirely uninhabited without so much as a road. It couldn’t be more different from my home in the Ghanaian jungle, lush with vegetation and life: no, Agadez was a dead place. But human beings find ways to live in the least likely places, under the most adverse conditions.

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.

I was glad to have a friend because the isolation can be immense on the journey north. It’s just you, alone in the whole world, far from your family and friends, unable to contact them. Having someone trustworthy on the trip with you is important. Someone to commiserate with. Someone who could end up holding your life in their hands.

The smugglers’ cruel business consisted of promising to bring people across the Sahara, collecting their fees, and then abandoning them in the middle of nowhere. Murder on a massive scale.

Abandoned in the desert, with no idea where I was and only one jug of water, I focused on the end of the journey. I tried not to lose hope and remembered a popular mantra from my country: “Forward ever, backward never.” I took refuge in that sentence. Just keep moving forward, without indulging negative thoughts.

Whenever we were lucky enough to find moist sand, we grabbed fistfuls of it and squeezed it until a single drop fell on our lips. Other times, we couldn’t even get that much; it was maddening. That was how we drank, drop by drop, each of those drops essential to our survival. Thanks to those tiny servings of water, we lived a few more hours and continued our journey.

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 mountain seemed to go on forever; we climbed and climbed, and it remained before us, indifferent to our efforts. It was during that ascent that I began to be plagued by more somber thoughts. We had been walking for seven days, maybe ten, and I was beginning to think that maybe we wouldn’t make it out alive. With every new stage of the journey, I lost a little more hope.

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.

One of the saddest things I learned on my journey is that in this life, no one gives you anything for free. They always want something in exchange: it’s human nature. Or at least, it’s the nature of the system that humans live in.

If I hadn’t been able to trade my wallet, even though it was hot in the desert and I was close to death, those children probably wouldn’t have given me the water. I wasn’t asking for a car, I wasn’t asking for treasure—just water, because I had been walking through the Sahara for weeks. But that’s how the world works.

With every passing day, my skin grew a little thicker. On one hand, I knew I could die, but on the other hand, I had nothing left to lose except my life. Despite all the hardship, I didn’t regret making the journey. I never once considered going home, never felt nostalgic, never felt homesick. On that path, there is no turning back. You either make it alive or you die trying.

As we walked on the road to Tripoli, somewhere between Ghat and Alawenat, I got a terrible nosebleed. It wouldn’t stop, so we left the main road to ask for help at a military outpost we saw in the distance. “We can’t touch a Black man’s blood,” they told us when we arrived. “For us, that would be like touching a dog’s blood. We can’t help you.” Some Muslims won’t touch dogs, because they’re considered impure. Libya is in North Africa, and most people who live there aren’t Black, they’re Arab. “Here, take these rags. That’s all we can do for you.” This exchange has been permanently etched in my memory. That was the first time I understood that there is a thing called “racism.” When I was in Ghana, in Black Africa, there was no racial discrimination. As I traveled farther in the world, I began to notice it.

I felt incredibly lonely and vulnerable in Ubari all by myself—I was still just a kid, alone in an unfamiliar place, unable to speak the language. But on the journey north, you adapt to sadness just like you adapt to everything else.

After that, I was terrified all the time. If I wasn’t safe even with someone I met at the mosque, then I wasn’t safe anywhere.

The women forced to work in the connection house came from all over the continent, although the majority were from Nigeria. Almost all of them had been tricked: husbands or smugglers lead them north, promising to bring them to Paradise, but as soon as they set foot in Libya, these women essentially become human merchandise. The men who smuggle them into the country act as their pimps, and they’re bought and sold in connection houses throughout the country. It was hard for male immigrants like me to earn enough money to survive, but at least we could look for voluntary work. With the extreme gender discrimination in Libya, these women couldn’t find jobs and had no choice but to work for the men who tricked them. It’s a miserable, dishonest system, and a horrible form of exploitation.

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. It means someone who belongs to Libya’s class of somewhat well-established Black people, migrants who have been in the country for a few years. The opposite of a Takum is an abba fresh, a Black migrant who only recently arrived, with no money and no connections.

“Are you okay? You look sick.” I hadn’t expected her to say anything, and I was taken off guard. “I couldn’t find any work today, or yesterday. I haven’t been able to eat.” “Here, take some bread.” I had felt so sorry for her, and here she was helping me. On my journey north, I saw so many people behaving worse than animals, motivated by such greed that they had no humanity. But then a person who was more vulnerable and exploited than I was reached out and shared what little she had. These are the moments that I try to remember, moments of our shared humanity.

She mocked me whenever I started praying: “Don’t waste your time,” she’d snap. “Your God doesn’t listen to prayers from a place like this.” I had seen a lot of suffering by that point, and 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.

I was unspeakably lucky to be out of the house at that particular moment. Otherwise, I would have ended up in a Libyan prison, probably one of the most wretched places in the world. In Libya, there is no concept of human rights. If they catch you, you die in prison.

After all my hopes and efforts to get there, I had only been in Tripoli for a week.