By Klaus Brinkbäumer
Editor's Note: This is the third installment of a multi-part series. You can read the first installments here.
Station Four: Benin City , Nigeria , kilometer 973
The city is infamous for sending its women to be prostitutes in Europe. It is a city built on red mud, a city with no asphalt, where there is nothing but potholes and huts and markets where there are many sellers but no buyers. Benin City, which calls itself "Nigeria's Heartbeat," is home to a million people, 90 percent of them unemployed. It was once a city of commerce, a place that exported wood and rubber and manufactured furniture and bronze figures.
Nowadays the city exports its daughters as indentured servants of the sex trade. The black women who stand along roadsides in Europe's industrial areas come from Benin City. The families here are so poor that they give their girls to human traffickers, hoping the girls will send money home from the European paradise one day. But when the money doesn't come and the families are unable to pay off their debts to the traffickers, they end up losing not only their daughters but also their houses, which they have often put up as collateral. The traffickers charge €60,000 to bring a girl to Europe, but what the gullible families don't realize is how difficult it is to make €60,000 standing on the shoulders of European streets.
Before the girls are sent on their way, the families take them to a priestess who performs a ceremony in whose power virtually everyone in Benin City believes. But it's a double-sided game that revolves around two things -- protection and pressure.
One of the places where this odd ceremony is performed is at 156 Akpakpa Street, behind Benin City's court house; behind a white wall and a rusted gate. This is one of the places a white reporter would never be allowed to enter unless accompanied by an African like John Ampan. What they have been doing here for the last 565 years is a mixture of witchcraft and religion.
Six people, all barefoot, three wearing long, red robes and bracelets on their arms and feet, the other three wearing ordinary clothes, sit in a small, five-by-five meter concrete building. Imuetinyan Ihosogie, the Chief Princess, also known as "Ikpate oba," sits on her throne to the right. "We are a sacrificial altar and a holy place, but we also help people solve their problems," says Ikpate oba.
This is where the sick come to be healed, where shopkeepers come to improve their prospects, where enemies can be made to succumb to illness and where quarrelling husbands and wives come to reconcile.
Chief Princess Ikpate oba has a lazy left eye. A pile of feathers, cow heads, chicken heads, bottles, glasses, bones and rusty machetes lies in a corner -- a stinking mess that smells like death. This is the altar. When the ceremony begins, the priestess sprinkles wine on the pile, takes a sip herself and recites her incantations.
In doing so, the witch is protecting the girl who is being forced to travel abroad, but she is also exacting the girl's loyalty. The girl must drink a concoction of blood, wine and her own underarm and pubic hair, a ritual the girl believes will make her constantly accessible to the witch in the future. If the girl tries to hide in Europe and refuses to repay her family's debts, the witch can easily bring about her death -- or so the girl believes.
A girl is worth €60,000. The girl will be forced to work off the €60,000 in the back seats of European cars or in the brothels of German cities like Münster, Oberhausen and Zwickau. And the girl, who, like everyone in Benin City, believes in the ceremony and the witch's spell, will feel compelled to comply. John says that he has heard of girls in Europe who were cursed, fell ill and ultimately died.
The high priestess seems to find nothing wrong with what she does. Okay, she admits, young girls are being sold, by their own parents, no less, and they're being trafficked into prostitution. But, says Ikpate oba, "this is good for our country. We are a poor land, and families can live from the money that comes from Europe. Someone must always make a sacrifice."
We drive on to visit Bob Izoua, who now calls himself Chief Ayobahan of the Kingdom of Benin. Bob Izoua, born in 1954, was once John's friend, 14 years ago in a prison in Lagos. Izoua began his career as a businessman by buying cheap houses whose owners were in debt or had quarrelled, and then charging high rents for the properties. He is said to have had something to do with the disappearing of two politicians, a deed that apparently helped a new governor get into office, and when he was released from prison he went into the oil business. Today he owns 300 small buses, 250 houses, 80 cars -- Lincolns, Hummers, Mercedes and the like -- and has eight wives.
When Izoua looks out the window, he sees sandy, potholed roads on which he is unable to drive his cars, and he sees families who sit in front of fire pits grilling rats. If he sold just one of his cars, he could build schools and have every street in the city repaired, but then he would be missing one car. And that, of course, is simply unthinkable.
Izoua can neither read nor write, and he can't really speak, either. He stammers, stutters and makes noises. He is fat, he drools and his right incisor is missing. His head is shaved, except for a gray patch at the back. He sits on a bronze rocking horse, and the people standing around him hold his telephones and read his letters, quietly putting their questions to the boss, who grimly answers yes or no.
Izoua seems pleased to see John -- for about a minute. "Oh," he says, "ah," of course he remembers the prison in Lagos, "da cell," as he calls it in his odd version of English. But he asks no questions and clearly has no interest in John. He does make a point of telling us that he has 2,000 employees.
Then he takes his friend and his friend's white companion on a tour of his possessions, beginning with the cellar, where water from a spring is filled into plastic bags ("St. Jane Water") and stored there, later to be sold on the street. He takes us to the bakery where Izoua's bread is baked. The boss strides through the streets, surrounded by bodyguards wielding Kalashnikov rifles. Look, his gait seems to say, look, white people have come to see me, because I am Bob Izoua, ruler of Benin City.
The city belongs to him, and he apparently has the exclusive right to destroy it.
This is Nigeria. People without education or empathy acquire money and power, which they share only with their families, because all others are their enemies. It is vulgar and excessive, and it helps explain why Nigeria, with its 140 million people, is such a tormented country. The people of Benin City whisper that Bob Izoua's wealth comes from oil wells that are protected by the governor, who in turn enjoys Izoua's protection. But when pressed on the issue, he delivers a blanket denial.
"Envy. Lies," he says, "I never sleep. I work hard."
John Ampan sat in many of these cars with their nameless drivers, men who took his money in silence and drove him north. He sat in the back, unable to move because the drivers would refuse to leave until they were full: Ten men in a Mercedes, 40 on a small truck.
John went to Benin City, where he was lucky enough to find a car that would take him north on the same day. The road was a four-lane highway, at least most of the time, and as it stretched northward the tropical green of the surrounding landscape gradually gave way to dryer, paler surroundings. They passed Zuma Rock, a gigantic formation, gray and dark and about as spectacular as the world's second-largest monolith, Ayers Rock in the middle of the Australian outback. Wrecked cars, looted and burned out, lined the roadside.
John traveled with a small nylon bag containing two pairs of pants, three shirts, two pairs of underwear, a towel, a toothbrush, a turban, a Casio walkman and four music cassettes: jazz, blues, Ghanaian music and reggae.
The men in these cars and trucks hardly talked. They were unable to move. They saw little of the cities through which they passed and little of the landscape. Occasionally one was friendly and would invite John to dinner, which meant sharing a plate of rice by the roadside. When no one invited him, John would buy a loaf of bread and a soft drink for breakfast, saving half the bread for lunch and eating nothing for dinner.
John Ampan's African truths:
Voodoo works. But it no longer protects us, now that we want to be like the white man.
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