• English Site
• >SPIEGEL Magazine
• >

  An African Odyssey Part III: Surviving the Sahara on the Way to Europe

An African Odyssey Part III Surviving the Sahara on the Way to Europe

By Klaus Brinkbäumer

Part 2: Part II: The Dangers of the Desert

Station Five: Agadez , Niger , kilometer 2,254

Niger is an arid country, barren and sandy. Families live in small, round huts scattered across the countryside. Ten or 20 huts form a village. The inhabitants of those villages lucky enough to have a well are happy, while the lives of those in villages without wells revolve around fetching water. The women and children set out for the nearest water source in the morning, returning in the evening with urns and buckets balanced on their heads.

Niger, a former French colony, has at least 12 million inhabitants. The average life expectancy is 44. Eighty percent of the men here are illiterate. According to the United Nations, Niger is the world's poorest country, even behind Sierra Leone.

The few cars traveling on Niger's roads are fully loaded with human cargo being taken from the south to the north. There are many camels traveling through Niger, salt caravans traversing a route from the Aïr Mountains in the north to the cities in the south, the same route that caravans have traveled for thousands of years. The road ends 250 kilometers (155 miles) short of Agadez -- where the sands of the Sahara begin.

Agadez is a hub for those attempting to reach Europe from Niger. It's a small city of 90,000, a place with desert sand in its streets, sandy brown houses and a mosque at its center. Agadez, like all African cities, is growing; a would-be migrant's first step is always into a city.

Many West African countries have experienced a boom at one time or another. In Nigeria it was the oil, in Niger the uranium. But all they produce is the one raw material that brought them the wealth in the first place. When prices decline, all that remain are the absurd houses, palaces, factories and monuments built in the heyday of the country's boom. And there's nothing to eat.

For the most part, Africa is a green continent from its Atlantic coastline up to the Sahara Desert. But in Niger, the orange juice comes from Spain, made from oranges picked by young Africans for €4 an hour. Of course the juice is only for the tourists; the parents of the young men picking the oranges in Africa can't afford the stuff.

The bus terminal, a marketplace for traffickers and a center for what Europeans call "illegal immigration," is a rectangle of about 130 x 80 meters (427 x 262 feet). Grimy men with small travel bags sleep in the shade. At the entrance, vendors sell the items travelers need: blankets, water bottles, turbans. A covered space at the center of the rectangle is for those waiting to depart; trucks are parked in the surrounding area. The perimeter consists of rows of one-room shops behind rusty iron gates. The shops are travel agencies. On side A, shop A13 specializes in trips to Algeria. Shop A18 is called the Ghana Union Agency, specializing in travel to Libya.

Whenever a vehicle arrives from the south, the men run from their shops and shout out their prices into the night. The new arrivals peer warily at the shopkeepers, not knowing whom to trust.

The deals being negotiated here at the Agadez bus terminal involve small sums of money for a bit of security and larger sums to pay the fare for the next stage of the journey, to Tamanrasset. Germany's Interior Ministry sees the whole thing as human trafficking and nothing short of organized crime. But here in Agadez they see it as a service. The police and the military get their shares, the vendors sell water bottles and blankets, the drivers earn a decent living and the travelers are able to make headway. Is this immoral? Mafia-like? It's a question of perspective. Here in Africa, shops like the ones surrounding the Agadez bus terminal are essentially travel agencies, and the shopkeepers are little more than brokers.

"There is demand and we offer a service. What's criminal about that? The real crime is the exploitation of Africa," says Abdullah Habat, the man in charge here. When we entered the market, policemen approached us and immediately took us to a room for questioning. Interviews and photography are illegal, the police officers said. But for 100,000 West African francs, about €150, we could move about freely and even interview Habat.

Habat is squatting in the sand behind the police building, wearing a green suit, a white turban and dusty sandals. He says that most of the migrants come from Nigeria and Ghana. "Large families send two sons, hoping that at least one will make it," he says.

Hundreds are stuck in Agadez because they've run out of money. They sit in corners and beg, not eating or drinking because they need every franc they can scrounge to continue their journey. They've been here for weeks, months and in some cases even years, unable to pay for the next leg of the trip north. They wear Beckham jerseys or FC Chelsea shirts, some sporting the slogan "Fly Emirates" emblazoned across their chests.

There is no turning back for these men. They say that their families would reject them and that they would be ridiculed in their villages if they went back. Getting out of Agadez is their only chance, their only hope for a better life. For them, it's now or never. There is no such thing as a dress rehearsal in the lives of Africans.

John Ampan's African truths:

If you want to be a member of the Mafia in Africa , you must sacrifice what's most important to you. If you have three daughters and a son, it'll be the son. If you are willing to sacrifice, you will belong and you will become a rich man. If you are a rich man in Africa , you must protect yourself. You need the support of every god you can get. Africans are afraid to reject the white man's religions. Half the time they believe in your God. But they are even more afraid to reject the gods of their ancestors. That's why your cross is on our tables and shrines for sacrifices are on the floor beneath the tables. That way, at least one of the two will help us.

Part IV: The journey takes us to Arlit, Niger.

For reasons of data protection and privacy, your IP address will only be stored if you are a registered user of Facebook and you are currently logged in to the service. For more detailed information, please click on the "i" symbol.

Post to other social networks:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•