Beyond the Sahara

By Agbor Emmanuel

Migration through the Sahara and the Mediterranean has been going on for decades. It was brought to the limelight by political upheavals in the Maghreb and Syria.
Beyond the Sahara tells the story of a young Cameroonian who dreams of playing professional football in Europe. Not having the means to pay for a visa and an air ticket, he decides to defy the Sahara and the Mediterranean.
The journey takes him from Cameroon through Nigeria in Boko Haram territory. He is rescued by Nigerian security forces and he enters the Republic of Niger. From there he enters Algeria and from Algeria they move on to Libya after losing a friend in the desert.
He and his friend smuggle themselves into a merchant ship bound for Barcelona. They are identified and his friend is killed while he jumps into the sea in a desperate attempt to escape. Some of his companions are arrested and deported to Nigeria. The story criticizes the socio political situation in Africa and depicts many aspects of the African tradition.
The man from Australia is your brother; the woman from Afghanistan is your sister; the man from Syria is your brother; the woman from America is your sister and the man from Africa is your brother too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Africa
• Release date: Apr 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781482824735

Agbor Emmanuel

The author believes that cans of worms exist in every corner of the world; human rights are violated. The author’s role is to open these cans of worms and defend human rights in a language of humour. He says “the Author is a Teacher”; his philosophy “The Author as a Mirror.”

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BEYOND THE SAHARA

AGBOR EMMANUEL

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Copyright © 2016 by Agbor Emmanuel.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/africa

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

DEDICATION

To all those who lost their lives in the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean; desperate journies in search of greener pastures.

CHAPTER ONE

God, our heavenly father, I call on you today, Sunday the twenty-fourth of July 2006 at 5.43 p.m., to give me the inspiration to make the best use of my time as I venture into the slippery path of writing. I pray that you make my story interesting to read and that it may serve as a lesson—a lesson for the millions of people born and unborn, who may want to leave their continent for other parts of the world some day; a lesson for those who meet these people that they may treat them with a touch of kindness; a lesson to all governments that it is no pride, no success to see your children go into the Diaspora just to find something to eat even though in many cases there should have been enough for them all at home; a lesson for all those who have exploited Africa for so many centuries and who continue to do so. They too have a share in this humanitarian disaster, which has befallen the continent. Africa is a continent with a past. Africa’s civilisation is believed to be older than Europe’s. Those who doubt Africa’s civilisation should visit the pyramids in Egypt and read the science of Egyptology. Different peoples have different civilisations. This is also true for animals. The python does not necessarily have the same civilisation as the mamba neither does the viper the same as the anaconda. Yet they are all of the snake family.

The man from Australia is your brother; the woman from Afghanistan is your sister; the man from Syria is your brother; the woman from America is your sister; the man from Africa is your brother too.

I

IT IS SIX MONTHS SINCE Joe disappeared, not a word have we heard from him or about him. We have seen neither friend nor traveller who claimed that they saw him or anyone who resembles him anywhere; however, he is a man with very distinct features: tall, slim, very fair skinned, and with shifty eyes. He is a near albino. Today, in Africa and some other parts of the world, the tendency is to go, to leave, to vamoose, to disappear, to take off, to piss off ... to scram. Why are children suddenly running away from home? Where are they going? What are their chances of getting to their destination? What are their chances of turning stone into gold in the wilderness?

To look at the current migration trend from the African continent and the Middle East, it seems to me that we must go back to examine the socio political and economic dynamics of most of these African and Middle Eastern countries. At independence, the young African statesmen and women were full of ambition; they set out to right the wrongs of colonialism. Political speeches across the board in the world’s second largest continent were made in different colonial languages: English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. They all had one main theme: criticism of the coloniser and promises of freedom, education, economic prosperity, improvement of living standards, and you name it—a continent has truly been born, born from the ashes of slavery and colonisation! Listening to the early African leaders, one would imagine that they were well equipped to turn Africa into a paradise. ‘…Fellow countrymen,’ they would say, ‘our country was, for many centuries, deprived of its manpower when millions of our brothers and sisters were captured and taken into slavery to work in plantations in the Americas and to build the city of Paris. They toiled in Europe, suffered in the sugar plantations of the Americas from dusk to dawn, they were tortured in Alabama, and some were killed in Araouna sold like objects to either die in the sea or arrive in chains to work as slaves. This was followed some centuries later by the partition of Africa in the Berlin conference of 1884 when colonial powers shared our continent and plundered our resources: gold from Ghana the gold coast, ivory from the Ivory Coast or Côte D’Ivoire, uranium from Niger, copper from the Congo, timber from Cameroon, Gabon, and Congo, diamonds from South Africa and Namibia, and copper from Zambia! They even took the liberty to name our countries and referred to our continent as the ‘Dark Continent.’ You are all living witnesses of the scourge of colonisation; the coloniser came to our continent under the pretext that he was on a mission of civilisation. They came with the Bible in one hand and the gun in the other. Where our people refused to give in to their wishes, they used brute force to subdue them leaving thousands dead. For close to a century, they plundered the resources of our continent. Some colonisers adopted a divide and rule policy while others adopted a policy of assimilation, yet there were others who never considered us as human beings. To them, it was a matter of exterminating the African as they did to the American Indians and the Aborigines of Australia. All these had just one objective—plunder our resources.…

Today we are free! Oh, thank God we are free! We shall lay emphasis on the education of our children by building schools and colleges and social infrastructures. We shall make agriculture the base of our economy. The future of our economy lies in the exportation of raw materials for European industries. We shall develop agro-based industries because political independence without economic independence is meaningless. My government has initiated a five-year development plan, which will lead our country to its development. God bless Africa!"

The intentions of the newly independent African leaders were undoubtedly very good. What really went wrong? Were they poorly educated? Were they inexperienced politicians? Did they run short of resources or ideas to foster the development of their countries? Was there any struggle for power in the newly independent African states? Were these African leaders given the free mantle to rule or did they come under the influence of the former colonial empire? It is true that the first African leaders were not all university graduates; this was not only common to Africa because many European leaders at the time did not really need to acquire university education to become good leaders. The level of education could, therefore, not be the measuring rod. There were African leaders like Dr Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, or Chief Doctor Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria who were very well educated. They all had the interest of their people at heart. They embarked on the building of schools, colleges, and universities in their respective countries. Civil servants worked across borders in different African countries to foster the development of the continent, Ghanaians worked in Nigeria, and Senegalese did the same in Côte d’Ivoire.

Talking about experience, it will be wrong to say that these African politicians did not have the requisite experience to rule their countries. Just how experienced were European leaders who ruled their own countries? European countries were driven by frustration after the Second World War to grant independence to African countries. We saw European leaders who plunged the world into disaster and brought misery to their own people. Europe was a heap of rubble at the end of the Second World War. African leaders were as experienced as they needed to be. They took stock of the past of their countries, worked to solve the problems of illiteracy, poverty and disease, and had a vision for their people. But what went wrong? What really went wrong?

Africa is endowed with a lot of natural resources; it is completely wrong to refer to it as a poor continent. From Cape to Cairo, the continent is endowed with riches which accounted for more than 70 per cent of Europe’s source of raw materials even before the beginning of the twentieth century. Europe took cognizance of the fact that Africa was a very important source of raw materials for its industry. Consequently, the Europeans did not leave Africa bag and baggage. The French, for instance, signed doubtful security and economic agreements with their former colonies, which gave them access to the natural resources of these countries; they control the currency of these countries. In fact, the French held their former colonies by their balls. Britain and the rest of Europe were quick to come up with economic groupings, which defended their interests; it was a stranglehold on the continent. The consequence of this was that African countries produced a lot of natural resources with the risk of depleting most of these resources. They had no say in determining the prices of the raw materials they produced. This, undoubtedly, was to have dire consequences on their economies. In certain cases, it led to serious economic problems followed by political upheavals. We can, therefore, trace some of the earliest military coup d’états in Africa to the unfair world economic order in the 1960s and 1970s. There may be other causes to these coups, I must admit. Most of them were however, provoked by the deplorable economic situation in many of these African countries, poor governance, the ambition of the military and interference from the former colonial powers.

Because these raw materials are of tremendous importance to European industries, some European countries went as far as instigating social unrest in some African countries so as to implant puppet leaders, who would yield to their demands. This led to the era of coup sponsors in the continent. If Nigeria were to be taken as an example, this country was one of the world’s leading producers of some natural resources: palm oil, groundnuts, timber, oil, cotton, etc. Between 1965 and 1975, the country experienced nothing less than three coups and one of the bloodiest civil wars on the continent. The situation in Ghana was very similar. Indeed, each time Europe sneezed, Africa caught a cold, irrespective of the climatic conditions.

If Europe’s greed for natural resources accounted for a fair share of the woes of the continent, Africans themselves are not exempt from blame. In many of the independent African countries, many politicians wanted to enrich themselves and their family members to the detriment of the rest of the people. This caught the attention of the increasingly educated Africans. Political leaders realised that it was necessary to satisfy their entourage, members of their political party or the ruling junta, tribes’ men, and other influential members of the society. It is difficult to imagine a more dangerous situation in a continent with a multiplicity of tribes. The danger of tribalism cannot be overemphasized. It was one of the root causes of the civil war in Nigeria, when Colonel Odumegwu Emeka Ojukwu declared the secession of Biafra from the rest of Nigeria. It was ‘to save his people from persecution.’ It must be admitted that Ibo greed in Nigeria pushed the Ibos to monopolise some of the key positions in the country. Tribalism is also responsible for one of the greatest massacres, i dare say genocide in the Great Lakes region of the continent.

Is tribalism the only weakness of African leaders? Well I do not think so. Let us look at governance. At independence, no one in Africa heard anything about transparency international. As bribery and corruption grew beyond leaps and bounds, it became evident that some African countries were among the most corrupt in the world. We insist that Europe is partly responsible for Africa’s poor economic situation today, and the poor economic situation gave rise to bad governments and civil strife.

The overriding question is how do we get the continent out of this quagmire? There have been several suggestions; there are some who believe that Africa’s problems can only be solved by Africans themselves. I do not think these people have answered the question. Some say Europe and America should pay reparations for colonisation and slavery. I do not think this will solve Africa’s problem either; there are yet others who call for increased development aid for the continent. This is far from being a solution, if we consider the fact that development aid accounts for less than 0.005 per cent of the continent’s development.

From the way I see it, there can be no development without the will to develop. This must stem from good leadership. For a good leader to succeed, the grounds must be prepared to carry out his set objectives. There is a need to overhaul the administrative, traditional, educational, and social machinery everywhere on the continent. Every effort must be geared toward development. Africa does not lack resources. These resources must, however, be utilised judiciously for the continent’s development. Europe must cease to play a pretentious role, that of solving Africa’s problem through development aid while at the same time draining the continent of its only source of foreign exchange. Europe must desist from supporting corrupt African politicians, who serve Europe’s interest to the detriment of their own people. How do we explain the fact that some European countries and even the United States of America claim that they have a mission to promote democracy in the world, yet they extend the red carpet treatment to African dictators, who have been ruling and plundering the economies of their countries for more than twenty four or even thirty years?

Many Africans think the rise of China may work in their favour; this is wishful thinking. China needs raw materials from Africa just as the Europeans. Of course, they will compete for Africa’s diminishing raw materials, and if care is not taken, it will only give rise to more conflicts. China’s rapid expansion in the next ten years will require almost all of Africa’s natural resources; unfortunately, this must be shared by all the wolves. Perhaps China could propose fairer trade deals with African countries, but Africa must be able to come up with the right economic, political, and social solutions to its present problems.

Some of the consequences of the economic and political situation on the continent can be seen in the lives of the citizens of these countries. People are forced to flee their countries as a result of war, starvation, unemployment, tribalism, natural disaster, persecution, and brain drain. Yes, brain drain. It is common knowledge that Europe will implement a selective immigration policy, where only educated Africans will be allowed into Europe; thereby, depriving the continent of its skilled manpower. We know that America has been carrying out the same policy for many decades. I, therefore, cannot understand why Sarkozy’s proposal for France to adopt a selective immigration policy shocked so many people. He was simply trying to let people see what has been going on for several decades.

Europe is facing the spectre of a declining population and will need to turn to Africa or Eastern Europe to fill the gap. The question is, must it be the educated Africans? If all educated people left the continent, it would worsen the socio-economic situation of Africa and make no mistake about it, this will lead to more migrations towards Europe; this phenomenon has already started. If young Senegalese and Malians come up with a slogan ‘Europe or death,’ it is because they have been made to believe that Europe has the panacea to all their problems. Boatmen with overloaded wooden canoes, which are barely sea worthy, leave the coast of Mauritania and recently even the coast of Senegal for Spain. The Spanish government had in the past exerted a lot of pressure on Morocco and Libya, which were the main transit points for African immigrants, most of them, from Africa south of the Sahara. Overwhelmed by the situation, the same Spanish government regularised the situation of several thousands of illegal African immigrants. Many perished in the high seas and never got to Spain, some were alleged to have been killed by Moroccan and Libyan security forces. This is a continent with plenty of natural and human resources; a continent plundered by colonisation; a victim of the slave trade, this is a continent that is now a victim of neo-colonialism; a continent that is once again losing its sons and daughters- this time into an economic Diaspora through the Sahara and the Mediterranean.

II

A YOUNG MAN AGED ABOUT eighteen, thin, tall dark, and dressed in a pair of very old dirty and torn jean trousers and a tee shirt, whose original colour could not be determined with precision, entered the house at about 5.30 p.m. His hair was overgrown, unkempt, and his body was scaly and dirty. I thought I smelt something strange once he entered the house; I mean he came in with on odour. Frida and I raised our heads and looked at the strange figure.

He smiled and said, ‘Good afternoon!’

I thought a mad man wouldn’t be that civil. ‘I am Joe’s friend,’ he announced.

‘Hey! You mean Joe?’ Frida asked, reassured that she did not have to deal with a mad man in her parlour.

‘So you know Joe? Where is he? Where did you meet him? Is he dead?’ She asked the stranger all at the same time.’

‘Joe is my friend. We have been living together for the past six months, and he is alive and kicking. I just decided to come and see my old father in the village. I met a traveller who told me he was very sick, and I managed to raise transport money with the help of friends and sympathisers. I got to my village at Dikome Baliwe on Tuesday last week, and the first thing I saw was a mound of red soil in front of our compound and a crowd of people. He was buried a few hours before I got there.’

‘Rose! Rose! Come and greet Joe’s friend.’ Frida’s younger sister rushed into the house and stopped all of a sudden when she saw the strange figure.

‘Give him some food,’ Frida added then she turned to the young man and said, ‘Accept our sympathy.’

The young man swallowed the fufu and eru in record time. He was undoubtedly famished. It was a traditional meal made of cooked cassava that was pounded and made in lumps. It was eaten with some wild vegetable from the equatorial forest prepared with palm oil, prawns, and fish or meat. It is a very popular meal in Nigeria and Cameroon and some West and Central African countries.

He washed his hands and turned to Frida and said, ‘Sister, thank you!’

‘Thank God,’ was Frida’s reply. ‘Now that you have eaten, tell me about my brother. Where did you people meet? You see, there is something that I cannot understand about you young people nowadays. You abandon your homes and disappear and come back just to learn that your parents are dead. You are quite courageous, and you even managed to come when you heard your father was sick, even though you didn’t meet him alive. May his soul rest in peace! As for my brother Joe, even if he hears that the entire family is dead, I don’t think it will even bother him.’

‘He is not that bad! He wrote you a letter.’

‘What! Joe wrote me a letter? Okay, let me see it.’

Dear sister,

I am somewhere in the East province of Cameroon, looking for a job. I have not been able to find any; I manage to find food to eat, and at times we go for days without food. I do all sorts of odd jobs that come my way, things I never imagined I could do. I would have come back to Limbe, but the truth is I do not want to come back home empty handed. A white man has come to Bertoua and is planning to start a football club; I hope to play in the team as soon as the next sports season begins. Please send me some money through my friend Samson. He is very honest and will give me the money.

Greet the rest of the family for me.

Your brother,

Joe.

‘Yes, I knew it! If he managed to write a few sentences, it should be to ask for money. For over six months, he simply disappeared from the house without telling anyone where he was going. Now that he needs money, he has remembered he has a sister. This is just bad luck! Some other women have younger brothers who play football in Europe and send back home millions, but my own brother wants to be a football star in a village where there will be no spectators to clap for him. How can he even play football with an empty stomach? Tell me, do you also play football? You look like someone who can only score a goal in the graveyard.’

‘No, sister. I can play. In fact, I am the goal keeper.’

‘You are indeed the funniest looking goalkeeper I ever saw. I pray you never catch for the indomitable lions or else fifteen million Cameroonians may suffer from cardiac arrest.’ They all laughed as if they had known each other for the past ten years.

‘You see, sister, let me tell you a little about myself. I come from a polygamous…’

‘Stop! Poly what? You see, Samson, we are all descendants of polygamous homes at one stage or another in our family lineage. In the past, it was a pride for our grandparents to have more than one wife; a man’s wealth was measured in terms of wives and children he had. These children helped their parents in the plantations, and there was an increase in production. Today you abandon your father and want to blame it on polygamy. Do not get me wrong, I am one of those who hold that polygamy no longer has any place in our society. It is that part of our tradition that should disappear and give way to modernism or monogamy. Even as an unmarried woman, I acknowledge the fact that not all women will find husbands, but I think polygamy is out of place in today’s society.’

‘Yes, sister I just wanted to tell you that my mother died when I was very young, so my father was absent from home most of the time. My step mother did not like me, so after my primary education, I started fending for myself because no one could pay for my secondary education. My father was just a poor farmer. In the past, he sold fifteen bags of cocoa every year and paid fees for all his children; he said the government reduced the price of cocoa because the white man did not pay well, so many farmers had to abandon their cocoa plantations, and the entire village became poor. It is same for coffee, rubber, and cotton producers.’

‘My dear brother’s friend, or Samson, as he wrote in his letter, you are right. I followed the news this morning, and I learnt that some African countries which produce cotton in the cotton belt region like, Burkina Faso, Benin, Mali, and Senegal are trying to make their voices heard in the World Trade Organisation by exerting pressure on greater powers to reduce agricultural subsidies to their farmers.’

‘Sister, I do not understand the meaning of subsidies.’

‘Well, it simply means that rich countries give money to their farmers so that they can produce more goods like cotton. And because they get money from their governments, their cost of production is reduced, so they can sell at a lower price than your father, who used a mere cutlass and a hoe to cultivate the same crops. He got no subsidies from the government of this country while the American farmer has been given a lot of money to buy sophisticated machines and produces more.’

‘Ah! Now I understand! I think we both agree that if some of us are not going to school today it may be because of these subsidies. At first, our mothers thought our father sold all the cash crops and bought beer with the money or gave part of it to his girlfriends, but if you come to my village, most of the young children stopped going to school because their parents could no longer afford to pay their fees. While in the East Province, we saw some other children from Gabon, the Central African Republic and the Congo. They all complained their parents could no longer send them to school because of the low prices of cash crops in the world market. The question I ask myself is, for how long will this continue and what is the future of Africa’s children? Why can’t African countries decide on how much to sell their own products?’ There is the story of the African farmer who did not even know what the cocoa he produced on his farm was used for. He was greatly amazed when a journalist gave him a bar of chocolate and told him it was derived from his cocoa.

‘I am happy you have asked the question yourself. When you hear that there is war in an African country, try to understand that the root cause may be that frustration caused by the low prices of these crops in the world market. Yes, because it leads to urban migration, and when people are not satisfied in the big towns, it results in wars or further migration towards Europe.’

‘Sister, thank you for the lesson. You should be teaching Political Agricultural Migratory Economics in a university. I must go now.’

‘Shut up! Don’t insult me.’ She responded laughingly.

She rushed into her bedroom took her handbag and took out ten thousand CFA francs from her purse; she handed the money to the young man and said, ‘Give this to Joe. He says he trusts you, but I don’t trust anybody.’ She gave an extra two thousand francs to Samson to supplement his transport.

‘Tell him to write so that we should at least know where he is and what he is doing so that if anything happens to him, we shall know where to look for him. He should not only write when he needs money. Strange things happen every day: accidents, deaths, murder, war, and diseases, and now we hear of terrorism. You people must be very careful. Do not look for trouble, and if things don’t work, for heavens’ sake, come back home. No one can run away from his own shadow, there is no place like home!’

‘Thank you, sister. I will give him the money and the message,’ he said.

‘Thank God.’ She replied.

III

SAMSON HAD NOT EATEN SO well for quite a long time. He suddenly felt as if his stomach was going to give way. He wondered what would happen if his stomach suddenly opened, and all the food he had eaten came out. That would be a terrible mixture of starch from cassava, palm oil, meat, and strong green vegetables! He tried to imagine what would be the situation in the days ahead then he smiled to himself. He crossed the road from Bota quarters, admired the tall trees around the Botanical garden, and saw some people reading in the garden as the stream flowing close to the garden splashed on the rocks as it made its way to the Atlantic Ocean.

‘This is the nicest thing the coloniser did in this town—the Botanical garden,’ He said to himself.

He arrived the Limbe motor park and boarded a vehicle for Bertoua. It was a night journey. The vehicle meant for eighteen passengers was carrying twenty-six people. No one dared to complain, for it was the only bus on that route at that hour, and if any