By Unoma N. Azuah
Friday, May23, 2014.
Editor's note: You can also read Part 4 of this story at this link - http://thenewblackmagazine.com/view.aspx?index=3299
A few
hours into the night ride, a grinding sound woke me up from sleep. Our bus had
developed a problem. It clattered to a stop and we were all asked to alight
from the bus. It was pitch-black and I shivered lightly. Perhaps, it was a
shudder of fear or from the cool temperature. It was surprising that the
atmosphere was cool when it was blistering hot a few hours ago. Mothers rushed
to the edge of the sand dunes, spread their wraps and laid their babies. Some
sat on the sand, while others stood and lingered around the road, but moved
away when they saw the bright lights of approaching solitary cars or trucks. After making a few frantic calls, the two
drivers and their assistants stayed inside the bus and slept. It was not quite
long after I sat on the sand, I felt a midge sting; it felt like a sting of a
red ant. Afraid to be beaten again, I stood up. When I got tired of standing, I
laid my bag on the sand and sat on it. We were informed that we wouldn’t be
able to go any further until we could get help at dawn. So many thoughts ran
through my mind. What if a desert hyena came after us? What if bandits attacked
us? I waved the thoughts away but for some reason, the darkness was
threatening. For no reason, I found myself sobbing. It didn’t last for more than thirty minutes
before I started nodding off in sleep. I just had to force myself to sit on the
sand, with my legs pulled up to support my head. It took day light too long to
arrive. It was the sound of the drivers banging away at the bus that woke me.
They fixed it themselves. The problem was the throttle.
The roads were constantly going uphill; it
became quite obvious that we were climbing a high terrain. When we eventually
seemed to have leveled out on flat scenery, it was littered with corpses of
dead bloated animals. There were a million plastic bags floating all over. It
was a surreal scene. It was either that environmental sanitation was not taken
seriously or the floating debris came flowing from afar to concentrate at a
particular plain. The dead animals might have strayed or wandered off to their
deaths. A few hundred miles into our
drive, we got to a customs post. Two cruel looking Arab men with rifles waved
at our bus to stop. One came into the bus and looked at our faces and then at
the corners of our seats as if we might have something hidden at the corners.
Another came in and asked us where we were coming from. The driver responded
for us. They didn’t take much of our
time and we were on our way again. Between reading, watching sand dunes and
sand hills, I dozed most of the time. I did grab my water intermittently.
Before I knew it nightfall came. It was a relief to finally pull into
Nouakchott. It had a city feel to it,
but it was nothing like Lagos. It looked more like a small part of Lagos, say
Yaba. Passengers were eager to step out. The Ghanaian female baker gave us her
number and told us to call when we were settled. She was willing to show us
around town. I was not sure that we were going to take that offer. It would
have been nice to be shown around town, but our eyes were towards the Western
Sahara. We hugged and said our goodbyes.
We waved down a taxi and headed to the Catholic
mission in the heart of town. The parish priest there was the friend of our
priest friend in Nouadhibou. He was expecting us. When our taxi pulled up to
the gate, the walls of the parish was towering. An elderly dark skinned man
opened the gate and told us that the priest had been expecting us. He was not
around; he was conducting mass. We were showed to our room among the long lined
house of guest rooms. It was a neat and cozy room. We hurriedly took a shower
and were directed to the kitchen where a meal was already waiting for us. When the priest showed up in the morning, he
was quite pleasant and inquired about our long trip. He said he came in late
because of errands and parish visits, so he didn’t want to disturb us. I would
have mistaken him for a Nigerian but he said he was from some country in West
Africa, Gambia, I think he said. He couldn’t have breakfast with us because he
had to hurry to another mission. At the
dining table for breakfast, a young handsome looking dark skinned young man
served us. He spoke little English but had fluent French.
After a sumptuous breakfast of French bread,
tea, eggs and fruits, we were told that buses to Nourdhibou didn’t leave on
that day. So, we decided to explore the biggest market in the city. I could
have mistaken the market for Tejuosho market except that there were more Arabs
there than in Lagos. The people were either dark skinned or fair skinned with
curly hair. As we got out of the taxi, we were attracted by a pile of beautiful
bright fabric. We walked up to the man selling them and started to ask for
price, all in the French we knew. We
didn’t quite conclude and another pile of clothing called our attention. Before
we could get to it an average height Arab man walked towards us. He spoke English.
It was as if he imposed it upon us to be our escort. He took us around
different stores, advised us on what to get and what not to get and took us to
the stores he considered the best. I kept wondering why he was so generous with
his time. I couldn’t guess because his assistance didn’t end there. When we ran
out of money and needed an ATM, he took us to almost all the banks close to the
market. He must have spent close to four hours with us; trying to make sure we
found an ATM that could accept a visa card. It was an ordeal but he stuck with
us throughout: a priceless side to the Mauritania hospitality. It was later
that I discovered that he was a boss with his own stores. He liked helping
tourists, while his boys tended to his stores.
When we got back to the market, we were acting
like kids in a toy store. There was so much to choose from. In the middle of
haggling over the price of a tunic outfit, the man who was showing us the
different colors to choose from, abandoned us and his store and took off. I
thought a fire had broken out somewhere and he was running to someone’s rescue
until I heard the prayer cry from a nearby Muezzin. The market was like an
abandoned homestead. Nobody tended to the stores. Apparently, they had no cases
of theft. We waited till we were done,
then concluded our transactions. We lingered and walked through a number of
jewelry and leather slip-on stalls before heading back to the Catholic parish.
The kitchen help had prepared and served our lunch. It started to feel like a
real vacation. A little bit before evening approached we decided to look around
and try out the restaurants. There was nothing close to a Nigerian restaurant,
so we settled for a French-Morocco restaurant. The owner was a French lady and
the items in the menu were quite pricey. It might have been worth it when I
considered the well-dressed black young men hovering over us for every need we
had, from scooping to taking away our used glasses. They might as well have fed
us.
On our way back to the parish, we stumbled upon
what we’d call a juju object. It was bigger than any juju object I had ever
seen. It looked like a humongous animal trap, cluttered with cowries, palm oil,
feathers but I couldn’t keep looking to see all the objects attached or poured
on it. I hurried away from it but my
travel mate had the nerve to take a picture of it. Just before we opened the
gate of the parish to enter, I saw an average height dark-skinned young lady
hawking T-shirts. She looked so much like, Kike, a friend of mine in Lagos. I
was almost sure she was a Nigerian. We
exchanged cursory glances and moved on.

Trapped
in the fringes of their dreams: Nourdhibou.
Early the next day, we were on our way to
Nourdhibou. The mini bus was full to the brim but not as packed as the long buses
we had taken previously. It was to be a seven hour drive to our destination. We
moved across the same terrain, the same landscape we had seen for hours and
days. A few hours into the drive, the
driver pulls away from the road and swings into the sandy desert land. I looked
around the faces of the other passengers, everything seemed calm until after
about a half a mile away from the main road, he stopped and hopped out of the
bus. The passenger’s side of the door was flung open and everyone seemed to be hurrying
out and running deeper into the desert.
My first thought was, bandits! It had to be arm-robbers. I ran even faster. They were mostly just men
running, though there was only one other woman and my travel partner, in the
bus. I was the only woman running with the men. One of the men slowed his pace
and tried to stop me by waving angrily at me. I ignored him and continued
scampering along.
Suddenly, they all started kneeling down. I stood transfixed. It was their prayer time.
Embarrassed, I sauntered back to the bus. It was not long; they were done and
returned to the bus. We pulled off. The pulling in and out of desert sands for
prayers became a routine I got used to. They must have prayed more than a dozen
times in that singular journey. As if that
was not enough, a loquacious Arab man sitting next to us in the bus wouldn’t
stop talking. He shared that his father was from Mauritania and his mother from
Morocco. As a professional musician, he played a special musical instrument
with a contemporary Arab band and they traveled around Europe most of the
time. He went on to say that he dreaded
dating European women because they were needy and clingy. They fall in love too
hard and they wouldn’t share their men. His last affair with a European woman
was abandoned in the middle of winter because the lady wanted him just for
herself. She had tried to convince him to divorce his wives. All she talked
about was love. The man went on and on.
His two wives lived together in a two storey building. One lived below and the
other on top. He was quiet for a few minutes until we passed a herd of camels
sashaying through the desert. He looked
at them, smiled and said, “You ladies should try camel milk. It’s an
Aphrodisiac. Men can go days on end once they drink camel milk.” He ended with
a wide grin. We thanked him for the enlightening information, but he offered to
give us our first taste of camel milk. We just ignored him since we couldn’t
muster up the nerve to tell him to shut up!
A few
hours later, he started snoring. Another passenger in the bus asked us where we
were coming from. When we told him, he shared that he had been to Lagos for a
non-governmental organization (NGO) workshop. He worked with NGOS around West
and North Africa. We were to call him as soon as we got to Nourdhibou because
he had offered to show us around. He
could have passed for an average West African man, but he said he was from
Mauritania. Nightfall came and we decided to close our eyes and sleep, since
there was not much to be seen or admired in the desert. The nap was, however,
interrupted when we were stopped by screams and threats. The driver had sped past a customs post. He reversed and acted as if he didn’t realize
that he had to stop at the post. We pulled into their vicinity; they searched
our belongings and then marched us into their office. Everybody else was
cleared quickly except for us, the Nigerians. Inside their tiny office were a
stack of photo albums. One after the other, we were queried. When it was my
turn, they flashed their torch-lights into my face and pointed at the pictures
of run-away women in their tattered albums, then asked if it was me. One of the
women was older and had only one eye. Yet, they repeatedly asked if that was
me. I didn’t want to be rude, so I kept saying “non!” I don’t think it was French they spoke; it
was not English either. They told the
NGO man who spoke fluent English to let us know that it is women like us that
run away and become prostitutes. We nodded our heads. Next they checked our
passports and asked where we were headed, we told them. The questions were
endless: what were we going to do at Nourdhibou? Who were we going to see? Why?
How long have we known the person that invited us? The questions didn’t stop. Finally, they released us.
We got into Nourdhibou at about 9pm that night.
It looked like a deserted city from the little we could see of the dimly lit
stores. My friend, Father Jerome was already there waiting for us. It felt as
if we were home. We drove to his parish location which included a church that
was a dome on top of a hill. A few feet away from the small church was a long
house with separate rooms. We couldn’t
see much of the place that night; we were too tired to take a tour. So we had a
quick dinner, took a shower and went to bed.
We woke up the next day eager to inspect the
area and to meet people. From the front
door of his house, I could see the convent he had mentioned to us. Three Indian
Reverend Sisters who were teachers lived there. Beside their convent was an
elementary school where they taught to the locals and mostly immigrant
children. Beyond the convent was a gas
station, and beside it was a major road.
Father Jerome is the parish priest of the Catholic mission in
Nourdhibou. Part of his ministry is to cater to stranded immigrants by seeking
funding which he uses to create vocational and craft training for them. A Chicago Public Radio called WBEZ 91. 5
described him as a “Nigerian priest who's trying to educate the immigrants on
the dangers of the [sea] voyage [to Europe] and give them tools to find a
better life back in their native countries.”
Gradually we started meeting the immigrants.
Their stories were awe-striking as well as tragic. One of them, a lady, happily
got married to a man who claimed to be a soccer player in Europe. So, after
their wedding, her husband informed her family that he was taking her with him
to Europe. They were happy for
them. However, they ended up in
Mauritania, Nouakchott where they were trapped. The man was not a footballer in
Europe. He was trying to find a way to
Europe. When none of them could find a job for sustenance, he convinced his
wife to have sex with other men in exchange for money. Even when he took all monies from her, he
still accused her of enjoying the act. Then he would beat her, yet he didn’t
stop using her for money. They had gotten so desperate for money that she
didn’t mind any kind of sex, even unsafe sex just to make the money they needed
until a friend in Nourdhibou helped her escape from the man’s grip. She joined
her in Nourdhibou. There she settled into a life of cooking and ran a small
restaurant. We visited her restaurant. It was one room which served as her
kitchen, her bed room and her restaurant. She had used a large curtain to
demarcate the bedroom from the kitchen and the tables for eating. During our
visit to her place, we encouraged her to return to Nigeria but she said she
could not afford the fare. So we
promised to get the money together.
Before we could fulfill that promise Father Jerome raised the money for
her and she returned to Nigeria. Two weeks after her return to Nigeria, she
died of complications from AIDS.

The writer (right) mingling with West African immigrants
Another immigrant had gone as far as Spain and
made some money, but he was caught with drugs during a raid in his neighborhood
while in Spain. He was deported to Morocco, from where he escaped to Mauritania
because he didn’t want to return to Nigeria. He confessed to dealing drugs and
being deported a multiple times, yet each time he changed his passport and
returned to Spain. He said that his
intention was to go back to Spain and find a decent job and stay out of
trouble.
Another immigrant said he had borrowed so much
money from home in Nigeria that he would not be able to face his family and
those he owed. You would rather die than face the shame. He sustained himself
as a barber.
A good number of the women were sex workers.
Unfortunately, some of them were often raided, attacked and raped by the same
police that raid them. Sometimes, they were ganged raped. In some cases, some
of the Arab men that patronize them don’t pay them and threaten to deport them
if they made any fuss. What some do was to change the money they made into
dollars, and send it back home to Nigeria to give their families the impression
that they were/are in Europe, working.
Their daily schedule included watching Nollywood movies from morning
till they had to ply their wares at about 7pm till dawn. After their night
work, they ate, slept and then watched Nollywood movies till it was time for
work. Some of them were high on drugs. Perhaps, it was their way of coping with
the harsh reality they had to deal with.
The Catholic mission provides safe spaces where
they could relax, use as therapy, have some form of respite and be nostalgic
about home. For instance, I witnessed as they re-created church services with
popular Igbo and Yoruba gospel songs. When I closed my eyes for a minute as
some of them sang, I thought I was in an Igbo village attending a church
service. They brought ‘home’ with them. Drops of tears fall down my cheeks.
Their sonorous voices captured the pain and travails of their journeys.
A few days into our stay there, Father Jerome
organized an event to create a platform where my travel partner and I could
talk to them about the dangers of attempting to reach Europe through the sea
and why it is important to consider establishing oneself at home and exploring
other options. As we spoke, and I looked
into their faces, they seemed detached.
But, we continued the conversation beyond the platform of speech giving
and advise doling. We continued to speak to them one-on-one, but they were
still withdrawn. It felt as if we were judging them.
The next day, we decided to do something
different, a walk, a restaurant visit or a visit to the beach for a swim. We
opted for going to the beach. When we got there, I wore my black shorts and a
pink tank-top because I knew I didn’t want to swim. I was eager to see and
touch this ocean that is about 600-700 seas miles to Spain. It was
intimidating, deep and blue; it was unlike any ocean I had ever seen. There was
something fierce about this North Atlantic body of water. I was deep in my
reverie when my travel mate pulled off her long gown, revealing her bikini. It
was a normal routine for people who were headed to the beach, or so we thought
until she waded her way into the deep ocean to swim. Out of nowhere, a group of
men both young and adults gathered closer around the shoreline and started
yelling and staring at her. Maybe they were not used to women in bikini
splashing into the ocean to swim. It all seemed to make sense because, there
were no Mauritanian women swimming.
Instead, they lingered a few feet away from the shoreline admiring
swimmers while the wind flirted with their hijabs. Most of them wore black. I was worried for my
friend. For a moment, I thought the excited men would dive into the sea and
make their way to attack or hurt her. Nothing happened. They just yelled and
cheered at her and excitedly beckoned at his friends to join them and watch
what was supposedly a spectacle. Because she was mostly under water as she
swam, their curiosity died down. When
she was done swimming, I pushed my way into the restive sea to give her a large
towel to cover herself. While she sun-dried herself, my eyes fell upon a group
of children playing soccer. I joined them and played for a few minutes. They
were more taken in by the fact that I could play than the game itself. I showed off the little dribbling and
shooting skills I knew. Each dribble and shot was punctuated with an excited
shout or screech. The kids were mostly black kids, perhaps, the children of
West African immigrants. A couple of Arab kids stood around and watched. It was fun.
But, our trip to the beach was ruined. When we
returned to our trucks to go back to the mission, we realized that we had been
robbed. All the items we left at the back of the truck like shoes, slippers and
water containers were gone. We looked around distraught, hoping to get some
kind of concern or sympathy from the crowd milling around. We were ignored, so
we headed back to the mission distraught.
However, it was not too long; a family from the Gambia invited us to
their child-naming ceremony. We used the opportunity to see more of the city.
Half of the time, the neighborhoods looked like an unfinished construction
site. Except for a few beautiful
buildings with fences, most of the houses were run-down. At the venue of the
naming ceremony, the place was abuzz with life. Arabs kids were thrilled by the
music and dance that was going. They swayed to the music in clumsy movements.
It was obvious that the Gambians brought life and thrill into their
neighborhood and into their lives. Inside the house where the gathering was
taking place, there was food everywhere even when there were not enough seats.
A lot of the West African immigrant men and women were at the party. They had a
bond and they had made a life for themselves. A number of the men worked at the
docks and were paid for cleaning out fish. Some of the women were cooks, while
some others sold food items. It may not
have been the kind of life they would have wanted, but it was a life
nonetheless. We ate, drank, danced and conversed. After the party, laughed and
joked about how the immigrants made their neighborhood livable. Besides their
music, everything and everywhere else around them seemed like a dull
trance-like existence. Gradually, the party came to an end.

For many immigrant there is a very dangerous sea journey to Spain
As soon as we got back to the mission with
Father Jerome, we got a call from our NGO friend from Nouakchott. He was to
come with a taxi to pick us up and take us round town. In no time, he appeared
and we were glad to drive with him. Our first port of call was a luxurious
hotel perched right near the north-Atlantic ocean. It was a breathtaking sight.
We sat at the ground porch of the hotel and could almost scoop some of the
water of the ocean. Moist sea winds
caressed our faces. We drank in the glory as the deep blue sea lapped and
crashed into the barricaded wall of the hotel. We could have lived there at that
spot near the ocean for the rest of our lives. But, we had other places to see.
We toured the ground floor of the hotel. It was strangely quiet. They didn't
seem to have any guests at that time. At a corner was a glass wardrobe that
contained West African art work, beads and jewelry. I thought it strange that a
Mauritanian hotel would display in its hotel West African items. Though
Mauritania pulled out of ECOWAS, they are still considered a part of West
Africa. This is in spite of the fact that their border in the north stretched
as far as the Western Sahara. Also, that they shared borders with Mali and
Senegal justified their display of West African art works and fabric. Hence,
both countries likely share cultural similarities. Nevertheless, I did expect
to see more of a North African influence. When we left the hotel, it was a
thrill to stumble upon camels strutting across a rail track. We paused, watched
and took pictures.
We arrived at the entrance of Mauritania's
military base. There were about six soldiers with guns guarding the base. The
men who were strolling around the gate were black, but the one military man
inside the post who was barking his orders at the black soldiers was light
skinned. It had almost become a trend I observed but maybe I was misreading
innocent situations. The light skinned Arabs tended to be in charge while the
dark skinned ones took orders and obeyed as instructed. The light skinned man
must have told them not to let us come any closer because as soon as he was
done giving his orders, the two black men yelled at us to stop. Their guns were
raised. Our NGO friend tried to let them know that we were tourist from Nigeria
and that we were exploring the country for our reportage. They were not
interested. With deep frowns, they waved their guns at us to step back. Our NGO
friend was embarrassed. He profusely apologized to us. We told him that it was
not his fault at all.
We rushed out of the place and went to a
restaurant in town. I had forgotten all about flies until we sat at a vacant
table. The whole table was full of agitated flies. I shoved and slapped and
pushed my chair away. The flies barely noticed that I was doing anything. We
looked around for the third time anticipating that somebody was coming to take
our orders. At last a tall bearded Arab man asked what we wanted. When we told
him, he informed us that it might take a while to be ready. Simultaneously, we
stood up. I grabbed a bottle of Fanta and we hastened away. The place was known
for their shawarma. Our NGO friend had a meeting to attend. So, we agreed to
meet on another date.
At the mission, we met Father Jerome cleaning
the parish’s library and re-stocking books. He shared that he wanted to build
the library so that immigrants can make better use of it. He then took us to a
computer laboratory where there were a number of computers. It was a computer
training center. His intention was to expand it and involve more people in
computer training skills. The last place we toured was the graveyard of
immigrants. He said that often the corpses of immigrants were brought to him
after they've been washed ashore. He did his best to give them a decent burial
for the repose of their souls. He recounted the story of some immigrants aboard
a ship, on the deck. They had been smuggled into the ship for a fee, and were
headed to Spain. Dolphins started following the ship. The captains of the ship
got scared and told the ladies that they were about to bring them bad luck
because the dolphins followed them dedicatedly. The ladies insisted on their
innocence but the captains threw them into the sea. It was later that somebody
explained to Father Jerome that when dolphins sense that humans are distress,
they tend to trail them to help.
Eventually, it was time for us to take off and
return to Nigeria. We were to drive past Mauritania into the Senegal-Gambia
region and push towards Dakar. We encountered butchers on road sides but this
time it was camel meat they sold. Just as we patronize butchers for cow and
goat meat in Nigeria, Mauritanians line up for camel meat. It didn't look or
sound tasteful.
As we pushed south, it was interesting to notice
how the landscape changed from dry land to a near tropical stretch. As we drove
through the southern plain of Mauritania, zipping through their game reserve,
the variety of birds and animals we saw were a feast to behold. They ranged
from wild ducks, bright birds, to grunting hogs. It was when the tires of our
truck got stuck in the mud, right in the middle of a water-logged terrain that
we came upon a frantic hog. It was then we realized that it was the kind of hog
that hunted humans. Some say that when such hogs were determined to eat a
human, even when such a human climbs up a tree, the hog uproots the tree just
to get at him or her. We panicked as we thought about the idea of being mauled
by a wild hog. Father Jerome stomped on
the speed pedal of the truck but the tires revved up and dug even deeper into
the marshland. One of us must have whispered a prayer because as the hog raced
towards our truck, instantly the truck moved forward and we sped off.
We continued
through the water-logged plains of southern Mauritania into Senegal, Dakar. It
was quite a feast to gaze at the endless expanse of their body of water. There
were gazelles prancing around for frogs and water insects. There were long
streams and what looked like rice plantations. Another hog almost gave us a hot
chase when our jeep almost lost its grip for the second time on a marshy land.
That was indeed a wild hog infested swamp.
By late
night we were at Dakar. Too tired to lug some of our luggage upstairs where we
were to sleep, we left some of our items in the truck. The next morning, we
discovered that the truck had been broken into. All the laptops gone, some
purses and bags were gone. We were in shock. When we recovered somewhat from
the devastation, we went to the police station to give a report. I couldn't be
more depressed when at the police station, there were about a dozen young
Nigerian men arrested and detained. Their crime? They came all the way from
Nigeria to Senegal, trying to find a way to Europe without passports. All they
had were identity cards. I couldn't stand the way they were being humiliated as
the Senegalese police eagerly prepared the paper work for their deportation to
Nigeria. I was so ready to take the next flight to back to Lagos. The near ten
days road trip in an attempt to see, feel, taste and touch what West African
immigrants encounter in their attempt to reach Europe through North Africa was
quite a challenge. It was, however, a revealing and an enriching experience.
Unoma
Nguemo Azuah is an award-winning Nigerian writer and an important new
voice in African literature. She holds an MFA in Poetry and Fiction from
the Virginia Commonwealth University and has edited literary
publications in Nigeria and abroad. She currently teaches at an American
university.