Agadez is lawless in other ways, too, as Mimi well understands. She is a woman in her 20s from Nigeria, the vast country south of Niger. Three years ago she and her three sisters were trafficked into sexual slavery. Now Mimi is a whistleblower in Agadez. The city was for centuries a hub of the caravan trade across the Sahara; recently it has become better known as a staging post for African migrants heading for Europe.
Mimi has been trying to catch the worst of the people-smugglers: the ones who force young women into prostitution. Her story is a snapshot of how ordinary, decent people try to cope in a region rocked by political violence, and preyed on by criminals who take advantage of the chaos. On July 26th the democratically elected president of Niger was ousted in a coup, the upshot of which was still unclear as this article was published.
We met Mimi in May in a quiet courtyard in Agadez. Small birds fluttered on the branches of a climbing plant and a high gate shielded Mimi, who was wearing a pink veil, from prying eyes. She was careful about her security even before the coup. “If these people [the smugglers] know you are their enemy, they are going to target you,” she said. (Mimi is not her real name.)
Agadez was for centuries a hub of the caravan trade across the Sahara; recently it has become better known as a staging post for African migrants heading for Europe
She has sources in the “ghetto”, as locals call the places in Agadez where would-be migrants stay before hitching an illicit ride across the desert. They tip her off when they know that a group of young women is about to be loaded onto a trafficker’s truck. Mimi alerts the police, who often catch the smugglers in the act. She said she has thwarted the passage of dozens of trucks and put several traffickers behind bars. The rescued women never find out who has saved them.
Mimi can penetrate criminal networks from Nigeria that the local police in Niger cannot since they don’t know the right people or speak the right languages. A gang may straddle several countries but be composed entirely of people from the same town back in Nigeria, who know and trust each other. Victims may be passed from one Nigerian smuggler to another as they cross multiple borders.
For Mimi, the fight against traffickers is personal. In 2019 one of her sisters met a plausible young businessman in a nightclub. They started to date. He told her he could help her get to Europe, where with her skills as a hairstylist she would “make it big” in no time. All the sisters – three in their 20s, one still a teenager – were short of cash; Mimi had dropped out of university for lack of it. They asked the man if they could all go together. He seemed to think that was an excellent idea.
The sisters snuck off without telling their parents. Their journey was hair-raising. The first smuggler’s car stopped in the bush, and the women were told to ride on the back of motorbikes. They raced across what the riders described as dangerous terrain, full of bandits, and sneaked across their first international border, into Niger. They travelled by night, usually by bus, from safe house to safe house. In Agadez, the smugglers took their phones “for safekeeping”. The women were told they would get them back when they reached Libya.
Mimi and her sisters were packed into a truck with other young women – perhaps 30 of them in total – each one squeezed between the legs of the woman behind her. The drivers careered recklessly across the roadless desert. “They were high on drugs,” reckoned Mimi, but they knew where they were going. The days were “very, very hot – oh my God!”; the nights were miserably cold.
Mimi said she has stopped traffickers’ trucks and put several people-smugglers behind bars. The rescued women never find out who has saved them
After six days they arrived in Libya. A soldier at the border took a wad of cash from the driver and waved them through. At another roadblock, soldiers gave them the choice of paying 100 Libyan dinars each or being raped. Mimi and her sisters found the money; some of the other travellers didn’t have enough.
At their destination, the traffickers told Mimi and her sisters that they each owed 20,000 Libyan dinars (about $4,000) for the ride, and would have to pay it off by selling sex. At first, they refused, but after days of beatings “we finally gave up,” said Mimi.
“It was terrible,” she recalled. The four of them were sold to a pimp, a tall man with dreadlocks who, like them, was from Nigeria. He was arrogant, fond of boasting that he knew he was going to hell. One day, two of Mimi’s sisters were told to pack their bags: they had been sold to another pimp. “They can sell you like chickens. They can sell you ten times. Sold, sold, sold, sold,” said Mimi, shivering at the memory.
She added that “the men in Libya don’t like using protection”, so the pimps would give the women a pregnancy test each month. If pregnant, they would be forced to go to a backstreet abortionist, whose fees would be added to their “debt”. This happened to one of Mimi’s sisters.
Eventually, all four sisters escaped. Mimi did so with the help of a boyfriend. (He helped her pay off her “debt”, at which point the pimp gave her slightly more freedom to move around, and the two of them promptly fled town.) Two of her sisters were sprung by a client who took pity on them. When bandits broke into the house where the other sister was being held, she fled during the confusion.
Free at last, all the sisters returned to Nigeria except Mimi. She went to live in Agadez, hoping to save other young women from suffering what she suffered.
The journey across the desert has always been dangerous, especially in war-shredded Libya. (Libyans have “guns like [other people have] cellphones”, observed Mimi.) But a law passed in Niger in 2015 exacerbated the risks. Under pressure from European governments that wanted to crack down on migration, Niger banned anyone from helping migrants move north from Agadez, “directly or indirectly”. Without this pressure, Niger would have had no reason to pass such a law. The civilian government that was overthrown on July 26th depended on international donors to boost its meagre budget and support its army, so it did the Europeans’ bidding.
Naturally, the law reduced the official tally of migrants heading north from Agadez – something European governments notched up as a win. Whether it cut the true number is hard to say, since what used to be an open exodus was then conducted in the shadows. For Agadez, however, the new law was a “disaster”, said local officials. It criminalised one of the city’s main industries: sheltering, feeding, supplying and transporting migrants.
“They can sell you like chickens. They can sell you ten times. Sold, sold, sold, sold”
One of the law’s purported aims was to protect migrants from exploitation. Instead, it made them more vulnerable. By banning drivers in Agadez from ferrying people north, it forced migrants to use smugglers; by setting up roadblocks on good roads, it forced them to take detours over the sand. “That law is not helping people at all,” complained Mimi. Many more people ended up dying in the desert, she said, and the traffickers “used it to make more money”. Their fees tripled, according to one estimate.
No one knows how the coup will affect migration. One of the first acts of the officers who seized power was to close Niger’s borders. This is surely a temporary measure. Indeed, since the military regime is not recognised by European donors and cannot expect significant aid, it has little reason to obstruct the movement of migrants towards Europe.
Then again, the coup may be reversed. Ecowas, an organisation of West African states, told the putschists to relinquish power by August 6th or face consequences, which could mean military intervention. That deadline has passed. People are keeping their heads down and waiting to see what happens. If neighbouring countries such as Nigeria send troops to Niger, things could quickly get ugly for any citizen of those countries – including Mimi. “We all are in a panic,” she messaged us after the coup. She said she was listening to the news every hour. If ecowas sends in troops “it’s gonna end badly,” she predicted.
The replacement of an elected government with an obviously illegitimate one adds to an atmosphere of lawlessness that has been spreading around the region. The collapse of Libya and the implosion of Mali destabilised Niger (as well as their other neighbours). If Niger slides into chaos, too, more people will want to emigrate, and smugglers will find ways to help – and exploit – them.
Back in May, Mimi told me about one of her recent cases. The Libyan government had deported five Nigerian sex slaves as far as Agadez, and their trafficker, a woman, was trying to coerce them to go back to Libya. She had made them undergo a witchcraft ceremony to scare them. “She was telling them, if you don’t go back, you will [be cursed and] die,” recalled Mimi. A contact in the house where the women were staying alerted her. She told the police, and the trafficker is now in jail, she said.
Not everyone who abets illegal migration is a villain. Many are the same drivers and landlords who used to provide services for migrants legally – and simply carried on discreetly after the law was passed in 2015. With local help, it was not hard to find them in Agadez. “Max”, who is from Ivory Coast, operates a lodging house for migrants on a street near a Koranic school. There was no sign on his gate, but people knocked on it nonetheless. In a neat walled yard, they were greeted by a cage full of pigeons and a pot of rice on the dirt floor. The two bedrooms inside can sleep 30 when packed together on shabby mattresses. Max said migrants pay him what they can afford.
People are keeping their heads down and waiting to see what happens. If neighbouring countries send troops to Niger, things could get ugly
How can he tell, when watching his guests climb into a people-smugglers truck, that the smuggler is not a predator? “You can’t tell for sure,” he said. “But if the guy has made several trips and you haven’t heard any bad reports, he’s probably OK.” Max’s optimism was striking given that he, too, was sold as a slave in Libya only six years ago (he managed to escape after two months). He said he knows people who have made it all the way to Europe.
That dream – of reaching the rich, peaceful world despite all the perils along the way – remains powerful. African migrants who make it to Europe earn sums that, while modest by European standards, are enough to transform the fortunes of their families back home. They attempt the trek not only to escape violence and improve their own lot but to buy a house for their parents or pay their siblings’ school fees.
European governments run programmes to warn Africans of the dangers of the journey to Europe, hoping to deter them from setting off. But a study of young Gambian men by two academics at the New University of Lisbon found that they overestimated the risk of death during an illicit trip over desert and sea to Europe – and were still willing to try it. (They thought there was a 50% chance of dying; researchers think it is around 20%.) Giving them more accurate information made them even more likely to try migrating.
Mimi offered blunt advice: “Please, everybody should just stay where they are.” Max said it is not his place to tell would-be migrants what to do. “I don’t know how desperate their situation back home is,” he explained.
The Economist
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