Africa

The undercover migrant

It was close to midnight when the young man crawled into the desert. All around him was darkness.

A hundred metres away, a handful of Tuareg rebels and people smugglers, who worked together ferrying migrants through this unforgiving stretch of the Sahara, were gathered around three trucks, drumming and dancing and letting off long bursts of gunfire that rattled the night sky.

He could just make out the faint light from their phones, and every fifth bullet they fired was a tracer that lit a bright arc towards the stars.

The young man, who had given himself the name Azeteng, was somewhere in northern Mali near to the border with Algeria. Behind him lay El-Khalil, a bleak and brutal way station on the West African migrant route to Europe.

Ahead of him, sand stretched for miles in every direction. He was a speck on the dark sea of the Sahara. Slowly, painfully, he pushed his body on, trying to keep as low as possible to the ground.

Azeteng was on the run. A few hours earlier, the smugglers who controlled El-Khalil had swiped his glasses from his face, just to mess with him, and refused to give them back.

Azeteng was 25 but he was small for his age — 5’ 5” and slightly built, with a shy manner and a way of moving through the world that suggested he was always trying not to be seen. He was powerless to stand up for himself, so he backed away.

If the smugglers had stopped then to look closely at his glasses, they might have seen the strangely thick frame, the mini-USB port under one arm, the pin-sized hole in the hinge — and they would surely have killed him. He had seen enough already to be sure.

The month was May 2017. The migrant routes through northern Mali were controlled by the Tuareg rebels, who worked with smuggling and trafficking networks connected to departure points across West Africa.

Azeteng’s journey began in Ghana. Others came from Guinea, the Gambia, Senegal, Sierra Leone. In recent years, tens of thousands of men, women and children made their way into the Sahara, drawn by the distant promise of a better life in Europe. –BBC

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