I just listened to a three-part documentary series by the BBC. It is about Sub-Saharan Africans who hope to cross the Sahara, and then cross over from North Africa to Europe.
One particularly sad story is that of a 19 year old Benin (Nigeria) girl whom the presenter, Jenny Cuffe, met in Agadez, Niger. Her story is uncannily familiar, the kind of story one hears of girls who are promised that they will be taken to Europe by traffickers. Only that this time, in the case of the girl, her career in prostitution started in Niger. At some point she escaped from her trafficker who had been giving her to about 14 customers a day at a garrison town in Niger. That was when the presenter met her. The third part of the series covers her story. Ms. Cuff took the girl to the Nigerian border, handed her over to the immigration officers, who then took her to NAPTIP, National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, in Abuja. When Jenny Cuffe went to check on her in Abuja and was told that after conducting a test, they found that she was HIV positive. She even goes to the girl’s home in Benin to see the kind of poverty that motivated her to want to leave for Europe in the first place. The thing is that poverty is always an incentive to want a better life; another incentive, perhaps a greater one, is seeing the houses built by local women who live in Europe, and the queue of people who go to Western Union points to receive money sent by relatives living in Europe.
I know that this story is familiar, but it is one of those things that simply come home to one with the illustration of a particular case.
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