The Human Flow. An Adventure Story E-Book

Jonathan Power

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 310

Beschreibung

Looking for a gripping and thought-provoking read? Look no further than this captivating book about two journalists, a Tanzanian, Agnes and Jon, an Englishman, who embark on a dangerous journey to report on the trafficking of West African migrants. As they travel from Senegal and Mali through Mauritania, Morocco, Spain, France and eventually to England, Agnes and Jon encounter heart-wrenching tales of hardship and loss. But their own lives are also at risk, as Agnes is kidnapped by traffickers and Jon sets out to rescue her. Along the way, they meet Ana, a journalist from Spain, and later a daring romance develops involving the three of them. Their journey takes them to the slums of Paris and London, where they inspire the BBC to film their story. But their quest for truth comes at a high price, as they are captured by a guerrilla movement in Morocco and ultimately meet a disastrous end in Libya. This fast-paced and gripping story sheds light on the harsh realities of trafficking and the bravery of journalists who risk everything to uncover the truth. Full of danger, excitement, and humanity, this is a book you won’t be able to put down. 

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Verlag

Title Page

July 5th 2023

Some weeks earlier

Afterword

For more about me and what I write about these days, see my website: jonathanpowerjournalist.com

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ibidem Press, Stuttgart

For my daughters, Carmen, Miri, Lucy and Jenny

July 5th 2023

I began my long, long, journey on a shaking bus. I was travelling from the up-country town of Iringa, once the regional capital of German-run Tanganyika, with its jacaranda trees smothered in blossoms of true purple—no better imperial legacy could there be—set haughtily amidst the dark, boulder-strewn, terrain of the Southern Highlands. The town had the smell of the early morning, silhouetted against the sky; the bus was fragrant with its added cargo of oranges. Everything uplifting and sharp, but the daytime heat would soon be upon us. Bit by jot the bus slowly edged itself down the mountainside to the Tanzanian capital, Dar-es-Salaam, residing on an extraordinary perfectly elliptical bay, facing the Indian Ocean, where the dhows flitted on their way to buy cloves in Zanzibar, and the sky appeared to be coloured with the hue of cobalt. Feather-light clouds cut thin lines from shore to horizon …

… I was tired. I was almost dizzy. I was dishevelled. I felt like a dead-beat, my legs dragged as though gravity had doubled itself. I felt unavailingly impotent. I was annoyed with my situation, their situation and the world's too. The poverty omnipresent all around me made me devoid of inspiration. I was squeezed out, my brain parched. My soul was exhausted. I withdrew and returned to the hotel. Deciding to take a swim in the hotel's lovely open-air pool I breast-stroked around, thinking all the time of my options. Was she here in Nouakchott, the dried-up, desiccated, capital of Mauritania on the West African coast, was she there? There was no answer. I could only see ahead days of surmise and apprehension. A flirtation with catastrophe perhaps?

I asked directions to the bus terminal. It was a mass of bodies, pushing and shoving to get on the various buses. I asked one driver how I could find information on buses to Morocco. He pointed towards a man in the crowd wearing an official's hat. It was a struggle to make myself understood, but after persisting I got the idea that there was a bus tomorrow at six in the early morning as far as the border of Western Sahara, a state being fought over by Morocco and Algeria, whose battles rarely made the Western press. The Moroccans had the upper hand. Seemingly endless deposits of phosphate were the prize. The bus would take around 40 hours, including a night at the border.

At dinner, my batteries re-charged by couscous and Moroccan (Islamic, you can say) red wine, I decided to get a good night's sleep and then catch this early morning bus and make my hard and slow way to Morocco via Western Sahara. Maybe it would take three days since there was no through bus. If she didn't turn up at the iconic Casablanca hotel where we had always said we would rendezvous if things went wrong and we got separated, I could always come back to Nouakchott and start to toothcomb the city.

It was the thought—was it becoming love? —of Agnes which propelled me. I knew I'd do almost anything to find her, and it would take as long as it took.

I was up at five. The sun was slowly, ploddingly, over a placid, slate-like sea, making its way into the sky. It was refreshingly, stimulatingly cool, as I walked to the bus station. I'd bought another rucksack at one of the truck stops yesterday and I filled it up with water and food. I had no idea what the bus planned to do to keep us fed. I thought I would take no chances.

The bus was crowded. Not just with people and their babies but also with chickens, some strutting in the aisle. Somewhat to my surprise, I found the bus was air-conditioned. There was a toilet and a screen at the front that endlessly played Spanish, French and American war films. Is this the only thing they know about the West, I wondered? In my hotel there had been no BBC or CNN, nor Spanish and French programmes, much less anything that drew on Western culture. I presume these kinds of videos were their window on Europe and North America.

I had got myself a window seat and later was joined by a young man in his late twenties who said hello in French and proffered his hand. He gave me a broad smile. At 7ish the bus departed. We speeded too fast through the town, and I looked again at the shanty towns—if I didn't find Agnes in Casablanca and had to retrace my steps where would I start?

All morning as we raced through the desert I could see the coast. The road stretched in what seemed an eternal emptiness in a phantom landscape, mysterious and eerie, where little, human or animal, moved, except the occasional cluster of camels and goats. By now the sun had climbed and the sea had turned into a mixture of blue and green, enticing. There was no wind and no waves. I started to enjoy it, only to be disillusioned when the tarmac ended, and the road became gravelly and bumpy. The bus was forced to slow, but not by much.

At noon we stopped in a village. Some of us walked around. A few including the driver dropped to their knees and said their prayers. I peed behind the back of the bus with the other men. Then it was the women's turn—the women always second in life all over Africa. Half an hour later we were on our way again. Back in the bus I pulled out my bread, a packet of imported liver pâté and some tomatoes.

I offered some to my neighbour who gave me a big smile and a thank you. We started to chat. He wasn't a migrant. He was going to Morocco to buy leather goods which he would bring back to Nouakchott to sell. He did this trip once a month, earning enough, he explained, to soon buy a decent house with a washing machine and television. He had three kids and his wife was pregnant again.

I told him my story. I gave him another sandwich. He looked a bit amazed as I narrated my tale, not least coming so far over the cruel and naked desert. "Well, it's possible she's in Casablanca," he said, "but don't be surprised if she isn't." "What do you mean?" I asked. "I don't want to alarm you, but there's a good chance she has been sold. A girl like that is worth a lot of money, as much as three or four Senegalese migrants, if not more."

"What would you do to track her down in Nouakchott?" I asked. "I would eliminate the shanty towns. She may have spent a couple of nights there, but she would have been sold very fast. Since she's educated, pretty, you say, and high class compared with the village girls here, she'd have ended up in some rich guy's house." "How would she be treated?" "Not well—not even pocket money. She would only be allowed out occasionally and then in the company of one of his wives and one of his guards—armed. She would be first for the bedroom and second to do the most menial chores is the house." "And if she refused the sex or tried to run away what would happen?" "He would beat her. Even if somehow, you tracked her down, you would never get to her. His house would be surrounded by high walls and there's bound to be a couple of armed guards on the gate. That's how the rich live here. If you tried to scale the wall they'd probably shoot you.

Slavery is so well ingrained in the culture here that even the government—which has tried—can't do much. The UN is always on the government's back to abolish slavery, so are the EU and the African Union. The other countries in Africa think it gives Africa a bad name. But nothing happens." "Couldn't I go to the police?" "Ha, Ha! The police can be paid off. Forget it, forget her. My advice is go back home and find a new woman. Africa is full of beautiful women, black and beautiful, just like your Agnes."

Evening was coming and again the bus stopped in a small town on the sea. It was obvious that its people lived off fishing. There was a small café and shop and half the bus crowded in. In the end everyone seemed to get fed. When we got back to the bus there was a new driver. We drove through the night. It started to get cold. I was unprepared for this. I tossed and turned in my seat. It was absolutely a lousy night. The most uncomfortable and disagreeable I'd ever spent. There was a stillness all around, broken only by the sound of the wheels turning on the gravel, which seemed to make everything inside the sleeping bus even more silent and solitary. My new friend was out for the count, wrapped in a blanket. How I envied him. I drifted into the night, exhausted.

The dawn came as the sun, preparing as usual for its day of torturing us, rose out of the ocean. The highway along this stretch of remote, treacherous land seemed to go on forever. At 7 we stopped in another small fishing town. Again, we changed drivers. It was another day of driving. This time the road was tarred, and we could speed along a road that appeared to have no end in sight. Namibia made me feel small and insignificant. But after another two stops we were at the border of Western Sahara, the statelet that was 'occupied' by Morocco but fought over by Polisario which had long received help and refuge from neighbouring Algeria with its military government and Gaddafi's dictatorship in next door Libya. Indeed, post-Gaddafi Libya continues its support of Polisario.

Moroccan police manned the frontier. The driver asked us to disembark and show our passports. The police were polite to me but were curious about why I was making this long journey. I explained I was a journalist. I asked them about the traffickers. Did they come this way? "No," replied one of them, "They come off the road 10 kilometres or more back. They cut across the desert and pick up the road 10 kilometres into Western Sahara." Another interjected, "Occasionally we do capture one, but that's quite rare. We can't possibly police such a vast area of desert ... Anyway, our first concern is the Polisario fighters. We're overstretched."

We drove on northwards to Western Sahara's dilapidated capital, a small sand-filled town with a bunch of Moroccan flags lamely hanging dejectedly from poles around the town hall. My new friend told me that the bus terminated here, and I must change to a Moroccan bus. Then it would be another half-day's drive. He advised me to do what he intended to do: spend the night in a little hotel he knew and get some sleep and decent food. There were three or four buses a day up to the Moroccan border proper. There in the morning we could catch a bus to Casablanca. He was going there too. He knew the city quite well. He would direct me to my hotel.

The next evening our bus rolled into Casablanca. He put me in a taxi and told the driver where to take me. "I'm staying in the Hotel Sahara. Remember that. I'm here for a week and if you need help come and find me. Better still, phone me." He gave me his number. Ten minutes later I was in the forecourt of the Casablanca hotel, paying the taxi what seemed like a pittance, but that's all the driver asked for. In the lobby there were big photos of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and the hotel's piano player, Dooley Wilson, who played Sam and sang "As Time Goes By," an immortal piece of music. Tattooed on the wall behind the piano was the everlasting line by Lisa (Bergman): "Play it again, Sam."

***

Some weeks earlier

Let me stop there. This story actually begins in Tanzania. I'd been living in a village and working advising peasant farmers on how to increase their lowly incomes. Idealistic my friends said. In fact, I hadn’t many options since I only had a third class degree in tropical agricultural economics.

I had taken the bus from where I lived in the Southern Highlands to the capital, Dar-es-Salaam, where I wanted to talk to the editor of the local newspaper to see if I could persuade him to let me write some articles about living up-country where, apart from the locals, only a few haggard leftovers from the British colonial service were still residing. The editor, a tall white-haired man, himself a better kind of leftover—one of the few idealists, I suspected—seemed favourable to me writing. After a coffee he walked me round the newsroom, briefly chatting to those we passed in the corridor, with his cheerful bonhomie highlighting his obvious lack of racism, which was still prevalent among the residual white population, and introduced me to a young African woman, Agnes, around my age, who ran the opinion desk. We talked about where I'd come from and what exactly her job was. The editor left me to it. She invited me to pull up a chair. I liked her from the start—bright and thoughtful. I thought, why not ask her out for a drink? We were about the same age—mid to late twenties. We made a date to go for a swim in the warm sea—her suggestion—when she finished work and after to talk over a beer in a beach café. In the sea I couldn't help but notice her lithe, lissom, figure, but also her high forehead and her intelligent looks. She had an amusing way of crinkling her pretty face when she laughed. Her swimsuit was finely cut and, to say the least, a little provocative. Despite being old enough to have finished a masters at university a year before, she looked like a precocious teenager, fresh out of childhood. After chatting a while, I could see why the editor had put her in charge at the opinion desk. She could talk about everything from politics to the worth of foreign aid to literature. Her Oxford education showed. Very few black students were admitted to Oxford in our day—there was a built-in discriminatory system that favoured those from public and top grammar schools and highly educated, well-placed, families. (Mind you, it's still true, albeit improving fast.) She fascinated me from the word go. The celibate me could barely control myself. I’d only had two girlfriends. And they were on kissing terms, full stop.

A while later, having manoeuvred around a Portuguese-man-of war jelly fish with its long tentacles and an excruciatingly painful sting—a danger here much more common than sharks—and then drunk a couple of locally brewed beers, I took her hand and leaned over the table and kissed her. To my utter surprise she didn't pull away. Instead, she took hold of my hand and stroked it.

To take my mind off my feelings I talked about my hopes for Africa, about how my urge to do right by a continent few in Europe or America gave much attention to unless there was a famine, coup d'état or a war—all of which happened much less than they used to. I started on my favourite subject: "Public opinion is led by the nose by the media who think, 'If it bleeds it leads'. We aren't very aware of new trends in Africa—big improvements in agriculture and a sharply increased rate of long-term economic growth, high-tech start-ups, the very rapid spread of mobile phones, a big sale of smart phones, a sizeable film industry in Nigeria, fashion houses with amazing designers and innovative ways of using phones—like giving medical advice over the phone. In some areas in the phone business, it's ahead of Europe." I was starting to get steamed up. "I know lots of people criticise foreign aid but when well used it has primed many a pump, leading to increased government social spending which has resulted in steady falls in infant mortality, the rapid slowing of deaths of women in childbirth and the provision of clean water. Smallpox, Polio and River Blindness have been eradicated from every village and town in the continent, there's a new vaccine for Ebola and a lot of progress has been made on eliminating Malaria, a scourge that lays low half of Africa at one time or another. A new vaccine seems to be effective. Rates of Covid infection have been low. The European idea of the dark continent just irritates me. What's dark is our ignorance of it."

Her eyes were all attentive. She gave me a high-five. "Not a bad speech for an imperialist," she said, grinning. She told me she had studied politics and economics at Oxford, how she had worked for a year on the Oxford Times and had eyed Fleet Street in London for a job on a national paper. But then her father summoned her back home as her mother had been found riddled with cancer, and here she was on a smallish paper, wondering what to do next and how to do it.

I told her about my time in Lesotho, doing an internship during my third year, and my thesis on migration and the debilitating effect it had on both the migrant males and their families left at home to farm a small plot and to wait anxiously for the monthly remittance payments.

What was the point of Africans fighting for independence in Lesotho and South Africa if the lifeblood was being drained out of their peasantry by the demands of the gold, platinum, lithium, cobalt and diamond mines, desperate for cheap labour?

We ate, we drank, we occasionally kissed quick ones and in the end agreed we would try and get a major British paper to sponsor an in-depth investigation of this. But we had no contacts.

She asked her editor in chief if he had a contact in London. He didn't but he did have on a Johannesburg paper. We wrote a letter with a summary of our idea. Two weeks later we had a reply. The editor liked it but wrote, "We are up to our eyes in the Southern African migrant story. Why don't you look at it in another part of Africa? Our readers would like to know about the travails of immigration in West Africa." He knew more than we did—about Senegal, Mali, Mauritania and Nigeria. They were off the map for both me and Agnes.

I'd had to get the bus back to Iringa the next day. I said farewell to Agnes, kissing behind the bus. "Bye Jon," she said, looking rather doleful. As we stood by the entrance to the bus she said she would wait for the reply of the South African editor to our proposal and how much he would pay us upfront. She would immediately let me know what he said. "As soon as the letter arrives, I'll write to you. I'm sure it will be a 'yes'."

It was a 'yes'. Within two days of her getting his reply I received her letter brimming with excitement. She had written back to him, asking for a fee and guaranteed expenses for the two of us. Her credentials looked good to a white South African liberal. She "sold" me as the necessary partner as I spoke French.

Two weeks later I set off for Dar-es-Salaam. Agnes was waiting for me and took me straight to the white beach to swim, with transparent blue-green water and tall palm trees lining the shore, waving like ballerinas in the tropical breeze. After dinner she dropped me off at the youth hostel. The next day we were airborne on Ethiopian Airlines, the continent's best, founded in the 1950s with no crash in its record until a new Boeing hurtled into the ground at the beginning of 2019, as a result of faulty technology installed by its maker. It had been started by the American airline, TWA, but its pilots and ground staff had long departed. This was a true African airline with all black crews. Sometimes, a newspaper report said, they had all female Ethiopian crews. It was the only one that crossed the continent, hence our long way round. The next day, early in the morning, the first, sharp, almost white, light reflecting off the plane's long wings, we landed in Dakar, the capital of Senegal.

What is there ever to do on a plane? For me it's writing. I'd decided to write an article for the Dar-es-Salaam paper about the airline. I chatted with the cabin staff to glean some more background. For Agnes it was reading a novel and interrupting me. I loved it. Her eyes gleamed as she told me about her life in Oxford. "I'll never forget Oxford. I learnt things I never knew existed. I read hundreds of novels and poetry books—from Chaucer to Graham Greene. I had teachers like Isaiah Berlin and A.J.P. Taylor. I met a boy I liked, Welsh, and lost my virginity."

We drank lots of wine, kissed a lot and got rather tipsy. It was a five-hour flight across the continent. I began to feel intoxicated in more ways than one. I felt I was becoming incandescent, feverish, craving her. So sexually charged I was, I wasn't presentable enough to stand up in front of all those passengers, but I desperately needed to go to the loo. Agnes and I hadn't discussed sex, but I had to tell her my condition. "I tell you what," she said giggling. "I'll come with you. Stand close behind me and follow me down the aisle. Nobody will notice!"

It broke the ice. My mind was in a rotating twirl, ready to spew out my momentary thoughts—and lusts. A drink later I told her I wanted to make love to her. She laughed. "I bet you do. You must be the hundredth man who has told me that. I'm picky." She put her head in her book and I realised the conversation was over for now. I started to re-read Alan Paton's novel, "Cry, The Beloved Country." No other novel had so affected me during my research in the mountains of Lesotho when in the evenings in my tent all I had for company was this book. It took me right into the storm centre of South Africa's apartheid and the naked evil of migration to the mines. The trauma of migration took on a new life. Every word rang with excruciating pain. How can men so exploit their fellow humans? These days on Sundays the whites no longer go to church, they go to Ikea. Morality has become an empty vessel. Of course, I told myself, it's always been a bit like this. Lip service wasn't introduced in 1963, the year when amoral consumerism took over Britain and among the whites in Britain's imperial empire, as the poet Philip Larkin might have written. (Recall his poem: "Sexual intercourse began/ in nineteen sixty-three/ which was rather late for me/ Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban/ And the Beatles first LP.")

By now I've read numerous novels written by non-South African blacks, like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o from Kenya and Chinua Achebe from Nigeria. Nigeria has become a veritable literary factory producing especially good novels. Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for literature and Ben Okri won the world's top prize for writers in English, the Booker, with "The Famished Road." And just two years ago, Abdulrazak Gurnah from Zanzibar won the Nobel Prize. Nigerian women too have joined the industry to great international acclaim, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Helen Oyeyemi, Ayobami Adebayo and Chigozie Obioma. The latter was on the long list to win the Booker prize. Another Nigerian novelist, Bernadine Evaristo, won it the year before last. (Note the Brazilian surname. Many Brazilian blacks once slavery was abolished returned home to where their forefathers lived.) But none of these novelists opened my eyes to the horror of migration as Paton's did.

"My favourite African novel," I leaned over and told Agnes, is "The Famished Road." I wanted to show I wasn't put out by her hurting remark. "The writing is so powerful. I don't know how Ben Okri does it. He throws words up in the air and like diamonds, rubies, emeralds and silver they catch the sun and dazzle before they fall and hit the page." "I wish you could read it to me," Agnes said and made to go back to her book. "Agnes, I've got a copy in my rucksack. I want to re-read it when we arrive in West Africa. It will help me get the atmosphere. And I will read it to you." I had no idea that Senegal was totally different from Nigeria.

I retrieved my copy and read to her a part I'd marked: "The old woman in the forest pressed on with the weaving of our true secret history. A history that was frightening and wondrous, bloody and comic, labyrinthine, circular, always turning, always surprising, with events becoming signs and signs becoming reality. The old woman in the forest coded the secrets of plants and their infinite curative properties; she coded the language of spirits, the epic speech of trees, the convergent lines of vital earth-forces, the healing uses of thunder, the magic properties of lightening, the interpretations of the human and spiritual world, the delicate balances of unseen powers and the ancient formula for glimpsing the unalterable movement of fate. She even coded fragments of the great jigsaw that the creator spread all over the diverse peoples of the earth, hinting that no one race or people can have the complete picture or monopoly of the ultimate possibilities of the human genius alone. With her magic she suggested that it's only when all peoples meet and know and love one another that we begin to get an inkling of the awesome picture or jigsaw of majestic power."

"Wow, that is amazing literature!" Agnes said. "I feel bad I'm so ignorant of the writing of my own continent. That's what comes of studying at Oxford. Dead white males are all we read."

"Will you read a few pages to me every evening on this trip? I like your voice too. So crystal clear, like an actor or BBC presenter!" "Sure," I said. "Why not? I'd enjoy it too—round a campfire would be good—in the forest." "I don't think there's much forest where we are going," Agnes said, laughing. Her white teeth made that smile of hers come to life. "Well, I'd better stop myself there. Any more kissing and I'll be a goner."

We got off the plane in Dakar. This is a tourist country so they make it easy to get through passport control and customs. Within 15 minutes we were on our way in a new-looking taxi to a little hotel, someone on the plane had told me about as I waited self-consciously in the queue for the bathroom. By chatting I hoped I'd distract him from my condition. The hotel was run by a bustling late middle-aged French woman. The hotel was a melange of French and African styles. We both liked it. "Let's drop our bags off in our rooms and meet down here for a drink," I suggested, "and then we can think about dinner and where to go."

After a cold orange juice we got a taxi to a place Madame recommended on the beach. "It's quite small, too simple for most tourists," she said, "but the fish is today's catch. You can get beer but not wine, but I've got plenty of French wine and brandy when you get back. My husband and I used to go there. He loved it but he died last year, and I don't want to go alone and trigger my memories."

There was good local fish, cooked over a charcoal fire with fried chicken, cashew nuts, rice and plantains, and iced beer and waves running up the beach as the leisurely tide came in. Stars, as bright, illuminated and luminous as in Tanzania, but this was a different sky since we had crossed the equator and now were in the northern hemisphere. The sky had been paved with the darkness of the night. I wanted to embrace it and hold too the vastness of the sea. If something as beautiful as the sea and sky exist, then life must be beautiful too. I had thought that for many years, as I was a city boy. A journey to look at the sea was always a peak experience that brought peace to my regular bouts of melancholia.

We decided to walk back to the hotel. Holding Agnes's hand seemed natural. We could see the paraffin lights in the village. There was the occasional passing person on the empty track. We always stopped for two or three minutes to say hello and for them to ask where we were going. I think both of us felt very safe.

Eventually we hit the main road just as an old, rattling, bus came round the corner. We flagged it down and ended up half an hour later in Dakar's bus station, five minutes' walk from the hotel.

Madame Chevalier was still up, serving a group of Senegalese. A glass of wine and three big brandies later we stumbled upstairs. We kissed in a rather drunken way and could hardly stop, but still I managed to hold back. Besides, there was no indication from Agnes that she was prepared to go further. I got the feeling if I made a move she would laugh at me again, just as she had on the plane.

***

The piercing African light woke us both up early. The sun burned in the sky like a fever dream. As I looked out of the wide window it appeared as if everything was becoming primary and elementary: the colours, the shapes and perimeters of the buildings. Already I could feel the heat, wrenching, probably later lacerating, interlaced by the smell of the tropical sea which has an odour of its own that comes from the many kinds of seaweed in southern latitudes. I smiled at Agnes as she descended the stairs, ever so refined and confident. I wondered how I seemed to her.

After a very French breakfast we headed off to one of the big, overflowing, shanty towns—what the French and Senegalese call a bidonville—that we had noticed on the road coming in from the airport. Bidonvilles exist all over Africa. They are settlements, built almost in a day and a night, a week at the most, housing new arrivals from the countryside, people desperate to find jobs. They contain their own tribal neighbourhoods, speaking their own languages and practising their own customs. They centre their settlements around a well. Apart from water the dwellings have hardly any urban necessities—no sewerage, rarely electricity and only a few schools or health clinics. The rubbish putrefies in the gutter. For decades they were seen as a temporary phenomenon, so the government more or less ignored them. As the years rolled by and they expanded their tentacles fast the government was compelled to think about the long-term. In Senegal, which is a fairly well-run, long-time, democracy, they decided to upgrade the settlements in situ, rather than build new houses. Water, electricity and sewerage were brought in. Primary schools and clinics were constructed. But these only attracted more peasants from the countryside. It has become a race between the local authorities and their creation of public utilities and the rate of arrival of new proletarians. As in Europe and North America immigrants can overwhelm the locals and those who settled before them. The creation of jobs cannot keep up. Some push off northwards to Europe—the lonely Dick Whittingtons of the desert.

We had no idea on how to start finding someone who would know about migration to Europe. We asked if there was a school in the first neighbourhood we arrived at. There was. We managed to find the headmaster. He was surprised to be confronted by two journalists, one white and one black, but not as surprised as if we had turned up in its east African ex-British counterpart. The French, unlike those of Anglo and Dutch stock, have always accepted mixed couples. Indeed, the late president, Leopold Senghor, had been a member of the French cabinet, married a white woman and his volumes of Negritude poems were good sellers among the cognoscenti in France.

We told him who we were looking for—someone who knew about the trafficking to Paris. He knew about it, telling us he despaired of its effect. He knew so many children bereft of a father. They did badly in school and provided more than their fair share of the unruly. He gave us the address of the local government administrator who might know more.

We saw him and got another lead and then another and then another, as we were constantly recommended to someone else. Nobody seemed to know or, if they did, pretended they knew nothing. This indeed was clandestine traffic. We sweated it out for four days and must have tramped miles around the tin and cardboard shacks of the newcomers and the more solid mud houses of the established residents.

The city government had done quite a good job in this shanty town. There were water stands and electricity. Buses connected people with the rest of the city. Most people, we were told, could find jobs of some kind—the lowest tiers of work—in shops, driving vans and taxis or in the peanut factories. Peanuts are Senegal's main cash crop. Still, as we had been told by the headmaster, a quarter of the population was unemployed. Crime was ubiquitous.

As we walked around, I began to feel I could write a thesis on this place and how it worked. I seemed to learn about everything, except what we wanted to know. Agnes was getting very fed up. I could see it in her eyes that were often half closed. We were both becoming demoralised and disillusioned. It showed. However drunk we got in the evening there was less kissing. Romance no longer frittered inside either of us. I began to feel we were on the road to nowhere.

Totally unexpectedly on the fifth day we got a lead. I'd told Agnes that she must do the talking as I think when I talked I maybe frightened people off. White men were a rarity hereabouts and one asking questions an object of suspicion. I sat myself in a tatty looking teashop and Agnes strolled off to the address she'd been given. Her schoolgirl French wasn't so good, but like many Africans she had an ear for languages. In four days of almost continuous conversation it had improved remarkably.

An hour later I saw her coming down the hill with its sprawling houses and cavorting children to the teashop. Small kids rolling hoops ran beside her, laughing, shouting, sometimes falling over as they sped down the hill too fast. She was smiling. "You must come with me. I've found an oldish fella who is prepared to talk. He says that for ten years he was a trafficker. But now he had made some money he was retired, living with his son's family." We could see two shiny new Peugeots parked outside his house. The house itself was quite large with a new roof. There was even a sizeable garden. Inside, as I found later, the toilet had a modern chemical disposal system. The bathroom was tiled, and the sink and bath had ostentatious imitation gold taps. The kitchen was prim and shiny, a new oven and washing machine in place.

He certainly knew his business. He knew the routes across the Sahara. He knew where we would find Senegalese traffickers. He knew how to hire a boat across to Gibraltar and he knew how to find a Spanish lorry driver there who would take 20 migrants at a time, crammed in the back, up to Paris. There he used to hand his load of men over to the big boss who ran one of the abandoned factories where the men stayed.

He talked on, rather liking our earnest questions and countenance, I suspected. After two hours of talk we ended up with five pages of my notebook full of names, directions and even a crude map of the way the migrants took. We had begun with locally grown tea and we were now on to imported beer. "You must take the train, the one that goes right up to Ouagadougou in Mali. It goes every other evening and it will take you nearly 10 hours. You must get off at Bakel. You will be on the Senegal side of the border of Mauritania. The river divides the countries. Get a lift into the town. I'm going to give you the name of my contact there, and a letter to the local chief." I handed him €50. He gave a slight bow, smiling.