Ziggy Lionheart E-Book

Dembo Fatty

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 121

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

After 13year-old Ziggy was attacked by fanatical neighbours, his mom decided to send him away so he could find a place to live safe and sound. But like many other Africans who left their countries hoping to find a better life, he had to experience unbelievable cruelties and had to fight again and again to survive. When he started a new life in Berlin, Germany, he was deeply afflicted getting bad news from home. Ziggy Lionheart is the story of a young man, who promised always to look forwards and never back. His story is about the power of hope and resilience.

Leseprobe

Jutta Michaud

Dembo Fatty

Ziggy Lionheart

A true story of flight and survival

All rights reserved, in particular the right of public presentation and broadcasting by radio, television and other media, also of individual parts. No part of the book/eBook may be reproduced or processed, duplicated or distributed using electronic systems in any form without the written permission of the authors Dembo Fatty and Jutta Michaud.

IMPRINT

© 2022 Dembo Fatty, Jutta Michaud

Print and Distribution on behalf of the author: tredition GmbH, Halenreie 40-44, 22359 Hamburg

Cover-Design: KORRLAY – Iris van Beek ([email protected])

Cover-Photo Landscape: Anita from Pixabay,

Cover-Picture Lion: Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Translation: Briand Bedford, https://b-spoke-english.de/

Layout: KORRLAY – Iris van Beek ([email protected])

Printed in Germany

ISBN (Softcover):

978-3-347-74273-4

ISBN (e-Book):

978-3-347-74274-1

Content

How this book came into being

Foreword

Chapter I – My life in the Gambia

Childhood days in The Gambia

A momentous incident and a difficult decision

The last day with my mother

Chapter II – A long journey begins

First stop: Senegal

Next stop: Mali

An overheard conversation with fateful consequences

Niger: the Connection House System

Through the desert

Next stop: Libya – The end of my childhood

Sold and enslaved

An unpunished massacre in Zara Assara

Off to Italy: Horror and the fear of death

Hell is a prison in Libya

Escape from slavery

Surviving in a world with its own laws

Off to Italy – The 2nd attempt

Survival techniques for inflatable boat refugees

Chapter III – No Dolce Vita in Italy

Lampedusa – completely different than dreamed of

Racism and shattered dreams

Olive groves instead of school: Mafia-like home structures

Setting off again: European destinations

Zurich

Strasbourg

Karlsruhe

Chapter IV – Berlin

Arrival

A pupil at last!

A wonderful coincidence

The little and the big Simon

An easygoing time

Prank videos

I become a chef

The thing with the egg

From Prank to YouTube

@Ziggyfatty on Instagram live

My second year of training begins

How I found my mother again

The saddest time of my life

My way back into life

About the Authors

How this book came into being

Dembo – alias Ziggy – and I met in 2021 at ubs e.V., umwelt, bildung, sozialarbeit (environment, education, social work) in Berlin. ubs e.V. is a youth welfare organization that trains young people for careers in gastronomy in its own canteen kitchens and a pastry shop. I have been on board there as a coach since 2014. I support the trainees with creative and therapeutic methods to recognize their strengths; to overcome crises and to develop visions for a self-determined future.

When Dembo and I met, he was going through a serious crisis. Some time before, he had managed to find his mother again through a Facebook contact. It is important to know that the two had not been in contact with each other for more than four years. Not voluntarily, but because they had not had the opportunity to contact each other for so long.

Dembo learned that his mother was suffering from a life-threatening kidney disease. She would have had to fly to a neighbouring country for the urgently needed surgery, but there was no money for that. Within a short period of time, Dembo had run up huge debts in order to at least provide medication and good accommodation for her. Nevertheless, with every telephone call he could feel her vitality fading. Fear and worry paralyzed him. More and more often he was absent from work. His training supervisors sent him to me for coaching, where he could talk about his acute worries and needs, but also told me more and more about his past.

At the same time we were looking for a treatment option for his mother and were finally able to establish contact with a non-profit organization that operates a hospital in The Gambia. Unfortunately, all help came too late. Mrs Fatty died the day before she was admitted to the hospital.

For Dembo a world collapsed. His mother had been his only relative and the most important person in his life. He felt alone, abandoned, hopeless. And yet he managed to overcome this serious crisis. And gradually resume his education, to talk about his experiences, to think about how he wanted to shape his future. His faith and the courage to face even cruel memories helped him.

All who have met him during his training are impressed by his mental strength; his perseverance and the will to not only continue living despite all odds and terrible experiences, but to want to do good someday. He is ready to forgive the people who treated him badly in the past. And there were more than enough of them.

Dembo’s story is only in parts an individual case. His individual story ends when he leaves his home country and only begins again with his time in Berlin.

The intermediate part, the things he experienced on his long journey from Africa to Europe, thousands of refugees have gone through the same or similar. This is especially true for the horror that will forever be linked to Libya for these people. These are inhumane experiences that urgently need to be told so that – this is our hope – something will change. First of all, the attitudes towards the people who have managed to free themselves from these circumstances and want to build a new life with us. Their courage and perseverance has earned our respect.

Dembo dictated his story in German into the keys of my notebook. At each of our meetings, he narrated almost breathlessly, interrupted only by follow-up and comprehension questions that I asked him in between. Questions and answers have been incorporated into this text without it having the classic form of an interview. In revising the text, I did not change any content, but merely adjusted the language, grammar, and temporal structure. Typical for narrated life are chronological jumps, i.e. the temporal boundaries dissolve again and again similar to the forward and rewind of a film. Of course, I had Dembo confirm these changes, although he himself once said that he was sometimes unsure when something had happened. Nothing, however was added, everything happened as described.

I thank Dembo for trusting me to write down his story for him. During our conversations, I not only learned a lot about his flight and his life, but also much more about African culture than could be accommodated in this book. Also very exciting were the conversations in which Dembo compared our cultures and discovered good and bad in both. He has a very clear idea of what his country would need in order to develop democratic structures and really allow all population groups to participate in a positive change. Education plays a central role in this. Not least for this reason, I hope that as many young people as possible will read his story and understand how important democratic structures are for a dignified life.

The title of the book was inspired by a drawing by Dembo. During one of our coaching sessions, we were working with the concept of the power animal and I asked Dembo to draw his animal. He drew a lion and signed the sheet as Ziggy. The addition of “Lionheart” represents his courage to always start over.

Jutta Michaud, Berlin, summer 2022

Foreword

My name is Dembo Fatty.

I prefer to call myself Ziggy, in memory of my mother and the life I led before I came to Germany.

My mother gave me this nickname. She especially liked the music of Bob Marley and reggae from Jamaica. In a song by Bob Marley, I don’t remember the exact title, the name of his son – Ziggy – appeared. At home I was the DJ, because I could handle the radio better than my mother. But whenever the song “Ziggy” was played, the radio stopped, it never went on. Only when I handed the radio to my mother did the music start again. But when I took it again, it stopped again. My mother laughed about it and said “now you are not Dembo, but Ziggy”. At first I didn’t like that because she also said, as a joke, whenever I did something wrong. ”Are you Ziggy again now?” Later we both laughed about it.

At the present time, telling my story to Mrs Michaud, I am 20 years old. I have been living in Germany for four years. Until I arrived here, I was on the road for three or four long years. I don’t know exactly, because in between I lost my sense of time. When I got into the first car that took me away from The Gambia at the age of thirteen, I had no idea where I would arrive. I didn’t know that a country called Germany even existed. And now I am preparing to become a chef at ubs e.V. in Berlin.

I come from The Gambia. This is a small country in West Africa, located between Senegal, Mauritania and Mali. This book is about why I left The Gambia, what I experienced along the way, and how my life kept changing.

I want to give people an idea of what it means to be a “refugee”. What it is like to experience violence and discrimination. But also that it is possible to choose for yourself to look forward and leave the past behind. That one should always look forward, never back. That doesn’t mean forgetting anything. It means understanding life as a learning process and never giving up hope, even if that is sometimes difficult.

Chapter I

My life in The Gambia

Childhood days in The Gambia

I was born and raised in a small village called Basse.

When I was born, my father had already died, so I only ever had my mother. My mother never told me exactly what my father died of. I know little about my parents, except that they had problems with the people in our village. They were not accepted there because they were not Mandinka. We belong to the Fulbe ethnic group, which has less power in our country than the Mandinka. There were both cultural and religious reasons that led to my parents’ problems, although the religious reasons actually have nothing to do with Islam. It is always the people who use our religion to have advantages and dictate to others.

In our small village, all the men had several wives. My father had only my mother. No one could understand that he wanted to have only one wife. Therefore, in the eyes of the villagers, he was not a “real man”. He was not respected.

After his death, another problem arose. In Mandinka culture, women must completely veil their faces after the death of their husbands. Not even the eyes are allowed to be seen. This may be different in the cities, but in my small village it was very strict. It is very far from the capital, only rarely a car passes by and the president is not interested in what is going on in our village. My mother refused to follow this tradition. She only wore a headscarf and accepted that after my father’s death, no one would have anything to do with us. When I was little, I had little contact with other children because their parents forbade them to play with me. My mother and I only had each other. We were completely on our own. The villagers didn’t even want to buy the things my mother and I grew together on our little farm. We supplied ourselves with rice, corn and peanuts. What we didn’t need ourselves, we sold at a market in another village. Some days we sold a lot, other days business was bad.

Even as a little boy, I always had to get up very early in the morning because my mother and I prayed. My mother thought praying was very important even when I was very small. As a child, I hated it. I had a lot of freedom, but she was strict about praying. But she was never strict with me like other African mothers. For example, she never hit me.

After praying, I was allowed to go back to bed and my mom started cooking. Around nine o’clock I ate. After that we either went to the market or to our farm. On the way there she talked to me a lot and asked many questions. For example, what my life should look like one day and how many children I would like to have later. Or she asked me questions for which I had to think hard to find answers like “What falls into the water but never gets wet?” (Your reflection). She was my first teacher.

She always talked to me about different topics. But almost every day she talked to me about women and their lives. For example, she kept saying, “There will never be anyone in this world who loves you like your mother, so you have to respect women.”

And she also said, “If you ever hit a woman, it means you are not my son.” In Africa it is common for men to beat their wives. My mother said my father never beat her. She believed life could be much easier if women and men got along better.

She wanted to be a role model. When the men in the village tried to tell my mother what to do, she always said “No, I’ll do my own thing.” That was another reason why people didn’t like us. They said: “You have a son. He wants to have a wife who always says yes.” But she replied, “No, he won’t be like that.” I think that’s why the men in the village didn’t get along with my mother. But for me it is important, even today, what my mother told me at that time. That’s why I talk a lot about the lives of women and children on my YouTube channel. Their lives and their problems are given far too little attention.

In The Gambia, I couldn’t go to school. I would have loved to have gone to school like most of the other children in the village. I wanted to learn so much and I was just like most children are: They want to have what others have. So I was angry with my mother because I couldn’t go to school. If I had gone to school, we wouldn’t have had money left for food because school is expensive in The Gambia.