The human face of North African migrants in Europe
“This is where I’m from,” announces Mous (a pseudonym), his pitch-black eyes gleaming in the Italian sunshine as he draws a circle somewhere west on the map of Sudan he has just traced on a piece of napkin. “This is Darfur”. Mous is 22 and, back home, he was studying to become a computer scientist. Now, he sits on a rock near the Italian-French border, under a big, dark blue umbrella that in a past life likely belonged to a local beachgoer. The Red Cross donated it to him upon his arrival.
In his wrinkled, light grey Hawaiian shorts and old white polo shirt carrying the name of a famous Monaco-based luxury yacht club whose clients, in the 1950s, included the likes of Brigitte Bardot, Richard Burton and Sophia Loren, Mous looks just like the well-off holidaymakers crowding the beaches of the French Riviera on this hot summer day. He laughs as I tell him this. “How much does that boat cost?” he asks, pointing at a bright white yacht sailing in French territorial waters, right across the bay. “Maybe in the future I can buy one,” he adds excitedly. Mous likes his choice of clothes; this morning, he picked them from one of the many boxes of donated goods lining up the pavement that runs along the rocks, leading to the border.
Although Mous arrived here by himself, he is not alone. On that same man-made rocky strip washed by the salty waves of the Mediterranean sea, 200 other migrants have gathered; they all share a couple dozen colourful beach umbrellas, mirroring the silhouettes of the hundreds of tourists seeking shade on the beaches of Menton — the first French city across the border, on the opposite side of the bay. “We come from everywhere,” Mous explains. “There’s all of Africa here. Many are from Sudan, Eritrea, some from Ghana, Egypt, South Africa. There’s Asia too, someone from Afghanistan.”
Though from different places, circumstances and life journeys, Mous and the others all share one thing: they have tried to cross the Italian-French border to migrate north, but France has pushed them back. Here, just a few steps away from a resurrected European border heavily patrolled by the Gendarmerie (the French police), the latest wave of the intesifying Mediterranean migration storm has broken on the shores of the westernmost Italian town of Ventimiglia, giving rise to a brand new makeshift refugee camp.
“In the night, we sleep there,” says Mous, gesturing at an improvised curtain of tarpaulins, space blankets and rope that extends across the entire length of the wall separating the rocky beach from the pavement. In the shade of this unstable structure, two children are sleeping on a layer of clothes, sharing the same slab of rock. Next to them, a Milan FC plastic bag, a gold-embossed copy of the Qu’ran and a bottle of water. “There are toilets and a place to wash where the grass is,” Mous says, pointing at a long queue of migrants waiting for their turn on the palm-lined traffic island that divides the road as it approaches the border. The number of toilets available to refugees does not even begin to cover the current emergency, however, and the smell of sun-heated urine and human feces on the rocks is overwhelming. Mous insists I only sit on the yoga mat covering his rock. “This is clean, but the place is no good. It’s not a clean place. It’s no good”.
Were you expecting Europe to be like this? “I thought you were united,” says Mous. “Yes, aren’t you called European Union?” asks someone from a neighbouring rock, emphatically. The man who just spoke introduces himself politely: he wants to be called Muhammad, from Ghana, 25 years old. “I hadn’t imagined this. I thought once in Italy I could get to France easily.” Where would you like to go? “Germany. I want to go to Germany. I heard life is good there. My dream is to go to England, but it’s too difficult now, there’s the sea. But one day I’ll live in Manchester, England, because my sister lives there. She had a baby. I’ve never seen him. I haven’t seen my nephew yet,” he explains, matter-of-factly. “And I support Manchester City,” he adds quickly, grinning knowingly at Mous and other young migrants who have now gathered around the rock.
There is Zou (a pseudonym) from South Africa, 30 years old and a pair of kind, sad eyes. There is Ahmed from Egypt, 28, wrapped in a Union Jack beach towel to hide from the sun. There are eight, nine, ten other refugees who seem keen to participate in the conversation but who cannot speak English.
“The biggest issue now is that most of these people are young and full of energy but they can’t do much,” worries a French Amnesty International volunteer who has been distributing comics, football and music magazines every day since France chose to shut its borders. “They sleep, they eat, they pray. They’re stuck in this limbo where they have food and a basic daily routine, but they can’t move around much, they can’t start planning their future and put their energy towards something productive. We have enough food, water and clothes, but we need footballs, books, pens, paper to keep them busy and active… We don’t know how long this situation is going to last,” she explains.
In fact, although Red Cross operators have to drive all migrants rejected by France back to the train station of Ventimiglia, where the local administration has renovated an annexed building to guarantee a roof for all refugees and folding beds for children and pregnant women, only the young travelling alone choose to immediately walk back to the rocky seafront with a view of the border; families prefer to spend the night at the station and get some rest before attempting to cross the border by train all over again. Those who stay on the rocks hope to be ready if the situation suddenly changes and France decides to let them through. At the same time, their continuous presence is a silent protest giving voice to a humanitarian crisis that Europe can no longer ignore. “We are not going back!” shouts confidently a protest sign in English. Next to it, a big banner carries a direct request written in French: “Humanitarian emergency. We are waiting for a political response from Europe now.”
“We’re staying here until France lets us pass,” Muhammad explains. “One week, two months, I’ll be here until it changes because this is no good.” Up to this point, Muhammad has tried to cross the Italian-French border five times. Four by train — the easiest option, since the first French station of Menton Garavan is only a 6-minute ride from Ventimiglia. However, with the intensification of the migration flow, the French police have been waiting for all double-decker trains coming from Italy to approach the platform in Menton. When these stop, officers inspect them systematically. Few migrants make it further; Muhammad was found and arrested each time.
On his fifth attempt, he decided to pay a man 50 euros to guide him along a hiking trail that cuts through the Maritime Alps. But the Gendarmerie have been patrolling the French side of most mountain paths as well, and so Muhammad was rejected once again. Now he says he will not try any more crossings until he is free to walk past the myriad of police vans blocking the border. “I’ll be here. This must change. We are all humans,” he mumbles half to himself.
On the rocks of Ventimiglia, Muhammad seems to be the preferred interlocutor of journalists, volunteers and migrants alike: he speaks fluent English — which he learnt out of admiration for the United Kingdom by borrowing one English book per week from his local library in Ghana — and he acts as a confident spokesperson for the group. After all, back home, he was a law student. After graduation, against his parents’ wishes, he planned his journey to the wealthier global North, until one day he started making his way through the desert and finally reached the Libyan coasts.
Although most of these migrants’ stories include the decision to escape war-torn regions — “if you stay, you get killed or you have no future, it’s not nice” says Mous, talking about Darfur — it’s from the mention of the desert onwards that these individual fragments begin to compose one terrifying, collective narrative. The walk through the scorching desert heat with little water, guided only by the unreliable interaction with people smugglers; friends, women and children lying dead in the sand; the fear of being arrested as illegal immigrants at the Libyan border; the years spent working in Libya to save enough money for a one-way ticket to Italy aboard an old, flimsy, overcrowded fishing boat. Muhammad lived in Libya for two years before he could afford to travel to Europe’s southernmost shores; Mous for one year; Zou for ten years. “And the boats…the boats are not like that one,” Muhammad jokes bitterly, pointing at a luxury three-story yacht that is crossing the Italian-French bay.
“We have seen bad things. Really bad,” sums up Muhammad. “This here is paradise compared to what we’ve seen in the desert. But it’s still no good. It’s becoming dirty here. Yesterday it rained all day. Now it’s very very hot. We have seen worse things but this is still not ok,” he concludes, as a dark, thick cloud of humidity starts to ponderously occupy the sky above us.
Down by the water, a man is hand-washing a T-shirt and a pair of jeans energetically. The see is deep here, and throughout the operation he holds tightly to a rock — “none of us can swim,” Muhammad explains. He then carefully lays both items flat to dry on a slab of rock. Not too far from him, another migrant is brushing his teeth in the salty water. Many of them are getting ready for asr, the afternoon prayer. They put on their cleanest clothes and use bottled water to perform wudu, the Islamic ritual ablutions. The melodic voice of a young refugee reciting verses from a pocket-sized edition of the Qu’ran vibrates through the air. It’s Ramadan.
Mous offers me a banana and a packet of biscuits that he saved from last night’s Iftar, the meal shared by Muslims after sunset during this month of fasting. He can’t eat just yet — although he often exclaims with the frank, guilty smile of a 22 year old: “I’m so hungry!” — but he wants to make sure I don’t starve. As humidity explodes into a thunderstorm, Mous borrows a waterproof umbrella from a volunteer and shatters any remaining cultural distance by doing something that a Western kid could do: he makes light of the situation by improvising a playful dance around the umbrella as he attempts to sing Single Ladies with a Beyoncé voice. For a brief, carefree moment, everybody laughs.
When the light begins to dim over the rocks of Ventimiglia, dreams start running fast in this no-man’s-land squeezed between the deep sea, a still border and the thick sky. “Which one is the best European country? Austria, Sweden, Norway or Germany?” Mous asks as he sits back on the rain-soaked yoga mat, keen to decide where to go once he makes it to France. “My friend is in Sweden so maybe I’ll go there. But wherever I go, I want to learn to make car engines, ” he adds. Aren’t you a computer scientist? “That was back in Darfur.”
“I want to get a job, a house, a family and a car. Then I want to do a Master’s and a PhD in Law. Do you think I can do it?” I hear Muhammad asking an Italian volunteer. “Yes,” she replies cautiously, perhaps wondering what will happen to Muhammad’s, Mous’ and every other young migrant’s determination if the united, welcoming European society they have been dreaming of ends up failing them. “But first,” Muhammad concludes, “first I have to cross this border”.
Originally published at contributoria.com.
