by
Pamela Kerpius

Recorded:
30 April – 1 May 2021

Published:
2 July 2021

Meet Matarr.

27 years old and from Gambia.

To reach Europe he crossed six countries: The Gambia, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and the most dangerous of all, Libya.

His journey took about nine months. He left on a Thursday in September 2013 at five o’clock in the morning in a car that took him to the capital city, Banjul. He took a ferry from Banjul to another city, then transferred to a taxi to the Senegalese border.

The car held seven people total, including two of his friends, who were the ones who helped convince him to leave. He transferred to another car, a taxi, traveling from Senegal to Mali to Burkina Faso, a trip that took one and a half days. The car was cramped, meant to hold seven passengers, but their group had eight.

There were many checkpoints along the way, but his understanding of French was useful at them since he could use it to negotiate with authorities. In the end, he paid the bribes they were requesting and he and the rest of the passengers were released.

There were eleven or 12 checkpoints total, something he was warned about before departing, with advice to carry multiple laminated photocopies of his national ID. Security across these checkpoints would confiscate passports and IDs as leverage for higher bribes, but if a traveler kept the original hidden and the fake at the ready, the financial and logistical hinderance would be less. He kept 11 photocopies in total.

As he watched each one after the other get handed over to security along the way, he realized this movement of people was a business for everybody. “The bribe can start in Gambia if [authorities there] see the cards,” he said.

He hid the laminated documents in the soles of his shoes.

There were times when he thought it might be easier to return to The Gambia, but there was also a lot of shame he would confront if he did. The stakes were high to make it out. This drove him to keep going.

There were multiple checkpoints across Burkina Faso, plus a number of stops to change cars. There was a woman among them that spoke the language well and negotiated with checkpoint authorities for their release in continuation of the journey. In between, he spent three days at a spot somewhere in Burkina where he slept on a mat in the open air of a compound. “It was like a hotspot,” said Matarr, referring to the colloquial name of the first-reception centers in Italy. There were more than one thousand people there by his estimate.

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From Burkina Faso he traveled by taxi that, again, was designed to hold seven, but took eight passengers, including himself, to Naimey, Niger. He stayed in the city for about a day before arriving in Agadez, where he stayed for one week.

Upon arrival in Agadez, locals accost migrants passing through with offers of places to stay for a fee, “They all know,” said Matarr, everyone is aware of the flow of people to exploit for business purposes.

In the end, he stayed with a Gambian man who had been in Agadez for more than thirty years. He knew a lot of the traffickers. Akon was his name. He had made it to Italy years before, but when he was deported he returned to Agadez to make his business in migration.

In the city Matarr found 17 others to join the truck he would depart on across the desert. Matarr crossed the Sahara desert in the back of a pickup truck with 23 people in a journey that lasted three to three-and-a-half days. He ate garri to survive, one of the easier provisions to pick up from the market before he left. It’s a dried root vegetable that’s granulated and cooked in water, an item popular across West Africa.

There were liter bottles of water stacked in the bed of the truck that he sat on top of. They placed sticks in the bed of the truck too, to have something to grasp on to when the road got bumpy. Matarr fell, but survived.

The driver was drunk, often high on marijuana, he said, “These drivers are already dead. They want to kill us too.” It was hot in the day, but cold at night. He burned his jacket on a fire at night to keep warm. He saw dead bodies in the desert. There were many people at their sides alive begging for a ride after their own trucks had crashed.

“I thought this was the last day of my life,” he said as he described the scene of the driver braking suddenly in the desert to meet gunshots from some local rebels. Matarr and the other passengers ran, but the driver was calling after them to come back. In the end, their trafficker was actually protecting them from the unseen shooters in the dark.

He arrived in Bayyah, Libya, his first stop in the country and stayed in a compound for two days to eat and rest. The drive was about thirty minutes to Sabha, his next stop, where he traveled by pickup truck with eight people, all of whom the trafficker continued to protect, saying to checkpoint authorities that they were all his employees.

He stayed in Sabha for about two months in an abandoned building that he thinks may have been a former prison from the Gaddafi years. He had food to eat, but his money was running out quickly. He felt the pressure to return to The Gambia, but he said at that point, “I cannot go back.”

He worked masonry and painting work to earn more money, earning only 15% of the pay initially promised to him, which prolonged his stay in the city he was eager to leave. A neighboring tribe took over the house he was staying in. Violence immediately erupted. They threw bombs in the area of the compound. The tribe came with guns. He remembers seeing bullets striking the walls.

“We were all worried because we don’t have weapons,” he said, “we don’t even know how to shoot.” His smugglers insisted he remain inside. People got shot and fell to the ground.

People were escaping. One was left behind, shot in the leg. There were Gambians, Guineans, and many nationalities of people among him. He found a temporary place of rest where he shared a meal with the others before contacting his traffickers again via mobile phone. The traffickers promised to pick him up.

The group moved on foot to reach the pickup point, and even along the way they were stopped and were threatened with death. These were other thieves or rebels that shot at their feet to frighten them. Matarr again thought for sure this was his last day alive on earth. His hands were raised behind his head.

In a twist of luck, the son of the man who had hired him before for painting work at his home was among the group, recognized Matarr and told the rebels to release him and the others. They were released, and found the connection point where he took a pickup truck with 19 people to Tripoli, Libya. They traveled for about a day and a half, the trip taking this long for the multiple detours his traffickers made around checkpoints.

They were just 30 minutes outside of Tripoli and had to make another stop again, this time transferring to a different car, all done to preserve their security.

Matarr stayed in Tripoli for about five-and-a-half or 6 months, again doing masonry and painting work to make money. It wasn’t safe, he said, but better than Sabha. The work he took was only from people who would come directly to the compound, rather than on the street corner, where people would regularly be kidnapped.

He was often paid in food rather than money. Employers tried to convince him that food was more abundant in Libya than in Italy, so the payment of food was a worthy one in advance of his next stage of travel.

“That’s what they told us,” Matarr laughed, “that there is no food in Italy and Europe and we’re better off in Libya.”

“These people you just have to let them talk,” he said, “They are not very strong. They have guns, you know, so they can shoot you.”

He was at work when his compound in Tripoli was attacked, “I was lucky,” said Matarr. A week later he paid the smugglers the remaining money necessary to get to the seaside. Those traffickers worked directly with the Libyan Navy or sea border authorities, he said. He saw all of them be bribed to make the deal happen.

He was then in waiting, working during the interim until he got final word that the boat manifest was set and it was time to go. It was the next afternoon when he was transported by car with a tarp thrown over him to stay hidden. There were two checkpoints; at the last he changed cars.

There were six boats waiting when he got to Sabratha and about 600 people waiting in a compound. The doors flung open and traffickers began calling off names, numbering each up to 120 or 130, then told them to go.

Matarr missed the first two calls, but was at the front of the door for the third. He was a called to inflate the boat he would travel in. He saw helicopters and patrol boats lingering around the seaside, so knew the Libyan authorities were coordinating with the traffickers to allow the push off the shore. They always left one boat to catch that would be captured on camera for the evening news – a produced stunt to prove to the public that Libya was enforcing its migration policies. On this day, three of the 6 boats were caught.

Matarr crossed the Mediterranean Sea in a rubber dingy at midnight on 8 June 2014 with 106 people, including two women and a couple of elderly passengers.

“It was sad to see elders trying to come,” he said.

There was a GPS phone and a compass, which was managed by one person on board, the “captain.” This was always a migrant trained to do it, allowing him to travel for free if he did. The captain was also allowed to bring one friend for free.

He reached international waters around 5:00a.m. They called Italian authorities for help, who said they were arriving and everyone on board cheered. There was a delay. Italy said they were on the way, but they couldn’t find the boat. They asked the captain to travel further forward on a stated route. Fuel was gone by then though, and the captain miscalculated the route.

There was a big ship on the horizon that Matarr and the passengers signaled to but it kept its distance. Another boat was passing and finally came to their rescue instead, throwing a rope to tie their boats together.

The passing boat called to the passengers to stay calm. People panicked anyway out of fear. It was dark now. Four to 6 people fell and Matarr watched them sink into the sea. He knows how to swim, and gauging the distance, jumped in, saving one of the elders on board (one year later, that same man was struck by a car in Italy and killed.)

He was transferred to the Guardia Costiera and landed in Ragusa, Sicily on 10 June 2014. He is 34 years of age now and living in Termoli, Italy where we recorded this story on 30 April and 1 May 2021.

Matarr is an amazing human being.