by
Pamela Kerpius

Recorded:
15 April 2022

Published:
18 August 2022

Meet Uloko.

26 years old and from Benin City, Nigeria.

To reach Italy he crossed three countries: Nigeria, Niger and Libya.

His first leg of travel was by bus, from Benin City to Caro, where he spent one day of rest. He traveled with a package of garri, a popular grain used in Nigerian cooking, and bottled water. From Caro, he moved by bicycle through back roads over the border and into Niger. Two were on the bike together, traveling with no documents or passports. Nor did they have phones, since there wasn’t a network connection anyway.

He arrived in Agadez, Niger, finding a man named Alagie at the connection point. He stayed back for a few hours, waiting for more passengers to arrive who would fill the truck the traffickers had arranged for crossing to Libya.

Uloko crossed the Sahara desert in the back of a pickup truck with 52 people, including women, traveling for one week total. Each passenger had a keg of water with them, but after two days they went dry, and so did their food supplies. Then, the driver ran out of fuel.

“It was just by the grace of God,” Uloko said, that the driver returned after leaving him and the group for two days while he fetched more gasoline. There was “just sand” all around him, nothing much to see, except for the occasional car or caravan passing. Sometimes they were caught and returned to Agadez. Everyone in his truck survived.

He arrived in Gadron, Libya, his first stop for the night after he entered the country. The original truck departed, and another arrived to pick up him and the other passengers for the next leg of the journey. That stop was Sabha, Libya.

There were more than 1,500 people, by his estimation, in the compound where he stayed, including women who numbered around five-hundred. Sexual assault was a regular occurrence there, and even before then during the desert crossing. One woman aboard his truck was raped at every checkpoint, the worst was three times in just one day.

“You can’t say anything,” Uloko said, “or they will shoot you.”

Inside the compound he experienced violence of his own. “They tie you like a goat,” he said of the traffickers binding his hands and feet, then flogging him with a pipe filled with cement. He was being tortured for ransom. He was handed a phone to call his family. His captors would strike him when he was on the line so they would hear his cries and send money. To add insult to injury, he was even charged for the phone card they used to call his family.

Food was scarce on purpose to keep the captured weak. If food was found hidden, traffickers would beat them. Uloko was beaten every day of his stay there. He escaped after two months, having eaten only Banku, a popular West African dumpling that consists of a flour mixture and water. Normally it would be eaten with meat or stew, but the plain doughy mixture is all he had, “slave food,” he called it. The water was “pipe water,” or from the tap, “[it] would be smelling, but I still drank it,” he said.

But when he escaped, he actually didn’t know where to go––he didn’t have anything to orient him in this country he did not know. He found a small phone and sold it for 15 dinars. He used ten dinars to call for help and directions, and five dinars for a piece of bread to eat.

He was directed to a barber shop where he met with a man who helped him make his next arrangements to move. He called his family, too, for money and was transferred to Tripoli, Libya where he stayed for two days.

Immediately thereafter, he transferred to Sabratha, the coastal camp, where there were more than 1,000 people around him at the “white house”*.

Uloko crossed the Mediterranean Sea in a rubber dinghy at four o’clock in the morning on 12 May 2017 with 128 people, including 28 women, two of whom were pregnant. He was out at sea for four hours before everyone aboard was safely rescued by a Spanish ship, which landed later that day on the 12th.

He is 31 years of age now and living in Frosinone, Italy, where we recorded this story on 15 April 2022.

Uloko is an amazing human being.



* The “white house” is a location many have named during their time in Sabratha, Libya, as a prominent spot that may or may not be an abandoned structure from the Gaddafi years.

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