Farewell Senegal

My anthromobile rolls out of Dakar now, direction London, then to new destinations along Africa's migrant routes. Here the summer high season for boat migration is off to an uneventful start - the coastline lies calm and quiet, though in Dakar's seaside neighbourhoods discontent is simmering. The policing front brings some news: the Spanish-Senegalese patrolling agreement has just been renewed for another year, while an Icelandic contingent has joined the Frontex mission off Senegal's coast - after first unloading a boatful of charity supplies.

These months I've bumped along potholed roads with police patrols, hung out with embittered and impatient repatriees who once braved the waves to the Canary Islands, and reminisced about the heady days of border crossings and expulsions with aid workers and migrants alike. It's all still a blur, but a picture is somehow slowly emerging of a phenomenon and mode-of-being that has only emerged in full force in recent years: that of clandestinity. The 'clandestine migrant' hovers like a ghostlike presence beyond the complete grasp of the police forces, journalists, NGOs and academics who make their living off him. One thing, though, stands out clearly in the haze of half-truths and doubts that surrounds the clandestine migration circuit: the security force cooperation that has developed in response to boat departures has made Europe's southernmost maritime borders more tangible and visible than ever. Except, perhaps, for a Swede boarding his 6am plane, Schengen passport in hand, bound for Casablanca and good ol' London.

A very long journey

Mbёkё mi - hitting one's head - is the Wolof term for the boat route to Europe. A week on board a creaking fishing vessel rocked by wild Atlantic waves may prove a rather brutal headache - but it’s still a shortcut. The older, longer 'clandestine' route winds through the dustiest reaches of Mali and Niger and traverses the deadliest stretches of desert. And it might prove the more resilient of routes as sea departures dwindle in response to border controls. Instead of hitting their heads against the wall, migrants may have to dig their feet into the sands yet again. 

Those who do so are the most resilient of aventuriers. A. was once one of them, and I meet him in his family home in Dakar’s sprawling suburbs to hear about his strange, year-long adventure.

One day he caught the long-distance bus at Dakar’s port, destination Libya. He slept in the bus stations of Bamako, Ouagadougou and Niamey. In Niger’s northernmost city Agadez at the edge of the desert, a hustler or coxeur finds him a Landcruiser heading north; then he ‘eats’ what’s left of his customer’s money. The Landcruiser is packed with people: ‘all the time, people fight to have more space’. At night, A. huddles under the car to escape the worst of the desert chill.

But the troubles have only began: the police is on their trail. The adventurers abandon the car, hide in a cave and start marching through the desert. Tuareg bandits soon appear, tipped off by the dismal gathering’s duplicitous guide. 'They took our money, our clothes, our bags.' They tore all clothes off the migrants and made them lie naked in a pile in the sand. They ripped up soles, seams and leather gris-gris or amulets, to see if there was cash hidden anywhere. They poured out their water and scattered their gari, a Nigerian staple that was all they had to eat. They took away four women in their group: one never came back. But as soon as the bandits left, A. and his colleagues set out again. No time to lose in the desert.

The migrants came to a waterhole, shoved a few goats aside and drank. And finally, dressed in someone's left-behind, ripped-up trousers, A. entered Libya.

He laughs when recalling his time in the desert as night descends on his patio and his mum - I think it's his mum - walks by and turns on the light for us just as I begin to squint at my notebook scribbles.

A. tries to scrape together some cash in languid border villages and after a few months he has enough for a lift up to Tripoli. He's told to lie down under the tarpaulin of a truck, tucked in like merchandise: the small convoy he’s travelling in is supposedly all meant for tobacco. ‘One vehicle took the men, the human beings, the other two' - one on each side - 'took the cigarettes.'

In Tripoli, he soon found out, a migrant is more of a cashpoint than a piece of merchandise. Instead of detaining him, the police extorted bribes and kept him sleepless through night-time raids on the dingy rooms where a dozen or more sub-Saharans sleep, nationality by nationality. No place was safe. 'All the time, you hide, hide, hide.'

To find 'peace' - more than anything else - A. decided to try mbёkё mi to Italy. He paid the passeurs, only to find himself locked into a barn for a month. He waited and waited, even as other migrants started trickling off, sure they had lost their money. A. was among the last to leave, penniless and still with no boat in sight. Finally he caught an IOM-sponsored flight back to Senegal where he now sits, a constant smile on his lips, reliving the madness of the road. He’s out of work but won't do it again. Still, his smile is a hint that his adventure has not been a complete failure. He’s not seen Europe, but he’s seen the world.

Mauritania through a fence

The road winds, tired and dusty, towards the border. The cramped car lurches over holes gouged out of the tarmac and swerves to avoid sand pits where chunks of asphalt are missing. This dismal track from St Louis on Senegal's northernmost shore hugs the river and, with it, the Mauritanian border: here, where Arab and black Africa nudge each other, there's something resembling a natural frontier, not just one of those straight colonial lines drawn up at the infamous Berlin Conference.

The djinns are out in full force: the Saharan sands swirl as we drive past bone-dry border outposts and, somewhat ironically, a Red Cross camp for flood victims from last summer's rains. At times forlorn figures appear in the haze - youngsters scattering sand over the holes in the road as we pass, hoping we'll chuck them some small change. The region's employment prospects, in a rusty bucket.

Then we finally reach our destination. In Rosso, sub-Saharan Africa ends - or begins, for intrepid European overland travellers - in a dump. Rosso reeks of garbage, roars with stationed Moroccan trucks, heaves with flies and hustlers and money-changers hungrily flogging useless ouguiya for euros or franc CFA or anything that smells of hard currency.

I love the place. It's the border, incarnate. Wooden pirogues ferret commuters, commercants and - perhaps - clandestine migrants across the deceptively blue Senegal river. People bathe next to the rubbish-ridden jetty. There's little by way of border checks amid the stacks of Spanish beauty creams and Moroccan biscuits that, for whatever reason, are a hot piece of merchandise at Rosso's manic bus terminus: they taste like caked sand. A man draped in a flowing boubou tells me he's the undercover narcotics police. Another fellow in a tattered uniform sharing a bench with a mix of Moors and Senegalese is supposedly checking people's vaccination certificates. The business of the border continues in its dirty, languid and lovely way.

That's until the returnees disembark. The frantic pace of expulsions might have subsided as of late, but the Mauritanian security forces still send luckless sub-Saharan migrants across the river in a pirogue at more or less regular intervals. Once they arrive, the Red Cross - in its Senegalese and Spanish incarnations - receives them, tired and penniless, expelled for supposedly trying to get to Europe without their documents in order. Some of them linger in Rosso, without money nor ideas of where to go next.

That's the case of three Liberians I meet. They have been here for a month now, sleeping rough or in the mosque and waiting - they say - for a money transfer from an elusive relative that will allow them to go back home. But it's hard to know if that's what they really want: the road seems to have sucked them into a vortex as dirty and indeterminate as the border zone they inhabit. "It's very difficult here with an English passport," says one of them, a woman who used to braid hair for a living in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania a few hundred kilometres up the road. Anglophones - who, together with other West Africans from far afield, are referred to as ñakk in Wolof - are not all that welcome in Senegal. Nor in Mauritania, where rumour has it that English-speaking Africans are not allowed to enter by land any longer. "In Mauritania, they say you're African - 'go back!'... Then they say they are from Europe... in Nouadhibou, they can see the lights from Europe."

The soft, comforting lights of Europe beckon here too, as I enter a hotel in the next-door hamlet Richard Toll after a long day at the border. A few steps away from the flies, the smells, the rough-sleeping migrants, a group of French pensioners on a €1,000-a-week cruise are playing boule next to a manicured riverside lawn. This is where Europe's border now lies, I sense: in this grimy parody of Senegal's riches that is Rosso and its languid river.

Dakar Dem Dikk

Sandy streets, handpainted and fume-belching cars rapides, tinny Mande music and crusty baguettes: bienvenue à Dakar, a city whose airport disgorges more French tourists than you could shake an eponymous stick at, half of them seemingly with their sights set on feelgood development projects on lush Senegalese islands. Dakar is an alluring, fast-paced place brimming with leisure migrants and labour migrants, businessfolk and beggars, stoic commuters and frantic street hawkers who seem to flog as little of their stuff as their colleagues on the Canary Islands. One of them, a newspaper vendor working the city's clogged suburban thoroughfares, gets excited when I say what I study. "Eh, l'anthropologie, c'est vraiment intéressant!" He studied English and Arabic at Dakar's Cheikh Anta Diop university, until he ran out of money. Now he flogs smudgy papers at 100 CFA - about 10p - apiece. I say goodbye as I get on my bus, run by Dakar Dem Dikk - "Dakar to and fro" in Wolof and a motto if any for my first few days in this seething, traffic-jammed labyrinth of a city.

My friend the people smuggler

"Ah! You're writing about the pateras." J's smile lights up the rain-swept Gran Canarian patio. "I know of some French journalists who went to Western Sahara, made a documentary there, they even took the boat to the Canary Islands, filming everything. If you want, I can help organise something. I have contacts. You could make good money with a film." He used to make good money too - J's line of business used to be people smuggling. But his story belies the usual stereotype among politicians and journalists of "unscrupulous traffickers" - he helped two brothers do the crossing, and then went himself. He knows the routes, how to evade paying bribes to the Moroccan security forces, how to quick-inflate a zodiac boat, how to steer the course from a beach in Western Sahara to Gran Canaria's shores in 24 hours. And he's happy to serve up stories about his journey, genereously peppered with the bravado of a jetset-style clandestine crosser.

But among many of those he and his ilk have ferried across the waters, a taboo seems to surround the crossing. A Senegalese man I meet says he never asks fellow countrymen how they arrived. But if some of them were ever to trade insults, it might sound like this: "I arrived in Spain with a visa, but you, you almost died trying to get here." There's a word for those who have come by sea: wa gaal gi, "boat people" - cayuco people - in Wolof. And I get the feeling it's hardly a compliment.

Meanwhile, my "smuggler" friend revels in memories of his once so profitable business. The situation has changed mucho, mucho - it's not the same, the police is everywhere, people have started realising that fortunes are not waiting for them on Spain's shores. He's looking for work himself, but nada. As I leave, he tries his sales pitch again: "I still have a zodiac in a garage in Morocco... I could inflate it, you could write a story, just give me a call! You could make lots of money!"