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.

A field day

"Fieldwork". A word that smells earthily of soiled fingers, an anthropological incantation whose connotations of slogging it out with long-lost tribes translates oddly into most other languages. Travail sur le terrain? Trabajo de campo? What's the Wolof equivalent?

But the funniest thing with the concept is hardly its untranslatability: it's that it's neither "work" nor takes place in a "field", however much the anthropological tribe that's sprung forth from our revered founding father, Malinowski, insists on the contrary.

The field is a state of mind, and a state of utter frustration, solitude and agony at that. And it's getting to me, big time.

Today my early-morning date - a soft-spoken, boubou-draped Senegalese policeman - stood me up. It's 8am at the grimy port of Dakar: my date all gone, my brain barely awake. Like an abandoned lover I wandered aimlessly across my "field" - the cosmopolis that is the downtown Plateau district, heaving with expats, vendors, tourist guides and other People With a Purpose. Drawing comparisons between my fruitless ambles and the travails of good ol' Malinowski, sat in his Melanesian hut in the heydays of colonialism pondering the sexual life of savages is, alas, the only fun to be had for this anthropologist-in-the-unmaking. I make phonecalls - someone should write an ethnography on the perlocutionary force of dull fieldwork phone conversations, voicemails left to rot, emails painstakingly typed on French cybercafe keyboards for the sole benefit of a voracious Outlook trashcan - without success. And to top it off, the only wordly reward that my basic Wolof brings is a measly heap of beans in the downtown Sandaga market. Ah, the joys of fieldwork. Soon enough, to escape the heat, the noise, the tape-recorded sales pitches blaring out of the impromptu market stands, I desperately need to leg it back to my little suburban hideout.

Oh dear, I'm an expat. Worse: an expat without a cause and without one of those omnipresent 4x4s packing the sand hard on the sidestreets of Dakar's posher neighbourhoods.

I sweat it out on a city bus, as anthropologists enthustiastically do to get up close and personal with the natives, only to be told it's not going to my destination. Instead I'm left at the mercy of one of the minibuses roaring through Dakar's bottlenecked streets; hostage to the heat, ah, the heat, and the coughing engine, and the noise, and my funny-looking legs, jammed as they are into an impossibly contorted position. Then we stop, yet again, to wait for more passengers. The clock is ticking. Migrants, where are all the migrants, my elusive object of study? My field lies fallow and hot: I'm just a silly toubab in a packed van. In pure frustration I indulge in a simple act of passive aggression: I grind my teeth and press my head against the plastic window. Crrk, it says, and comes unhinged, the last gluey bit of rust finally giving way under the sweaty anthropologist's forehead and, as the bus hits another bump in the road, the window gladly throws itself onto the dusty tarmac with abandon. We screech to a halt, pick it up, and wait for a few long hot minutes as I do the Swede, as the Spaniards say - it wasn't my fault, was it? At least I do get the benefit of extra ventilation once the engine roars into action again.

That's my day in the field, folks. I'm inclined to blame my inner Mr Bean for all the anthropological anomie, but a frank recent AnthropologyMatters article suggests it's not all his fault. Would be happy to hear from anyone else, anthropologist or not, facing similar frustrations in that field that is the world that is the mind that is the mind helplessly locked into a world not altogether of its own choosing. Cheers.

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!"

A day on pirate bay

As I stand talking to the Guardia Civil officer at the port of Los Cristianos, a Peter Pan ship sharks up behind his patrol boat, silently, laden with pale Britons. But the vessels fail to collide: here, on Tenerife's southernmost shore, mass tourism thrives next to state-of-the-art border surveillance.

"The steak sandwich... it's so tender, you can't have one from the butcher like this," muses an elderly British woman, praising her and her husband's favourite lunchspot at the beachfront. "And with the camareros, we've learnt all the local sayings and everything." "But they're not from here, they're from the peninsula," retorts her interlocutor, a Teutonic gentleman on the table across. "Northern Spain... where is it? Andalusia? Galicia?" A Senegalese youngster appears, loaded with cheap sunglasses and sparkling bracelets that he tries to peddle, half-heartedly. The English husband waves him off. "Over there, they serve solomillo this thick, on a plate heated up to 700 degrees," his wife continues, lost in remembrance of steaks past. "It's right there, on the plaza, next to the Chinese restaurant. You can't miss it."

Most of the Senegalese working the seaside promenade probably arrived here by cayuco - a Spanish term applied to large Senegalese fishing vessels or gaal - back in the day. It's hard to be sure, since they're not keen to discuss it. They gather in little cliques, then branch out to different tables, then gather again. No one seems to buy a thing off them. More business - in the shape of bare-bellied Britons - streams into the Asian-run shops promising Bloody Hell Offers on Ciggies. Bulk buy cheap price: Lambert and Butler, Benson and Hedges, Mayfair, Royals, Drum. Nestling next to the Peter Pan, the Jolly Roger ship also lures its fair share of visitors. Pirates still abound at this port - Spain's second busiest for passenger traffic, according to the customs police viewing the spectacle from the pier.

Out there, past the sunglass vendors and pirate ships, the Guardia Civil waits for cayucos to arrive. Their patrol boat is specially furnished for the purpose of tracking down near-capsizing fishing vessels: it's manned 24 hours a day, ready to set out whenever the signal comes through. These days, nothing. The radars and thermal cameras of Spain's maritime borders surveillance system - SIVE - only pick up commercial vessels, patrol boats, large waves, sailing ships. Nothing more.

But the patrolling, coordinated through an intricate web of control centres stretching from Dakar to Warsaw, continues unabated. The centres and agencies are tied together in an ever-tighter mesh encompassing Spain's Guardia Civil, the EU's Frontex border agency, Spain's sea rescue service, the Armada, the Red Cross, and police forces and gendarmeries from a dozen or more European and African countries. In their wake follow a flurry of obscure acronyms and cryptic labels - CCRC, CECON, HERA, SEA HORSE, NOBLE CENTINELA, ALFA-INDIA - referring to transnational border control centres and surveillance projects that fan ever further out from European territory. But this need not bother the British and German carnivores ashore, nor the ferry passengers lounging between the patrol boat and an emergencies-equipped Red Cross trailer out at the pier.

"The problem's being cut at the root," says the Guardia Civil official. "Here we can't contain the migration flows - it has to be over there." He means the Gambia, where he was recently on mission, and neighburing Senegal: my next stops on this fieldwork trip.

Strong winds at the edge of Europe

Fuerteventura, island of fierce winds and a few too many sandblasted northern Europeans, is my starting point on this anthropological roundtrip to West Africa. After the dunes and gloomy resorts of the north, this Canary island's capital - Puerto del Rosario - comes as a surprise. Sleepy and rundown, with streets named after long-dead comandantes and almirantes, Puerto feels like a bordertown - the African coast might be 100km away, but the frontier is never far off. The navy, Guardia Civil, and assorted state agencies line the seaside promenade; Sahrawi women in loose, pastel-coloured robes and black Africans mingle with local builders, port workers, brothel staff and discombobulated tourists.

The crisis of the pateras - small fishing boats carrying clandestine migrants from Tarfaya in Western Sahara - has receded, and spectacularly so. The island's detention centre for foreigners, El Matorral, held a couple of thousand Africans in its heyday a few years back; now it's empty, says a local aid worker, with a smile and a shrug. Funding's being cut, either because of the economic crisis battering Spain or the drop in boat arrivals, or both; queues of downcast African migrants no longer line up in front of NGO offices. Spain's government is claiming "victory" in the "battle" against clandestine migration, and says it's thanks to increased policing in the Canaries, at sea and on African soil that numbers have dropped. But is that the whole story? And what is happening beyond those inviting waves, which seem to have morphed into a solid, almost impenetrable border since the boats started arriving en masse in the middle of the last decade? That's what this blog will try to unravel.

From Europe to West Africa (and back)

Time to embark – my PhD fieldwork on clandestine migration from West Africa to the southern fringes of Europe is kicking off. The project – and this blog – will be about borders, those who cross them, and those who labour on behalf of the EU’s citizens to keep them in place. It will be about the chasm between Africa and Europe, and what’s to be found in this liminal and little-known space.

I’ll be posting stories, snippets, grumbles and witticisms here throughout 2010, first from the Canary Islands where a trickle of African fishing boats has triggered European panic about a ‘flood’ of ‘illegals’ in recent years. The journey will continue in Senegal and then perhaps veer towards Mali, the Gambia, Mauritania and beyond. The travellers I encounter will give shape to my trip through Europe’s southern backyard. Please comment on any of the postings, or get in touch!