This Land Is Our Land

by Suketu Mehta

  4

  TWO SIDES OF A STRAIT

  TANGIER: WAITING FOR EL DORADO

  All over the world, the ordinary heroes are on the move, whether it’s Central America, or Ghana, or other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. In summer 2018, I visited Europe’s equivalent of the U.S.-Mexican border—the straits that separate southern Spain from northern Morocco.

  In 2017, Morocco rejoined the African Union after a thirty-three-year absence. It is now trying to set up Casablanca as the capital of Africa. Trade with West African countries is flourishing. And so is the human traffic across the border. You see them everywhere, the African migrants, speaking French or English rather than Arabic. Some invited by their hosts, others not. For many of them, of course, Morocco isn’t a destination; it’s a transit country. Sub-Saharan migration across the Mediterranean and into Spain jumped tenfold from 2016 to 2018. Morocco and Spain have negotiated a treaty that returns migrants attempting to cross over, which the two countries have held up as a diplomatic success.

  * * *

  There is a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean at the bottom of Tangier’s old town where migrants from all over West Africa gather and look past the yachts toward the cliffs of Andalusia. Tangier is the last step of the long journey across Africa. You can see El Dorado, just fourteen kilometers across the strait. It is here that I meet Khalil, a twenty-six-year-old man from Conakry, the capital of Guinea. He and his wife have been in Tangier for nine months. Last week, they had a baby boy, Isaca. Khalil is waiting till the baby is a month old to make the crossing.

  Khalil’s pension is just below and to the right of the terrace. As I climb up, a Moroccan man challenges us: Who am I? Why am I here? He wants to examine my bag, to extract his commission. All the other guests are African. On the wall of the landing, there’s a tourist poster of the Tower of London.

  Khalil takes me into his room, which has yellow walls and a bare lightbulb, and shuts the door behind him. Three women are inside: his wife and two other African women, whom he introduces as his sister and his grandmother. On the floor is a plastic bottle of cooking oil, half an onion, and a pile of unwashed mugs in a pot. There’s a small gas cylinder in the room, a clear fire hazard, and another one outside. They use the one in the room mostly to make tea. There are three beds, with brightly patterned polyester blankets lumped on them. It costs them €2.50 a night for the room.

  Khalil’s father died, and he has a little sister and a mother in Conakry and a brother in Belgium, who has a wife, who has papers and works cleaning houses. In Conakry, Khalil worked in a call center. “It’s not easy,” they keep saying. The teachers in Conakry haven’t been paid in three months, so they’re on strike. But Khalil shows me pictures on his Facebook page of his life back in Conakry. There, too, people dress up, have parties, have fun, have a Facebook life.

  Guinea’s population lives in extreme poverty, but it is not a poor country. It has from a quarter to half of the world’s bauxite reserves, and gold, and diamonds. A series of Western corporations, including Rio Tinto and a hedge fund named Och-Ziff Capital Management, have systematically exploited the country’s enormous mineral wealth by “negotiated” contracts with the country’s leadership that siphon off an extortionate share of the profits.

  According to a 2017 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission complaint, Och-Ziff bribed Guinean officials to the tune of “tens of millions,” from 2007 to 2012. The previous year, the firm paid a $213 million criminal penalty to the U.S. Justice Department and another $199 million fine to the SEC for corrupt practices in Africa. These were a slap on the wrist compared with the profits the company had made already. With these profits, Dan Och, the fund’s chairman, bought an apartment at 220 Central Park South, the most expensive building in New York, where units sell for up to a quarter of a billion dollars. (He’s kept his penthouse at 15 Central Park West, which is valued at $100 million). Michael Cohen, an American who was the European head of Och-Ziff, bought a nine-hundred-acre estate in the English countryside. In 2018, U.S. officials charged him with criminal fraud and bribery related to the hedge fund’s African activities. (The case was later dismissed on a technicality: the statute of limitations had expired on the crime.) The money earned by Guinean locals is mainly accrued by the president and his many wives; and that money, too, follows the company profits out of the country. Every year, $150 billion leaves Africa for overseas tax havens.

  It took Khalil and his wife two weeks to go from Guinea to Senegal to Mauritania to Morocco in a series of trucks. Sometimes the drivers would demand money or threaten to abandon their cargo in the desert. He traveled with sixteen people; at night the women slept in the truck and the men on the road. They had very little food, and only a small bottle of water, which they sipped from, not knowing how long it would last.

  They arrived in Casablanca, stayed there for a week, and met an African smuggler, who convinced the two of them to give him €2,500 to cross into Spain. Then the smuggler disappeared with their money. “His skin is black, but he’s not African,” says Khalil, bitterly.

  They moved north, to Tangier, and found a room with a Moroccan family. After a while, they couldn’t make the rent and were kicked out. They found shelter with a Senegalese migrant who said, “Join me in my room.” Then Khalil’s wife found out that she was pregnant for the first time.

  They had the baby in a Moroccan hospital, which treats blacks differently than it does Moroccans. Khalil’s wife went into labor in the morning, so she went to the hospital, but was told that she had to wait till the evening to be admitted. She sat in the corridor all day, without anyone checking on her.

  I am given Isaca, the five-day-old baby, to hold on my lap; there’s none of the rigmarole of visitors washing their hands before touching the baby. He looks at me through rheumy eyes, fuzz from his fetal skin still on his cheeks. Such a wrinkly little thing, probably premature. He is overdressed and sneezes, but flexes with surprising strength as I hold him in my arms. It is hot, stifling hot; the window is jammed shut and there’s a curtain over it, and the door leading to the corridor is kept closed. There are mosquitoes and bad air in the room with the baby.

  The mother breastfeeds the child in full view of all of us. They need seven medicines for the baby and the mother. The Moroccan hospital delivered the baby for free but didn’t give them medicines, which cost ninety dollars, money they don’t have. The newborn hasn’t seen a doctor.

  Someone who crossed over to Spain with a baby earlier has told Khalil to buy a medicine at the pharmacy that will keep the baby quiet for three hours, the duration of the crossing, and to swaddle the baby tightly so the sea won’t wet him. Khalil is intent on buying medicine that will keep the baby quiet for twenty-four hours. Fearing for the baby’s life, I tell him not to do it.

  They have to get a group of people together now and buy a boat, a plastic boat—the more money, the bigger the boat and the more powerful the motor. And they need to pay the captain and bribe the coast guard. If they are intercepted by the navy, they’ll be picked up from the small boat and be put in the naval boat and brought back. If it’s bad weather, they’ll drown, like two of Khalil’s friends did. None of the people in this room know how to swim. In 2016, for every forty-seven migrants who crossed the Mediterranean, one person died. Lately, the fatalities have been rising even higher: one out of every eighteen won’t make it to shore. On the fourteen-kilometer ride, through dangerous currents, the migrants sing spiritual songs, praising and appealing to whatever gods they worship.

  The coast guard will give them a sign and the navigational GPS signals, which they have to follow. The ideal time to cross over is Ramadan, which is coming up. Everyone is hungry, and the police spend much of the day sleeping. On the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan, the heavens open up and the Prophet ascends on his horse to heaven.

  They know it’s dangerous, they know they might die making the crossing; but when you’ve come this far, when you’ve crossed deserts and mountains, this is the fina
l bit. Because you can see Spain, you can see your destination. Khalil wants to go to Europe. No matter the difficulties, he won’t turn back, because, he says, “my family needs my aid.”

  In Belgium, Khalil would like to play professional soccer. In Conakry, he was a midfield attacker, number 9, in a second-division team. Khalil is not playing football here. He doesn’t have the right shoes—he’s wearing fake Crocs, and he doesn’t have a soccer outfit. He once tried to play soccer in a field, but Moroccans drove him off. So he can’t play, he can’t exercise, and at night the baby cries.

  A friend and I have brought the family baby clothes, two boxes of them, and some others in a bag. Our gifts sit on the bed beside the mother, unopened. They will probably sell them. On the crossing, they will travel with just a knapsack each. Tangier is littered with discarded objects, shed by the migrants just before they cross.

  Khalil calls the older woman his “grandmother,” but she’s not the mother of either of his parents. She is in the same family as his mother and is planning to cross with them. It’s unusual to find a woman her age—she could be in her sixties or seventies; it’s hard to tell, because life has been hard on her—making the crossing. She blesses us for bringing the baby clothes.

  Hawa, the younger woman, also turns out not to be Khalil’s sister, but a cousin. She is twenty-nine years old. She has large lips, and wears a scarf over her head and a winter jacket. She speaks a little English; her husband studies English in Conakry. There, she “sold things. On a little table.” She had to leave school after the tenth grade when she got pregnant. She couldn’t get her diploma.

  Hawa has four children, two boys and two girls: ages eight, six, four, and one. Her husband can’t find work, and the children are in the care of her mother. The one-year-old had his birthday yesterday. She called him. She shows me a picture on Facebook of her baby boy, dressed in a birthday outfit. I remember my eldest son’s first birthday and what a production we made out of it by inviting two hundred people to a restaurant in Lower Manhattan, how I went shopping for a dress for him, how Gautama, dressed like a medieval Italian prince, watched the American puppeteer who’d studied kathputli in Rajasthan for years as he manipulated the marionettes, all for the benefit of our little prince. It was, after all, his first birthday. Gautama didn’t care. We did.

  Hawa is on the verge of tears. “I miss my children. It is hard. It is hard.”

  What would it have been like, three weeks ago, on the day she got into the car, four people in the back, two in the front, to begin the long trek to Europe? How would she have said goodbye to the youngest one, knowing it might be years or decades before she saw him again?

  “I want my children to learn. I want them to go to school. I want them to get a diploma.”

  A man comes in with food for all of them, and he gives the change to Hawa; she must be paying for them now because she’s the newest. She’ll get to Europe somehow, she says.

  Where will she stay?

  “Anywhere.”

  She says she wants to work.

  What kind of work will she do?

  “Work.” She doesn’t say “I’m going to Europe because the government will give me money.” She will do any kind of work. And then she will send for her children—she doesn’t know when. “I can’t go back.”

  She details the choice of passage. She could go on a lifeboat, the kind propelled by “a small stick,” she says, making rowing motions with her arms, which costs €500, or on a motorboat, which costs between €2,000 and €2,500.

  I sense that there is some tension between her and the rest of the family. They say they will cross when the baby is strong, maybe in a month, two months.

  “Not two months. Definitely not!” Hawa bursts out. “Two or three weeks.”

  “Three weeks,” says Khalil, tentatively.

  * * *

  As I walk back to my apartment, I pass two big yachts, one of them a five-masted sailing ship, all lit up and resting at harbor. I can see them from my balcony, coming and going at will. Tangier is a port city par excellence, from where Ibn Battuta sailed out to discover the world. The French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, and finally, the Americans, took claim on this port, with its medina crawling up the hillsides. It’s where Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and the Beat writers came to discover themselves. They could come here, as expats, and live here for as long or as little as they liked, and go back, or die here, as they chose.

  TARIFA: AN AFRICAN MAKES A HOME IN EUROPE

  Flashing my American passport, I get on a fast, comfortable ferryboat from Tangier, at the tip of Africa, and disembark on the continent of Europe an hour later. Tarifa is known, thanks to the wind whipping around the southernmost tip of Europe, as the finest kitesurfing destination on the continent. You can see the kitesurfers zooming across the water, the golden flowers of Europe, for whom the sea isn’t a graveyard but a vacationland on which to play daredevil. On shore, topless white women sun themselves on white-sand beaches. After every full moon—prime crossing time of the month—debris from the migrants’ boats washes up on the same beaches, objects discarded when the boat takes on water or life jackets hurriedly thrown off after the migrants make it to land.

  * * *

  Many of the young Spanish girls walk around Tarifa sporting the same braided, African-style hair. The source is in the back of a lively shop selling clothes and tourist souvenirs. Her name is Favoui, and she’s from Nigeria. She wears a white bandanna around the multicolored braids that adorn her head and has an easy smile.

  I ask her how old she is.

  “Well, now I’m forty-one,” she says, laughing. “I don’t want to say it!”

  There are giraffe masks on the wall of the shop, and Indian and African garments for sale, mostly for tourists. Two young Spanish women, voluptuous, come in for their hair-braiding appointment. They are white, and their hair is black and blue. Favoui attends to them, and an hour later they walk out looking, or at least feeling, like Amber Rose or Kim Kardashian.

  Favoui is from Delta State in Nigeria. She comes from a polygamous home. Her father was in the air force, and she had a lot of brothers. She lived well as a child, but then her parents separated and Favoui lived with her mother.

  As a young woman, Favoui would see the people from her village who’d gone to Europe drive back to the village in their big cars. Living in her shack, made of tarpaulin and mud, she would see the houses that the migrants would build for their parents, made of wood and brick. So, she thought, “I have to go to Europe.”

  This desire begins early, she tells me. In Nigeria, children of fourteen or fifteen leave the village to go to Europe. They hear their friends talk about life there, and they pick up and go; sometimes, they don’t even tell their parents they’re going. The smugglers tell the young men they can go to Europe and pay when they get there. They make them sign oaths, cut their wrists, and do a blood ritual. They tell them their soul will be stolen if they don’t pay.

  Delta is the richest oil-producing state in Nigeria, but the local people don’t see much of the money or the oil. Favoui recalls growing up without lights. Sometimes there would be no electricity for days. “Three days, no light. Four days, no light.” But closer to the end of the month, just before the electricity bill was due, the company would switch on the electricity for two or three hours and make their customers pay the bill. After they did, the power cuts would begin again.

  So anyone who could afford it had a generator and either bought fuel or stole it from the pipelines transporting the wealth of their state out of it. “You have to have this thing that makes you to have light.” But the generators were extremely dangerous “because people buy the most cheapest one, and they don’t even know how to use it, and a lot of houses get burnt. Children, parents, get burnt.”

  It happened in her village often. She remembers a family who had left their generator on in the kitchen at night while they slept, because it was really hot in the summer and they needed the fan. But t
he generator leaked carbon monoxide, and the family fell asleep. “They were breathing and breathing and breathing, and the next morning, they were all dead.”

  The Nigerian Delta is where, four years before Favoui left, the Nigerian government executed Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists who led a nonviolent campaign against Shell Oil Company. The giant Anglo-Dutch conglomerate has been drilling in the area since 1958 and has extracted over $30 billion in oil. Very little of it goes to the people living in the states across which Shell’s pipelines run, where much of the area has been reduced to a vast wasteland of oil spills, bereft of virtually all fish or wildlife. In 2017, Amnesty International uncovered documents pointing to Shell’s complicity in the Nigerian military’s murder, rape, and torture of citizens who were opposed to the multinational’s plunder of its oil wealth.

  * * *

  In 1999, Favoui left her village to set out for Europe. She traveled with a group of migrants in a 4×4 through several countries and ended up in the Sahara, going from village to village. The Tuaregs, men with scarves around their faces, hid them in a series of houses. “If you were lucky, they came back for you.” There were bandits everywhere. Occasionally, their convoy would be intercepted by the police, who would tell the smugglers, “If you don’t want us to arrest everybody, we need some ladies tonight.” So the smugglers would go inside and pick out some of the women from the convoy to be given to the police, as bribe or sacrifice.

  She was in Morocco for over a year. Her first son was born in Rabat. One night the police came to the hotel where she and other migrants were staying in Tangier. She had overstayed her six-month visa and was now illegal. The police burst in and “everybody started running.” They ran up to the roof and a couple of them jumped over the narrow alleyway to the adjoining roof. But one of them didn’t make it; he fell into the alleyway and died.