By Joel Gunter
BBC Africa Eye
It was close to midnight when the young man crawled into the desert. All around him was darkness. A hundred metres away, a handful of Tuareg rebels and people smugglers, who worked together ferrying migrants through this unforgiving stretch of the Sahara, were gathered around three trucks, drumming and dancing and letting off long bursts of gunfire that rattled the night sky. He could just make out the faint light from their phones, and every fifth bullet they fired was a tracer that lit a bright arc towards the stars.
The young man, who had given himself the name Azeteng, was somewhere in northern Mali near to the border with Algeria. Behind him lay El-Khalil, a bleak and brutal waystation on the West African migrant route to Europe. Ahead of him, sand stretched for miles in every direction. He was a speck on the dark sea of the Sahara. Slowly, painfully, he pushed his body on, trying to keep as low as possible to the ground.
Azeteng was on the run. A few hours earlier, the smugglers who controlled El-Khalil had swiped his glasses from his face, just to mess with him, and refused to give them back. Azeteng was 25 but he was small for his age — 5’ 5” and slightly built, with a shy manner and a way of moving through the world that suggested he was always trying not to be seen. He was powerless to stand up for himself, so he backed away.
If the smugglers had stopped then to look closely at his glasses, they might have seen the strangely thick frame, the mini-USB port under one arm, the pin-sized hole in the hinge — and they would surely have killed him. He had seen enough already to be sure.
The month was May 2017. The migrant routes through northern Mali were controlled by the Tuareg rebels, who worked with smuggling and trafficking networks connected to departure points across West Africa. Azeteng’s journey began in Ghana. Others came from Guinea, the Gambia, Senegal, Sierra Leone. In recent years, tens of thousands of men, women and children made their way into the Sahara, drawn by the distant promise of a better life in Europe.
A Ghanaian migrant who set out in 2016 told me he turned back in fear after hitting the desert. His friends persevered, towards Libya, he said. “Only one succeeded, to Italy. Later he told us that the rest were dead.”
Those who attempt the desert crossing travel along ancient trans-Saharan trade routes through Mali and Niger to Algeria and Libya and on to the sea. News reports have focused on the grim toll of the Mediterranean, which claimed the lives of more than 5,000 migrants the year before Azeteng set out. But according to UN estimates, as many as twice the number of migrants have died in the desert.
A few weeks after Azeteng crawled out of El-Khalil, 44 Ghanaians and Nigerians, including young children, died of thirst in Niger when the smugglers who brought them that far ran out of fuel. Weeks later, at least 50 migrants died when three trucks were abandoned for unknown reasons. Those were the headlines. Many more would die uncounted in the sand.
Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
Outside El-Khalil, Azeteng prayed. For now, at least, the smugglers seemed too preoccupied with partying to notice the young migrant crawling in the sand, or pay much attention to the strange pair of glasses he had been wearing. When Azeteng thought he was far enough away to be safe, he stood up, brushed the sand from his clothes, and walked into the desert.
Azeteng was a middle child but an odd one out. Of his seven siblings, he was the only one with a different mother. He grew up on a rural police barracks in northern Ghana with his father, step-mother, and three half-sisters in two rooms. His own mother lived in central Ghana, and when Azeteng’s father was away, which was often, Azeteng felt like a stranger in his own home.
He was supposed to follow his father into the police, but Azeteng dreamed of being a spy. He spent his pocket money on James Bond films and low-budget CIA thrillers, burned on to blank DVDs by traders at the local market. On the weekends, when his father sent him to cut grass for the family’s livestock in a garden behind the police station, Azeteng would pretend he was on a mission, and tiptoe up to the door to listen in.
What he heard on those weekends killed off what little ambition he had to join the police. He heard poor women come to the office to report that their husbands had beaten them, only to be told they would have to pay for a pen to take their statement, or for petrol to drive to make arrests. The tricks were cheap, and the sums pitifully small, but they had an outsized impact on young Azeteng. When he saw prisoners whipped with sticks in their cells, he knew for sure he would not be a policeman after all.
As a teenager, Azeteng carried a pocket radio everywhere. His whirring, detail-driven mind catalogued the world around him, but sometimes struggled to discern which details were important and which were not. He wanted to fight against injustice, but he didn’t know how. After high school he went to work with his mother in the fields of Kintampo, and at night he listened to his radio and imagined himself as an undercover journalist. He had already reported one story, at his high school. Using a flip phone to secretly film, he exposed a group of teachers who were brewing alcohol on school grounds and taking money from students for grades, and when the story made the local papers, three teachers, including the headmaster, were sacked or transferred.
Lying in bed in Kintampo after working in the fields, he dreamed of telling a bigger story, exposing bigger crimes. On the radio, the news bulletins said young people from Africa were dying in their thousands in the desert and the sea.
Six months later, Azeteng boarded a bus to Abeka Lapaz in the west of Accra, where he walked along the side of the nine-lane George W Bush Highway until he reached a nondescript two-storey building, home to CSIT Limited — purveyors of computer products and technical solutions, including secret cameras. He had already done some research into the various types of secret camera available. There was the button, the pen, the clock, the watch, and the glasses.
At 200 cedis — about £30 — the glasses were the cheapest. They were capable of recording only low-resolution images and they worked poorly at night. Later, British police would have to examine the footage carefully as they pieced together Azeteng’s story. But as he looked at himself in the mirror that day, Azeteng was just pleased to see it would take a second, third, probably fourth glance to spot that anything was amiss. He bought them, and called them his secret spectacles.
For five months, while he saved, Azeteng practised filming and hiding the memory cards in his mouth — a trick from a spy film. Then he sold his livestock — two sheep, six goats and 10 chickens — and set a date to leave.
At this point, no-one knew about Azeteng’s wildly dangerous idea except for Azeteng. So he told his priest: he intended to get himself smuggled on the desert migrant route to Europe, using a secret camera in his glasses to document the crimes of the smugglers. The priest asked him if he had considered the dangers involved. Azeteng said he had. “I thought it was a service to the world, a service to restore human dignity,” the priest told me later. “I said I would offer Mass for him while he was away.”
Next Azeteng told his father, who lives now in a stone house on a small plot outside Accra. He still has the bearing of a policeman, though slightly faded by retirement, and he still rears livestock, which roamed the plot while we sat inside, away from the fierce afternoon sun.
“I was mad, mad because I couldn’t understand why he wants to take that risk,” he said. “Sincerely, I did not give him my blessing. Then he called to say that he had taken off, and I said, well, that is his choice. God be with you.”
Azeteng had packed a few items of clothing and made a razor cut in the lining of his rucksack to hide his cash. Then he walked to Kinbu Junction, a teeming transport hub in downtown Accra, and asked three young men if they were going north. They said yes, they were headed for Europe — across the water to Italy or Spain. They gave Azeteng the number for a smuggler named Sulemana.
Sulemana told Azeteng to board an ordinary bus to Bamako, the capital of Mali, where they would meet. Azeteng had taught himself to record phone conversations, and he recorded his conversation with Sulemana and took detailed notes. The bus pulled out of Kinbu Junction. Azeteng wrote in his diary: “Saturday, April 15, 2017 — depart for Mali. 9.15am GMT.”
The bus crossed into Burkina Faso and then Mali, via checkpoints where small amounts of money were extorted by the police. After three days they reached Bamako. Sulemana arranged a fake travel vaccination certificate for Azeteng and demanded 45,000 CFA — £60 — for the next stage of his trip up to Gao, where Azeteng would meet Sulemana’s boss, Moussa Sangare.
At the bus station, somewhere close to a thousand migrants milled around in the heat. Azeteng took out his diary. “Every five minutes a bus will set off with African migrants and those trafficked,” he wrote. “It is more like a busy international airport.” He wrote down a detailed description of Sulemana and the smuggler's phone number, then he boarded the bus. After a few hours, Sulemana called him. “If anyone asks you where you are going, tell them you are going to visit your relative,” he said. “Do not tell them you are going to Europe through the desert.”
Sulemana told him to prepare for his cash to run out, and to call home to ask for more along the way. “It is like I told you,” he said. “The road is all about money.”
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