JOYCE OJEI is “wiser” now. But her mind works like a coffin for spent lusts, a casket of hope through which beauty has raged. Back when she was a young adult, Ojei dreamed of living like a queen. To achieve her dream, she decided to travel out. Patiently and with calm resolve, she departed Nigeria for Europe through Africa’s desert corridors the way the housefly seeking to know its true nature follows faeces into the latrine. Ten years after she embarked on the perilous trip, Ojei seems a spent girl lost in a hopeless twirl for womanhood. Like a violet dying before its full blossom, she has aged and emaciated. At 31, she looks like she just clocked 50.
After a dozen years doing the ‘hustle,’ there should have been nothing left of the wiry girl who deserted her birthplace in Ekuri, Akamkpa district of Cross River State to seek greener pastures in Lagos and Europe. Ojei dropped out of secondary school with her mother’s blessing, just before she wrote her graduation exams. According to her, it was imperative that she quit school, in order to seize what she and her mother considered once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to flee the grinding poverty in her family and “make it big.”
“Mama really tried for me and my brother but she was growing weak. Life became very tough for us after papa died. We survived by the little we got from selling fruits and mama’s petty trade in provisions. But things became harder and we decided that I should quit schooling as we could not raise money to further my education even if I passed my SSCE. So I continued hawking fruits until I met David,” she said. David, she explained, is an elder brother to Christy, her childhood friend. And according to Ojei, he was the angel sent to rescue her family from crushing poverty.
In 1999, Ojei left Akamkpa with David few days after she clocked 16. They caught an early bus to Lagos where David got her a job as a maid and six months later, as a pub waitress off Medical road in Ikeja. She squatted with David and reluctantly became his bedmate after parrying his overtures in the first three weeks of her arrival in Lagos. David could make things happen for her and she didn’t want to jeopardize that.
With David’s help, she transited between jobs for seven years, saving every kobo she earned to the tune of N167, 000, money she intended to fund a canteen business in Ekuri. Ojei was on the path to achieving her dreams but with just a few months to go before she hit her N300, 000 target, she was forced to re-examine her dreams.
On a night out with friends and co-workers in Mende, Maryland, Lagos, Joyce was exposed to cozy realities she had never imagined. “Na dat day I finally tear eye (got wise),” she said. Aunty Pat (short form of Patricia), one of her co-workers’ “area sister” (mentor), introduced them to the adventurous world she purportedly held sway. Over steaming plates of nkwobi, a local delicacy made from goat meat and chilled malt, Aunty Pat, who claimed to be an international businesswoman regaled Ojei and company with exciting tales about life in the swanky and currency-paved streets of Spain and Italy.
She said only the “sharp girls” get to travel out and enjoy the immeasurable benefits of hustle on European streets. Having gotten their attention, Aunty Pat disclosed that sometimes, she helps “only responsible and very reliable girls” secure travel documents for onward journey to her touted Eldorado. “She said she could help us get to Europe where she would also assist us in securing jobs as waitresses and bartenders in five star hotels and very big restaurants,” said Ojei.
Of course, Ojei agreed to be a recipient of Aunty Pat’s generosity. Having seen her spend lavishly and foot the bill running into thousands of naira for everything they consumed at the joint, Ojei and two of her colleagues signed up with Aunty Pat. Two years later, she paid Aunty Pat “crossing money” of N450, 000 and they embarked on a hazardous trip through Nigeria’s north-eastern border at Jibiya, Katsina through Maradi to Agadez, Niger Republic.
At Agadez, they were joined by 58 other migrants from Ghana, Mali, Ivory Coast and Togo for onward journey to Europe through Niger’s desert corridor. They would have gotten to Spain12 months earlier but for a botched attempt through Republic of Benin which caused Aunty Pat to drop one of the girls whom she described as spiritually perverse and a “bad market.”
No sooner did she get to Spain than the truth dawned on Ojei. She got to know that Aunty Pat was actually an agent (human trafficker) who transported Nigerian girls to work as commercial sex workers for Nigerian and Ivorien Madams in Spain and Italy. She was told that even though she had paid her “crossing money” she still owed Aunty Pat additional N500, 000 “crossing money” and a separate sum of N2 million being money that would be used for her upkeep as she hustled to work off her debt. Ojei set to work immediately, and Aunty Pat took her to an associate, a madam running a very busy brothel in Malaga, Spain.
At first sight, the madam acknowledged Ojei to be a “very fine girl” whom she could groom to become a “hot one.” At this point, things started to get better. Ojei claimed she started out under the watchful eyes of the madam in a restaurant and hostel that also served as a brothel. According to her, she was subjected to the dastardly process called “blending (an equivalent of gang rape)” which she passed in flying colours. “I be runs girl now. Even before I comot village, I don tear eye,” she bragged. Subsequently, she was taken to a cleric from Nigeria whom she insisted, operated like a witchdoctor.
She revealed that on getting to his place, he directed them to a room where her madam asked her to strip before she proceeded to cut hair from her vagina and armpits after dousing her in brown powder. Then she dragged her to the priest who allegedly drew blood from her thumb and mixed it with her vaginal hair and some other concoction that she was forced to share with her madam in consecration of a blood oath.
Ojei made “plenty money” but she never got to keep any of it, not even the additional tips she got from her clients. The bulk of the money she made under the watchful eye of her pimps and her madam went to the latter. The reality of securing that lucrative job as a bartender in a five star hotel disappeared into thin air as she landed in Malaga, Spain as one of Aunty Pat’s several commercial sex workers. Its six years since Ojei worked off her debts and things have really moved on for her, she claimed.
Now 31, she owns a tastefully furnished apartment in Ogba-Aguda. From there, she monitors and directs the operations of her “travel agency” (human trafficking business) comprising a hostel, training school and transit home for girls desperate and naïve enough to brave the perilous crossing to Europe through the desert. Interestingly, while Ojei has regained her freedom and become her own boss, Christy, her childhood friend, is still working off her debts to Aunty Pat and her madam in Europe. Unlike Ojei, Christy was unable to raise fund for her “crossing money” through the desert. After a disastrous spell in Malaga that saw a customer die in her arms, she was sneaked into Italy by her madam. In Italy, she shares a bed in the cramped fifth-floor room occupied by 26 Nigerian girls in a dormitory building for immigrants near Paris’ Left Bank. “They are all hustling to pay off their debts and work for their personal money,” revealed Ojei.
Ojei believes she is very successful because she had “liver” (was courageous) and never shied away from hard work. “In Malaga, there were times I got frustrated. I was working my ass off day and night. I was making money but I wasn’t the one spending it. And I couldn’t run away. I don swear oath naa (I had taken blood oath). Most girls who try to run end up dying mysteriously. Hustle no dey kill, na juju we fear pass. Juju dey kill fast. Once you’ve taken the blood oath, there is no going back. You can’t escape the consequences if you break it,” she said.
Colet’s case offers a different perspective to a malaise ravenously eating into the country’s social fabric like a hideous canker. When you look at Colet, you just might see middling grief passively bound beneath the folds of her wan smile. At 19, the native of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State exudes that disquieting resignation characteristic of the aged who had suddenly realized that beneath life’s promising bounties lurks a sad and sour anticlimax.
Two years ago, she had left her hometown for Lagos in a desperate bid to travel to Europe in search of greener pasture. Colet is yet to achieve her dream and the reason is hardly far-fetched: her lover and Good Samaritan who promised to assist her with the travel fare had suddenly backed out claiming that she had a “very bad spirit.”
“He claimed I was bad business and he did not wish to destroy his own work with his hands,” disclosed Colet. Afterwards, she said, “I was forced to work in several joints across Lagos and Ogun State. I needed to raise enough money to finance my trip. But first, I had to settle my bills.” And she is still settling her bills.
Colet’s story yielded all sorts of detail about her predicament particularly her entanglement with voodoo and her very dubious boyfriend. According to her, she met Raphael, her boyfriend, on her birthday in October 2008. Having wooed and won her heart, Raphael who had always identified himself as a businessman proposed to fly her to Belgium to assist her with her schooling, she explained.
Colet agreed, so did her mother, only for the 19-year-old to discover that in the month before their departure that her knight in shiny armour would take her to a voodoo shrine to have her take an oath not to betray him. At the shrine, the priest (oheri) took hair, fingernails, toenails and pubic hair from both of them and concocted them into one packet. Added to the packet in the days that she had to spend at the shrine were a few drops of her menstrual blood and some sperm from the intercourse she had with Raphael. In the presence of the gods, Raphael pledged to take her to Europe, while Colet in turn had to swear to repay him whatever she owed him for his services.
Both ate from the same kola nut and pronounced these oaths before the deities of the shrine while some offerings were made (in money and a goat was slaughtered) to invoke the gods’ presence. The priest, she recounted, made it clear to both of them that breaking this arrangement would anger the gods and could jeopardise their lives, a statement which elicited fear in her heart, even as she explained.
Colet received in addition a number of incisions, on her chest and her forehead, into which potent medicines were rubbed. The priest explained that these would enhance her beauty and afford travel protection. When they finally left the shrine, Raphael paid the priest and some days later applied for travel visa for Colet to Belgium.
He accompanied her and, after some ill fated attempts to secure a visa to Belgium, Raphael finally delivered her to a brothel in Abeokuta. At that point he received an undisclosed sum from the madam and owner of the brothel and disappeared. For a while, she worked for her new boss who persistently claimed that she owed her so much money and that when she had made her investment’s worth off her, she would release her from her service.
Worried and totally dissatisfied with the situation, Colet fled her madam’s brothel in Abeokuta for Ibadan, Oyo State with the assistance of one of her favourite customers, a commercial truck driver. In Ibadan, she lived with the driver for a while until she developed a rash and swellings all over her body. She fell terribly ill and the driver, claiming to act in accordance with a divination, kicked her out of his house.
Friends to the driver took pity on her and led her back to her madam in Abeokuta. Much to her surprise, she found Raphael waiting there for her. He beat her to a pulp and warned her that her mysterious ailment was just a tip of the iceberg. He warned her never to flee again and administered what she called a swift-acting remedy to her ailment on her. The rashes and chronic fever disappeared in a week and Colet resumed work immediately, this time shuttling across brothels owned by her madam.
As their cases reveal, there is a worrisome dimension to sex trafficking of young adults and under-aged girls. As they are being put to work on the nation’s streets after they are forced to declare vows in the presence of witchdoctors and their idols. Such measure guarantees close inspection of the girls’ fulfillment of commitments by the ‘invisible’ world. In a number of cases defaulting girls are reported to have mysteriously died or disappeared.
Further findings revealed that such arrangements with sex traffickers oftentimes involved the victims’ families, relatives and possessions as a kind of guarantee of the repayment of the debts that the girls were incurring. This again meant that sureties for the costs of the girls’ travel were given supernatural sanctification so that misfortune and so forth could be kept at bay.
Visits to various shrines for this whole complex of arrangements and agreements also involved those shrines which are perceived to exist under the watchful eyes of very powerful witchdoctors which principally serve to instill extreme caution and fair in the girls’ perception of things.
In addition to the body-related material, the made-up packets often appear to include many more signifiers embodying personal and spiritual power, beauty and sex appeal, protection and success. For instance, pieces of twisted metal refer to the power of a deity, soap and powder to enhance beauty and sexual agility, the kola nut is an exchange of faithfulness between lovers, and so forth.
In the case of victims who are trafficked overseas, a travel agent and sex merchant who simply identified himself as Gbaja K revealed that in addition, victims are also fortified with travel protection obtained at various shrines. Animals, usually white goats and fowls were slaughtered for the purpose and the girls were sprinkled with their blood.
There are in short, a superabundance of meanings and signifiers both in the ritual practices that many of the girls undergo before leaving the shrines and in the contents of the amulets they or their operators carry with them. Further empowerment is acquired by the girls via prayer sessions at the rapidly emerging charismatic Pentecostal and white garment churches across the country.
While referring to the initial phases of intercontinental travel to Europe, which include the quest for spiritual empowerment for success and protection in their narratives, the girls very often used the word juju. Some victims enthusiastically referred to it as “African insurance.”
Although the experience of swearing oaths at the shrines and obtaining charms and amulets meant for various types of fortification including the enhancement of beauty and enthrallment of a witless client or what the girls persistently called “Mugun (fool)” seemed tasking and awe-inspiring three other girls and ‘trainees’ of Ojei revealed that they did not consider such rituals intimidating or coercive per se.
They identified them as necessary steps to be taken in their quest for self-actualisation and attainment of the good life. Usually the girls only began experiencing much more coercive and intimidating forms of rituals as well as physical violence further down the line of their extended contact with their operators, pimps and madams. Particularly when things begin to go wrong, for instance, if a girl decides to get out of the prostitution networks, she would meet with a violent mix of physical abuse and occult intimidation.
Ritual oaths ceremonies
Isoke Aikpitanyi, a former victim of trafficking and a popular advocate for Nigerian women in Italy, understands the workings of the business. According to her, “Today in Italy there are almost 10,000 madams, each one in control of an average of two or three girls.” Madams are the key, she explained stressing that they force girls into prostitution and ask for money to repay the debt. They work with “brothers,” men who are in charge of physically trafficking the “babies,” as girls forced into prostitution are called.
The women and girls are often forced to undergo a voodoo oath-swearing ritual that commits them to repaying the money they owe to their smugglers on pain of death or insanity. “The juju, the voodoo rite, it’s not a bad practice. It was used to bring justice, but they ruined everything,” said Aikpitanyi in anger. “They don’t care how they make their money as far as they make it. They use Juju to enslave.”
According to the Nigerian National Agency for Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (NAPTIP) about 90 per cent of girls that are been trafficked to Europe are taken to shrines to take “oaths of secrecy.” The oaths are taken in ceremonies that include body parts from the person on whom the oath is being administered, as well as from one of her relatives, usually her mother or sister. The use of body parts such as fingernails, blood, sweat, teeth and/or pubic hairs give the voodoo priest possession of some part of the victim, creating a sense of fear and an unwillingness to speak out.
Thirty two year old Ivie also narrated how she later came to realize that her spontaneous travelling adventure was a big mistake, a naïve leap into the unknown with high personal costs: “When I was there I was always sending cassette, I would record my voice and send it to my people. I was always complaining that I’m really tired of this. Even when they were repatriating me, there were many people that were regretting it, but me, I was happy because, when I got there and I saw the life I regretted it, it was miserable for me. I didn’t have my kind of life, so I wanted to go back. I don’t think there is any girl who has travelled there that is really happy, usually they are forced experiences, most of them cry. They are like slaves.”
Gambling and risk-taking are powerful descriptors for their quests, a hope in the future and a trust in destiny despite its unpredictability and the wretchedness of the present. “This travel of a thing is like a game, if you have luck your play is good, if you don’t have luck, you play bad. It’s a game, you understand?” according to Osas, a former migrant sex worker. In at least two separate instances, the Benin, Edo State native, negotiated a debt that allowed her travel to Europe, but she was deported in both instances and had contracted HIV. Yet her qualms against travelling concerned the conditions under which she had to perform sex work, particularly the lack of autonomy, and of the risks it entailed, which she carefully balanced against the advantages. She said she was prepared to travel again, despite having just given birth and being sick: “What else can I do? I will go if there is nothing else for me here.” Her project of opening a hair salon and her attempts at trading in the market had failed. The micro-credit bank that lent her the money on behalf of an international anti-trafficking project was threatening to take her to court, given her failure to return what she owed.
Consequences of breaking the oaths
The inobservance of the pact can “anger the gods” and “jeopardize the victim´s life” according to Ojei. Women are strongly persuaded that terrible things such as illness, death and madness, will befall them and their families if they don´t repay the debt. According to a victim “those who do not respect the pact will eventually die gruesomely after living a wretched life.”
All the misfortunes or problems that may happen to the victim after breaking the ritual oath will be linked to this rupture. Sometimes, the trafficked girls may even think that voodoo magic has impregnated them as a form of punishment for breaking their pact with the traffickers. Victims usually believe they deserve these consequences because they broke the ritual oath. This reinforces other victims’ belief in the power of the oaths as they witness how the rupture has caused misfortune to their peer who defaulted.
Fear of breaking the pact is so strong that traffickers usually do not even have to closely monitor the women. Some operators confirm that in contrast with other sex trafficking victims, African women enjoy considerable freedom unlike their peer from other regions of the world who are subjected to extreme violence and abuse by their traffickers. Nevertheless, physical threats and violence against the victims and their families is also a reality of these networks, as well as the confiscation of documents, money and the lack of independence. Coercion only begins when the victims seek to escape the pact by breaking their oath, and not at the time when the oath is sworn. This is the moment when the women begin using the word “voodoo” as synonymous with black magic and spiritual entrapment.
The Edo conundrum
According to the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), Italy is now the main destination for more than 10,000 Nigerian prostitutes, trafficked from Benin City to European cities and criminal hubs, just like the Domitiana and its coast.
A significant number of female migrants are accompanied by children born en route from their country of origin, contributing to the presence in Europe today of up to 30,000 unaccompanied minors from sub-Saharan Africa according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
A disturbing element in the migration of single women or even girls from Africa to Europe is the export from Nigeria of unaccompanied females who are subsequently recruited into prostitution networks, especially in Italy. It is currently reckoned that up to 5,700 West African women, mainly from Nigeria, enter Europe each yearoften by airto work as prostitutes, contributing to a population of some 11,400 to 17,100 such prostitutes at any one time. In addition, many West African women work in the sex trade in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and Morocco. Recent estimates by the House of Representatives hold that as many as 10,000 Nigerian teenage girls could be “held captive by the sex-slave trade” in those two countries, many of them from Edo State. Many accounts suggest that women migrants across the Sahara, including those who have no intention of working in the sex trade, are subject to rape and other mistreatment. Some may fall into the hands of traffickers and be “bought” and “sold” between rival traffickers.
In this regard, it may be noted that the trafficking of women for sex work is one of the few types of migration where a dominant role is indisputably played by professional criminals formed into networks that correspond to the definition of organized crime by the United Nations. A UNODC report recently estimated the value of these women at their destination at up to $228 million per year. An operation led by the Netherlands police in 2007, joined by colleagues from several other countries, including Nigeria, resulted in a series of arrests. In this case, police investigations established that a highly organized trafficking ring was run by a circle of professional smugglers of migrants with roots in Edo State. Not coincidentally, the leader of this group had a travel agency that served as a legal front for his criminal business.
Recently, Spanish police dismantled a trafficking ring that used voodoo rituals including animal sacrifice to force Nigerian girls into prostitution in Spain. In the raid, six traffickers were arrested and four of the victims freed. The girls, who travelled to Europe on dangerous, makeshift boats, were recruited in Nigeria, where they were enticed with false promises of employment.
But once they arrived in places like the Spanish holiday island of Mallorca, they were forced into prostitution. Authorities said the traffickers attempted to keep the women submissive by performing “tribal rituals” in Nigeria that sometimes involved “animal sacrifice”.
They used the women’s nail clippings and locks of hair to convince them that they had been placed under a spell “so they would do everything asked of them, under the threat of death to them or their family,” the police said.
The women had travelled across northern Africa to get to Spain illegally, making the arduous journey on foot and then by boat. “Women take on a debt up to 50,000 euros ($56,000), and swear obedience to a ‘madam’ and traffickers,” police said.
To the grave
Just recently, a Nigerian girl of about 30 years old, and who answered by the name Jessica was found dead in the industrial area between Carinaro and Gricignano, near Morris bicycle factory, Italy. The body of the deceased was found unclad and without documents for identification and two clean knives were found beside the body. Though the body didn’t show any visible trace of violence or injuries from firearms and sharp weapons, Italian authorities claimed she may have been strangled. In a separated incident, a 29-year old Nigerian, Mary Ada Ortuya was beaten to death by her lover, 47-year old Juan Carlos Aguilar. Aguilar, a three-time World Kung fu Champion was arrested after neighbours claimed they saw him drag a woman by the hair into the gym he ran in Bilbao.
When police entered the building they discovered late Ortuya bound by her arms and legs. The martial arts expert was allegedly standing over her body and she had been tortured and beaten so badly that she slipped into coma. Ortuya died while receiving treatment in Basurto Hospital, Bilbao.
Like Ojei, Christy and company, Jessica and Ortuya probably never regarded themselves as prostitutes but “hustlers.” They probably lived in cabins partitioned into rooms without fan and proper sanitation. They probably inhabited the forests and outskirts of Italy offering sexual gratification to under-aged boys and ubiquitous criminals, urchins, adulterers and gang lords on bug-infested mattresses at ridiculous rates and threat to their lives.
They probably got to Europe flinching with terror and awareness of an adolescent girl who suddenly finds herself raped by a bumbling-lad-turned-brute on her first date. But in the wake of their heartrending demise, many more under-aged girls, unemployed graduates and fortune hunters are trooping to the cities in a daze, spurred by prospects and attractions of the good life promised by the next “Good Samaritan” and ever generous “Aunty Pat.” They will complain of crippling poverty, joblessness and persecution as their reasons for braving the perilous desert paths to North Africa and Europe in search of better life.
Like their predecessors in Europe, they will watch their dreams disappear into thin air, while they toil, hopeless and stranded, far from home and saddled with debts that will take years to repay. But the lure will survive in captivating accounts of unbounded bliss and greener pasture promised by the fabled sidewalks of Europe where many more Nigerian girls continue to loiter, ravaged and half-naked. Like Jessica and Ortuya, their ends may be predictable.
