Three years ago she and her sisters were trafficked into sexual slavery. Now she’s a whistleblower who helps catch the people-smugglers. 1843 magazine investigates
lone tree rustles in the hot desert breeze, every branch festooned with black plastic bags. At first glance, it looks like a piece of installation art: a striking protest against those who fail to dispose properly of their rubbish. But if you look around, practically every tree in the area is decorated with black plastic, blown into branches by the wind. So is every barbed-wire fence. In Agadez, a city in Niger, rules against littering are not respected.
Agadez was for centuries a hub of the caravan trade across the Sahara; recently it has become better known as a staging post for African migrants heading for Europe The sisters snuck off without telling their parents. Their journey was hair-raising. The first smuggler’s car stopped in the bush, and the women were told to ride on the back of motorbikes. They raced across what the riders described as dangerous terrain, full of bandits, and sneaked across their first international border, into Niger. They travelled by night, usually by bus, from safe house to safe house. In Agadez, the smugglers took their phones “for safekeeping”.
At their destination, the traffickers told Mimi and her sisters that they each owed 20,000 Libyan dinars for the ride, and would have to pay it off by selling sex. At first they refused, but after days of beatings “we finally gave up,” said Mimi. Free at last, all the sisters returned to Nigeria except Mimi. She went to live in Agadez, hoping to save other young women from suffering what she suffered.he journey across the desert has always been dangerous, especially in war-shredded Libya. But a law passed in Niger in 2015 exacerbated the risks. Under pressure from European governments that wanted to crack down on migration, Niger banned anyone from helping migrants move north from Agadez, “directly or indirectly”.
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