INDENTURED SEX WORK MIGRATION FROM EDO STATE TO EUROPE NAVIGATION IN VIOLENT CONTEXTS Wetenschappelijke verhandeling Aantal woorden: 24.416
Sophie Lindiwe Samyn Stamnummer: 20055788
Promotor: dr. Jeroen Cuvelier Commissaris: dr. Marlene Schäfers
Masterproef voorgelegd voor het behalen van de graad Master in de richting Conflict en Development Academiejaar: 2017-2018
Abstract (NL)
Sinds de jaren negentig migreren Edo meisjes in groten getale vanuit Nigeria naar Europa. Ze sluiten een overeenkomst met een sponsor, die hun migratieproject financiert. Nadat ze Europa illegaal binnenkomen worden ze tewerkgesteld in de prostitutie, zodat ze hun schuld kunnen terugbetalen. Deze studie onderzoekt wat deze Indentured Sex Work (ISW)-migratie motiveert. Hierbij wordt afgeweken van algemene theorievorming en berichtgeving die de vrouwen bestempelt als slachtoffers in de handen van mensenhandelaars. In de plaats daarvan wordt gekozen voor een open mobiliteitskader waarin de ervaringen en verbeelding van de vrouwen centraal komen te staan. Agency en geweld werden gebruikt als analytische tools doorheen het migratietraject. Een multi-sited onderzoeksdesign, uitgevoerd in Nigeria en Belgieë, verbindt de recente literatuur en expertise over ISW-migratie met een diepgaande analyse van de levensverhalen van tien Edo vrouwen. De studie concludeert dat (1) de ernstige vormen van structureel geweld waaraan Edo vrouwen worden onderworpen, (2) de kracht van de verbeelding, (3) de medeplichtigheid van de gemeenschap en spirituele wereld en (4) de mogelijkheid tot het verwerven van een hogere sociale positie in Nigeria, de belangrijkste factoren zijn die ISW-migratie van Edo state naar Europa bevorderen.
i Contents
Aknowledgements...... vi Abbreviations and terminology...... vii 1 INTRODUCTION...... 1 1.1 Setting the tone...... 1 1.2 Research question and relevance...... 2 1.3 Structure...... 3 2 LITERATURE...... 3 2.1 The human trafficking frame and its limits...... 3
LOCATING CONSENT IN HT...... 6 STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS...... 6 BEYOND HT...... 8 2.2 New theoretical framework...... 9 2.2.1 Mobility lens: the subjective experience of irregular migrants...... 9 2.2.1 Navigating in contexts of violence...... 11
VIOLENCE...... 11 AGENCY...... 12 3 METHODOLOGY...... 13 3.1 Positionality statement...... 13 3.2 Multi-sited fieldwork...... 14
OBSERVATIONS...... 14 LIFE STORIES...... 14 EXPERT INTERVIEWS...... 15 EXISTING DATA AND OTHER SOURCES...... 15 3.3 Analysis...... 15 3.4 Challenges & Limitations...... 16 4 BACKGROUND INFORMATION...... 17 5 NAVIGATION IN CONTEXTS OF VIOLENCE...... 20 5.1 Traveling...... 21 5.1.1 Violence in Benin...... 21
BEING STUCK ON THE WRONG SIDE...... 21 INSECURITY AND DISTRUST...... 23 5.1.2 Going Abroad...... 25
ii MIGRATION DESIRE...... 25 GIRLS, YOU CAN PAY LATER!...... 27 COMMUNAL COMPLICITY...... 28 5.1.3 Journey through hell...... 29 5.2 Indentured Sex Work...... 31 5.2.1 Debt bondage...... 31
DECEPTION...... 32 THE PACT...... 32 BEATINGS AND THREATS...... 34 ILLEGALITY AND SEX WORK...... 35 5.2.2 Man go survive...... 36
ESCAPE...... 37 LOYALTY...... 37 AGENCY OF CONCEALMENT...... 39 5.3 Beyond debt...... 39 5.3.1 From tactics to strategies...... 39
INDEPENDENT SEX WORK...... 40 LETTING GO OF FAMILY PRESSURE...... 41 LOVE AND SEDUCTION...... 42 BECOMING A VICTIM...... 43 JOINING THE BUSINESS...... 45 5.3.2 Becoming powerful at home...... 46
KEEPING UP APPEARANCES...... 46 SETTLING THE FAMILY...... 47 BENIN LANDLADIES...... 48 DOING CHARITY...... 48 6 CONCLUSIONS...... 49 References...... 52
iii Aknowledgements
This thesis is the result of a journey going back to my first contact with Edo women in Europe in 2010. Contrarily to them, I was able to freely cross boundaries in search of answers and new questions about their movement. It exposed my own privilege in a world of unequal opportunities.
I want to thank dr. Jeroen Cuvelier (University of Ghent), dr. Akinyinka Akinyoade (University of Leiden) and prof. Kokunre Eghafone (University of Benin) for their academic guidance.
I am forever grateful to Solomon, Peter and Abubacar, three Bini men who took care of me in Nigeria like family. Additionally, I want to thank Franca, Toyin, Sunday, Edith, Silvia, Solomon, Bode, Precious, Grace, the coppers in Abuja, the guys at Benin Club who kept me company and made my stay an unforgettable experience.
Thank you to Team Afrika of the Human Trafficking cell of the federal police (Brussels), Naptip (Benin city and Abuja), Idia Renaissance (Benin city), GPI (Benin city), COSUDOW (Benin city), DEVATOP (Abuja), Pagasa (Brussels), Payoke (Antwerp) and il progetto Nave (Venezia) for their collaboration and being enthusiastic about my research. I am thankful to Donata (Arcisolidarietaà), Irene (Caritas) and Roberta (Coop Porto Alegre) with whom I worked in Italy, and struggled to grasp the complexities of la tratta nigeriana.
I am indebted to the Nigerian women who were willing to share not only their stories, but also their time with me. Despite all the violent experiences they endured – which I can never fully understand –, their humor, intelligence and energy made me long to spend time with them. Lastly, I want to thank my parents and Eva, Johan and Martijn for their support and reflections.
iv Abbreviations and terminology
Terminology of the trade boss male pimp and/or sponsor madam female pimp and/or sponsor sponsor person who organizes and finances the journey of a girl from Benin to Europe recruiter person that finds a girl or woman for a sponsor trolley smuggler connection situation where sex work is facilitated: brothels, window prostitution, bars etc.
Useful words and expressions get salary have a regular, documented job issue children man go survive people find new ways to survive in economic hardship oba king oyibo white person settle the family provide for one’s family members by giving them education and jobs travel migrate voodoo/juju popularly used to refer to forms of traditional religion in Nigeria wahala trouble
Abbreviations
ISW Indentured Sex Work HT Human Trafficking
v 1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Setting the tone
It’s still morning, too early for lunch but I have some time to kill and I enter a local canteen I had discovered the day before. “Ciao bella ! Come stai?” I smile. The greetings come from Grace, a big lady in her late forties, and the cook in the establishment. Grace looks decrepit, even a little scary: her face full of scars and she has one glass eye. Happy to host an oyibo1 in her restaurant, she told me the day before how she had done business in Italy, where she had learned to speak Italian. She had been to many places: Cagliari, Bologna, Rimini etc. I ask her for food and when she brings me a plate of greasy red jolof rice we start chatting. There are no other customers and, maybe because she doesn’t want me to leave, she leaves no room for silence and starts telling me about her life in Europe. “I know you now,” she says, as a way of letting me know my loyalty of coming back has earned me the right to some truth. She tells me how she had worked the streets of Italy as a prostitute. She had worked for three years to pay off her debt to her sponsors who had brought her there. “It was a hard life but worth it. Here there is nothing,” she commented. She now works in the restaurant, owned by her cousin and lives in the stone house behind it. She wants to invite me inside to show me how nice it is. When I am about to leave, she tells me she has sent her daughter to Spain to suffer the same fate. She smiles proudly. (personal observation, Benin City, July 2017)
I use this unsettling encounter to introduce the complex issue at stake in this thesis. Since the 1990's, Nigerian women have flocked to Europe to work in the sex industry. The initial destination was Italy, but women soon moved on to Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and other countries. They are by far the largest national group of African sex workers in Europe, although it is impossible to know exactly how many women are involved in this business, considering the fact that they essentially live undocumented lives. In 2016, 11,000 Nigerian girls arrived on Italy’s shores, of which an estimated 80 per cent were expected to work in the sex industry (IOM, 2017).2 They were mostly aged between 13 and 24, and the vast majority of them came from Edo state, in Southern Nigeria, especially from Esan and Edo ethnic groups.3 It is said that in some communities around Benin City, the state capital, every family has a daughter in Europe and consequently, this movement of women has altered the social and economic fabric of their society (Okojie et al., 2003; Plambech, 2017). When in Europe, the women have to pay off a debt of between thirty and sixty thousand euros to their sponsors, who organized and paid for their travel. The popularity of this migration trajectory, its violent and exploitative nature and
1 Pidgin English for a white person 2 Those arriving in Italy by boat are registered on arrival as asylum seekers. Once in a reception center, they either escape or engage in sex work during their asylum procedure. 3 Between 85 to 95 percent of the girls come from Edo state, according to estimates made by IOM, UNODC and NAPTIP (Akor, 2011; Braimah, 2013; Carling, 2003). Other states that are involved are: Delta, Lagos, Ogun, Anambra, Imo, Akwa Ibom, Enugu, Osun, Rivers (IOM, 2017)
1 the dominant involvement of Edo women in its organization, have turned it into a phenomenon that provokes questions like: Why? How? Who?
Since its discovery, the migration of Edo women to Europe for sex work has been framed as human trafficking (HT) and as a crime that needs to be stopped. However, migration is a complex matter. We need to listen to the voices of these women in order to make sense of their movement and allow for the possibility of the heterogeneity of their experiences. Only then can we begin to comprehend.
In this thesis I will do exactly that: listen to their stories, while wondering why? and how? while questioning the scope and (often) violent impact of this women’s migration on their lives.
1.2 Research question and relevance
Moving away from the human trafficking frame, which fails to grasp the complexities of this migration, I will instead refer to this movement as indentured4 sex work (ISW) migration, following Plambech’s suggestion (2017). Departing from the migrants’ perspective, the main question of this thesis is: What encourages ISW migration from Edo State, Nigeria to Europe? The subquestions are:
– How is ISW migration experienced and imagined by the women at different stages of the migration project? - What encouraged the migrant women to make certain choices? – How do the women navigate contexts of violence during their migratory project? – Can ISW migration lead to social and economic mobility for Edo women?
By locating these migrant women within a broader migratory frame, I do not by any means excuse the violence and abuse that is involved or dismiss anti-trafficking efforts. It is my opinion that the extreme forms of violence these women are subjected to, are an absolute violation of human dignity. If anything, understanding how this HT is experienced, can only help those combating it. Considering the population growth in Nigeria5 and the entrenchment of this migratory project in Edo State, this movement is not about to stop. Furthermore, looking at HT from a migratory perspective, focusing on how it is experienced by Nigerian women, can potentially contribute to the theoretical debate in transnational feminist studies and critical trafficking studies.
4 Indentured = bound by an agreement 5 Nigeria is expected to have a population of around 250 million in 2050.
2 What follows is not theé story of Edo women and instead of coming to general conclusions it merely offers an insight in the lives of some. Important to note here is that during this migration project many women die, become ill or go mad and are no longer able to tell their story.
1.3 Structure
First I introduce the topic and present the research question. In the second part I will present the literature study that went along with the field work. I will give a state of the art of the existing studies on Nigerian ISW migration to Europe, within the dominant HT frame, exposing its limits. Consequently, I will propose a new theoretical framework and additional analytical concepts that will be used in this thesis to come to a better understanding of ISW migration to Europe from Edo State. I will place the migration trajectory of these women within a contemporary mobility frame that focuses on the subjective experience of irregular6 migrants, focusing on experiences of violence and agency. In the third part, I will explain the methodology used for this thesis. Using a multi-sited ethnographic research design, I describe how I collected the various empirical and textual sources on which this study is based. I will additionally discuss the numerous challenges I was faced with in the course of my field work. In the fourth part I briefly introduce Edo state and how ISW migration became an available option for young women. Finally, in the fifth and main part of the thesis, I will bring forward my findings in an attempt to answer the questions asked in the introduction. The discussion is structured like the actual migration trajectory, divided into three parts: leaving Benin City, working in Europe under debt bondage, and life after debt. In each of these phases I discuss how the women navigate the particularly violent surroundings.
2 LITERATURE
2.1 The human trafficking frame and its limits
About thirty years ago, Nigerian sex workers became visible on the streets of Italy. There was a growing sex market of migrant women at that time in Europe (Carrisi, 2011) but the size and exploitative nature of the Nigerian business incited international attention. 7 This happened in the context of heightened attention to organized international crime in general, with the founding of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 1997 and the drawing of the Palermo Convention in 2000, with its two Protocols concerning Human Trafficking and smuggling.8 Trafficking in persons was
6 Irregular, undocumented and illegal will be used interchangeably to describe migrants without a formal residence permit. 7 In 2001, the Italian Ambassador to Nigeria, Dr. Giovanni Germano stated that there were 10,000 Nigerian prostitutes (60% of all the prostitutes) in Italy (Adesina, 2005). 8 For previous instruments relating to the abolition of trafficking in human cf. Braimah (2013).
3 defined as “the recruitment, transportation, (…) or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, (…) of deception, (…) or of a position of vulnerability (…) for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others...” HT was considered a violation of human rights (Gbadamosi, 2006; Opara, 2006), and bodies were set up on a national and international level to eradicate this practice. Aside from a concern for the victims, the will to slow down the irregular entry of Nigerians into Europe put the focus on the criminal nature of the migration (Braimah, 2013; Van Dijk, 2001). Special police units were created to investigate trafficking networks, lock up the traffickers and women were returned to Nigeria as undocumented migrants. Since 2004, following a European directive, victims may be granted temporary residence permits provided they cooperate with the authorities in the investigation and judicial procedures.9 After experiencing mass deportations from Italy since 1999 (Attoh, 2009; Opara, 2006), Nigeria adopted anti-trafficking legislation in 200310 and created NAPTIP (National Agency for Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons). Anti-Trafficking efforts are accompanied by the tedious task of monitoring and studying the clandestine movement of these women. UN institutions, government institutions and NGOs in Europe and Nigeria, the catholic church and universities collaborate to research the hows and whys of the business in order to write advisory reports on how to solve and stop HT.
The first research conducted in Edo State, Nigeria, was carried out in 1996-199711, when the phenomenon had just been discovered (Osakue, 1997). It resulted in remarkable findings as the practice of sponsoring the journey of young women to Europe, to work as sex workers had not yet been criminalized. Grace Osakue, who was leading the research, told me:
That was my first time of knowing that trafficking was going on. There were signs all over, it’s just that we didn’t know. We didn’t know what trafficking was, much less that what we were seeing, was trafficking, [the research] brought me in contact with traffickers who then were actually doing more than the government was doing. They felt that they were helping the girls. They were giving the girls an opportunity to earn a living […] So they were very proud that they were contributing. (personal communication, July 6, 2017)
The situation for researchers changed with the Nigerian anti-trafficking legislation of 200312 and increasing police action in Europe, and everything became more secretive. Fieldwork since then is mostly carried out with women who allegedly left sex work, often called ex-victims or survivors, either
9 The protection of victims of HT can vary in the national law of countries. In Italy women can already obtain temporary residence permits if they follow a social project and swear off prostitution, in accordance with articolo 18. cf. Cole (2006). 10 Prior to July 2003, only components of the offense could be punished, and prosecutors had to be willing and use their own creativity to punish perpetrators of human trafficking (Falola & Afolabi, 2007). 11 Commissioned by the UN International Rapporteur on violence against women, Florence Butegwa. 12 The anti-trafficking law prescribes 10 years to life imprisonment for cases of HT for sexual exploitation, although it is publicly known that people can easily buy their way out of prison (Braimah, 2013; Elabor-Idemudia, 2003).
4 in Nigeria (i.a. Attoh, 2009; Elabor-Idemudia, 2010; Okojie et al., 2003; Prina, 2003; Plambech, 2017) or in Europe (i.a. Ikeora, 2016; Peano, 2013,). Few have succeeded to include voices of active sex workers, in Spain (Gonzalez, 2012), the Netherlands (Olabisi & Akinyoade, 2015), France (Lavaud-Legendre & Quatoni, 2013; Simoni, 2013) and Italy (i.a. Cole, 2006; Taliani, 2012). However, the women are careful with the information they give and prefer to leave parts of life stories or possible futures out. Other studies draw upon the voice of the community and parents of those have been trafficked to discover knowledge and attitudes towards HT (i.a. Abdulraheem & Oladipo, 2010; Okunofia et al., 2004; Ofuoku & Uzokwe, 2012; Okolocha et al., 2011a; Omorodion, 2009; Osezua, 2013). The voice of the traffickers is mostly taken from police reports (i.a. Ellis, 2015; Leman & Janssens, 2013; Prina, 2003; Siegel, 2007) or journalistic articles (i.a. Agbu & Agu, 2017; Akor, 2011).
HT from Edo state to Europe has been approached from all kinds of academic disciplines, predominantly law, sociology and anthropology, in independent or policy related studies.13 Some of the questions at stake are: How did this HT start? How does it operate? Why is it successful? Some authors consider it an isolated criminal event and adopt a western feminist perspective, considering the girls guileless victims whose human rights are being violated (Gbadamosi, 2007; Kigbu & Hassan, 2015). They talk about vicious syndicates that lure in young women. The renowned Nigerian historian Falola calls HT “the dark side of migration as it effects the most vulnerable and naïve in African society: women and children [...] unsuspecting victims of this offensive trade, [...] a modern form of slavery” (2007: 6-7). The term modern slavery is often cited to describe contemporary forms of trafficking (i.a. Carisi, 2011; Elechi et al. 2007, Nnadi, 2013). Some Nigerian authors are embarrassment about the presence of their women on the streets in Italy, and call it a “shame for our nation”, “a debasement of womanhood” or a “monstrous trade” (Akor, 2011; Lawal, 2013; Nnadi, 2013).
Outside of academia, the media is keen to adopt the criminal perspective considering its straightforward, sensationalist character and its association with the modern notion of women as innocent. In several newspapers in Belgium, following a police operation in May 2017, journalists reported that thirty “victims” were saved from “pitiless traffickers”, now locked up behind bars (HLN, de Standaard, Knack). The magic-religious element in Nigerian trafficking also receives much attention as the ”mixture of voodoo, organized crime, and the sex trade appeals to the media” (Carling, 2005).
13 Studies from following disciplines: law (i.a. Abiodun et al., 2017; Braimah, 2013; Gbadamosi, 2006; Elechi et al., 2007; Kigbu & Hasan, 2015; Nnadi, 2013; Okogbule, 2013; Okosun & Ngwe, 2007; Opara, 2006; Siegel, 2007), sociology (Abdulraheem & Oladipo, 2010; Agbu & Agu, 2017; Akor, 2011; Attoh, 2009; Prina, 2003; Elabor-Idemudia, 2003; Okonufua et al., 2004) and anthropology (i.a Beneduci & Taliani, 2006; Cole, 2006; Gonzalez, 2012; Iacono, 2014; Ikeora, 2016; Lavaud- Legendre & Quatoni, 2013; Leman & Jansens, 2012; Okojie et al., 2003; Okolocha et al., 2011a; Olabisi & Akinyoade, 2015; Peano, 2013; Plambech, 2017; Simoni, 2013; Taliani, 2012). Other disciplines include women studies (i.a. Achebe, 2004; Aluko-Daniels, 2014; Ikeora, 2016; Monde-Anumihe, 2013; Osezua, 2013), agriculture (Ofuoku & Uzokwe, 2012), migration studies (i.a. Carling, 2005), history (i.a. Adesina, 2005; Fourchard, 2013; Lawal, 2013; Olaniyi, 2011; Osiki, 2015).
5 LOCATING CONSENT IN HT
The observed consent of the women that are trafficked, something not unique to the Nigerian case (cf. critical trafficking studies: Opara, 2006), has become the preoccupation of many scholars. Girls agree to migrate and pay off their debt once in Europe. While many are promised regular jobs, others are aware of the work they will be expected to do (Abiodun et al., 2017; Braimah, 2013; Carling, 2005; Okojie et al., 2003). Today’s legal definition of HT – as opposed to previous descriptions of trafficking practices – includes the possibility of consent when the victim is not fully informed or deceived. In line with the convention, “trafficked women who agreed to prostitute themselves but did not understand the harsh and unfair working conditions beforehand should be considered victims” (Iacono, 2014: 112). However, these women stay loyal to their traffickers in Europe, even when things get rough. The idea of women willingly prostituting themselves is not consistent with their image as innocent victims.
Authors have tried to explain the behavior of the women. Opara (2006) argues that there is “a hidden matrix of inequality, domination, exploitation, oppression, dehumanization, threat and lack of liberty and freedom,” (p. 20) in the trafficking model and that any contract or form of consent is invalid and equal to former contracts of slavery. Aluko-Daniels (2014) similarly explains that the use of juju and debt bondage eliminates the possibility of talking about consent. Ikeora (2016) and Nagle & Owasanoye (2016) focus on the central role of oath taking in the exploitation of the girls. The madam (often ex-victim herself) is considered a victim gone criminal, upkeeping the victim-aggressor dichotomy (Iacono, 2014). Observed forms of compliance from the government, families and communities (Braimah, 2013), however, complicate the simple villain-victim framework. Another factor explaining consent is based on the vulnerability of Edo women. This is explained by scholars that choose a more structural analysis of the causes of HT.
STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS
The legal definition of HT includes the “abuse of vulnerability (…) which encompasses a broad range of situations, including the poor living conditions in the native countries of the trafficked individuals” (Iacono 2014: 112). Poverty is an argument commonly used to explain the success of trafficking from Nigeria (Abdulraheem & Oladipe, 2010; Akor, 2011; Etobe, 2009). HT is interpreted as a survival strategy for the poor.
Others have blamed social and cultural elements of the Edo people, most importantly gender inequality (Abiodun et al., 2017; Osezua, 2013). Opara argues that the idea that girls are disposable has created in them a feeling of worthlessness and puts them before a dilemma: accept subordination or take their future in their own hand (2006). Osezua similarly argues that “sex trafficking among the Binis [is a]
6 response to unhealthy oppressive culture that has sustained high forms of discrimination against women and which have continued to be perpetrated by traditional belief system [sic]” (2013: 33). Others point to “societal pressure to ‘go get money regardless of how it is earned’” (Lawal, 2013: 17) and call attention to the role of colluding government officials, that want their share of the lucrative business (Akor, 2003; Braimah, 2013; Olaniyi, 2011).
However, many of these factors can be found in other parts of Nigeria and there is no consensus on the often asked question: “Why Benin?”. A collective of scholars conducted interviews and organized focus groups with more than 500 inhabitants of Edo state (including community leaders), asking their opinion on the matter, but the results were not conclusive (Okolocha et al., 2011b). Adesina (2005), who made a historical analysis of sex work in Edo culture, concludes that prostitution “exists as a part of Edo history but not as a component of the Edo culture” (p. 33). Much of the answer, Carling argues, lies in the “self-reinforcing mechanisms that come into force once a migration flow has been initiated” (2005: para. 11). In fact, other regions in Nigeria have their own HT routes, e.g. girls from Rivers state are trafficked to Lagos for domestic work and children in Akwa Ibom are trafficked to work on farm plantations in Gabon or Cameroon (Abiodun et al., 2017; Nnadi, 2013). Furthermore, falling back on the simple poverty argument or aspects of Edo’s cultural fabric conveniently covers up any sign of global power imbalances or post-colonial conditions that might be at stake in creating these conditions.
Asking questions about who today stands in similar relation to law, state, and sovereign power might teach us a great deal about relations of exploitation (…) Such questions are, however, absent in dominant discourse on ‘modern slavery’, which focuses on the powers exercised by individual ‘modern slaveholders’ over individual ‘modern slaves’. (Davidson, 2017: 3)
After the independence of African countries in the 60’s, the expansion of capitalism has continued to result in uneven development globally. Authors convincingly argue it is not poverty but inequality that is the root cause of HT and they dare to ask: What are African women doing on the streets of Europe? They examine the push and pull factors of this movement that, they argue, is vulnerable to exploitation because of non-existent legal migration possibilities (Elabor-Idemudia, 2003; Olaniyi, 2011). These authors argue that the monocultural economy, crisis of family structures and moral/traditional values and the growing population at home (Abiodun et al., 2017; Braimah, 2013; Elechi et al., 2007; Okogbole 2013) are pushing women towards an existing demand for sex workers in Europe (Opara, 2006). Attoh uses Merton’s concept of Anomie to explain how young people show deviant behavior and chose to be trafficked in a desperate attempt to reach a lifestyle they feel they are entitled to. She argues that youth have “internalized success goals as shown on Western media (…) Their inability to attain such measures of existence in Nigeria is due to [...] their positioning within the social structure and the position of Nigeria within a globalized economy” (2009: 169). Trade patterns and debt burden (Elabor-
7 Idemudia, 2003), with a focus on the SAPs in the eighties, have had damaging consequences on the economy (Achebe, 2004; Akor, 2011; Lawal, 2013; Abiodun et al., 2017).
Adding gender to the discussion, authors have turned to feminist theories (Bergeron, 2001; Sassen, 2003) and the analytical tool of intersectionality (Elabor-Idemudia, 2010; Monde-Anumihe, 2013; Aluko-Daniels, 2014) to connect the story of Nigerian victims of HT to that of other women. They argue that neoliberal policies, patriarchal governments and the feminization of migration have turned poor and colored women14 into “marketable commodities” that provide a “steady supply of women in the global sex industry” (Olayini, 2011: 111).
BEYOND HT
“The search for policy relevance has encouraged researchers to take the categories, concepts and priorities of policy makers and practitioners as their initial frame of reference for identifying their areas of study and formulating research questions,” (Bakewell, 2008: 432) and thus forcing research in a certain direction. However complex the debate concerning sex work migrants from Edo state has become, within the HT-frame, they remain victims and the similar social, economic and political living conditions of traffickers are ignored (which would complicate the victim-villain dichotomy). By listening to how this migration project is experienced, recent research including my own reveals moments of agency at different stages of the migration trajectory.
From the beginning, authors such as Van Dijk (2001), Prina (2003), Carling (2005) and Cole (2006) stressed the importance of reciprocity as the strength of the business, witnessing the unwillingness of the girls to be saved and the sometimes blurred distinction between victims and traffickers. In the so- called rescue sector, created to protect and empower victims of HT in Nigeria and Europe, there are indeed signs that the narrow HT-frame is unfit. All NGOs, government institutions and churches I was in contact with and who organize such programs, confess to having difficulties helping Edo women. Some girls don’t cooperate, are reluctant to leave sex work and don’t easily trust their rescuers. The main shelter in Benin City, run by COSUDOW, laments the deplorable behaviour of some of the victims (Okolocha et al., 2011) and sister Bibiana admitted that a lot of the women that enter the program attempt to be retrafficked as soon as possible (personal communication, July 10, 2017). Prof. Eghafona of the university of Benin told me she is tired of engaging in the anti-trafficking project, saying: “Sometimes I think there is no point, the girls will go anyway” (personal communication, July 11, 2017) Lavaud-Lagendre (2013) and Olabisi & Akinyoade (2015) make similar observations in Paris and Den Hague, where a social worker commented: “...many NGOs in the Netherlands have stopped working with Nigerian victims, as they do not know if they are real or false victims” (p.186). Awareness
14 In this context I consider Eastern-European women to be equally colored.
8 campaigns carried out by NGOs like GPI and Idia Renaissance in Edo state during local markets, encounter resistance from certain communities. “Some women shout that we are taking chances away from them,” Grace Osakue told me (personal communication, July 7,2017).
Understanding Bini migrants, “calls for more oblique approaches to research, which recognize the ‘normality’ within their situation,” (Bakewell, 2008: 432) rather than privileging their role as victims of HT. Recently, some scholars have done just that allowing for broader theories of social transformation and human mobility (Bergouignan, 2013; Iacono, 2014; Olabisi & Akinyoade, 2015; Peano, 2013; Plambech, 2017; Simoni, 2013). They explore topics such as the migratory choice, romantic relationships with lovers and clients, the navigation of the rescue sector, the will to become a madam and the violence of anti-trafficking efforts.
2.2 New theoretical framework
2.2.1 Mobility lens: the subjective experience of irregular migrants
I will refer to the Edo women as ISW migrants and their movement as a migration project/trajectory. In this way, I locate them within the broader movement of bodies migrating “by any means necessary” from West-Africa to Europe in search of better futures (Ifekwunigwe, 2004). Migration studies classically examine the push and pull factors behind the movement of people, and although these analyses are important to expose structural factors of inequality, they often say very little about the heterogeneous experiences of migration and ambivalent motivations of migrants. The focus on migrants’ voices in recent academia is also a reaction to the alarmist rhetoric surrounding migration. “Through misleading nomenclature and criminalizing labels – such as illegal, irregular, undocumented, overstayer, sans papier, clandestino – European states have become unable or unwilling to imagine irregular migrants as human beings” (Triulzi & McKenzie, 2013). New concepts like the automony of migration (Papadopoulos, Stephenson & Tsianos, 2008) and migration careers (Timmerman et al., 2014) focus on the agency of migrants and the way migration is imagined and experienced.
Since the fall of the Berlin wall, globalization and transnational studies have been examining the never- before experienced movement of people, goods and images. Appadurai (1990) introduced scapes, presenting the world and its communities as fluid and mobile, connecting the local to the global. “People and their cultural practices are not confined to a fixed territory but are parts of multiple spatial networks and temporal linkages” (Glick Schiller & Salazar 2013: 185).15 However, we also live in a time
15 It is important to note that, “mobility is not just of our time. Throughout history, people have traveled vast distances, engaging in complex networks of cross-cultural exchanges and creating translocal identifications.” (Salazar & Smart, 2011: iii)
9 where borders are being materialized and migration possibilities decline (Musaroà & Parmiggiani, 2017). Bauman (2013) argues that while mobility has increased for capital and social elites, it has certainly not for the poor, whose movements are increasingly controlled and limited. “The very processes that produce movement (…) also promote immobility“ (Salazar & Smart, 2011: iv). Mobility is thus related to power. In Foucault’s panopticon, people’s mobility was completely restricted (Danaher & Webb, 2000). From a global perspective we can add race to class “to explore the relationship between the privileged movements of some and the co-dependent but stigmatized and forbidden movement [of others]” (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013: 188).
Sex work and migration are intimately connected.16 “At every stage of the migration process, strategies are highly gendered. West African clandestine migrant women and men may share a similar destination, (…) but their destinies will be very different,” (Ifekwunigwe, 2004: 119) and a woman’s choice is often limited to domestic work or prostitution, also while in transit. When it comes to migrant prostitutes, a clear distinction is made between independent sex workers (documented or undocumented) and victims of trafficking, which “make it difficult to understand all the multiple roles that the individuals play in the trade industry” (Iacono, 2014: 111). Regardless of the legal status, sex work is morally contested in every culture or society. I follow an existentialist feminist approach that, rather than adopting a normative frame, considers “the wide diversity of experiences, values, and beliefs of individual prostitutes,” (Bromberg, 1998: para. 6) with a particular attention to be critically towards Western understandings of sex work or prostitution. The practice of sexual exchange or transactional sex (exchanging sexual favours for gifts) is common in many regions of sub-Saharan Africa (Leclerc Madlala, 2003) and must be taken in consideration.
16 In this thesis I will use sex work and prostitution interchangeably.
10 2.2.1 Navigating in contexts of violence
Vigh developed the analytical tool of social navigation to explain an individual’s actions in an uncertain environment (2009). The concept of navigation, through its nautical reference, adds a third dimension to social action, namely the interaction of a moving subject and its moving environment. Social structures change over time but crucial here is the pace at which they change. Contexts of violence can be experienced as particularly uncertain, moving and unsettling. Social navigation includes the way the agent constantly adapts both his immediate action and his imagined future to the changing environment. Scott’s use of tragedy as a lens to explain the postcolonial condition, helps to understand Vigh’s idea of a moving environment. Tragedy, as a literary form, makes a character vulnerable “to forces and powers not entirely within its rational control” (2004: 13). Tragedy doesn’t dismiss reason but it introduces risk and luck in action and depicts “a world where values are unstable and ambiguous” (p.13).
VIOLENCE
Violence is interpreted as: “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, [...] resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation."17 This definition includes the narrow definition (violence as physical harm) and the broad definition, as defined by Galtung (1969) of structural violence (violence by social structures that prevent people from meeting their basic needs). ZŽizžek (2008) made a similar distinction between subjective and objective violence.
Subjective violence is the immediate physical experience of “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (p.1). The victim-perpetrator denotation is often used to determine who is undergoing, and who is exercising violence. A distinction, however, that is often blurred.
Objective violence is further divided into symbolic and systemic forms (a distinction also Galtung later made). Symbolic violence is related to language and discourse and systemic violence refers to the “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (ZŽizžek, 2008: 2). These are forms of violence that have become part of normality and are not generally defined as violent. Law making and political decisions, for example, can be violent when they exclude certain people. Butler’s concept of precarity (2009) similarly refers to societal structures outside one’s control that expose people to injury, violence and displacement or that put people at risk of not being qualified as a subject of recognition. Butler observes that certain populations are more inclined to
17 I use the following definition of violence, as used by World report on violence and health
11 precarity. Violence and coercion (the threat to use violence) are related to power and by studying violence, sources of power can become visible. In Foucault’s biopolitics – based on dispositifs that discipline people’s movement and behavior – the source of power has become less visible (Danaher & Webb, 2000).
AGENCY
The concept of agency has proven useful in opposition to theories of victimization, to highlight resistance, struggle and achievement of the subaltern, including children and women in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, risking to become overused and empty - everybody has some form of agency - it is important to explain the way it will be used here. The underlying premise is that individuals are “active meaning-makers who are constantly in the process of constructing, reconstructing, and defending the meaning of their lived realities” (Elabor-Idemudia, 2003: 117).
The structure-agency dichotomy has incited much theory. It asks the question to which extent people are free to actively shape their social environment, opposing structuralist to rational choice theory. Giddens (1984) went further to highlight the duality of social structure itself, being both the medium and outcome of social agency. Agency is thus generated in dialogue with structural confines. People shape and shake society, while at the same time being shaped and shaken by it (Honwana & de Boek, 2005). Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (= the socialized norms that guide behaviour and thinking) is useful to understand why people do not always experience agency. Forms of structural violence can inscribe social differences and hierarchies in people’s minds, to create a sense of one’s place and behaviors of self-exclusion (1986). If agency is having the capacity to choose action, the lack of agency is “to be acted upon, to be the object of events, to have things happen to oneself or in oneself, to be constrained and controlled” (Hewson, 2010: 13). However, Mahmood warns us not to understand agency solely as the emancipation from structures of dominance and power. Agency is the capacity to act, made possible because of specific historical relations of subordination. She opposes the western assumption of the universal desire to be free of relations of subordination (2006).
Agency is related to power, as “to be able to act otherwise implies that the individual has some sort of power” (Honwana, 2005: 48). I will use tactics and strategies to differentiate forms of agency in relation to different positions of dominance within social structures, introduced by De Certeau in The practice of everyday life (1984). Anthropologists like Vigh, Honwana and Utas (2005), have found this distinction useful in analyzing behavior in (post)-conflict contexts.
Strategies refer to forms of agency aimed to have long term benefits. It presumes a group of equals that have a proper and visible locus within society and who have the possibility to control (by manipulation
12 of relationships or force) its enemies or subjects (Honwana, 2005). According to Foucault, power is relational and produces who we are, what we desire and our possibilities of action (Danaher & Webb, 2000). That is why we need to add tactics as those actions of the powerless. The agents in this case, are not in a position of power, “may not be fully conscious of the ultimate goals of their actions (…) [but] are fully aware of immediate returns, and act within certain constraints, to seize opportunities available to them” (Honwana, 2005). Tactics refers to the ability to navigate the environment, shaped by the strategies of the powerful. Lacking a visible locus or in-group entails vulnerability but at the same time offers opportunities, as the agents “are able to be mobile and grab opportunities the moment they arise. Despite being deprived of a locus of power, they are able to navigate within a multiplicity of spaces and states of being” (Honwana, 2005: 50).
3 METHODOLOGY
3.1 Positionality statement
During the last seven years, while working in reception homes for migrants and doing research on Nigerian film making in the diaspora, I have met many Nigerians in Belgium and Italy, the majority of whom came from Edo state. I have developed many friendships and a particular appreciation for Nigerian popular culture. I dance to Nigerian music and binge watch Nollywood films and series on Iroko TV18 before falling asleep. I learned about ISW migration from Edo state through a Nollywood film but only while in Italy, I began to understand the size and complexity of the phenomenon. My love for pidgin English, discussions about the latest Nollywood gossip and Nigerian spicy food (with a preference for starch and bangasoup19) are aspects of me that helped me in connecting with people for this thesis.
18 Online Nollywood platform 19 A typical dish from Delta state
13 3.2 Multi-sited fieldwork
Studying migration is crossing borders (Marcus, 1995), and in my fieldwork I followed the problem and collected my data in geographically dislocated spaces, in Europe and Nigeria. The illegal nature of this migration trajectory called for a combination of different methods to come to a more complete understanding. While I focus on data collected in 2017, when my role as a researcher was clear, other experiences color my findings, in which I had different roles towards the migrant women: as a volunteer, social worker, researcher and friend. The voices and experiences of these women are the focal point of this thesis. Their stories were held up against the observations of experts and other ethnographic research.
OBSERVATIONS
In July 2017, I traveled to Nigeria for one month, of which I spent ten days in Benin City. Informal encounters, observations and casual conversations were a great source of information and it surprised me how present the issue of HT was as a subject of conversation. I stayed in the home of a local barrister, an acquaintance of a Bini friend of mine in Italy. I made observations inside the house where I stayed (which hosted a wife, an unmarried sister and a house girl), in a small canteen in town and in Benin club (home to the local elite and where I hung out with my host every evening). In Lagos and Abuja, I met many people from Edo state with whom I continued to talk informally about the issue. I wrote down my observations in notebooks I carried around with me. The encounters I had with Edo women in Belgium – while weaving hair, watching films and sharing food – offered additional observational material.
LIFE STORIES
Through semi-structured interviews (sometimes taped) and informal conversation I collected the life stories or fragments of ten women, aged between 19 and 45, who at one point left from Benin City, focusing on their migration project. I met them through NGOs in Benin City and Belgium. They agreed to share their experiences for this research if their identity was not revealed. In Benin, the girls had worked as sex workers in Europe and were returned as victims with a voluntary return program. The coordinator of the NGO knew them well and encouraged them to open up to me. In Belgium I got to know the women (each over a period of around 3 to 6 months) in a shelter for victims of trafficking, where I volunteer. At the time of my field work, some were still in the shelter and some had left to live independently. I spent time with them, watching films, washing clothes and eating indomie noodles. They understood that I was not an anti-trafficking social worker. They sometimes said: ‘You are not like them,’ giving me genuine offers to marry brothers and friends, because it was clear I should marry
14 black. I also confessed to them I had Nigerian friends working as sex workers in Italy, to stress the fact I would not judge their life choices. Despite the fact I met them in a shelter, their experiences were very heterogeneous and they found themselves at different stages of their migratory project. Some of them had finished paying their debt but, continuing to work as prostitutes independently, had found themselves in new situations of exploitation. All but one of the women, had chosen to become victims when they were locked up in a detention center.
EXPERT INTERVIEWS
Because little exact data is available, I approached experts to provide me with information. They have been studying this migration trajectory for many years, as researchers, activists and police officers and I asked them for their views and opinions on the matter. In Nigeria, I interviewed people from NAPTIP, Idia Renaissance, GPI, Justice and Democracy, Cosudow and Devatop. In Belgium I interviewed a social worker from Payoke and a police commissioner of Team Afrika of the Human Trafficking cell of the federal police. These were all semi-structured interviews, in different gradations of formality.
EXISTING DATA AND OTHER SOURCES
I conducted an elaborate search for existing academic literature on Benin sex work migration. I used online databases (Jstor, Scope, Google Scholar), contacted researcher for unpublished work, made inter-librarian loans and went to Leiden to consult the library of the African Studies Department (with a good collection recarding Nigeria, including i.a. the Lagos Historical Review). I consulted all sources available in English, Dutch, French and Italian. As a result, I was able to locate my research within existing academic literature. I was critical of research commissioned by NGOs, government institutions (political interests) or churches (moral issues). I sometimes refer to other studies in my finding, namely those based on qualitative fieldwork that focus on the subjective experience of migrants (i.a. Attoh, 2009; Beneduce & Taliani, 2006; Cole, 2006; Ikeora, 2016; Lavaud-Legendre & Quatoni, 2013; Okojie et al., 2003; Olabisi & Akinyoade, 2015; Okolocha et al., 2011a; Peano, 2014; Plambech, 2016; Simoni, 2013; Taliani, 2012). The primary sources I used are autobiographical accounts of women and clients (Aikpitanyi, Giordano & Perlino, 2014; Carrisi, 2011).
3.3 Analysis
I use the Grounded Theory approach to analyze my data, based on the inductive method of extracting theory from empirical findings (and not the other way round) (Mortelmans, 2007). The life story method I used fits in well with this model because it allowed for an initial unintentional approach to
15 the topic. Only after a first scan of my findings did I decide to move away from the HT frame. It became clear that violence and agency were dominant themes in these women’s experiences. I decided to organize the discussion along the lines of the migration trajectory and I coded my material (transcribed interviews, field notes and other texts) to discover different moments of agency and violence. Consequently immersing myself in literature, I discovered different layers of these concepts that were useful. The result can be considered an interaction between fieldwork and theory.
3.4 Challenges & Limitations
It was my first time going to Nigeria, and it was difficult for me to understand the safety situation in Edo State (also considering I had a limited budget and was traveling alone). There are no international NGOs or ex-pat communities there I could ask for some advice. Around 2007, most foreigners left the region after kidnappers started targeting white people. No one, except dr. Akinyoade in Leiden, told me it was going to be fine. When I asked an Igbo friend and ex-colleague of mine in Italy if he could help me, he replied:
No, I donnot trust anyone from there. If you go there, make sure you have police escort. Donnot go alone. I am telling you this because I know my country and I love u. Almost every family has a girls here in Europe doing what you and I know very well. If you want to speak about it in Benin City, please measure your words with caution and wisdom.
My good friends from Benin City in Europe, previously very enthusiastic about my intention to travel, suddenly didn’t return my calls now that I was serious about it. Prof Eghafone of the university of Benin cautioned me not to stay long because of the risk of kidnapping. All this made me give up my original idea of doing long term fieldwork in Edo state. I decided instead to focus on a more multi-sited approach, that allowed me to collect most of my data in Belgium. Getting a visa was an additional challenge. I went through a roller coaster of quasi bribery, intimidation and bureaucratic n’importe quoi in the embassy in Brussels: in the end a perfect preparation for my stay in Nigeria.
All the interviewees, including the experts, gave me information that reflect a particular experience, no matter how honest their answers. Sex work is morally contested and tends to incite normative reactions (sometimes religiously motivated). Some of my informants were tired or ashamed of being known for trafficking of women for sexual labor. They addressed their answers to me: a female oyibo researcher, which surely tainted the results. The issue of truth becomes particularly challenging when it comes to the life stories of the migrant women, who have become masters in trickery and lies during their violent migratory project. They easily adjust their identity to fit a certain situation and, although
16 they had nothing to gain from sharing their experiences with me, the stories they told me might just be stories.
Because of the criminal nature of irregular migration and undocumented sex work, it is not easy to come in contact with these women. I originally wanted to interview Edo girls I had known very well in Italy (while they were asking asylum). We kept in touch through Facebook, occasionally telephoned and I followed how they moved from Padova to Genova to Hamburg to Heidelberg to Oslo etc. probably being moved around by their madams. They knew I was aware of what they were doing but we never talked about it. I arranged to meet two of them in Germany to ask if they wanted to share their experience for my research. One of them moved back to Italy the day before I arrived. The other disappeared one month before I went to meet her in Hamburg. I decided to go to our appointment anyway, hoping she would show up, and desperately walked around the red light district. Until today, we (some of her other friends and I) have not heard from her and the whole experience confronted me with my inability to ever really understand the lived worlds of these women and the precarity of their situation. I consequently decided to use a more convenient setting and asked the collaboration of the girls in the shelter in Belgium.
4 BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Edo state, of which Benin City is the capital, is one of the 36 federal states of Nigeria, located in the South of the country. Edo and Bini can be used interchangeably to describe the ethnic groups that originally founded the Empire of Benin20: Benin proper, Esan, Etsako, Owan and Akoko Edo (Okojie et al., 2003). Benin is a patriarchal society marked by polygyny and a dowry system. Male children continue the family name and women have no heritage rights (Bradbury, 1957; Okoji et al., 2003). Pre- colonial traditions and customs (concerning i.a. systems of justice, heritage, marriage and religion) today co-exist with colonial and post-colonial practices. The Binis are an ethnic minority in a nation dominated by three major ethnic groups: the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. People navigate through the abundance of institutions that organize life in Edo state: secret societies 21, traditional shrines, Pentecostal churches, federal government institutions etc. (Ellis, 2015). The king or the Oba is the religious and political leader of Edo people, and although today he only has a ceremonial role, it is said that the Edo people will follow anything he says. The traditional council, connected to his palace, is the most important court of customary law (Okojie et al., 2003).
20 The Benin Empire, one of the oldest kingdoms of West-Africa was a well-organized political unity before first European contact with the Portuguese as early as the 15th century (Bradbury, 1957). 21 Elites in Benin were and still are organized in secret societies (Ogboni and Owegbe being the most prominent), one of the most common forms of authority, that are connected to shrines, and have political, judicial and religious functions (Ellis, 2015).
17 The history of Edo people became part of the history of Nigeria, under British indirect rule, after its violent occupation in 1897. Taxation, bureaucracy and the monetization of many activities in a setting, characterized by the tradition of gift-exchange and no division of public and private wealth, led to corruption, competition and a growing gap between the haves and the have-nots (Akor, 2011; Ellis, 2015). The introduction of the colonial law code, “itself poorly known and not generally seen as legitimate,” (Ellis, 2015: 30) and Christian religion22 put pressure on the traditional justice system, based on the negotiation with the spirit world (Braimah 2013).23 The ruling elite made shady deals with foreign companies, benefiting them personally, and developed little industry. At the same time, people were moving to urban areas because they preferred trade to farming, as it provided easier access to money (Ellis, 2015). In this context, a kind of fostering system was established whereby “rural and economically poorer families [...] send children to urban relatives, friends and acquaintances to assist in improving their chances of [...] education, skills and employment” (Abiodun et al., 2017: 193). Prostitution, called Igbeagha in Edo, is not traditionally accepted (Braimah, 2013) but increased as a way for women to earn a living (Adesina, 2005).
In the 1930’s, a business took off that shows remarkable similarities with the sex work migration to Europe today (Ellis 2015, Fourchard 2013, Osiki 2015). In the context of mass migration from Nigeria to the Gold Coast, women from Calabar, Cross River state, came along to work as sex workers. It was believed that
the trade was organized by older women who were taking money of the young women under their authority [and] who had themselves worked as prostitutes before graduating to becoming an organizer (…) The women concerned considered their business to be no different from any other type of work. (…) This regional specialization [resulted] in tight networks of patrons and clients that in some parts of the Cross River area involved almost every family. (Ellis, 2015: 38)
After an initial decade of unrest after independence, the 1970’s oil boom made people think the time for Nigeria had finally arrived. Without warning, Nigeria became the wealthiest country in Africa. The economic prosperity was dazzling and Nigerianism was born: a form of patriotism that believed Nigeria had a special place in the world (Ellis, 2015). The government invested in prestige projects and universities mushroomed all over the country (the university of Benin was built in 1970). “Nigeria’s entire economy came to respond on a vastly overvalued exchange rate, kept high by the fact that the Naira was backed by oil, and an unquenchable thirst for imported goods” (Ellis, 2015: 98). Sudden
22 “The growing influence of Christianity and Islam tended to dissolve traditional morality, the former teaching that God forgives all” (Ellis 2015: 56). 23 Traditional religion for Edo people – like in most of southern Nigeria - consists of “a belief in the existence of an invisible world, distinct but not separate from the visible one, that is home to spiritual beings with effective powers over the material world (…) Through a process of negotiation with the spirit world,” (Ellis, 2015: 16) they try to shape the well-being of themselves and the community.
18 wealth, and displays of extravagance and western life styles could be witnessed among the elite and military officials went on foreign spending trips. People didn’t understand where the wealth came from, which created a distortion with the harmony of the spiritual world and made people desperate for money, at the expense of everything and everyone else (Elechi et al., 2007; Ellis, 2015). At the end of the seventies there was a record number of graduates for whom there were no jobs, and the emigration of young Nigerians began (Ellis, 2015)24.
The economic prosperity was short-lived and the fall in oil prices that began in 1981 marked the beginning of a deep crisis. The government had never invested in sustainable industries or infrastructure and had indebted itself due to mismanagement (Abiodun et al. 2017) and Babagida’s eight-year military regime that followed, took corruption to a still unprecedented level (Ellis, 2015). Macro-economic policies to reduce government spending, i.a the Economic Stabilization Program and the Structural Adjustment Programs, had depressing effects on employment incomes and the standard of living (Akor, 2011; Attoh, 2009; Okoji et al., 2003; Zibouh & Martiniello, 2015). In the meantime, the population of Nigeria was growing rapidly25 which led to a lot of social tension, lack of opportunities and the rise of crime (Akor, 2011). “People used what they had to get what they wanted […] wealth became idolized and was regarded as the only sign of success” (Adesina, 2005: 31). Pentecostal churches, that promised prosperity, flourished. Many argue that the economic hardship created a breakdown of family and social settings (Abiodun et al., 2017; Achebe, 2004) and accepted practices such as placing and fostering children at the homes of relatives were turned into money-making ventures for parents (Akor, 2011). The naira was devaluated, going from parity with the US dollar to 140 naira a dollar in 1994, which created an extra stimulus for migration. In the 80's and 90’s, Nigerians migrated out massively, in search of better futures and foreign currency. They left with little luggage. “What they did have was brains and a spirit of enterprise that would not countenance failure” (Ellis, 2015: 121). A vast diaspora of Nigerians was created, predominantly in the US, the UK and Italy, but also in countries like the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Belgium (Zibouh & Martiniello, 2015). These were made out of strong transnational networks that formed strategic and valuable assets in the context of globalisation (Ionescu, 2006). The Edo people mostly settled in Italy. Both men and women had come to work on tomato fields in Campania (Adesina, 2005; Akor, 2011; Carling, 2005), to trade in clothes and jewelry (Braimah, 2013) and as Christian pilgrims on a tourist visa (Ellis, 2015). Dr. Attoh told me that employees of Italian companies who had been involved in the reconstruction of Benin City after the Biafran occupation, had taken Bini wives with them back to Italy (personal communication, July 3, 2017). Scholars agree that it was in those days that Edo women discovered the lucrative business of sex work, sharing the market with Eastern European women (Olaniyi, 2011).26
24 In the forties and fifties the first Nigerians had migrated regularly to the UK for education or work 25 From 45 million at independence to an estimated 100 million in 1990 (UN) 26 There was a general trend of a growing sex market of foreign women at that time, which many attribute to HIV prevalence among Italian prostitutes (Carrisi, 2011; Ellis, 2015; Olaniyi, 2011)
19 The first sex workers in Italy became the first madams or sponsors, bringing girls over to work as prostitutes and “these pioneers soon controlled entry into the business, keeping it in the hands of Benin women” (Ellis, 2015: 134). In the 90's, Europe introduced stricter migration policies and it generally became more expensive to travel (De Haas, 2006; Zibouh & Martiniello, 2015), which created the debt or loan system. Originally seen as a form of solidarity – facilitating the journey for relatives by advancing the money for the journey27– it increasingly turned into a lucrative enterprise, making huge profits (Simoni, 2013). The subsequent modus operandi (i.a. Carling, 2005; Okojie et al., 2003; Osakue, 1997; Prina, 2003) is well-known and continued developing with only minor changes in policy. Girls, mostly aged between 15 and 25 (Abdulraheem & Oladipo, 2010) are recruited by a relative or acquaintance of the family, who works for a madam in Europe. Before leaving, the girl swears an oath at a traditional shrine, saying she will pay back her debt (= travel expenses with interest) and remain loyal to her sponsors. She is accompanied to Europe by trolleys, Nigerian men, who arrange the travel. This can be overland (through Morocco or Libya) or by air (with false documents). Once in Europe, the girl meets her madam and is set up to work as a prostitute until she has finished paying her debt. The lucrative nature of the business, run by women, has economically and socially changed many communities in Edo state and once these networks, infrastructures, and expectations were established, the migration flow was reinforced (Carling, 2005). Through small adaptations (cf. Leman & Janssens, 2013) and despite anti-trafficking operations it has continued to grow. Apart from the financial gains for the sponsors, other economies have appeared that profit from the movement of these women: through remittances, the smuggling trade, the rescue sector and the detention and repatriation of migrants (Plambech, 2017). Additionally, traditional and evangelist priests, immigration officers and lawyers are known to take their share of the money. The traffickers “take on the abdicated responsibility of the Nigerian government,” stated Chief D.U. Edebiri, the Esogban of Benin Kingdom and popularly known as the Oracle of the Kingdom (Adesina, 2015).
5 NAVIGATION IN CONTEXTS OF VIOLENCE
To try and understand what encourages the movement of indentured sex work migrants to Europe, I will narrate the experience from the perspective of Edo women. This story will start in Benin City, where the women departed, continue through the desert and across the Mediterranean to Italy and Belgium and end up back home. At each stage of the migration trajectory, I will describe the violence these women experience and the way they consequently navigate their environment. The underlying premise is that, despite extreme forms of exploitation, these women can still experience choice.
27 It’s common practice that, when somebody does well in the city, they will take in relatives from the village.
20 5.1 Traveling
5.1.1 Violence in Benin
In Benin City there’s a general sense of exclusion and insecurity that I felt while being there. Within elite circles, there’s a lot of frustration about the state of things: a feeling that things are not moving forward and that government officials are only filling their own pockets. They lament the state of the roads and the lack of jobs for young people that are fleeing the country. When I went out in the evening with my host, a well-respected Bini man, we took the bad car as not to attract attention, didn’t stop for traffic lights and never stayed out later than 9pm. When a person has money, the fear of armed robbers and kidnappers is always present.
BEING STUCK ON THE WRONG SIDE
Growing up was very difficult. I never experience the other side of life. I didn’t know my father. I grew up with my mum (…) We were eight in one room. We were really poor, farming, you know, vegetables and timber. We go every four days to the market. I took care of some old woman because the money was not enough. I was the last of my mum. My brother was in the city learning how to be a mechanic. He impregnated a girl and the baby twins came to us in the village. When I was seven, I had a child on my back and yam on my head, that was life.
Wendy’s words illustrate what growing up in Benin can be like. Belonging to a social group, having the right connections or a title means everything, and these can be bought at the right price, regardless of how the money was made. “If you have money it’s ok. Life is good. But if you don’t, no. I am not going back ooo,” Lovely told me about Benin. And indeed, the majority of the people live in poverty and life is about everyday survival. Education and health care are available for those who can afford it. The women I met had very different socio-economic backgrounds and family situations, but they all suffered from forms of structural violence (Galtung 1969), living in the margin of a world system and excluded from mobilities and life styles, enjoyed by the elite. Most of the girls had lost a parent and suffered to make ends meet. The reference to the other side of life is interesting because it reflects an imagined global order (Vigh, 2009a) divided in different zones: one of poverty, the absence of education and the lack of fathers and a different one of wealth and possibilities yet not accessible to her. Some of the women I met had children at a young age and were working as market women, tailors or hair dressers, with an unstable income and always longing for a glimpse of the other side.
Those who were able to finish secondary school, left there with bigger dreams and new imagined futures. Queen, who finished secondary school while staying with an aunt in Lagos, told me how she
21 felt out of place when she returned to Benin, “my sister laugh at me because I don’t know how to cook. I forget about village life,” she told me She dreamt about going to university. Gloria experienced a situation of choicelessness she had not anticipated when she left school: there were no jobs, no options. She didn’t know what to do next. Those experiences a sense of relative deprivation similar to that of Edo boys.
One day in Benin City, I asked someone if her gate man was a Bini boy. “Of course not,” she answered me, “that lazy boy. Our boys would rather die in the Mediterranean than do this kind of brainless job.” The gate man was Hausa, from the North of Nigeria. I was shocked by what she said but recognized this rather reckless determination to make it from what I had experienced with Bini men in Italy. They feel excluded from a wage labour system they feel entitled to. In a context where education and hard work are not rewarded, the most ambitious feel stuck in their social mobility. Apart from Queen and Gloria, the women I met did not travel out of frustration or because they felt entitled to another life. They did it with a simple dream of becoming successful. This sense of entitlement will change when they are in Europe.
People in Edo state are continuously confronted with the other side. Being rich counts as a status symbol and the elite don’t hold back to showcase their wealth, dressing well and driving around in big cars. Funerals and weddings are the ideal occasion to show the world that a person has made it, and on Fridays it is common to get stuck in traffic due to celebrations on the road. The local television station covers the most important social events. Most impressive are the funerals, when hundreds of people come together to praise the life of one man, in a context where lives are sometimes worth very little. In the center of Benin City, there are many expensive hotels and recently a mall was built with a fast food restaurant and a cinema. The Government Reserved Area displays some of the most extravagant villas, an airport and a golf course. Nigerian films, binge watched by especially women, have a preference to portray rich and glamorous lifestyles.
Gloria, who was deported back to Nigeria told me: “To me Nigeria, they have money more than in Europe, (…) just the light and the road, that differentiates us.” A source of frustration and the topic of everyday conversation are roads and light (meaning electricity). In the time I was in Benin city there were about three hours of electricity a day, and in other parts of the state it’s much less. This slows down the development of small businesses and does not attract industries. Some people think the government is colluding with the Japanese because the latter are doing good business selling generators. Roads were theé topic of the local news. The heavy July rains, combined with the deplorable state of the roads was causing accidents and flooding. In the eyes of many, infrastructure symbolizes development and, although they are theé promises of local election campaigns, in the last years little has improved. People feel like they are stuck in time, while the rest of the world is progressing.
22 While money and images move across borders in an unrestricted way, for the average Benin women today, it is impossible to travel legally to Europe. The cost is too high and a mere tourist visa is unthinkable. NGO workers and academics in Benin told me about the difficulties of getting a visa, even when invited by an official European body. It takes them months to prepare and the process is costly. All this in the context of Edo people that are closely connected to their diaspora in Europe and have developed a tradition of migration. Some even say that Italy is another district of Edo state. Restricting migration possibilities is a form of violence because it excludes certain people from this transnational movement that has become part of their reality. Moreover, they have made illegal entry more dangerous and expensive, increasingly one of no return (Mc Kenzie & Triulzi 2013).
INSECURITY AND DISTRUST
While poverty and unemployment are not unique to Nigeria, “the level of peacetime violence, corruption, and organized crime surpasses most other African countries” (Carling 2005), especially in the South-South and South-East of the country. It’s often said and written not to trust Edo people. Although my friends tell me they suffer from this (mis)perception, when I was in Benin City, Edo people repeatedly told me: “People are desperate, don’t trust anyone, they’ll do anything.” Not just because I’m an oyibo. Crime rates are high. Armed robbery and kidnapping have become forms of livelihood and people have little trust in the justice system. It’s a well-known fact that people buy their way out of prison. While I was in Benin, a woman had to appear before court for HT charges. However, the chief judge had “felt pity for her,” (personal communication NAPTIP, July 6, 2017) and released her from prison the day before. The police have a reputation of bribing and causing trouble more than protecting people. I remember literally speeding up to avoid them if they were on the road, because “they have not been paid for two months,” my host explained to me. The atmosphere of distrust and insecurity is very violent and people feel they have to be on their guard all the time.
The general belief in the existence of an invisible world, inhabited by gods and spirits, creates an experience of vulnerability for the anger or envy of others. At certain shrines, people can appeal to priests to call upon the spirits in order to cause injury or death upon others. Difficult for some to imagine, I turn to Abbie’s story. Abbie’s youth began in a very promising way. She grew up just outside of Benin City in a four-room stone house with her ten siblings. Her father was a firefighter and her mother owned a shop of provisions.
At one time something happened. My mother became sick. She have to sell everything she had. My father used all the savings for the treatments. My mum had to stay at home. Everything was gone. It was not normal, it was through voodoo things. Because my mum had a very big shop. She sells provisions, clothes,
23 drinks...everything was going well and she has her own home. People were jealous: ‘Look at how she’s doing good, her kids are going to school.’ They were jealous and so they have to attack her. I was maybe 14. Things became difficult and I stopped school. [...] It was better I stay at home. They sold the shop and everything, everything was gone. And my dad was just spending money on treatment. Even my father’s work was not doing well anymore.
In Abbie’s experience, her family’s success had angered people. She blamed the illness of her mother, that caused the downfall of the family, on the interference of spirits, called upon by people in general who did not grant them a good life. Trying to explain to me how things work over there, Abbie shared an experience her father had told her:
The first day my father came to Benin to lay foundation of his home that day they gave him poison to drink. [...] He almost died but after he survived it. And then he know the kind of people, the environment. From then on, he was being careful, he don’t talk to people too much. We were just staying clear of people. And people are just jealous for no reason. (…) For a long time I was scared because it will always be a life of jealousy, of no peace like, it will never be peace of mind.
Abbie experienced her direct environment as one of envy, competition and malevolent intentions. Recently, her father died in suspicious circumstances and she swore to me she would never in her life go back. I remember once in the shelter, I joined a conversation she was having with another resident wondering if magic could travel to Europe by phone. She wanted to know if she was safe here.
For some, trust issues start in their own family. Driving around Benin City, I can see This house is not for sale painted on many walls. Apparently, it can happen that family members sell property without the knowledge of the other house-owners, in order to get money for their journey abroad. Economic hardship has social consequences, and there’s a lot of competition among siblings within the same household. For some, the family is the most violent social institution (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004) Wendy tells me she cannot trust her own family. It was her brothers’ decision to send her and her sister to Europe and they chopped28 the money she sent them. She felt deceived by her own kin. She saw friends going through similar situations:
Sometimes you don’t get pity from parents. They will say oh my god I can’t wait to have a daughter so I can send her to Europe. They will send a girl as early as thirteen. (…) Most of us girls, we made a lot of money but the families, especially the single mothers, mostly the father got married to a different wife, so the mother will start dating small boys, eating her daughter’s money. And when they ask their mums to buy land or build a house, the mum will not do all those things, and when they go back to Nigeria, they see there is nothing.
28 ‘To chop’ is pidgin English for ‘to eat’ or ‘to consume’
24 5.1.2 Going Abroad
In the above described situation of structural, spiritual and criminal violence, women have limited agency. The only option for real change in Benin is a radical one and might to some seem dangerous and reckless.
MIGRATION DESIRE
One day, while I was folding clothes with Mary in a laundromat in Brussels, she asked me why the police was so eager to arrest girls in Europe. “What of those that are happy doing it?” she asked me. I told her that politicians here don’t really want people to come at all. She looked at me apprehensively and said: “but they don’t know that people will always come?
All of the girls I met, even those pressured into this migratory project, were excited to go to Europe at the time. Scared but excited. Migration, more commonly referred to as travelling or going abroad incites the imagination for Bini men and women alike. It means new possible futures.
One morning at breakfast, Sara, the house girl working in the house I was staying in Benin City, told me she wanted to come to Europe. She was 23, woke up at 5 am and went to sleep at 10 pm: cooking, cleaning, washing clothes and even refilling a glass when she was called for. She earned about 35 euros a month and had not been home to her family for several months. When I told her about the traps of going abroad, she giggled. She didn’t care or listen. I felt her desperation to get out of the situation she was in.
Rose was only sixteen when she left. It was a friend of her sister that made the offer: “If somebody tells you to go to Europe, you will go. I didn’t tell anyone. I was very excited to go to this Europe.” Europe is imagined as a place without wahala29, where everything works, where the government takes care of its people, where there are jobs and where you can earn foreign currency. “In Nigeria you can do nothing with 1 naira, in Europe at least with 1 euro I can buy a bread,” sha said. Rose’s reasoning illustrates the psychological effect currency fluctuations can have.
People are hungry for euros, pounds and dollars because they are reliable. The girls told me that they imagined to work in a shop or a saloon, or further their education, to send money home and eventually come back themselves. Most knew about other girls being involved in prostitution but thought that it
29 Pidgin English for trouble
25 would be different for them or saw it as something to get through before finding other work. They were prepared to sacrifice something for this Europe. Looking at how migration to Europe is imagined, can be useful to discover the social meaning of migration. This is not necessarily linked to what is feasible but, as is often the case in contexts of deprivation, it is based on hope.
For the short time I was in Benin City, traveling was everywhere. Posters advertising free-of-charge visa, travel agencies, men selling passports on the market: just some of the signs that highlight that this is theé place to come if you want to travel out. It is astonishing to what extent migration has become a part of the story of many families. Almost everyone I met had a relative abroad. While growing up, the women had heard stories of people traveling successfully and they saw families doing better because of the money their children were sending. The unsuccessful migration stories, of those who die or are deported, are a source of embarrassment and preferably not shared.
Over there there is no work, there is nothing, there is no fun. And still you see people on Facebook, they are enjoying [themselves]. Those who have not gone before will be desperate, they are so anxious. My friends were jealous when I left and when I was deported back they thought if it was them, they would succeed.
The Nigerians I know in Europe, look like celebrities on their Facebook page. They pose next to expensive cars whose owners they have never met, wearing stark white, cheap sneakers and synthetic clothes. Maybe they have nothing here yet but at home they had already become somebody.
It’s like if you don’t go to Europe you are a nobody or people don’t recognize you. [...] You must make money. Not like those days when people want to work, want to go to school. Have good dreams about their lives. It’s not like that anymore. Everybody wants to become rich, you know.
The simple fact of being abroad, to have the Europe experience, can enhance your status, because it will eventually mean you will earn money. Going abroad shows a minimal form of agency, in a desperate attempt to be recognized and to become somebody.
I heard the saying that if you go there, you can get money, you can take care of your family. There is a lot of job opportunity over there. So that was the main reason why I wanted to go. I never know it was trafficking. [...] I finished secondary school but there was no work and my family was suffering. My daddy was unemployed and mummy was a trader. So I came to the conclusion on my own that let me just to this as a support, and besides, an opportunity for me to travel. Because I had never traveled before, in all my life.
26 Some girls go along for the adventure. It can be a liberating idea for some to leave their family setting and live independently in Europe. It’s considered courageous to travel. Most, however, think about gaining respect and giving a better future to their family. Anna considers her choice to leave as a sacrifice she is making for her children “If I had had no children I would never have come. I do it for them. Now I want to bring them here so they can be safe.”
In this way, the desire to migrate in Edo state can be located within the broader context of migration desires of men and women in West-Africa, who see migration as a livelihood strategy and a way to maximize chances of survival, the only divergence being that the relative importance of remittances and the visibility of wealth of those who travel is extremely high in Edo state. The desire to migrate is decisive for the success of indentured sex work migration. It’s so entrenched that it pulls girls over the edge to venture into the unknown. However, not everybody does. A minimal thirst for abroad is necessary.
GIRLS, YOU CAN PAY LATER!
The point now is that the girls in Edo state are offered a deal many boys are envious of. If they want to travel, they have to pay upfront by selling property, using family savings or working along the way. Girls, on the contrary are offered an organized journey to their desired destination with everything taken care of. They don’t have to worry about visa, other documents or money: an offer difficult to refuse. They all had very little concrete information about how they would travel, where they would be living and how they would make a living. However, they didn’t experience this as problematic. Girls are brought up not to ask too many questions, especially to people older than them. Besides, Wendy told me, “even if people are informed about the dangers they will say: I will take my chance, that’s what they will say.”
Most girls get approached, while others phone friends in Europe and ask around for a sponsor, who appear to be very accessible. Madams, sponsors and trolleys generally all come from Edo state and are often related or familiar to the girls. The proposed loan of thirty thousand to sixty thousand euro is an apprehensive amount of money for the girls and they are convinced they will earn it in no time. “She said I had to give her 35 thousand euro. But I was thinking 35 thousand is like African currency. Maybe it would be 135 thousand naira, something like that,” Abbie told me. All they have to do is make a promise that they will repay the money. One woman explains:
But during the process they were like, you go to swear because we don’t trust a lot of girls that go there. They use the opportunity and they may not want to pay for the ticket and for the processing of
27 everything, I was like, why would I not pay if I have the money? why would I steal? […] I said, no problem oo. I said, you people are helping me so I cannot be bad to you people.
Most girls consider it quite normal that their sponsors want some form of guarantee that they will get the money back they are investing. In Benin, the practice of making deals or contracts at the shrine is very common. Even girls who are not familiar with traditional practices go along with it. Queen was suspicious of the proposition made by in-laws of her cousin:
They promised me further education in Europe, but I knew about human trafficking in Edo state and the oath at the shrine. I had an education, I knew. I didn’t want to do prostitution. They didn’t make me do an oath. I was cautious. I discussed with my mum and we thought we could trust it.
Not all girls are asked to promise at the shrine, but always a pact is made, stating that the girl in question will start paying back her travel costs plus interest once she’s in Europe.
Girls experience agency in choosing this option but I argue that this inkling of agency is immediately compromised by the promise they make and now binds them. It’s a dangerous promise of which they do not know the consequences yet, because they have no idea about illegal life in Europe and the size of the debt they have gotten themselves into. Are they being deceived or deceiving themselves?
COMMUNAL COMPLICITY
Esther’s senior sister traveled to Italy in the nineties:
I was still a little baby, maybe 11 years old. Then those days when people travelled, you were like happy. I have a sister that lives in Europe, in overseas! Everybody gets so envious of you. She will send money home. Your imagination, stupid mechanic you have: if someone is in Europe, you are happy.
And indeed, things turned around for her family and she was now able to go to school with the money her sister sent. Only today, after her own European experience, she understands what her sister went through and regrets the ignorance of her family:
She was never happy. She never said she was happy. She really went through hell. But we, in Africa, we are kind of greedy. You know why I say that? We believe that, even when you say you are not happy in Europe, we see Europe like heaven. You don’t have to cry in Europe. […] That is our stupidity we have. Ah you are lying if you say there is no money. There is money! You are lying, you are not suffering, you are enjoying. You have a house, a car, you are living a good life, oh my god. Winter time, your skin is fresh.
28 Her brother pressured her sister to continue working after she had paid her debt. By then, she was in her thirties and wanted to stop the work. In any case, at a certain moment, the money was no longer flowing in from Italy.
They decided I needed to continue where my sister stopped. It was a family decision. Especially my elder brother. He is so desperate, he can sell you off. So it was his plan, like he planned it for my late sister to take me since we don’t have too much girls in my family. I was the only young girl remaining in the family so they need to bring me to Europe to make a lot of money. Because I’m still young, That was their decision. I was 18.
Chief D.U. Edebiri, a respected traditional leader of the Binis said: “I do not consider it a problem, [HT is] the product of the type of society in which we find ourselves, so I do not see what really is wrong” (Adesina 2005: 42). There seems to be a kind of communal complicity in Edo state when it comes to indentured sex work migration: many, at different levels of influence in society, are in some way profiting from it (Elabor-Idemudia, 2003; Osakue, 1997). In this context, what sense does it have to talk about legal and illegal? People generally know about sex work and consider it a sacrifice worth making. Parents and husbands are often complicit in the migratory project of a woman. In the nineties, the famous Edo singer Ohenhen made a song, praising the sponsors who were taking the girls to Europe (Adesina, 2005).
However, Blessing, Gloria, Anna and Rose left secretly. They didn’t want to worry their family and were afraid to be stopped. They made the arrangements themselves and called only when they were in Europe. Gloria wanted it to be a surprise to her family and never told them:
I was tired and angry because I really want to go to school. I know it’s not my parents fault. I thought maybe I just have to make a decision and do something with my life. Sitting home all the time will give me nothing. I thought of running away from home […] That’s how I met the woman who said she can arrange for me to travel. She lived closed to our home. Although I never liked her before but I felt I had no other option. I don’t like her because I heard people talking that she’s a trouble woman. […] So I went to talk to her and she said she can help me travel to Europe, no problem. You can go to school and have a good life. I was happy because that is what I want. My parents were not aware of it. I only told my mum that I was going to travel. I told her not to tell anybody […] I threatened her to let me go. She was scared and she kept quiet.
5.1.3 Journey through hell
The moment they leave Benin City, the girls find themselves out of their known environment and completely dependent on their guides. The little agency they had in their choice to migrate is taken
29 away. The majority of the women had never traveled before, not even to another state, and the whole experience is very unsettling. When they talk about the journey, they shake their heads and prefer not to dwell on it, telling me: “You can never understand.”
The women tell me they left suddenly, often in the night and without notice. Abbie said:
Then she said we had to go somewhere and meet other people. I thought maybe we are going to arrange all the papers or something. She took me to a house. I saw a lot of girls and boys there in Okpa. I don’t understand. I kept quiet. The next morning, at 3 o’clock we left, there’s a bus. I didn’t talk to anyone, I was just thinking: Am I making the right decision? I was scared.
Not before and not during the trip were they ever informed about how the journey was organized and how it was proceeding. Most of the women came overland through Libya. Two of them flew and one came through Morocco. Each trajectory has its own challenges. Vivian explains:
I didn’t know how they planned it, it was their own plan and the people that brought me. And my sister was also involved. They never told me any day, we never discussed it. Not, get ready, any day now you’ll be travelling abroad. Nothing like that. (…) One day my brother came and said, pick some of your things, we are going. The next thing, from Benin, we take a bus to Lagos, that’s how we moved.
They moved towards Ivory coast, where Vivian got stuck. She thinks someone ran away with a part of the money that was meant for her. She was left on the streets with nothing, and was beaten and raped. A man she calls a good Samaritan, who was involved in people smuggling, helped her and she started to work in prostitution, not knowing how she could leave this situation. After eight months, she flew to Europe:
The way they told me: that I am not going to suffer. I am going to take a plane, it will be easy. Within three weeks I will be in Europe. I thought, really? I never thought I would pass through all those stress. Anyway, after when I get to Europe, I will still say I am lucky. Because I didn’t use the ship. You can imagine the stress other people went through. So I don’t have to complain too much, because even the fact that I went through stress, a lot of people die during the process.
Most, however, do cross the desert and it’s only the ones that make it that live to tell their experience:
We stay one month in Duruku [Niger], no food, no water to bathe. We had an accident in the dessert and many people died or were injured. We were thirty-eight in a land cruiser. The moto just tumble. I still have a scar on my back. No rescue and many were injured. After four days, god help us, they take us back in Duruku. The sponsors have to pay another money. So we have to wait until the sponsor provide the
30 money until we can move away. In Libya they lock us up. They ask money and they don’t release us. We dry. We were no longer human beings.
It was a really bad experience. They kill a lot of people. A lot of girls were raped. They shoot a guy before my eyes. Like hell. I was loosing strength, very weak. I collapsed. I wake up. They were throwing water. I thought I was dead already. Going back is not an option. There were people saying they want to go back. You know what they do to them? They say ok, lets take you back and they went to throw the girl and boy in the desert. Once you leave, maybe you die but you cannot go back. […] I was not thinking any more about Europe, I was just hoping I would not die. I didn’t feel life. I thought I would just die. I was thinking how the woman deceived me and about my family. I was losing my mind.
The trolleys are often violent and sexually abuse the girls. Lilly was able to resist.
He [had sex] with the other two, they were younger […] In Libya he didn’t have the money for three to cross. I was crying because I had injury from the accident in the desert. I said I would go report to police because I have children. I was giving him trouble. He made me go first.
When they got to the coastline in Libya, they were locked up and waited for the day they could cross the Mediterranean, the girls refer to as the river. They left in the dark in overcrowded boats and prayed to god they would survive. The whole journey was longer and different than anyone had imagined. “The excitement goes away. You think: what did I get myself into?” Rose told me. Although most had been given little information, they felt deceived about the conditions of the journey. It was an unsettling realization. Nevertheless, in the girls’ experience, one thing was clear: once they leave, there’s no way back, or all the stress would have been for nothing. “When you cross that river, you cannot send us back, that is just inhuman,” Anna told me.
5.2 Indentured Sex Work
5.2.1 Debt bondage
Traumatized by the journey, the women realized that they had made it to Europe: they survived! However, they had made a pact and they were not given any time to daydream. They were indebted to their sponsors and when they arrived in Europe they were told that the way to earn this money is through sex work. Because of their undocumented status, new arrivals become dependent on the goodness or badness of their sponsor, normally a madam based in Europe. One of the women I met had heér madam in Nigeria and another had a male sponsor, which is quite unusual. Only a few were related in some way to their sponsor.
31 Today, madams can literally place an order through the organized networks of recruiters and trolleys (increasingly demanding under-aged girls), paying as little as 1500 euro to get a girl to Europe. The madams come in all shapes and sizes. On one end of the spectrum there are those who are gentle with the girls. They let them have some autonomy, some money of their own to spend and when a girl has finished paying her debt, her freedom is celebrated. Some are open to renegotiate the amount of the debt. On the other end are those who are abusive and dump the girls when they are of no more use (sometimes by reporting them to the police for deportation). The women initially lived with their madams but today girls are moved around, set up in different situations and given connections all around Europe: on the street, behind a window, in private houses, following where money is being made. Some madams have become colleagues, discussing the best routes and exchanging girls. A lot of girls in Belgium have their madams in Spain or Italy.30
DECEPTION
When they made their promise in Benin, things were said, imagined or taken for granted: travelling by plane, getting an education, a decent job etc. Some blame themselves for their own naivety and ignorance (slowly realizing what this migration project really means), some think they had bad luck, and still others experience the deception they were subjected to. They realize people intentionally took advantage of their eagerness to travel. Running away from uncertainty and insecurity in Benin, they become even more cautious and suspicious. Abbie spent three months in an apartment in Italy, after a very traumatic journey through Libya. The men in charge did not tell her anything and she was not allowed to go out. She said it made her restless and angry. Abbie realized she was being lied to. When she was finally sent to Belgium and put to work behind a window, she was desperate. “All I wanted was to go to school like they promised.” Queen had been suspicious about everything since she left because, determined as she was not to end up in prostitution like those she had heard about. When she arrived in an asylum centre in Italy, she says, “I talked to a social worker in the camp and she said be careful but I didn’t believe her and I left the camp. Then I really discovered why they brought me.”
THE PACT
I was like, swear, swear… I was a Christian[…] So it just crossed my mind but I said, no problem, it doesn’t make any difference, so let me just do this. So I followed the man to this shrine. I swear, do incantations and all. I was like, please God forgive me, I’ve not done this before. Before I left, the man said that I should not bathe that night, […] and that I should drop the pants. I was just wondering, what is this man going to use the pants for? I said, no problem oo, so when we got there, the man collected the pants. He gave me fowl intestine to swallow, not cooked. He made me promise to the shrine that when I get there, I would
30 These recent developments were narrated to me by a police commissioner of the federal police in Belgium who deal with Nigerian networks of HT and match the experiences of the women I worked with.
32 not run, I will not change my mind. So many people are there to deceive me, so I won’t go against my promises.”
The oath taking rituals are all quite similar. The used panties Gloria gave, normally accompanied by i.a. menstrual blood, pubic hair and nails (also called particulars), form the juju, her package, now in hands of the priest or madam, that gives them the power to protect but also turn against her. Even when girls are not familiar with traditional beliefs, like Gloria, who stresses the fact that she is a Christian, these rites are effective in keeping girls loyal to their promise. Shrines are important in traditional justice. Especially the deity Ayelala is well-known for her efficacy in punishing offenders of law and order when invoked (Ellis, 2015) and when an official court is unable to settle a case, the judge will tell people to “settle things at the shrine” (Lavaud-Legendre & Quattoni, 2013). When people depart, it is very common to ask for protection from the spirits. All this, to explain that the appeal to the spiritual world is not per se experienced as violent by the girls: it gives them (1) protection and (2) a guarantee of their loyalty to their benevolent sponsors. They understand they are obliged to resort to the spiritual realm because of the difficulty and cost of their enterprise: they need supernatural powers (Simoni 2013). It’s now also common to swear on the bible and ask protection from god through evangelist priests.
I now argue that the violence of the pact, not clearly definable in the terms of Galtung and ZŽizžek, creates a spiritual bondage, through the combination of (1) the unequal relationship of both parties who made the pact, an observation largely taken from Simoni (2013) and (2) the fear of repercussions – through the real or spiritual realm. These girls are made to promise they will pay the debt and not reveal their sponsors. However, the pact is marked by an unequal relationship. In the eyes of the girls, the madam or recruiter in Nigeria is older and wealthy and has abroad knowledge. The girls are brought up to respect, not talk back and accept any gift of elders. This relationship of dominance makes the pact an inherently violent one.
Some run away. I paid her [my debt]. They will kill you! I was having that fear because she said she would kill me and my family. And also I promised, I will pay, don’t worry. I don’t want to say I don’t pay. I swear before I go in Benin […] I was afraid. I don’t want anything to happen to them. I promised I would pay. It’s a contract. He knew where my family was staying.
Additionally, the repercussions cited in the pact are very violent: madness, illness and even death, for them or for their families. This can be executed by the madam and her helpers, or through the spirit world. Abbie’s determination not to do the ritual before traveling illustrates its strength.
That same evening, the madam called me to come in the night. She said I had to take an oath. […] I am not that desperate that I will do voodoo. I had never gone to shrine before […] I was really scared and
33 thinking: Am I really doing the right thing? What was I going to do at that shrine? […] I only saw in movies. She made me read the oath. She told me she normally takes hair of people but I refused. I told her I cannot allow that. I am not that desperate. I just had to speak, she said no problem. But she killed a live chicken in my presence. She cut the neck and put her hand in the chicken and bring out the heart. She says I have to eat it. I said I refuse, that I am leaving. I was mean. I said I am not going to do this I am not that desperate. I said, ‘even if you cook it inside the pot in your house I will not eat it.’ Then she said, ‘ok, you must drink gin’, but I said ‘I don’t drink gin.’ My stomach will be hot. […] Then I had to drink pure water but I never drink it, I held it in my hand. I had to swear that I will repay the money, that if I don’t pay, the voodoo is going to kill me. I was thinking, ‘what am I doing?’
A couple of years ago, in the news feed of my Facebook, a video of ‘Precious’ appeared. The video was made in Dubai and showed a completely naked woman, with an off-screen voice asking her questions. She answered hesitantly that she was from Edo state, had willingly come to work in prostitution and had gone to the shrine with her mother. While she was saying this, the camera moved closer to her face and her private parts. “So this is to show what you came to do here and you are going to abide by the rules, do you agree? And if you go and pay your money everything here will be deleted but if you go against the laws in this house this will be published, and this will be sent to your family, do you agree?” the off-screen voice asked.
BEATINGS AND THREATS
The boyfriend of my madam was like a devil. He was in charge. The woman was ok. The boy said I had no choice. He locked us up in the morning. I was here in Belgium like that for two months. We don’t go out at day. I never see the sun, only through the window. The boy treat us like animals. I was tired and fed up of everything. This is not what I wanted from life. I didn’t care anymore what happened. Anything that must happen, let it happen. (Abbie)
In many cases, the madams and their helpers abuse the girls, subjecting them to subjective violence (ZŽizžek 2008). If they do not perform as they are told, the women are beaten up and insulted. Almost all the girls I have met, while working and doing research, have scars: on their arms, backs and faces. Some tell me they felt treated like animals, like merchandise. Lilly describes her experience:
I was like an animal when I came out of the desert. Ugly and thin. The woman was upset. She looked at my body, ‘You don’t even have breast, how will you work, how will you make money?’ She brought a perrucca31 for me to wear and a bra that make my breast big. Go and follow them, prepare yourself. If I came home without money, she would beat me. All she cared about was money.
31 Perrucca is Italian for wig
34 ILLEGALITY AND SEX WORK
The girls don’t talk to me much about how they initially experienced the relations with clients. It’s known that some girls get raped on the way to prepare them for the work. They did tell all say they felt tired and that they had no time or energy to think about what they were doing.
7 months of it, I was really tired. I never planned for this lifestyle, god forbid, I just go house to work, house to work, nothing like church. I even forget when is Monday, when is Tuesday because every day I go to work. I see money. The day I don’t see money they beat me.(Gloria)
The girls are set up differently – in bars, on the street, behind windows or in private houses. Different settings come with different prices, clients and challenges. Their first and often only contact with whites is in their position as prostitutes:
People think they can do anything with us. They use us for what their wives won’t let them do. Sometimes a girl can have boundaries, certain things you won’t do, but in the end if they’ll pay extra for it, you will do it anyway. (Vivian)
The cost can go from 5 euro to 200 for a sexual favour. The girls are sometimes moved around to where money is being made. This makes it difficult for the girls to familiarize with the local context, social norms and foreign language. In many cases – especially when working along the road or in private houses – the girls are vulnerable for abuse.
[The clients were] Italians, most, and Romania were the dangerous. They would pick you, fuck you, beat you and collect even the money you had before. I have this experience. I normally go to the house. […]When I will enter I saw other people. I wanted to run but they bar the door. The brought out a knife and they collected my money.[…] In the bush they can do anything to you. Some clients will burst the condom themselves, the bad ones. Once I got pregnant, a friend helped me for document, and I went to hospital to do abortion.
Lilly use bush to describe street prostitution in the country side in Italy. The women experience the objectification of being prostitutes. When Gloria got lost in Italy, she thought: “What kind of life is this now, I have the number but I cannot call, I don’t speak Italy. Even if I just meet a white man say I want to call, they will just conclude their own, because they have seen girls like me in prostitution.” With girls like me, Gloria refers to her skin color. In their work, the women are treated like exotic objects and looking around and seeing the racially segregated society, they experience for the first time what it means to be black in Europe.
35 The women enter Europe illegally: a reality they learn about once in Europe. The threat of detention centers, arrest and deportation, makes them feel like criminals, something they had not foreseen. Gloria flew to Italy and was detained at the airport, she explains: “So when we got there, they were now checking other people’s documents, so they can enter Italy. But our own was different. No document, only passport. How is that possible? We don’t know that it’s crime that help us.”
Some women apply for political asylum, but most remain undocumented, living invisible lives. They experience a situation of precarity (Butler 2009), at risk of not being qualified as a subject of recognition. Being illegal for the girls translates in being not wanted or not allowed to be here, with little understanding of how migration regulations and policies work globally.
There’s more action now than before about human trafficking. Like this time now, the police know almost all the information. They know what’s going on. If you are lying to a police man he will know. (…) They will just throw you out. It’s not like those days you used to make story to get documents: (…) In Italy still today it’s more secured in terms of human trafficking, more than Belgium or any place I can say, because in Belgium they capture you so fast. In Italy it’s secured, it’s free, you can bring enough people.
It’s quite revealing that Wendy describes Italy as secure and free, because of inefficient anti-trafficking operations: operations set up to save girls. Deportation is a constant threat and the women fear law enforcement, other forms of authority and white people in general (except maybe clients). They become dependent on the Nigerian community, fellow sex workers or even just their pimps to navigate their new and alien environment. Sponsors sometimes exaggerate the dangers of the environment to add to the social isolation of the women and take advantage of their ignorance. Girls commonly pay 300 euro for rent, sharing a room with four other people, and the same amount for their connection (window or street space). Before Abbie was set up for prostitution, she lived in Italy for a few months, “like prisoner we were not allowed to go out. I was confused, I thought of running away but where would I go?” It shows that being illegal can lead to lead to a secluded life and immobility.
5.2.2 Man go survive
Despite everything, the women experienced a sense of accomplishment to finally be in this Europe, that continued to trigger the imagination and possibly offer great things. However, whereas Vigh’s (2009a) subjects – young Guinea men – get stuck once in Europe, Edo women enter the exploitative and lucrative business of sex work. The pace of the changing environment is more dizzying than ever. The girls fight to keep a form of control over their lives and sometimes simply to survive. The expression man go survive in pidgin English is a popular expression, similar to Vigh’s use of dubriagem, denoting a certain flexibility, constant negotiation and adjustment in individual action.
36 ESCAPE
Blessing ran from her situation. She told me: “I am stubborn. You have not seen that side of me. If I am angry, I go mad. I ran away. But I was so afraid of the police.” Some girls break their promise, because they feel deceived, because of the abuse or because the work is too hard on them. Being undocumented, they easily end up in other exploitative situations. Gloria describes how she felt: “What if somebody wants to go back ooo, no paper, nothing nothing? That’s not easy. If you tell police on the street they will tell you, you should go back the way you came.”
After three years of prostitution in the North of Italy, having paid half of her debt, Lilly told me she “gave up”:
Some girls will suffer, until they die and the family don’t really care. They sacrifice themselves for the family. All they [the relatives] care about is money. For me, I don’t feel fine, I can’t continue this, I will die. I decide myself not to do it anymore. I want to go back to Nigeria. Let me go and meet my children.
Lilly had never anticipated to stay so long in Europe and she was able to send only a very small amount of money home. Her yearning to see her children again in Nigerian pulled her over the line to break her pact. Similarly, Gloria escaped after seven months working for a very abusive madam. “I said I would rather die in Nigeria then to die here as a nobody.” When a girl runs, however, she risks repercussions from the sponsors: for themselves and for their families back home.
They’d beaten Itohan to death. Itohan didn’t want to be a prostitute anymore. She’d said she wasn’t paying off the debt and she never would. She was 20 years old. They found her body months later on the outskirts of Turin, in the abandoned warehouse of a factory that had been closed for years. (Aikpitanyi, Giordano & Perlino, 2014: 37)
Between 1994 and 1998, the UN counted 116 Nigerian women killed in Italy (Adesina, 2005). By 2010 over 500 young Nigerians had been killed (Aikpitanyi, Giordano & Perlino, 2014). However, Wendy told me that “new girls now, they will threaten their madams to go to police, to free themselves from paying the debt.” She disapproves of those who break their promise, especially because she had remained loyal to her own oath.
LOYALTY
Mostly the girls stay loyal to their promise and are determined to finish paying their debt. Complying with the agreement shows a minimal form of agency, because in its most humble form, Giddens argues,
37 it is “the power to intervene or refrain from intervention” (in: Honwana, 2005: 48). It can also mean a choice to remain loyal to their own family, culture and gods. Mahmood argued that in observed docility, the agency lies in different ways a person inhabits and gives meaning to social and cultural norms.
The girls talk about making sacrifices. Simoni explained that in rural areas in Edo state there exists a culture of sacrifice, a logic that justifies the suffering of one sibling for the benefit of the whole family (2013). Some take drugs and start drinking to survive this temporary ordeal. On the other hand, staying loyal is also a decision to protect their own migration project, and they focus on imagining their post-debt lives. Seeing the money pass through their hands, is for many surreal. Wendy told me it’s an obsession: “All you can think about is how one day all this money will be yours.” The women I met were all able to send money home from the beginning. However little, they could already improve the lives of their families. Their agency is collectively motivated and many girls, however much they suffer, acquired a sense of satisfaction from the well-being of their relatives.
The girls have complex relationships with their sponsors. Rose worked about six months in Spain, before her madam decided to move her to Belgium to work for another two years: “She was my boss. I do what she say. Of course I was thankful to her. She is the one that brought me to Europe. But she didn’t make it easy for me. There was a time I ask to go to camp to ask asylum but she said no.” Simoni (2013) rightly argues that the higher status and economic success of madams contribute to the respectful and obedient behaviour of the girls.
My sister and somebody else were my madam. They combined the money to bring me over. I always stayed in Torino. I never stayed with her. We had issues. […] They had to have a family meeting at home and my brother said: ‘You are stupid. What do you think she did when she was paying your school fees when you were in Africa. And you think you don’t want to do it. You must do it!’ For some years we didn’t talk to each other but I was paying her. I have to pay. I was really upset and angry with her. She had friends in Torino that told me how it works [to do sex work] and that is how you are going to the police to seek asylum.[…] I rented a place and went to work. I got my document. For that she put me through rightly. I really respected that. I had to pay just forty thousand euro. I never swear an oath. There was money there. It took me two years to pay the money. And I was taking care of my mum the same time. I sent money home every month and I paid the school fees of my nephews.
Vivian’s story illustrates one example of how complex an agreement can be. Although she had been pushed into sex work against her will, the madam was her own sister who had gone through the experience herself for the well-being of the family. She felt particularly grateful that her sister put her through, which means she helped her get a legal status: a sign that her sister had her interests at heart. She was able to provide for her family very fast, something unthinkable if she had stayed in Benin.
38 AGENCY OF CONCEALMENT
I begged her to send money to my children but she [my madam] didn’t. By the time I got wise, I hide small money. I managed to send some to my children, maybe fifty or one hundred euro a month.
It took Lilly a while to get wise. Bini sex workers in Europe develop a special relationship with the truth. The violence and deception they were subjected to during their journey and in Europe has made them suspicious of others. They become protective of their own identity and imagined futures. Revealing information about oneself involves a risk, as it means giving away control and making oneself vulnerable to the abuse of others (who might have different interests at heart). To navigate their new environment, interacting with clients, boyfriends and fellow prostitutes, they adapt their identity and life story to get what they want.
It is my opinion therefore, that Edo women who migrate to Europe master the agency of concealment (Comaroff, in Peano, 2013): the choice to conceal or reveal parts of themselves. In western society rooted in the modern, “preoccupation with transparency, clear-cut definitions and truth,” this behavior can become problematic for some (Peano, 2013). In Foucault’s panopticon, the prisoners had no privacy, they could conceal nothing, and thus all their power was taken away. Visibility gives power to the other (Danaher & Webb, 2000). Wendy understands this and when I ask her about her future plans, she tells even me: “I don’t reveal my secrets, not anymore!” This tactic the women use will reappear at different times in the rest of the discussion.
5.3 Beyond debt
5.3.1 From tactics to strategies
Many women do not make it beyond debt. Deported, mad or exhausted they do not manage to pursue their migration career (Timmerman et al., 2014). However, I argue that beyond debt, there is a possibility of a shift in the social status of the women: in the diasporic community or back home in Nigeria. In the foreign European context, they continue to tactically move in interstitial spaces (Utas, 2005), constantly adapting their identities. In Benin (including the diaspora), however, they are no longer the powerless. This new position allows for more strategical agency. All the women I have met at this stage are exceptionally ambitious and greedy for life. I claim that this is a result of the combination of (1) having experienced the subjective violence of indentured sex work, and (2) the effect of European life, that even though they are excluded from it, is now very close, and offers a world antagonistic to that of Benin. They have developed a sense of entitlement they didn’t have before in Benin and talk about deserving better and having rights to certain things. Merton argued that social
39 deviance such as crime or deception can be the consequence of being deprived of things a person believes to deserve (Merton, 1938). This framing helps to explain some of the choices the women make.
INDEPENDENT SEX WORK
Recent studies in the Netherlands (Olabisi & Akinyoade, 2015) and France (Lavaud-Legendre, 2013) discovered that not all of the Nigerian sex workers are under debt bondage. One of the women I interviewed described to me how she had continued to work in prostitution for eight years after she had finished paying her debt. Prostitution was all she knew and:
The money is a lot. That is the problem. It’s like a pest, something in you now, you cannot resist any more. You have seen a lot of money and when later you see five hundred euro a month, you can’t do a thing. When someone tell you to get normal job, it’s not easy, it will take time. It’s like something into your system, you need it.
Sex work centres around the female body, and the girls were preoccupied with their looks because they wanted to attract clients. In the new European context, they started adopting habits of excessive consumerism. They prefer synthetic Chinese clothes, jewelry, Brazilian hair and high heels: things they never had access to and symbolize the western life style they had dreamed about at home. In Benin people say that Europe freshens the skin, and many women I met started using bleaching cream in Europe. The consumer habits are hard to tame. Queen has the biggest collection of high heels I have ever seen, it almost covered half her room, and Rose and Esther parade on the streets hoping to be scouted as models. This new lifestyle, combined with the will to provide for their relatives in Nigeria, made some women continue sex work after debt, because it was all they know and it is more lucrative than other jobs generally offered to foreign, unskilled women.
Most of our parents, they are pushing our children so hard to work in prostitution. Because when you are receiving salary you cannot send money like before. […] Or when you want to settle down and get married, the parents, especially the dad, will not be happy. He is respected because his daughters are in Europe and the money keeps coming. If a girl gets a family she will invest in her family.
This woman explains that some parents do not want their daughters to get a salary (= a regular job) or a family of her own because there will be less money for the parents in that case. After debt, there is less stress involved in doing sex work. After paying her debt and getting a residence permit in Italy, Wendy told me that her life was “not bad”. She was no longer afraid of the police and she could work independently. Internet has created new possibilities and I remember that some women I knew in Italy organized their rendezvous through dating websites. However, most women depend on a connection, and in this way, they remain vulnerable for exploitation. In Brussels for example, legal or documented
40 Eastern European women sublet their spaces to Nigerians for fifty per cent of the profit. This woman explained what happened to her:
My girlfriend set me up. The [pimp of my new connection] was so arrogant, but I needed him. It’s not like in Italy where you can just stop a car on the street. When the man phoned, I stopped everything I was doing and took a taxi. He was the one doing the red light in the computer. He decided everything and made appointments. The problem is, he will accept everything: anal, body shower [...] nasty things, useless things, and after you pay the taxi, you will share the money, sixty, forty [...] Even when I had my period I work. You have to fix something on your body so you can work.
Anna, a single mother whose children are in Nigeria, disapproves of the behaviour of her compatriots: “They will be old, without issue32, for what are they doing it? They are just greedy. Or maybe they sacrifice for their parents. Me I am doing it for my children. But if you don’t have issue for what? Prostitution is no good. You need your family.”
LETTING GO OF FAMILY PRESSURE
Gloria chose to return to Nigeria through a voluntary return program. She said:
I went there [= Benin], and I said: I am back. Some they build house and buy car but I will not suffer for my family. And I started to explain everything about life over there. Life over there is like hell. I must not go through hell to get money. And if I die, all those whites, they are vanity. They [my parents] are Christians, they understand. Besides, when I came home, I was not looking good at all. It was not as if I had gone there (…) After three months, they [my parents] started forgetting the issue and gave me advice to live a good life. They said I should think of what next to do.
Gloria chose to risk shame and rejection by breaking the secrecy around what she was doing in Europe to her family, by openly talking about the sex work and the suffering she went through. She did not want to sacrifice her life in that way for them.
It’s a common fear among girls that their money will be spent unwisely by relatives. “Many girls buy property but many the family will just use the money rough,” Lilly told me. After 8 years of maintaining her family Wendy has decided to let go:
The way my family make me suffer [...] [my brothers] give me all kinds of excuses but they’re eating the money [...] So I thought, since I finish settling you people I need to concern my life. I stopped telling them
32 Pidgin English for children
41 anything, except my mum, I sent her things sometimes (…) If I can open a shop for my mum, if she’s not happy, she can go because I am not going to prostitute for the rest of my life.
LOVE AND SEDUCTION
The only contact the Edo women usually have with locals, is with their clients. They have something to offer that these men want and these social exchanges can potentially give the women a feeling of empowerment. Wendy told me that she was very good at pleasing clients and that men kept asking for her and giving her tips. Peano (2013) explains very sharply how the women play on the ambiguity of the economic and affective domain creating, confusing clients. They manipulate and seduce clients to evoke romantic attention or feelings of pity. Sometimes a client will start a relationship with a girl and offer to pay part off her debt but they often end up feeling betrayed because they are not met with the expected gratitude and affection (Peano, 2013). One woman told me that
those days, like 15, 20 years ago, in Europe there was a lot of money. That is how I understood it. You can have a good white client and at the end of the day he becomes your boyfriend and then he will say: ok, I would like to pay your money. (…) But most of our people took that for granted. You know why? (…) He will tell you, ‘stop doing prostitution, let’s get married, I don’t want you to suffer, I’ll pay your debt, and I will settle your family.’ Some of them they settle down, but most of them are not satisfied and they still go back to the street. The money the white man will give them to start up something (…) They will use the money to bring and exploit girls.
These men have become victims of Edo women. Wendy told me that men are more cautious now and this scenario is less likely to happen. A blog post, written by a former Nigerian sex worker, recently caught my attention. She addresses it to clients that fall in love and offer to help the women. She warns them to be cautious and claims that the goal of each girl is to pay her debt and get documents. “In t he state of imprisonment and subjection they are in, every means becomes licit to take money from anyone who falls in love with them” (Joseph, 2017).
It is not unusual in Nigeria for men to provide for women in exchange of sexual favors. These forms of transactional sex cannot simply be called prostitution as they are mutually desired, very complex, can involve friendship and even love. “Sexual exchange [...] is a power niche for those with limited social and economic power, enabling them to seek and access material goods, social status, and sexual experience” (Barnett & Maticka-Tyndale, 2011: 349). Adaku is dating two older white men at the moment. “They take care of me,” she tells me. One of them used to be her boyfriend but now she occasionally meets with him. “He wants to marry me, he would die without me. But he doesn’t give me money, he is stingy, he just wants to love me,” she says. She now has another lover. I met him a few times in Adaku’s house. He is married but comes to stay with her for a couple of days a week. They cook
42 together, laugh a lot and watch films. He is clearly in love with her and she affectionately calls him ‘my love’. When I ask Adaku one day if she loves him, she tells me: “noooo I can’t afford to love oo, I have a family to take care of.”
Blessing, who suffered a very abusive relationship when she was young, told me she has a new African boyfriend, but “...he’s no good. […] He should provide for me. I don’t know what he does with his money because he is not giving it to me. I tell him I want to go shopping but he doesn’t give me any.” The girls usually have black boyfriends while they are working, who give them protection and gifts. Utah made similar observations of female agency in times of war, in their relationship with male combatants (2005). Wendy said sex work affected her ability “to love”: when it comes to love I am too emotional. I give easily. I am very soft, you know this. Coming to Europe and doing prostitution, I started seeing myself as a beast, with men. […] I became a beast and started treating men like trash. I can have any man I want. I can sleep with anyone. I mean black men. When I say relationship because when you are doing prostitution, you will have your serious relationship. I can have any man and they come to my house and then you know, and I throw them all out. ‘Get the fuck out of my house.’ It was really not good for me.
The experience of sex work can have a destructive effect on a women’s ability to have affective relationships. Wendy said she felt like a beast and treated men like trash. Most women I met are skeptical to declarations of love, and although they don’t necessarily want a husband, they all want to have children one day (if they do not have them already). Few, like Anna and Wendy, hopelessly dream of falling in love and finding someone who takes care of them, “like in the movies”.
BECOMING A VICTIM
Like in many other European countries33, in Belgium, victims of trafficking in human beings who cooperate with the competent authorities are granted a residence permit. This so-called victim status is based on a fragile balance between, on the one hand, the will to protect the victims and offer them different life choices, and on the other hand, the need to act efficiently against the networks. However, not everyone is offered this option and if a woman is unwilling to testify against her exploiters, she is offered no protection at all and is at risk for deportation. In its most pure form, Utas argues that victimcy is a minimal form of agency because it is taking advantage of other people’s pity (2005). Being a victim can get you things in certain situations. In this case, becoming a victim can get you a legal residence, protection and new future perspectives: a very attractive offer.
33 The European Council Directive 2004/81/EC
43 What is asked from the women in return is the truth: to trust unknown policemen and social workers to reveal their real identity, open up painful memories and break their pact: expose the identity of their sponsors and risk repercussions, through the invisible and visible world. The protection offered in Europe, Lavaud-Legendre argues, is conditional on denouncing and perhaps betraying or renouncing a certain part of one's culture, past and tradition (2013). Many refuse to collaborate and a Belgian police commissioner told me their first task is to convince women that they are de facto victims (personal communication, May 30, 2017). I argue that for those who are able to accept the deal, there is a clear shift to more strategical agency. This is no longer a tactical choice in order to survive everyday challenges but clearly long-term goals are at stake. The girls remain on their guard about what they reveal and what they conceal, trying to fit into this victim category. It can take the police months before some kind of trust relationship is created. Abbie and Mary explain what the program has done for them:
I am 20 now, I want to learn the language and do a training. I am very happy. I love this country and this government, the police. Really, they are straight. I had to give the name of the people that sponsored me. The police […] only want the truth. They know when you lie. I didn’t want to go back. Now I can’t go back. If the family of those sponsors find out I gave their name they will come after me.
I am happy now, my life changed, I am going to school. I cannot go back to Benin. It’s very dangerous. I miss my mum but she doesn’t pressure me. If I get a job and good life, I can provide for them. [...] I never told them anything about what happened. I don’t want to bother them. Now I just want to go to school.
The social project attached to the procedure is for some a welcome cocoon and for others difficult to abide. For Mary and Abbie, Europe has become a safe place where they are getting the opportunities they dreamed of when they left Benin. However, making this decision has made it impossible for them to ever go back home. For others, the formal nature of the procedure and the hands-on social assistance can be experienced as threatening for women who have learned to distrust others and guard their individual agency with their life.
I met Rose in her new studio. Leaving Benin at barely sixteen, she had worked as a prostitute for three years. She told me she had never lived this comfortably before and that she was very happy. About her legal procedure, she said:
I was lucky. I did not have to betray her [= her madam]. They were already on the case for several years. They were gathering evidence about my connection here. The police here. So they already knew. The police said it was so difficult to work with the police in Nigeria so they will leave my madam alone.
44 It gives Rose peace of mind that she didn’t break her promise and because her madam is in Nigeria, she is in anyway less likely to be persecuted.
In some cases victims enter voluntary return programs, that include skills training and financial support in Nigeria. The women I met were able to improve their living situation thanks to the program. One of them said: “I am working. I can take care of myself. I can go anywhere I want. I am free.”
When an Edo woman says she is a victim of HT, it normally means she went through one of these procedures, and not being a victim per se. One woman asserted that:
me, I am a victim of human trafficking. The guy I was working for was exploiting young girls. He took a lot of my money. Now I am free, the government is paying me. I have to be grateful for this. Not think: the police will not know, I can bring some girls. If the police find out later that, even though they freed me and arrested somebody because of my situation, I decide to exploit girls, I’m finished. They can now give me like 20 years because I lied.
JOINING THE BUSINESS
At some point, there are women who decide they want to join the business. It can happen that their own madam introduces them into the trade, after they have bought their freedom. In other cases they start on their own, often with help from family members back home. Being abroad, maybe even having obtained a document, power relations have shifted. “After being exploited, women start to exploit others themselves. The roles have become interchangeable parts of an endless chain.” (Aikpitanyi, Giordano & Perlino, 2014: 5) The migration project becomes a self-cultivating phenomenon. Situations of exploitation and abuse can incite a violent logic. Violence can have a dehumanizing effect on its victims, create trauma and feelings of revenge. When the oppressed is dehumanized, there is nothing human in him or her left not to do the same to others (Freire, 1970). One of the women told me disapprovingly that
a lot think about becoming madam. They think that, the only way I can stop this, is to bring somebody else. But the real truth is that, you bringing somebody else is like you doing it again. You, yourself you are still the prostitute. Why would you bring someone? You are still in it. It’s the same thing.
The madams are inventive and adapt their modus operandi to changes in the environment. They collaborate across borders, following where there is money to be made and trying to escape anti- trafficking efforts. Leman and Janssens appropriately call them creative entrepreneurs (2013). Vivian shared the experience of a friend of hers:
45 Three years ago, a friend – she’s younger than me – who just bought her freedom said ‘let’s bring girls.’ I told her it’s not my thing. They would run away because I wouldn’t want to control them. But she brought girls and it was working for her. She treated them like her own sisters. If you see these girls you would not believe they are paying. Because they wear the best Brazilian hair, the best shoes. They send money home.
Madams have become more cautious of the danger of their own girls reporting them. Some chose to remain more or less anonymous and put the girls to work in another country. Others have understood that violence is not the most effective way to bind the girls to them.
5.3.2 Becoming powerful at home
Migration changes not only the destiny of the individual migrant but also the conditions of family members and by expansion the whole community back home. In Osezua’s research among community members, one man said: “You don’t know how many homes this abroad thing and trafficking have broken in Benin. Many homes have scattered because the woman now gets money in dollars so the husband cannot control her again” (2013: 30). However, it is known that fathers and husband are often behind the migration projects of women and they equally benefit from the remittances. In any case, it is clear that this particular migratory option has given women greater access to desired resources such as foreign currency and property, which has enhanced their social recognition and prestige in the family and in society in general. Osezua argues that it is challenging an age-old power structure of male dominance (2013).
KEEPING UP APPEARANCES
Anna stays in her room most of the time in the shelter. One day, I find her sitting in her bed facing the window. “You know what I dream yesterday,” she tells me: “I just sit here like now and I close my eyes and I see myself going home for Christmas, to Nigeria, to Benin as a successful woman. I bring presents, like all those from abroad.”
The precarity of being female, foreign and colored keeps the women in a marginal position in the European context. If documents are obtained, which is formally possible through marriage, asylum, victimhood or other forms of regularization, the social context becomes less hostile and the women are in more comfortable situation to strategically get to more powerful position in the diasporic community and more importantly back home. They have access to both European social and health services and the informal activities of the diaspora. Moreover, they can now freely travel home and come back.
46 As opposed to those who chose a radical new life in Europe, most women project their futures in relation to home. These women desire to be recognized in Nigeria. They become greedy for money and desperate to display the image of their actual or pretended wealth back home. After all, in Benin, respect and status are related to wealth. Although there are only few that survive the journey, buy their freedom, obtain documents and remain alive and sane through it all: it is their success stories that will pull new girls over the line to take the risk.
SETTLING THE FAMILY
Wendy, who had grown up in the village, farming, explains what happened when her sister was in Europe:
When she traveled to abroad, when she finished paying her debt, I went to the city to start school. She sent money for me to pay my school fees. I finished my secondary school. My mum she moved to the city with me, we had a room and a parlor. My sister was sending money and it was really cool. My brother started working. Things started turning around for us. We had a supermarket. My sister sent the money to start the supermarket. I was bright. I finished secondary school.
Being abroad enables the women to send money home and they become the breadwinners of the family, especially once they are free from debt. The remittances become the main and sometimes only income of the family, and the money can be used for the school fees of siblings, food and rent. They provide a livelihood, status and security for their family. One of the women told me she was able to provide an education for her brothers and sisters through the money she earned working as an independent sex worker in Italy. If they are successful, the women come home as heroes, regardless of how the money was made. A study among 300 families in Benin City carried out in 2015, confirms that “the effect of migrant remittances has gone a long way to influence the economic well-being of the families in Benin City and transformed the social status of most families who have migrant as relatives outside [sic]” (Alenkhe & Omigie, 2015: 11) It is said that The Benin office of Western Union is the company’s busiest in Nigeria (Adesina, 2005; Osezua, 2013).
47 BENIN LANDLADIES
On the plane coming from Lagos, I was looking outside, eager to catch a first glimpse of Benin City. Initially, all I could see was a large green plane with clouds hanging low. It was the middle of the rainy season. As the first signs of human life showed up, I saw identical plots of land, one after another, enclosed by walls and with skeletons of unfinished houses in them, all similar in shape and size: so- called four-flats.
In Edo tradition, land is communal and managed by the Oba. However, land has become increasingly commodified and privately owned. In the context of uncertainty and insecurity of life in Benin, owning a house offers a kind of stability that is quite unique. A house means a permanent place to live and additionally, if rented out, a source of income. The very material presence of a stone house is significant as something that is definite in a constantly moving environment of everyday survival. Building a house in Benin is taking care of one’s pension. Remittances are the biggest source of money for construction. Men and women, who have been going abroad since the eighties, are building houses and progressively changing and expanding the city. One woman said that
most women all they think off, when you have a house you are a rich person. When you buy a house your family will respect you. They will say oh my god, her son built a house, her daughter built a house, they are in Europe, that is their own thinking.
Concerning heritage rights in Benin, only men and no women formerly owned real estate. Women, however, are legally allowed to have property, even when married, since the introduction of British colonial law. Since about twenty years, Bini women have been buying plots and building houses with the money they make in Europe. A friend of mine told me this is unthinkable in other parts of Nigeria, like Igboland. People now say that more than fifty per cent of all property in Benin City is owned by women (personal communication, Odebata Friday, 7 July, 2017). In Benin I met a lot of people who paid rent to their landlady.
DOING CHARITY
The most ambitious of these women dream of becoming successful business women, commuting between Europe and Africa, and enjoying the status of a celebrity. One evening in the shelter, Esther was showing a video to the other girls on her phone. It showed a successful Edo woman on Ring Road in Benin City. The woman in the video explained how she was financially supporting an orphanage. The girls were praising this woman. Esther shouted that one day this would be her. On another occasion, Wendy expressed similar desires:
48 I have so many dreams, seriously, I am too ambitious. I don’t think I will do this daily job for too long, but for business I am thinking of something. That is something I cannot get rid of my body. I still think of business, I still think of helping a lot of people. I saw the way I grew up as a woman. I never experienced father love. (…) One of my dreams is to help less privileged children, having my own foundation.
Doing charity becomes part of the imagined future of some women, through a combination of genuine altruism (because of uncomfortable memories of suffering at home), and a longing for respect and status at home. Helping the poor in their eyes is a pastime of the elite and they are familiar with images of successful women and celebrities that help the less privileged. It is the ultimate sign that they have climbed the social ladder and are no longer those who need help. They have moved to the other side. Additionally, it offers a way to imagine going home. Those who have been in Europe for a long time have a hard time picturing themselves back in the Nigerian setting. Business women, of the kind that do charity, have a clear identity or locus and assuming this identity can give them access to a new social group of reference in Nigeria.
6 CONCLUSIONS
Using a multi-sited research design, based on existing literature, expert interviews and the in-debt analysis of the life stories of ten Bini women, I was able to add a degree of nuance and complexity to the discourse on human trafficking (HT) from Edo state to Europe. This transnational movement, which started in the nineties and has involved thousands of young women, evokes many questions in view of the extreme forms of violence involved. The dominant framing has a tendency to regard the women as empty vessels, devoid of agency, and at the mercy of madams and bosses that exploit and abuse them. However, anti-trafficking efforts that focus on saving victims and persecuting traffickers encounter resistance from different angles. The question arises: what are we missing?
Alternatively, in order to discover what encourages sex work migration to Europe, I chose to adopt an open mobility frame, assuming a certain normality of the situation of Bini migrants, and allowing for experience and imagination to play central roles. I found Plambech’s label of indentured sex work migration (ISW) a welcome move away from the classical attitude towards HT (2017). This exploratory approach, focusing on individual life stories, did not lead to general truths about Bini migrants, but on the contrary, highlighted the heterogeneity of their experiences. The women navigate their environment, looking for available options and making different choices. If anything, it has shown that it is quite useless to define these women as mere victims, if one wants to understand anything about their movement. Using the analytical tools of agency and violence, I was able to shed a different light on the hows and whys of ISW migration. I subsequently conclude that the major factors encouraging ISW
49 migration from Edo state to Europe are: (1) the severe forms of structural violence Edo women are subjected to, (2) the strength of the imagination, (3) communal and religious complicity to ISW migration, and (4) the possibility of gaining social status in Nigeria.
First and foremost, I argue that during their migration trajectories, Edo women are subjected to extreme forms of structural or systemic violence (Galtung, 1969; ZŽizžek 2008), which are not sufficiently accounted for in the HT frame. In Benin, the unprivileged positioning of Bini women within the social structure, characterized by economic inequality and gender discrimination, combined with the position of Nigeria within a globalized economy, excludes them from certain life styles and actions aimed at long term benefits. Life is about every day survival. In this condition of choicelessness, they are eager to accept any offer for an alternative. Additionally, the average woman in Edo state is deprived of access to forms of transnational mobility, because of the high costs involved and imposed migration regulations. This leads to more violent consequences: the only option for Edo women to migrate, is by making dangerous promises to sponsors oversea, and risking their lives on illegal migration routes. The journey is unsettling and one of no return, during which the women generally experience a complete loss of agency in their migratory project. Once in Europe, the experience of being illegal, unwanted and foreign, constrains the women to live invisible lives. They fear the authorities, are ignorant of the local fabric and are not recognized as subjects by society. The new environment offers them few alternatives to sex work. At every stage, ISW migrants are the powerless, navigating social contexts shaped by the powerful. Their marginal position encourages particular forms of tactical agency (cf. De Certeau, 1984). They develop ways to survive in-between spaces and maintain a form of control, most notably through the agency of concealment: creatively hiding and revealing parts of themselves.
To understand the popularity of ISW migration, we need to also add the realm of imagination to structural push and pull arguments. The visibility of success stories in Edo state, that have improved the lives of many families, triggers the imagination of many. The migration project is understood as an economic activity which potentially facilitates purchasing property, starting up a business and providing for the family. How the money will be made is omitted from the mirage. The taboo surrounding failed migration projects cultivates optimism. The way life in Europe is imagined is at odds with reality. Europe without wahala, with perfect roads and electricity and where lives are both glamorous and serene, an idea repeatedly conveyed through images and narratives of those who have migrated abroad. Virtually living a successful life abroad, is an accomplishment in its own right. The regression and insecurity in Nigeria is measured against the development and prosperity of Europe. The result is an imagined global order: “a world divided into different zones of mastery over social, political and economic processes” (Vigh, 2009: 95). These conditions create fertile ground for migration desires, because the imagined futures of many are located abroad.
50 Furthermore, it is my opinion that ISW migration thrives because of the presence of collectively motivated agency (as opposed to individually). There is a kind of communal and spiritual complicity in Edo state (especially among Edo and Esan ethnic groups) in the sense that there is a general approval of the practice. The tradition of sacrificing one child for the benefit of the whole family makes ISW migration tolerated and to some degree even encouraged. Authority figures, both spiritual and political, and relatives are involved. Moreover, the pact that leads to the debt bondage is not only an economic agreement. It is made with a sponsor who is older, wealthier and wiser and therefor, according to custom, deserves obedience and respect of the powerless. The spirits are called upon to supervise that the conditions of the pact are respected. When the women are in Europe, socially isolated in a hostile environment, the pact becomes an issue of loyalty towards the beliefs and customs of their family and community. As Mahmood said, even docility to social and cultural norms implies a form of agency (2008).
Finally, if a woman is able to buy her freedom, ISW migration has the potential to allow for a genuine transformation to a more powerful position in Benin society. Although experienced by few, it is these stories that incite the imagination of many and keeps those in debt bondage devoted to the pact. When the women are able to earn foreign currency and a sense of entitlement follows, tactics are turned into strategies, now including long-term goals and the possibility to control others (De Certeau, 1989). Some women buy houses to ensure their pension. Others think about becoming a madam and start exploiting others. The victim-perpretrator dichotomy is blurred. The new madams have gained recognition and become the powerful partner in the unequal relationship at the shrine. The social fabric in some communities in Edo state has transformed thoroughly as a result of ISW migration. Bini landladies have become masters in navigating different authorities: official European governments, as well as formal and traditional authorities in Benin.
There is undoubtedly much we will never know or understand about the experiences of Edo indentured sex work migrants and there are many aspects that need to be further explored and analyzed. However, let this be an appeal to break through the single story of victims and criminals and give the women a voice. Because, as the Nigerian author Chamamanda Adichie said: “...the single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story [...] It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult“ (2009).
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