SHELTERED LIVES God, Sex, and Mobility in Nigeria's Counter Trafficking Programs by St

SHELTERED LIVES

God, Sex, and Mobility in Nigeria’s Counter Traﬃcking Programs

By Stacey Vanderhurst

B.A University of Notre Dame, 2007 A.M. Brown University, 2009

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulﬁllment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island May 2014 © 2014 Stacey Leigh Vanderhurst This dissertation by Stacey Leigh Vanderhurst is accepted in its present form by the Department of Anthropology as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date ______Daniel Jordan Smith, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date ______Kay B. Warren, Reader

Date ______Catherine Lutz, Reader

Date ______Victoria Bernal, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

iii STACEY VANDERHURST Department of Anthropology Brown University—Box 1921 Providence, RI 02912 USA [email protected]

EDUCATION

2014 Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island Ph.D. in Anthropology

Sheltered Lives: God, Sex, and Mobility in Nigeria’s Counter-Traﬃcking Programs Daniel Jordan Smith (chair), Kay B. Warren, and Catherine Lutz 2009 Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island M.A. in Anthropology ‘Image is Everything’: Transnational Governance and the Nigerian Reputation Daniel Jordan Smith (chair), Kay B. Warren, and Catherine Lutz

2007 University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana B.A., magna cum laude, with double major in Anthropology and International Peace Studies and minor in the Arts & Letters Honors Program Identity in Refuge: The Individual Experiences of Asylum Seekers in Ireland Susan B. Blum

2005-2006 Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Visiting Student, Departments of Sociology and Politics

PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS

2014-2015 Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana Center for Law, Culture, and Society, Maurer School of Law Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow

HONORS & AWARDS

2013 AFA Dissertation Award (declined) “Sheltered Lives: God, Sex and Mobility in Nigeria’s Counter-Traﬃcking Programs,” Association for Feminist Anthropology

2013 APLA Graduate Student Paper Prize “God Rescued You: Divine Intervention & Sovereign Power in Nigeria’s Counter- Traﬃcking Programs,” Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

2013 Watson Smith Award for Best Student Research Paper “God Rescued You: Divine Intervention & Sovereign Power in Nigeria’s Counter- Traﬃcking Programs,” Department of Anthropology, Brown University

iv GRANTS & FELLOWSHIPS

2013 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship American Council of Learned Societies

2013 International Affairs Travel Fund Grant Office of International Affairs, Brown University

2011 Writing Fellowship Department of Anthropology, Brown University

2010 NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant Programs in Cultural Anthropology and Law & Social Sciences, National Science Foundation

2010 SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship Social Science Research Council

2010 Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

2009 Graduate Program in Development Summer Fellowship Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University

2008, 2009 Travel and Research Grant Population Studies Training Center, Brown University

2008, 2009 Summer Fellowship Graduate School, Brown University

2008, 2009 Eunice Kennedy Shriver NICHD Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Population Studies & Training Center, Brown University

2007-2013 Doctoral Fellowship Graduate School, Brown University

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

2013 Instructor, Ethnographies of Global Connection Department of Anthropology and Program in International Relations, Brown University 2012 Teaching Assistant, Anthropology & Global Social Problems Department of Anthropology and Program in International Relations, Brown University 2009 Teaching Assistant, Human Traﬃcking, Transnationalism & the Law Department of Anthropology, Brown University 2009 Teaching Assistant, Africa in Transnational Perspective Department of Anthropology, Brown University 2008 Teaching Assistant, War & Society Department of Anthropology and Program in International Relations, Brown University

v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In Nigeria, most given native names have a literal meaning. My Yoruba name, Aduke (ah-doo-kay), was bestowed on me by friends wearing matching aso- ebi cloth and headties at a big funeral party one Friday afternoon. Everyone laughed when it was suggested, arguing over its exact meaning but all agreeing it was perfect. Some said it meant beloved, others said spoiled. It is the one people love to look after, they finally decided. And I had to admit, it was true. This dissertation has been made possible by the kindness and generosity of too many people to count. First and foremost, that includes everyone who supported me in Nigeria, especially the women whose stories are featured in these pages. While I can not mention them by name, this project would have been impossible without their patience, candor, and good humor in the midst of such dire circumstances. By the same token, I have immense appreciation and respect toward the NAPTIP organization for welcoming me into the shelter, and to the entire Lagos counseling team for making my visits there so remarkably at ease. I hope both of these groups see themselves in what follows. Outside the shelter, an equally adept team of women took great care to show me Nigeria from their eyes. I would like to extend special gratitude my friends and neighbors at the student hostel, especially Chichi Okoye. Adeola Olun- loyo, Misan Rewane, Yetunde Becks-Dada, Benjamin Anyaegbunam, Kenneth Asamoah, Benjamin Idowu and all of the Agoha family also took me in to their hearts and homes. Mike Kunnuji and Igwe Igwe at the University of Lagos offered crucial logistical support as I settled into Lagos. A magnificent network of American expatriates provided great respite in such a wild city and time in my life, as well. Kristiann and Graham Gips, Keri Lesniak Solon, and Kurt Solon each saved me more than once, in more ways than they could have known. Katie Rhine literally ushered me into this world and remains a treasured mentor and fellow Naijaphile adventurer. She taught me not only how to live in Nigeria but how to love Nigeria, and for that I am eternally grateful. My entering cohortmates at Brown—Susan Ellison, Sohini Kar, Láura Vares, Caitlin Walker, Co- lin Porter, and James Doyle—are also just such beautiful people. I thank all of them for Tyra Banks and wheat-crust pizza and so, so much grant writing. They continue to remind me what it can mean to pursue meaning and joy in the mess of this all. Those who joined us along the way made the journey especially pleasant, especially Andrea Flores, Inna Leykin, Yağmur Nuhrat, Kathleen Millar, Casey Messick, Jennifer Ashley, Harris Solomon, Chelsea Cormier-Swiggin, Katharine Marsh, and everyone else who trudged over to Abe’s in the rain.

vi I am likewise indebted to the uncommonly kind team of faculty and staff in the anthropology department. Dan Smith was a rock of good faith and good sense amidst the throes of graduate school, usefully critical and confident in equal doses. Catherine Lutz provided consistently close readings of both my academic writing and professional materials, and conversations with Kay Warren always pushed me to see this project in new ways. Victoria Bernal provided especially thoughtful and timely feedback, initiating what I hope are further discussions to come. Bianca Dahl, Jessaca Leinaweaver, Paja Faudree, and Marida Hollos offered tremendous encouragement and feedback throughout my graduate training as well. All dead- lines were made by attainable with the administrative and magic wanding support from Katherine Grimaldi, who continues to check up on her students even in re- tirement. Special thanks are also due to Mariesa DelSoto, Matilde Andrade, and Marjorie Sugrue for accommodating this gypsy student’s requests across great distances. They all join a line of remarkable educators I have enjoyed since childhood, and I thank David Richmond in particular for still asking what I’m giving in return. Fieldwork supporting this research was generously funded by an Interna- tional Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthro- pological Research, and by a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, jointly sponsored by the programs in Anthropology and Law and Society. A postfield workshop sponsored by the SSRC cultivated scholarly friendships I cherish today, especially those with Jatin Dua and Will Thomson. Other trips to Nigeria were subsidized by the Brown Graduate School, Population Studies and Training Center, the Graduate Program in Development, and the Office of International Affairs. My final year of writing was supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and by the couches and fridges of loved ones, who helped me spend my last year as a student galavanting across the country in style. As it turns out, I really can write from anywhere. As for my wild, wonderful family, I am grateful to all aunts, uncles, cousins, and step variations thereof, most especially Kevin, Laura, and baby Ellie Santora, for never letting me take myself too seriously. The same goes to my ND family, especially Kara Walter and Julie Libardi, who have faithfully indulged my bouts of industriousness and irreverence alike. I thank my cousin Kacy Santora for late nights at the library and early mornings at Jolly. You can truly never split Aces. I owe a great debt to my brother Chris Vanderhurst and my adopted brothers Mark Lyons and Jason Reisch for opening their home to me this past year. LEU. Steven Koontz has proven a delightful and generous partner in crime as well. I thank both my grandmothers, June Vanderhurst and Delphine Burgio, for teaching me me to seek love and adventure on my own terms. And finally, special recognition is due to my parents, Mike and Karen Vanderhurst, who never let me not go somewhere. From finagling European holidays throughout my teenage years to preparing for me to move to Nigeria, they always just said to go and have fun. I know this took sacrifices both mental and material, but you really did give me the world.

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vi List of Illustrations ix

Part 1: Logics of Intervention Introduction 2 1. Everyone Wan Go 36 Politics, Policies & Practices of Involuntary Detention 2. Convincing Victims 75 Pre-Emptive Interception & Preventative Rehabilitation

Part II: Debating Women’s Choices 3. Risky Moves 108 Cultures & Calculus of Emigrating 4. Waka Waka Baby 139 Sex, Money & Mobility 5. God Rescued You 168 Religious Subjectivity & Sovereign Power

Part III: Life After Shelter 6. Earning Empowerment 209 Release, Reintegration & Uncertain Futures Conclusion 234

Bibliography 243

viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. NAPTIP Organogram 40 2. “Fight Prostitution” 118 3. “I’ll Get You a Job in Italy” 118 4. “Die in Hot Deserts or Drown in Seas” 118 5. “Be a Good Ambassador” 239

PART I

Logics of Intervention

INTRODUCTION

Governing Women

Florence

Florence is a strong and ambitious woman from a large family Edo State in southern Nigeria. As the second eldest of many children, she completed most of her secondary school but fell short of graduating when her aunt needed assistance in her home across town. While her younger brother attended a local university, she spent the first years of her twenties apprenticing for a hair dresser, only to struggle of find sufficient work with those skills years later. She helped her mother run a small provisions shop from the front of their home on the city periphery, and maintained relationships with successful men from the area, but felt bored and stagnant with “nothing going” for herself.

Over the last two decades, Florence’s hometown and state capital, Benin

City, had become notorious for human trafficking, especially the trafficking of young women to Europe for sex work. Signs offering language courses in Italian,

Spanish, and German dot the landscape. When she was 25 years old, a family friend offered to help her travel out, and she agreed. Within weeks, he had matched her up with another woman from same the area, and arranged their papers and tickets. Because flights from Nigeria to Italy and other parts of Europe are so now heavily monitored for human trafficking, they would first fly to Gambia.

From there, they would board another plane to Italy and work to pay oﬀ the travel debt.

Things did not go as planned.

Upon check in at the Lagos airport, Florence and her travel companion were pulled aside by an immigration oﬃcer. Seeing two young women traveling together, the man demanded a bribe of 1,000 naira, or about $6. Florence refused.

“Why should I pay, if my papers are real?” she would tell me later. The officer eventually turned them in, accusing them of being human trafficking victims. But that was on a Friday evening and the counter-trafficking office was closed, so they spent the weekend in a holding cell. Both girls came to the shelter that Monday, still wearing the new clothes they had bought to travel in. That was where I met them—at the federally run shelter for human trafficking victims in Lagos, Nigeria, where I had just begun my fieldwork.

Needless to say, Florence was not pleased with this turn of events. She spent much of her ﬁrst several days there visibly upset, her head hung low over her lap, praying in heavy whispers into folded hands. She whispered in pidgin, “I wan go, I wan go…” (I want to go) over and over again, and read aloud carefully marked passages from the Bible. She would stay in the shelter for nearly two months, ostensibly for the purposes of “rehabilitation.”

Most of the women I met at this shelter were, like Florence, stopped en route—at international airports, African land borders, and European points of entry—before ever reaching their ﬁnal destination. They had decided to travel and arranged a sponsor and travel agent to organize their plans. Human traﬃcking is

characterized by exploitation, so what starts as smuggling becomes trafficking when those agents abuse, coerce, deceive, or otherwise exploit their clients. This line between smuggling and trafficking is often difficult to distinguish in practice, but most of the women at the shelter were identified as victims and “rescued” before any such abuses transpired at all.

Nigerian officials proudly framed this form of intervention as preemptive, admitting that the women were yet unharmed while insisting their abuse was im- minent. However, without any experience of injury or even danger, the so-called victims in these cases did not see their experiences in those terms and adamantly protested their detention. Regardless of their wishes to be released, to be sent home, or to just be allowed to continue traveling, all intercepted women were repatriated back to Nigeria and taken to one of several rehabilitation centers around the country—most often the flagship shelter in Lagos, where my fieldwork was based.

This dissertation explores what is at stake in that shelter, for the women detained there and the state agents and programs trying to help them. It focuses on the shelter’s rehabilitation programing, offered ostensibly in accord with international standards for human trafficking interventions, but muddled by the different circumstances surrounding most women’s interception. Since even the counselors at the shelter acknowledged that the women there had not yet been abused, there was little sense that they would need help recovering from trauma or other uses of therapy typical of trafficking rehabilitation projects. Rather, the purpose of rehabilitation, as counselors often described it, was to convince the women of the

danger of their migration choices, and to prevent them from making the same mistakes again. This model of rehabilitation implied victims’ complicity in being traf-

ficked, such that trafficking prevention required their own reform. It glossed the desire to migrate and willingness to take on debt to do so as vulnerabilities that needed to be fixed. Preventing human trafficking, as a result, was equivalent to preventing women from migrating, where anti-migration campaigns were ironically justified in the name of protecting migrants, with little regard for what the women involved see or want for themselves.

As we will see, this critique is consistent with a growing body of critical scholarship on campaigns against human trafficking. This literature critiques campaigns against “modern day slavery” for hurting the women they intend to help, and for thereby reproducing the gender, race, and class dichotomies they ostensibly sought to disrupt in the first place. My contribution here then is not to con- demn counter-trafficking campaigns anew, but to identify how the execution of these campaigns in Nigeria provides new insights toward the broader practices of governance and statecraft in postcolonial Africa. In particular, I use the following chapters to make two interventions.

First, previous studies have documented how state policies for migration management are increasingly justiﬁed as humanitarian protections, especially border enforcement initiatives that have been exported to migrant origin regions like

Nigeria. However, most of this research has focused on the motivations of migrant-receiving states like the US and UK. This dearth reﬂects not merely a gap in the literature but a set of cross-cutting theoretical assumptions about states and

migrants: that migrant-receiving states are most interested in preventing migration, that migrant-sending states have generally positive relationships with migrant and diasporic populations, and that their respective interests are generally opposed. Where states in the global south participate in migration prevention campaigns, both through border security and “root causes” development programs, it is seen as a political concession and resource appropriation to appease northern interests, and not, in part, a reﬂection of their own interests in managing that population.

This dissertation uses the Nigerian case to better interrogate this assumption. Officials from the Nigerian government consistently blame undocumented migrant nationals and sex workers for the country’s global reputation for corruption and criminality, a view expressed in the official preface to their counter- trafficking legislation. Indeed, high ranking Nigerian foreign affairs officers admit that they are more concerned with recruiting foreign investment than with recruiting migrant remittances. It is in this context that feminized figure of the trafficking victim, and the correspondingly paternalistic vision of the state, make other forms of intervention possible and even likely. Thus, by exploring how the Nigerian state governs emigration through its own counter-trafficking program, this dissertation challenges dominant academic models of migration management that privilege the perspective of migrant “host” or “receiving” states.

Second, this dissertation traces these global migration regimes and north- south geopolitics as they take shape in the day to day happenings of the traﬃcking shelter. By forgoing the question of whether or not anyone was really traﬃck-

ed—an exercise that quickly proved to be futile—I consider instead how counselors and residents argued over these things, including the reasons these women were traveling, the purpose of their detention at the shelter, and their plans for life after release. I use these debates as a lens onto citizen-state encounters in Nigeria, examining how the counselors represented the government and its authority to shelter residents, and how residents revoked those claims for other frameworks of sovereignty, including individual ambition, family responsibility, and trust in divine will. In the context of widespread and well-founded distrust of government oﬃcials and interventions, I suggest these moments reveal the awkward forms of subjectivity and governmentality forged in the uneven landscape of developing states, where even well-regarded state programs are experienced as arbitrary at best and as arbitrary forms of violence at worst. Women’s divergent and often con- tradictory experiences navigating these interventions thus provide an important ethnographic contribution to contemporary anthropological conversations around on postcolonial subjectivity, citizenship, and humanitarian governance that challenges facile reductions of African governments like Nigeria as failed and corrupt states.

In so doing, this dissertation not only exposes the inadequacies or injustices of these often well-intentioned programs, but explores the deeper questions they raise about women’s mobility, empowerment, and roles as citizens in this global- ized world. Using the stories of Florence and dozens of others like her, it aims to re-humanize the figure of abject suffering that is evoked by the human trafficking victim, and in the process, recognize the complex interplay of ambition, abuse, and

acquiescence that color poor African women’s attempts to make a better lives for themselves and their families.

This chapter thereby aims to destabilize the taken for granted virtue of campaigns against human traﬃcking, which are so often defended as promoting self-evidently good, universal, and apolitical values. The global counter-traﬃcking regime emerged rapidly over the past two decades since the the United Nations’

Palermo Protocol was passed in the year 2000. Its swift adaptation into national laws and agencies in the years that followed was a testament to, among other things, the seemingly universal consensus it inspired. I present the historical gene- sis of Nigeria’s own counter-trafficking agency to show how the counter-trafficking agenda there—and the specific dynamic of rehabilitation it has produced—consolidated multiple social and political movements, including forces from both within and outside Nigeria. In the process, I introduce three important sets of literature that inform the rest of the dissertation. First, I describe the history of Nige- rian emigration leading to the Benin-Italy link notorious for human trafficking, and I use this history to introduce some basic academic theories on transnational migration, citizenship, and borders. Second, I use the history of transnational feminist activism around human trafficking to illustrate parallel academic debates on sexual labor and sexual exploitation. Third, I situate Nigeria’s resultant counter- trafficking legislation within a longer history of gendered governance, particularly via the pet projects of First Ladies, to introduce academic thinking on African states and statecraft. Together, these historical and theoretical themes provide a

foundation for the following chapters’ exploration how women’s bodies are gov- erned today.

Embarrassing Emigrants

Nigeria’s traﬃcking problem is notoriously tied to on particular state in the

“south-south” region of central Nigeria. Just north of the oil-rich Niger Delta, Edo

State is neither signiﬁcantly poorer nor richer than other parts of the country, and folk explanations for this migration pattern abound. Many blame cultural decay, greed, and moral depravity, but the likely explanation is much more mundane. In the 1980s, Europeans are said to have traveled to Benin City, now the Edo state capital of about a million people, to recruit local men and women to pick tomatoes in northern rural Italy. That recruitment initiated a pattern of chain migration that persists today, even though the agricultural jobs do not.

Movement in and out of Nigeria had been largely unrestricted until the country achieved Independence in 1960. Like many new post-colonial African states around it, the Nigerian government was eager to establish all the papers and trappings of statehood, like passports and visa systems, alongside an eﬀort it to ostensibly improve the lives of its citizens, ultimately passing a series of three major immigration laws in the ﬁrst decade of independence (Adepoju 2003). Emigration increased during and following the Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s. The subsequent oil boom lessoned the urgency to leave, although elite youth continued to pursue education abroad. In the 1980s, the economy collapsed and the government along with it. Local currency went from being stronger than the US dollar in 1980

to nearing a value of ten naira to one dollar by the end of the decade, a shift accelerated by IMF and Wold Bank imposed structural adjustment programs that also entailed radical reduction in basic social services (Falola and Paddock 2011). When

I initiated this project in in 2008, the value of the naira was 115 to the dollar, and it has now stabilized around 160:1.

Emigration accelerated significantly during the collapse, among Nigerian elites and working poor alike. The UK and the US were preferred destinations for many, especially educated, professionals, but Germany, Spain, and eventually Ire- land also saw significant immigration from Nigeria. As is common, these variations depended on individual access to social networks of existing migrants that are increasingly self-sustaining once established (Massey et al. 1993). This cohort of migrants established these between Benin City and Italy as well. However, as Italian agriculture stagnated in the early 1990s, many sought other work—a significant portion of the women entering the lucrative local sex industry. These founding madams generally managed their own careers and turned a significant profit, eventually cornering the market on street prostitution throughout much of Italy. After purportedly investing this money in lavish parties and new home construction around Benin City, this cohort of women motivated successive waves of female migrants. Today, at least according to records of legally resident migrants, Italy appears to be the only European country with more women than men among its

Nigerian population (Carling 2006).

Such persistent transnational ties between “home” countries in the global south and “destination” countries in the global north have been a fruitful site of

academic study and theorization. In particular, Nina Glick Schiller describes “de- territorialized nation- states” (Basch et al 1994; Glick Schiller et al 1992; Glick Schil- ler et al 1995) and later “transnational nation-states” (Glick Schiller and Fouron

2001; Glick Schiller 2004) as a challenge to conventional political theory:

The standard textbook version of the nation-state envisions a polity in which the people within a territory share a history, culture, and government, and envision themselves as a nation. Today, both political leaders and disparate others are reviving and updating earlier notions of the state in which membership in the polity extended across state borders to include persons living or even born elsewhere. The people whom the government of a state claims and/or the people who claim the government may live outside its national territory.

This scholarship emphasizes the positive relationships migrant-sending states cul- tivate with such diasporic populations, extending voting rights, political campaigns, and diplomatic priority to them. Here, I argue that Nigerian counter- traﬃcking programs must be understood not only as a positive protective service for diaspora populations, but as a historical product of movements governing what were seen as “bad” migrant populations, sex workers in particular.

Migrant-receiving states bolstered national borders in response to persistent influx of migrants, also distinguishing between good and bad migrants. The massive failure of structural adjustment programs and the fall of the Soviet Union initiated significant population movements across the world. The European Union consolidated after 1992, opening borders within the continent mirrored increasingly closed borders on the periphery, prompting a return to what is called “For- tress Europe” (Favell and Hansen 2002). Among other things, these efforts included in the mass deportation of Nigerian migrant sex workers from Italy throughout the late 1990s. Anthropologists and other scholars have explored the

political construction of illegality, including its overlaps with histories of race, gender, and class that naturalize practices of social exclusion and labor exploitation (De Genova 2005; Silverstein 2005; De Genova 2002; Coutin 2000). Most of this literature, however, has again focused on the politics of deportation in migrant receiving states like Italy. Eﬀorts to trace out the shape of deportation in migrant- receiving states have largely focused on the experiences of individual migrants (De

Genova and Peutz 2010), with less to say about the politics of these practices writ large. The social panic around women deportees in Nigeria, however, was palpable, and directly shaped the counter-traﬃcking movement that would follow.

Deportation Crisis

In the late 1990s, deportations of migrant women sex workers garnered massive media attention in Nigeria. Journalists framed the stories in terms of the shame these women brought on the country and the importance of reviving the that image abroad—absent any ideas of coercion, victimhood or exploitation. Ni- geria’s ambassador to Italy claims to have described the presence of Nigerian sex workers there as “an embarrassment” as early as 1994, insisting “I am afraid that if urgent steps are not taken to arrest the situation, women-trafficking would be more devastating in Nigeria than drug trafficking”—meaning, in terms of damage to the country’s reputation. News reports around that time began to announce the arrival of deportees along with their accused crimes, including prostitution and related charges. Some early reports included promises from immigration officials

to punish the deportees, again in order “to deter others from detracting from Nige- ria’s image abroad” (News Agency of Nigeria 1995).

Around the democratic transition in the spring of 1999, state oﬃcials actively collaborated in these campaigns. They declared to local news agencies, for example, “We will soon bring back home all Nigerians who have illegal status in

Italy as part of an eﬀort to redress the country’s image already tarnished by these citizens” (Agence France Presse 2000). Deportees were regularly detained by police for HIV testing and were often subject to further harassment by state oﬃcials. The following newspaper account describes a parade of deported women in Benin City in these terms—disparaging them for exhibiting a deliberate disregard for their own reputation and the nation’s alike:

One thing is sure, the business of prostitution (at whatever age) attracts little or no shame in the city of Benin.

On 30 April, a thick crowd of residents which gathered at the state police headquarters to witness the display of Italian returnees [who] were forced to swallow their shameful spits as the returnees turned the heat on them all.

They made everyone feel stupid for leaving their homes to witness the hurriedly announced “show of shame.”

The crowd started converging at 3 p.m. that Friday once news broke out that the deported prostitutes had arrived Benin and were to be paraded by the police.

At 5.20 p.m. when the 74 deportees ﬁled out of their police cells, they betrayed no remorse. They barked at the crowd, including journalists and policemen for wasting their time to “come and look.” There they inﬂicted a big defeat for the police’s original agenda.

Their being paraded in Benin where most of them lived before ﬁnd- ing their way outside the country was meant to be a psychological war. It backﬁred. (Taiwo 1999)

These deportation announcements, and derisive comments alongside them, became a regular occurrence in the Nigerian news.

The Italian ambassador to Nigeria participated in these discourses as well, or at least Nigerian journalists interpreted his comments within this context. He held large press conferences alongside the mass deportations of women from Italy to Nigeria, reproducing moral ambivalence around the alternately depraved and victimized women. For example, with the announcement that 350 migrant women sex workers had been deported in the ﬁrst 10 months of 1999, he oﬀered the following comments, paraphrased by a local news reporter:

These girls he said are the pretty ones who leave their country and their family in the quest for survival in another country but on getting there turn to slaves to their host citizens. “Nigerian girls are slaves to the foreigners,” he said.

The ambassadors explained that the girls who are between 18 and 25 years are identiﬁed and subsequently repatriated through their indecent mode of dressing, behaviour and their penchant for sex in open places.

An oﬃcial of the Italian Embassy in Nigeria said the girls look beautiful and of unquestionable character when you see them but what “resides” inside them is quite diﬀerent.

“Their idea about freedom, their idea about fulfilling the desire of their heart is quite different from ours. The mentality inside them is wrong and that is how and why even their mothers who should love them and love their destiny are busy planning how they could go back and continue their job,” the official said.

The oﬃcial therefore urged everyone to be concerned about these Nigerians, know why they do what they are doing and the means of stopping them in order save them and save the country’s image.

…Funso Alabi, actor and crusader whose six minutes dramatic presentation centred on help from within, brought the message even more poignantly: “Sew your dresses well and always close your legs.”

While the ambassador’s description of the women as “slaves of foreigners” evokes the language of traﬃcking, the rest of the account continues to denigrate “what resides inside them,” the depravity of their morals despite the beauty of their bodies. Ultimately, he frames the issue as pressing not only for the well-being of these women, but for the improvement of the country’s image abroad. Indeed, even foreign prostitutes working inside Nigeria were reportedly deported in the name of defending Nigeria’s reputation, as well.

In this context, the choices of these women who were just leaving were re- soundingly dismissed as shameful, greedy, and misguided—characterizations that persist around young female migrants today. As one reporter put in in June 1999:

In the face of such embarrassing statistics [evincing the number of Bini women working in prostitution abroad], Edo girls are unrelenting in their search for the ‘golden ﬂeece’ through prostitution. As some are getting deported home, others are moving out of their homes en route [to] Spain and Algeria.

Recently, travelers up north in Benin were…humiliated when 20 of the commuters were asked to disembark from the bus they had earlier boarded because “some people have chartered it.” Those people turned out to be young girls of between 16 and 18 who were being piloted to Kano from where they [could ﬁnd] their way abroad through the trans-Sahara route. The 60 young girls were soon herded into the luxury bus.

On another day, passengers who usually wait for three hours [for a bus to ﬁll and depart] were surprised to see the bus ﬁlled up in 30 minutes. A surprised broadcast-journalist who inquired about the magic was told about the presence of some 40 “ambassadors”— prostitutes.

In this telling, the “unrelenting” audacity of young women’s ambition is met by great shame they bring on themselves and others, reﬂected in the “embarrassing” statistics and work as “ambassadors” of the nation as a whole.

The news story also recalls a longer myth of emigration of desperation and shamelessness, one that harkens back to Nigeria’s original slave trade. This version was retold by US-based Nigerian author and academic Femi Ojo-Ade (2001:37),:

Nigeria is the only country where exile, even if it means enslave- ment, is now preferred to life at home. A common joke in Lagos is, that a slave-ship from America anchored oﬀ the shores of the ex- capital city, will be so overﬁlled with elated candidates, that it will sink right there, before setting sail for the New World.

Ojo-Ade situates this urgency to leave within the politics of emigration, infrastructure failure, and denial, pointing to the bigger politics of such cultures of exile. He continues:

And the government is not at all bothered. And the authorities claim that life at home is more abundant than ever before. And they accuse any critic of collaborating with those Western enemies seeking Nigeria’s downfall. And they tell everyone that hungry workers are excellently remunerated; that ill-equipped hospitals are providing ﬁrst-class services; that everything is functional superbly where there is nothing at all; that everyone is happy to be in Nige- ria, including professors, and other professionals, who are dying to leave for greener pastures.

Where Ojo-Ade insists that “the government is not at all bothered,” he describes a series of lies and performances evoking Mbembe’s (2001) description of African states as mere simulacra, discussed below. In many ways this vision of the state articulates the frustrations of people living there too, who see it in this same light.

But to say that the government does not notice these things and does not take them seriously misses some of what else was brewing at the time—not only in the public humiliation of deported women, but in wider movements against certain kinds of migration that would be soon be ushered in under the banner of campaigns against “human traﬃcking.”

Transnational Traﬃcking Movements

Human traﬃcking discourses emerged in Nigeria at the turn of the twenty-

ﬁrst century, immediately following the deportation crisis and just as they gained prominence around the rest of the world. In some ways, moral panics around human traﬃcking re-appropriated the tropes of vulnerable migrant women and menacing foreign men implied by “white slavery” a hundred years previous (Lui

2009; Doezema 2002; Soderlund 2002; Doezema 1999). In addition to the push for border enforcement that escalated throughout the 1990s, traﬃcking’s modern re- surgence gained new currency with increasing attention to sex work and prostitution in academic and activist circles. The 1980s sex wars saw wide feminist debate over whether or not commercial sex and a range of other sexual practices like por- nography and sadomasichism were inherently objectifying. While starkly divided in their ideas of exploitation and consent, both sides of this debate would go on to use the language of traﬃcking to articulate and garner support for their cause.

On the one hand, “neo-abolitionists” declared all forms of what they called

“prostitution” to be exploitative and therefore sought to abolish its practice world wide. Drawing from prominent feminist scholars like Kathleen Barry (1995, 1979) and Sheila Jeﬀreys (1991, 2009, 2008), these groups argued that commercial sex always harmed women, whether it was consensual or not. They formed the Coalition

Against Traﬃcking in Women (CATW) in 1988 to promote anti-prostitution legislation and social movements across the world, including eﬀorts to criminalize demand, pimping, and solicitation. On the other hand, sex-positive feminists generally saw what they refer to as “sex work” to be a legitimate form of labor. They

aimed instead to combat the problems associated with it (stigma, violence, abuse) by framing sex workers’ rights as a labor rights issue. Organized through the

Global Alliance Against Traﬃcking in Women (GAATW), they fought for the de- criminalization of activities associated with sex work, and argued that the global work of neo-abolitionist feminists ultimately did more harm to than good, per- petuating images of third world women especially as agentless victims in need of rescue (Doezema 2001; cf. Mohanty 1988; Spivak 1988).

These positions solidiﬁed in a number of international conferences, including the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna and the 1995 Fourth

World Conference on Women in Beijing (Kempadoo 2005a). They gained even greater momentum as they overlapped with broader concerns about security of migrants and states in an era of increasing mobility across national borders. While human trafficking discourses originated in women’s and human rights movements, in the end, the impetus of state securitization and border enforcement catalyzed the political interests necessary to organize an enforceable transnational movement against human trafficking—reflected in the United Nations Protocol’s ulti- mate origins in the Office and Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

This process began in Vienna in 1998 and 1999. The UN organized a series of meetings to develop an international agreement on transnational organized crime, including separate protocols on human smuggling, human traﬃcking, and the trade in small arms. Legal scholar Anne Gallagher (2010) describes the ambiva- lent feelings she shared as representative for the UN High Commissioner on Hu- man Rights at the UNODC meetings in Vienna:

We [the human rights community] had good reason to be worried. Migrant smuggling had recently been identiﬁed as a security threat by the preferred destination countries in Europe, North America, and Australia, and had moved from the margins to the mainstream of international policy concern. Human traﬃcking, an obscure but jealously guarded mandate of the UN’s human rights system, had been similarly elevated and, in the process, unceremoniously snatched away from its traditional home. (1)

International traﬃcking is a system of exploitation that relies directly upon the strict enforcement of borders and associated legal vulnerability of undocumented migrants; if people were allowed to pass freely across open borders, they could organize their own travel and seek legal help as needed without fear of deportation.

Gallagher describes how the human rights approach therefore recognized this complicity of states and border enforcement, but representatives of national governments continually denied any such responsibility. Instead, they reframed the problem from one of systematic vulnerability to individual criminals and crimes:

“You have to understand,” [one state representative] said, “this is not like torture. It’s not even about human rights. We governments are not the villains here. Traﬃckers are just criminals. We can’t be responsible for what they are doing. In fact, if it wasn’t that we needed the cooperation of other countries to catch them, I wouldn’t be here.” (ibid)

As a lawyer and UN oﬃcial herself, Gallagher was as invested in (or at least re- signed to) the international order of sovereignty claims that take for granted the enforcement of borders, citizenship claims, and tiered restrictions on mobility that go along with them. While she admits suspicion toward the primary motives of state security interests in the counter-traﬃcking movement, she stops short of un- dermining that project as a whole. “When it became clear that the UN Crime

Commission was going to develop a treaty on traﬃcking, we were, in the best tradition of our profession, righteously outraged,” she recalls, before ultimately con-

ceding that the human rights system never would have galvanized the global attention, enforcement mechanisms, or resources that ultimately were produced from the UN Protocol. Gallagher cites these as successes, but as we will see, other scholars of the counter traﬃcking movement remain more skeptical of their impact.

The Vienna meetings Gallagher describes ultimately led to the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Traﬃcking in Persons, Especially Women and

Children. Passed in December 2000 in Palermo, Italy, it is often referred to as the

Palermo Protocol. The jumble of interests invested in campaigns against human trafficking were well-represented at the meetings and across the Protocol, down to a mixed definition of human trafficking itself:

‘Traﬃcking in persons’ shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or beneﬁts to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.

Kay Warren (2007) shows how the text of the Protocol demonstrates the disjointed interests and collaborations that came together to produce it, including both abolitionist and labor rights approaches to defining and combatting the problem. In particular, she cites the use of “especially women and children” as a chorus repeated throughout to emphasize the special place sexual abuse and prostitution occupy in the Protocol, despite a definition that ostensibly includes all forms of labor exploitation. She also points out the tensions between the law enforcement and human rights paradigms embedded in the text of the Protocol, noting that its primary effect—in efforts to identify both victims and perpetrators—is ultimately

to enhance state power, at a time when the nation-state and nation-state borders were increasingly threatened by globalization.

Critical scholarship on human trafficking campaigns has established how these contradictions within the text of the Protocol have translated to ineffective and even counter-productive interventions around women migrants in particular, the world over. Strictly abolitionist interventions alienate women they are trying to help (Agustín 2007). Even campaigns committed to fighting specifically forced sex work cast voluntary sex workers as “fallen woman” undeserving of rights or legal protections (Doezema 1998, 2010). Women in working in sex industries, as a result, are left “running from rescuers” (Soderlund 2005). Under the banner of human trafficking, these anti-prostitution campaigns specifically target migrant women and can provide a humanitarian cover for increased border enforcement and return policies (Chapkis 2003). Indeed, even where anti-trafficking laws provide apparently generous residency rights to victims, these exceptions can serve as merely a “soft glove” to the “punishing fist” of otherwise severe immigration policy (Chap- kis 2005).

These critiques, while increasingly common in critical activist and academic writing, are largely been reserved for migrant-receiving states like Italy, the UK, or the United States, each with a long history of xenophobic and racist immigration policy. With the exception of carceral states like the Soviet Union or Eritrea that prohibit emigration en masse, migrant-sending states like Nigeria, are presumed to have little interest in governing those leaving the country. Yet, as the above media accounts of women’s deportation demonstrate, the politics of reputation and mo-

bility had different foundations in Nigeria. Just as human trafficking re-emerged on the global legal agenda, migrant women in Nigeria were routinely ostracized and punished for their misdeeds abroad. If the draconian closing of borders was incompatible with the professed intentions of the new democratic regime, the apparently universally lauded cause of human trafficking provided an alternative model of intervention.

Women and Government in Nigeria

Nigeria’s founding counter-traﬃcking legislation was passed in 2003, and it is generally credited to the initiative of a single women, Titi Abubakar, who was then wife to the newly democratically elected vice-president, Atiku Abubakar. In taking up Nigeria’s counter-traﬃcking banner, Titi Abubakar joined a long line of politician’s wives with pet projects before her, a pattern that has become known in

Nigeria as “First Ladies Syndrome.” However, while those organizations mostly depended on the charisma and influence of their patron figures, Abubakar successfully moved her cause from a personal agenda to federal law, including a new paramilitary agency that spans seven zonal offices across the country. These projects were often dismissed as fronts for channeling foreign funding into politician- affiliated coffers. However, even where their programing was superficial, they were effective fronts precisely because they were able to at least mimic prevailing ideas about what kind of services state and non-state organizations should provide—as- tute political choices in both form and content. In this sense, human trafficking

proved especially fruitful, capitalizing on national and transnational interests in migrant women sex workers.

Original first ladies projects displayed a persistent ambivalence around women’s bodies that was eventually displaced onto the bodies of migrant women in the human trafficking cause. Here, I contend that this displacement happened at the precise historical moment that the Nigerian state (and, arguably, Nigerians at large) became concerned with Nigeria’s national image abroad, amid the embarrassing deportation of migrant sex workers from Europe. I argue this history is important to understanding how women have been conceived in state and NGO counter-trafficking programs in Nigeria, captured in the janus-faced figure of the migrant woman sex worker and human trafficking victim. In this section, I trace the line of first wive’s projects leading up to Abubakar’s counter-trafficking campaign, to follow how those popular logics of governance shifted over time. I also introduce broader literatures on states and governance in Africa to show how such targeted interventions are experienced and understood in the context of an often corrupt and capricious state authority. Ultimately I argue that Nigeria’s counter trafficking campaign is forging a new relationship between states and citizens.

The political utility and practical impact of Abubakar’s interventions must therefore be understood within the long history of stilted statecraft and governance eﬀorts in postcolonial Nigeria. The country was granted independence from

British rule on October 1, 1960 and would spend most of the next four decades under aggressive military dictatorships with occasional brief democratic interludes.

Successive authoritarian regimes each revealed diﬀerent styles of state sovereignty

and power, especially in their engagement with citizens and the international community. The lineage of ﬁrst ladies projects were a part of this story around Ni- gerian politics and foreign policy, eventually leading to the counter-traﬃcking legislation decades later.

First and foremost, long before newspapers and counter-trafficking discourses would blame Nigeria’s problems on specifically “bad” migrants, these leaders of these early regimes regularly displaced blame for Nigeria’s corruption onto the citizens themselves. Major-General Muhamadu Buhari, for example, premised his military coup in 1983 on the need for reform not only in government but among the population itself. He initiated an intense, dictatorial “War Against In- discipline” to impose order on daily life in Nigeria. The campaign was wide- ranging, posting armed police to enforce bus queues in Lagos and imposing prison sentences to students who cheated on exams (Falola and Heaton 2008). Women were targeted specifically by a number of these initiatives, including prohibitions on teenage pregnancy, adolescent delinquency, and other sexual behaviors. Some states attempted to outlaw single women altogether, ordering “free women”

(sometimes used as a euphemism for sex workers) to marry or risk losing their jobs or homes (Mama 1997; Dennis 1987).

Typical of the Buhari regime, these disciplinary policies were enforced with explicit violence and threats of it, with little care to mask it as anything else. These displays are consistent with the spectacle of brutality and domination that has characterized anthropological literature on African governance. Political theorist

Achille Mbembe (2001, 1992) uses ethnographic cases of state violence, popular

discourse, and media images to develop a particular reading of power in the Afri- can postcolony like Buhari’s. He argues that power takes a “dramaturgical” form as the state authority or “commandemant” institutionalizes itself in public performances of violence that simultaneously become banal by way of their regularity in everyday life, copying the colonial rationality. Ultimately, he describes the postcolony as “par excellence, a hollow pretense, a regime of unreality (regime du simulacre)” where the state and its agents are invested with a “fetishistic power” of performance and excess that is semiotic in mode but material in its eﬀect (1992:9, 11).

But while Buhari performed such acts of sovereign violence and “disciplining” with relative candor, subsequent regimes developed that hollow pretense of good governance even further.

In August 1985, Major General Ibrahim Babangida (known to most Nigeri- ans by his initials IBB) staged a palace coup and installed a regime that at least half-heartedly engaged international expectations. Nigerian historian Toyin Falola writes that “if Buhari was straightforward and sincere, Babangida was an evil gen- ius— aﬀable and cunning, he was a master of double-speak, deceit, and ambiguity”

(Falola and Heaton 2008, 183). In particular, when structural adjustment programs

(SAP) necessitated stronger foreign relations, IBB made an eﬀort to re-engage the international community, but on his own terms. IBB deftly navigated these international pressures, defending national austerity measures as “SAP with a Nigerian face” (Smith 2007, 100). Meanwhile, he developed various directorates, institutions, and quasi-governmental organizations to siphon signiﬁcant portions of any remaining budgets from the relevant government ministries. As global development

rationales increasingly emphasized civil society and NGO work over direct state interventions, Nigerian elites continued to creatively navigate these revenue streams, creating what became known as “GONGOs”, or government-organized

NGOs, among other variations, a process Bayart (2000, 2009) calls extraversion.

Together, IBB and the political elite continued to stage a simulacre of government as Mbembe describes it, extending their performance for an international audience.

These strategies laid the foundation for the First Ladies projects that would ultimately prompt Nigeria’s counter-traﬃcking legislation. One early example of these quasi-governmental organizations was IBB’s wife Maryam Babangida’s initiative “Better Life for Rural Women” (BLP), founded in 1987. In response to emerging neoliberal demand for nongovernmental services, the BLP set the standard of,

first, politicians’ wives taking on personal political projects, and, second, the specific targeting of women’s issues within those projects. In practice, the BLP did little to combat the hardships felt by women and the rural poor that were brought by the radical reduction of state services under IBB (Elabor-Idemudia 1994). Instead, it was derided as a corrupt front for channeling government money, and was particularly known as an occasion for elite women to parade around in fine cloth, earning the nicknames “Better Life for Rich Women” and “Bitter Life for Rural

Women” (Mama 1998). Regardless, the BLP still demonstrated an important shift in the logics of statecraft that underlined IBB’s regime. In contrast to Buhari’s ruth- less disciplinary campaigns, it at least made the nod toward serving Nigeria’s neediest women, staging spectacular displays of benevolence in the process.

Following the nulled elections of 1993, IBB was succeeded by General Sani

Abacha. Abacha grew infamous for ﬂagrant human rights abuses like the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Meanwhile, his wife Maryam Abacha founded her own women’s projects, as was now convention. Mrs. Abacha nominally focused on

“family” programming instead of women alone, including the “Family Support

Program” (FSP) in 1994 and the “Family Economic Advancement Program” (FEAP) in 1997. This shift was both culturally and economically conservative, speciﬁcally in an eﬀort to align with the neoliberal agenda of foreign and local interests.

Abacha herself declared them part of a “social crusade” for discipline and morality.

Practically speaking, her programs promoted income-generating activities and credit schemes like others before her. These objectives catered simultaneously to international ﬁnancial markets eager to incorporate marginal communities while also relieving the government of responsibilities to provide a social safety net to the poor—a “politically expedient [strategy] in a decimated nation becoming alienated from the international community” (Mama 1998: 11). By the time Abacha died in 1998, Nigeria’s international reputation was in ruins, prompting bigger changes under the newly elected democratic regime that followed.

When he took oﬃce in 1999, former military head-of-state Olusegun

Obasanjo was the ﬁrst civilian president after nearly two decades of successive military rule. He made diplomacy and foreign relations a central point of his presi- dency, expressly aiming to repair Nigeria’s national reputation in the wake of

Abacha. He earned praise for supporting peacekeeping missions in Liberia and Si- erra Leone and spent much of his two terms traveling abroad. These eﬀorts were

mirrored in the project choices both the ﬁrst and second lady as well, turning efforts from projects based on domestic poverty and cultural values to international women’s issues. President Obasanjo’s wife Stella became the international spokes- person for the erstwhile national organization Campaign Against Female Genital

Mutilation, touring neighboring African countries to raise awareness for the cause.

Titi Abubakar, the wife of vice-president Atiku Abubakar, founded WOTCLEF, the

Women Traﬃcking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation. Now an established feature of any administration, these choices were hotly anticipated in local press.

In a nod to democratic transparency and the consolidation of the NGO era, each organization was now formally separated from the federal government, though still thrived on “donations” that were understood as political favors and likely sourced from pilfered state budgets.

Like other ﬁrst ladies before them, both women capitalized on existent domestic and transnational interests, and chose appropriately gendered intervention projects. Generic campaigns for poor women and children could not galvanize interest as they had in decades previous and also belied the persistent unreliability of

Nigeria’s welfare state more broadly. These very targeted interventions around women’s bodies, on the other hand, resonated with progressive transnational feminisms and local moral panics alike. Rather than a universal right to a share of state services for women, families, or the poor, they honor what Jean Comaroff has characterized as “claims to entitlement based on suffering and injury…a politics of shroud waving and abjection, a politics of survival (bare life) at the lowest common denominator of social being” (Comaroff 2007, 211). Indeed, as we will see,

Abubakar’s project articulated so well with other stakeholders that she actually succeeded in passing federal legislation that created an independent federal agency solely dedicated to the ﬁght against human traﬃcking in Nigeria.

From WOTCLEF to NAPTIP

In May 2000, Abubakar announced the creation of WOTCLEF with the stated the intention of counseling, rehabilitating, and reintegrating deported Nige- rian women. She counted 403 total women deported from Italy to Nigeria for pros- tituting that year between January and July, with another 3,000 supposedly waiting in prisons to return (Panafrican News Agency 2000). Abubakar capitalized on a speciﬁc narrative of emigration, shame, and governmental responsibility around the democratic transition. The following news report was published under the headline “Up Against Sexport”:

Lagos — Nigerian professionals especially those in the health sciences, the academia and other ﬁelds who departed the country in the wake of military misrule, left mostly because they felt under- valued. They also wanted more adventure and career fulﬁlment which the country could not provide at that time.

But more importantly, they had brains and whenever they arrived a country, they just walked into the waiting hands of their expectant and obliging hosts. This, obviously was the greatest of Nigeria’s export.

But, the new Nigerian professionals who are already practising in various parts of the world are completely diﬀerent from their fore- runners. All they have are mere sexual skills and sometimes, good bodies. They export themselves by unusual methods too. They normally process travel documents to the country of their choice (usually in Latin America) through an agent. Once settled, they begin to repatriate illicit sex proceeds for one pressing family project or the other.

The commercial sex exports attained an unprecedented notoriety during the military regimes of Generals Ibrahim Babangida and

Sani Abacha partly because they did not really take the country’s image seriously. But since the return of democracy, a few states like Edo, which leads the pack of foreign-based prostitutes, is working very hard to see how young ladies will be discouraged from going abroad to work in brothels.

While WOTCLEF is not speciﬁcally mentioned in this text, it well articulates the popular dismissal of women’s migration ambitions at the time. Indeed, the rather peculiar mention in this piece of Latin America as the destination of choice—despite the ample evidence to the contrary—arbitrarily undermines the legitimacy of the women’s intentions even further.

Discourses of emigration as embarrassing are not new. For example, David

Fitzgerald (2008) observes that even in the early 1900s, the Mexican government and Mexican elites framed massive emigration as embarrassing to the nation. This

“humiliation” appears due to the sense that emigration was as an index of the poverty and desperation of the Mexican poor, and not necessarily because the emigrants themselves were personally immoral or corrupt (40). However, for Nigeria, it is not only the fact that these women are eager to leave the country that makes them a source of embarrassment, as the politics of “voting with their feet” implies.

That eagerness is compounded by the particularly shameful jobs they move to pursue, without legitimate professions as “mere sexual skills”. Jobs in the sex industry and not pitied but rather heighten the cause for embarrassment—partly as an expression of their desperation, perhaps, but more as immoral and greedy than poor or pathetic.

Six months after WOTCLEF was founded, the UNODC passed the Palermo

Protocol. Abubakar used the organization to push for the ratiﬁcation of the Proto-

col and the eventual development of Nigeria’s own counter-traﬃcking legislation.

According to WOTCLEF press releases, she was the ﬁrst civilian in Nigerian history to put forward a draft of legislation, and the bill was passed under her support. The ﬁrst line of the Attorney General’s forward to the “National Policy on

Protection and Assistance to Trafficked Persons in Nigeria” declares: “[NAPTIP] was established in July 2003, by the Federal Government of Nigeria, as a response to the social menace and negative image engendered by the phenomenon of human trafficking” (emphasis my own). The NAPTIP legislation itself is lengthy and convoluted, reflecting at times that persistent ambivalence toward the women it is meant to protect. As Victoria Nwogu writes:

This definition [of human trafficking in the NAPTIP legislation] draws greatly on Article 5(2a) of the UN Trafficking Protocol in making attempts to traffic a person a criminal offence. This has enabled law enforcement agents to institute criminal proceedings when they suspect that an offence related to human trafficking is about to be committed, even where the act is yet incomplete. How- ever, such proceedings can also impede other lawful activities (such as migration), owing to a suspicion of an attempt at human trafficking. In applying this clause, law enforcement agents are confronted with the problem of proving that there will be actual exploitation of the intercepted ‘victims’ upon arrival at their destination. (Nwogu 2007, 142)

One part of the legislation actually criminalizes those who have been convicted of traﬃcking abroad for the separate crime of bringing the image of Nigeria under disrepute, borrowing language from a 1990 military decree passed under IBB (Van- derhurst 2009).

Nevertheless, in the ten years since its original approval, NAPTIP has claimed great achievements. The education campaigns are widely considered a success, and human traﬃcking has oﬃcially entered the national lexicon. With

help from international donors and local collaborators, NAPTIP spearheaded a massive national education and enlightenment campaign, targeting Benin City and

Edo State especially. Youth Service teams went to secondary schools, universities, and public markets to do skits to raise awareness. Radio jingles, billboards, and airport banners broadcast the dangers of human traﬃcking and suggested the real work waiting for women abroad.

By 2007, when I first went to Nigeria, no matter where I went in the country, everyone seemed to have had heard of human trafficking, knew specifically about the Benin-Italy link, and, for better or worse, assumed most young Nigerian women traveling to Europe would eventually enter the sex industry. Nowadays, this warning—along with the stereotypes and stigma associated with it—has so permeated public consciousness that people believe anyone traveling from Benin must know, on some level, what she is going to be up against. She may trust her travel agent (often a family friend) and believe that their story could be the exception. But there is a sense that she’s been warned, and that most women will agree to any story the agent offers, while knowing with a wink and nod that there is still no real money in hairdressing, even in Europe.

It was these women, mostly in their early twenties, from the same region of southern Nigeria, all eager to migrate and some even eager to enter the sex industry, who were proﬁled and intercepted at Nigerian and foreign border points in the campaign against human traﬃcking, before being returned to the shelter where this research was based.

Dissertation Outline

The remainder of Part One further parses out these logics of intervention around women’s bodies, as they are expressed in the NAPTIP intervention program. The first chapter introduces life in shelter for human trafficking victims that comprises the primary setting for this manuscript. It presents the frustrations and protests that I witnessed in this space, most often articulated in the Nigerian pidgin phrase I wan go (I want to go). In the face of these demands, I consider how sustained detention at the shelter was variously justified for purposes of victim protection, bureaucratic investigations, criminal prosecutions, and ultimately for the rehabilitative purpose of intervention itself. The second chapter expands on what rehabilitation means for women who were rescued preemptively and were not believed to have suffered trauma. I show how rehabilitation was therefore not invoked as a psychological paradigm but as an institutionalized form of “personal development” that would render women less likely to emigrate or be trafficked after their release. In particular, I use Foucault’s theories of penitentiary reform to examine how shelter models preemptive rescue and preventative rehabilitation were intertwined to justify the remaking of women’s interior selves—their thoughts, desires, and dispositions that allegedly made them “vulnerable” to being trafficked in the first place.

Part Two explores the content of these arguments at the shelter, explicitly and implicitly prompted by the rehabilitation agenda. Chapter Three delves into the regular debates held at the shelter about whether or not the residents would try to migrate again. I recount the ways staﬀ and residents sparred over the appeals

of traveling abroad, the kind of work they hoped to find there, and the risks they were willing to take on to do so. I situate these exchanges within the broader context of migration politics in Nigeria, where everyone is assumed to want to travel, yet certain groups are still chastised for that choice—most prominently by the government itself. Chapter Four describes how sex, money, and mobility were intertwined for women at the shelter and for all women in Nigeria, and how these ideas intersected with the rehabilitation agenda and counter-trafficking campaigns more broadly. It first explores the ambiguous categories of transactional sex women navigate and situates these experiences vis a vis their expectations for work abroad. I show how shelter programing shamed residents’ ambition as greed and impatience, echoing broader discourses about the menacing sexual appetites of young unmarried women in Nigeria. Finally, Chapter Five discusses how heated theological arguments over different possible fates—what would have happened had they not been intercepted, which path God had actually destined for them, and what they should do now—made each woman at the shelter contemplate, articulate, and defend her life choices. I situate these debates within residents’ own ordinary hermeneutical practices in daily life to show how they proved a compelling means of intervention and ultimately suggested an emergent ad hoc governance practice of African states.

The third and ﬁnal part of this dissertation looks toward the future as women return home after rehabilitation. The sixth chapter traces women through their ﬁnal negotiations to leave the shelter, describing the arbitrariness of both release and ‘empowerment’ decisions. I then follow the women back to Benin City,

where they slip back into old lives with barely a word to their friends or family about experiences either on the road or in the shelter. I thus turn to the real world ramifications of these policies, beyond academic models of statecraft and migration to the well-being of women in Nigeria and beyond, whose precarious position in the global economy is ensured by demobilization programs ostensibly aimed to help them. It closes with an argument among shelter staff over the purposes of rehabilitation, juxtaposing counselor’s own alternate visions for the agency with the few changes I did witness during my research. The dissertation culminates in a discussion of the persistent themes of discipline and desire observed within the shelter. The conclusion then turns to the larger implications these women’s experiences have for our ideas about the national economy, global governance, and alternate visions of justice and intervention for women in Africa. It closes with the argument that these modes of intervention are not merely indicative of bad counter-trafficking programs, but that they typify some of the contradictions internal to the trafficking paradigm itself, as well as the complicated political- economic and moral landscapes that have shaped it. These contradictions, I argue, force us to consider not only how we can better combat the abuse and exploitation of migrant women, but how we must reevaluate the wider structures of power, governance, and inequality that make such abuses possible.

CHAPTER ONE

Everyone Wan Go

The shelter itself was massive, a wide five story block of a building. It was tucked in the corner of a large federal office complex on a busy commercial street in one of the nicer districts of Lagos. Adjacent buildings contained other government offices, remnants from the city’s days as the capital of Nigeria, including anti- corruption offices and paramilitary stations. These agencies employed a half dozen guards to stand watch over the narrow driveway that accessed the compound, re- plete with bullet proof vests and AK-47 guns strapped casually behind their shoulders. But amidst the ubiquitous military checkpoints and elaborate police escorts for even minor politicians seen across the city and countryside alike, this kind of sight was not out of place in Nigeria, and the men always waved me through without trouble.

New visitors to the NAPTIP shelter were always given a formal tour of the site, especially when coming from abroad. The tour was usually lead by men in pinstriped suits and women in formal gele headties, administrators who shuttled over from the oﬃces across town, trailed by the counselors and other building staﬀ wearing blue jeans and agency printed polo shirts. By way of introduction, then, this chapter will be framed in a similar style, with an orientation to the building that follows a typical routine of my time there. I use this tour to introduce the or-

dinary operations of the shelter and to illustrate my own research methods within that space. Next, I introduce the occupants of the shelter through the frustrations and protests that I witnessed there, most often articulated in the ubiquitous Nige- rian pidgin phrase I wan go (I want to go). I explore the various replies and explanations shelter staff offered in the face of these demands, including how they talked about them to each other, to visitors, and to me. Specifically, I consider how sustained detention at the shelter was variously justified as necessary for purposes of victim protection, bureaucratic investigations, criminal prosecutions, and ultimately for the rehabilitative purpose of intervention itself. I relate these justifica- tions to different models of governance and intervention, drawing connections to the wider practices of statecraft and citizenship they evoke as fundamentally draconian policies beneath a thin facade of democratic rule.

Barred and Broken Windows

Inside the compound, near the entrance to the building itself, a plaque hung on the exterior wall, thanking USAID and the Italian government for their help in renovating the space in 2003, after the passing of NAPTIP’s founding legislation. According to a report commissioned by USAID, the Nigerian government leased the building at no cost to NAPTIP for ten years. USAID and the Italian government provided funds to renovate the space, while the IOM (International Or- ganization for Migration) funded initial operation costs. NAPTIP then ran the space independently since January 2005 (Chemonics International 2005). Rather, the plaque commemorating this history hung near the former entrance, because a

tree had fallen through a part of the foyer roof during a storm a few years previous, and the money never materialized to repair it.

Instead, everyone used the entrance on the opposite end, hidden behind two mango trees and a dilapidated IOM-donated passenger van in need of repair.

Two men sat guard outside the doors, unarmed and in plainclothes at a heavy wooden laminate desk, weathered from rainy seasons spent partially exposed under the veranda. The men alternated shifts but were there 24 hours a day. They kept a small bureau with a change of clothes and rubber slippers (flip flops) for bathing. A stack of large worn ledgers sat on the desk, each tracking the movements of different sets of people who came in and out of the shelter: one for victims, one for NAPTIP staff, one for visitors. Every morning they would greet me

“well done” as I signed in, a common salutation. My name quickly came to dominate the pages of the guest log with a speckling of information from other visitors

— nuns from charity organizations, political oﬃcers from nearby consulates, local and international journalists, and the occasional fellow academic researcher. Resi- dents of the shelter were only taken oﬀ the compound to go to the investigation headquarters, the hospital, or the courts. Otherwise, they were not allowed outside.

Just inside from the guards’ desk, I would climb the uneven cement stairs several floors. There were locked doors limiting access to each of the floors used by residents, but above those the staff office floor was open during the daytime, needing only to slide the night’s padlock off the hook and unhinge the metal security gate to let myself in.

There were actually two more floors that went entirely unused above the offices as well. NAPTIP was organized into seven zones across the country, and the top floor of the shelter building was once headquarters for the rest of the Lagos zonal staff, including separate departments for investigation and monitoring, legal prosecution, public enlightenment, and research and program development. Sev- eral years previous, they had moved into the purpose-built zonal headquarters building across town in the quiet tree lined streets of the Government Reserve

Area (GRA). The empty offices remaining had since suffered storm damage as well, and were then used only for storage, if at all. The other floor was vacated by the

IOM just a few months before my arrival, when they moved to a chic remodeled office building office down the street, complete with floor to ceiling glass walls and regular generator power.

The hallway off the stairs, by contrast, was long and dim, lit only by a single shattered window on either end. I had heard that some of the many broken windows in the building were smashed by residents in angry fits of vandalism; I was certain others were casualties of the same storms that had put corners of the rest of the building in shambles. Offices lined each side of the lengthy corridor though maybe only a third of those were even occupied. The dozen or so staff counselors kept desks there to process paperwork and host private counseling sessions.

Shared two to a piece, each oﬃce contained identical heavy modular wood laminate desks with walls decorated by sun-bleached posters from the NAPTIP Public

Enlightenment oﬃce, IOM, and local women’s shelters. Every morning I would duck my head in to greet each counselor as I pass by, practicing “hello” and “good

morning” in each person’s local languages as they taught me — ina gajiya, ekaaro, kedu. Most were usually ﬁnishing up a second breakfast of hearty rice and stew from a local street vendor, having already spent hours commuting by bus through notoriously heavy traﬃc from all corners of the sprawling metropolis. They would each insist I join them, as is compulsory in local etiquette, and I would do my best to graciously decline.

Figure 1 NAPTIP Organogram (Adapted from naptip.gov.ng)

At the end of the hallway, another set of labyrinthian stairs lead back down to the floors where the victims resided. I would pass the office of the nurse, a recent graduate who offered medical exams and HIV tests to newly arrived residents.

Next were the residential quarters of “Mommy Matron,” a jovial and portly woman who managed the day to day logistics of the space, supervising the two cooks as well as the supplies, cleaning and maintenance. There was always one counselor on 24-hour duty as well, who maintained a sparse but neat room adjacent to the matron’s for overnight shifts.

Finally, I would reach the residents’ dormitories. As NAPTIP’s flagship shelter, the building officially accommodated up to 150 people, but had not hosted that many in years. After the initial counter-trafficking legislation was passed, the shelter regularly brimmed with over a hundred occupants. NAPTIP staff attributed this drop to the success of public enlightenment that sponsored radio announcements, billboard warnings, and public school informational programs. More likely explanations would also include waning political support and donor funding typical of international development trends. In the year I spent at the shelter, I never saw those numbers rise much above thirty. Occupancy fluctuated dramatically from week to week, even dropping off completely for some time in January. Still, there were usually two or three bedrooms in use on any given day, with up to a half dozen victims sharing each room. The set up included several sets of wooden bunk beds, some with top slats knocked out to serve only single occupants. Each resident was supposed to also use a insecticide-treated bed net inside the bunk to ward off mosquitoes that inevitably snuck in through more broken windows in each room. But some residents refused the nets, others were never given them, and still more gave up trying to get torn ones to stay sealed across their bed. They were also provided a flat sheet to cover the mattress, and many used donated ankara

wrappers as a top sheet for sleeping, as is common around Nigeria on those rare nights that it is cool enough to warrant cover.

Few other items were visible in their rooms. Residents kept their things in makeshift drawers and nylon “Ghana-must-go” bags tucked under the lower bunks

(so named as the cheap luggage of choice when Nigeria deported over a million

Ghanaians in 1983). Each one also kept one or two buckets of water in her room, and tiffs arose frequently about who was interfering with whose water reserves or other possessions. Like most of the rest of the country, shelter management had given up on putting water through the pipes, sick of trying to fix and power the pump that could bring water from the well to the roof top tank and back down to the pipes. Instead they collected water directly from the bore hole outside twice a day before bathing. Since the residents were not allowed to come and go from the building as they please, water collection had to be supervised. Extra trips were not permitted, unless they were made at the behest of NAPTIP staff, who had to source their own bathroom water from there as well and often solicited residents to gather it for them.

Below the bedrooms and common room was the ground floor, accessible only from the staircase above, with locked outer doors and more barred, broken windows. It contained an expansive open dining foyer, where the shelter staff host weekly worship sessions and other special events. There were several hexagonal tables in the space, but residents toted flimsy molded plastic chairs up and down the stairs several times a day for meals and other meetings. Adjacent to the foyer, a broad kitchen space went mostly unused except for one stove in the corner, with

industrial sized stew pots from higher capacity days sitting grimy along the walls.

Although the residents all participated in regular cleaning sessions, sweeping the cement floor hunched over with short straw brooms after each meal and mopping the space twice a week, it too remained perpetually dusty, as dirt floated in from the open windows and small piles of termite remains accumulate on different surfaces, dropped from the aging particle board ceiling panels above.

Idle Gisting

On a typical research day, after greeting everyone, I would settle in somewhere, usually in the common room with residents or occasionally in the adjacent office of two counselors I call Benjamin and Prudence. Among the most senior staff members, they were also the most engaged with residents, in part due to their own dedication and initiative, and in part due to office geography—theirs being the only counselors’ office on the same floor as the bedrooms and across from the common room. Their office always felt cramped too, overcrowded with two oversized wooden desks butting up against each other and perpetually covered with stray papers, folders, and handwritten ledgers, as well as a long-broken old Dell desktop computer and defunct HP printer. Ben told me they had solicited repairs and replacements from the NAPTIP headquarters but did not really worry about it too much, since the desktop was useless without regular power anyway.

On the wall of their oﬃce was a weekly calendar of shelter programming. It was relic of the days when the shelter was more occupied, funding more generous, and programming more rigorous. The chart dictated a full schedule, jam packed

days with activities from 9 to 6. It listed recreational and vocational training in photography, beading, catering, hairdressing, tailoring, and even computer skills.

There were English language classes, separate from the non-formal education offered to everyone. And even the latter, counselors recalled, had been split into further groups, depending on ability. By the time I got there, the schedule was less strict. Only a few of the prearranged activities remained on the schedule in practice, and even those were half-heartedly enforced. An outside teacher still came in to provide non-formal education twice a week based oﬀ a UNICEF curriculum, but attendance was sparse, especially among the older residents, who bore quickly of the literacy and arithmetic lessons that were usually beneath their skill level. Of the many vocational training classes original oﬀered, only hairdressing and tailoring remained, and the residents’ enthusiasm for those seemed to only come in spurts, partly because so many of the women passing through the shelter had already completed training in these areas—deciding to travel only after failing to

ﬁnd satisfactory work in those ﬁelds.

More often, the residents preferred to just lay around, relaxing, waiting, and chatting, or what in Nigerian pidgin is called gisting. They would spend hours lounging about on mattresses pulled onto the ﬂoor where it was cooler, moving from the bedrooms to the common room and back throughout the day. There was a television in the common room, two for a while, and a couple DVD players as well. They all sat on a laminate wooden entertainment center between two barred windows, each stenciled with long bureaucratic codes that track all of NAPTIP’s property: NAP/LAG/SHL/3/74/5038, and the like. The entire year I was there, only

one of the TVs worked, but neither of the DVD players did. The furniture had seen better days, too. The brown and red floral upholstery that once covered the chairs was beyond threadbare, missing entirely in huge sections to expose the wooden beams and bent up springs beneath. The cushions were lopsided from too many restuffing efforts. Still, residents quickly devised ways of arranging them just so for the purpose at hand—piling several to recline in a moment of solitude, balancing

ﬁrmer pillows on laps as work surfaces during the education classes, and lining up others for padding on the ﬂoor.

While no one was satisﬁed with these conditions, it is worth noting that, for the most part, they were not terribly diﬀerent from the home environment of most residents. Sharing rooms, carrying water, managing for days without electricity—all of these things are standard practice for the poor and working class people in Nigeria who constitute a majority of the country’s population. What was most frustrating for residents, then, was not the dilapidated shelter space, but both the injustice and boredom of being trapped idle within it. On a good day, when there was electricity and the reception proved strong enough, the rabbit ear antennae could pick up a few broadcast television channels. Everyone would congregate to watch the news, badly dubbed Brazilian soap operas, music videos, and local “Nol- lywood” movies. But NEPA (the National Electric Power Authority, also known as

Never Expect Power Always) would only “bring light” for a few hours a day, sometimes less. Without electricity, more often women would just sit and gist, maybe braiding or unbraiding a friend’s hair, or playing jacks-like games with pebbles snatched on early morning trips to fetch water outside.

That was the tone of life at the shelter—milling about trying to stay entertained, or at least occupied, in the inuring monotony of waiting to be released.

Shelter Residents & Field Methods

In the first several months of my fieldwork, about three dozen women passed through the shelter, and they comprise the primary study population for this dissertation. These women varied somewhat in age and background but mostly fit the total NAPTIP statistics for victims—not surprisingly, considering how victim profiling plays into the interception and referral processes. They came generally from the southern parts of Nigeria, especially but not exclusively Benin

City in Edo State—a region notorious for sex trafficking over the past two decades, as described in the previous chapter. They ranged from 17 to 40 years old, the vast majority in their early to mid twenties. Most were literate and finished at least middle school; many had graduated secondary school and some had even attended university. Most also reported completing some type of vocational training, especially hair dressing, though sometimes shelter staff suspected these claims were merely cover stories for migrating, invented either by residents themselves or under the advisement of their travel agents and alleged traffickers.

Nearly all of these women I worked with were intercepted en route in different parts of West Africa, traveling in small groups of two to ﬁve, mostly on their way to Italy and other European destinations. One group of three was told they were going to Argentina; another pair was headed to Egypt. Like Florence, several were stopped by immigration oﬃcers demanding a bribe to let them pass, who

then turned the women over to NAPTIP only after they refused to pay. Perhaps a third of the women I met told me that they had sought help themselves after growing suspicious of their travel agents’ intentions, mostly from hearing rumors from other travelers on public buses and around rest stops. This happened in the Lagos international airport, Nigerian land borders, and foreign border checkpoints, in crossings to places like Mali and Burkina Faso. Whether they identified themselves or were identified by others as victims, all of these women were made to wait in holding cells, often for days, for NAPTIP officials to come collect them from local authorities. Many groups who would later share bedrooms at the shelter first met at the Nigerian Immigration Service holding cell at the Seme border checkpoint between Nigeria and the Benin Republic, just 50 miles west of Lagos. Importantly, even those who originally sought help and thereby initiated their own rescue would all go on to adamantly protest their continued detention in the shelter, without exception.

A handful of other women I worked with came to the shelter through different means, though they still shared similar biographies in terms of age, class, and origins. A few hotel and brothel raids in Lagos yielded about a dozen residents over the course of the year, referred to NAPTIP by the local police and also made to stay in the shelter for weeks under suspicion of domestic or internal traﬃcking, from rural villages to the city. Other women were there on a more genuinely consensual basis, and were often granted more freedoms accordingly—access to mobile phones and occasional permission to walk to a nearby provisions stall for a cold Coke or roasted plantains. This included a few women repatriated to Nigeria

from abroad through one of the IOM’s Assisted Voluntary Return programs. Sev- eral others came through the shelter for days or weeks at a time to testify in a La- gos court, years after their original interception. One woman had stayed in the shelter over ﬁve years previous, but was still being supported by NAPTIP and passed through occasionally, whenever she grew frustrated with her longer term housing at a women’s home on the other side of the city.

Many children stayed in the shelter too, occasionally even outnumbering the adults. Most had come from small villages to stay with distant relatives Lagos or neighboring cities on promises of better schooling for help with domestic chores (Mbakogu 2004; Dottridge 2010; Adepoju 2005; NAPTIP 2008; International

Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour 2001). Some young men passed through as well, but never for more than a couple days, and usually conﬁned to a makeshift men’s dorm in the dining foyer, for reasons I discuss at greater length below. However, both the men and the children remained outside my project focus.

Due to this range of interception and referral stories, I avoid calling the residents of the shelter “victims.” Formally, they all were identified by NAPTIP as victims of human trafficking, and NAPTIP staff used this term widely and without discretion. However, as we will see, many of the residents of the shelter did not see their experiences this way. I therefore use the victim terminology here when describing ideologies or articulating others’ views. The women themselves referred to each other as girls, and I also occasionally appropriate that language as well.

I spent just over one year in Nigeria in 2010-2011 conducting the primary

fieldwork for this project. During that time, I visited the shelter on most weekdays for at least a couple hours at a time. In the tradition of “deep hanging out” research methods, I spent my time lounging and gisting with residents and staff alike. In order not to impose myself in such an already strained space, I generally stayed in shared, public spaces within the building unless specifically invited into offices or bedrooms. Thankfully, most days people seemed to find me a welcome diversion from an otherwise monotonous routine. I would describe my project to new arrivals, who were naturally curious about the strange oyibo (foreigner) always lingering around the building, moleskin notebook in hand. Both a practical recording tool and a reminder of my research intent, residents would sometimes ask me to put it away, and we would talk “off record.” Other times, they would demand I take it out, proud of stories they were preparing to share. Counselors were always re- spectful of this relationship and never pressured or even invited me to divulge information regarding particular cases.

As a condition of my access to NAPTIP facilities and consistent with their privacy policies, I did not take photographs of women at the shelter. NAPTIP did permit me to record my conversations with residents, but I quickly found such de- vices both distracting and deterring to would-be participants in the project. Still in the midst of legal investigations and trying to secure their own release from the shelter, it was no surprise that recorders leant an overly formal tone to conversations. Instead, I took avid notes by hand during discussions, lectures, and meetings. Computers were likewise intrusive to use in real time, but I reconstructed all

conversations into longform narratives as soon as possible, often immediately following a session and usually within a couple hours of its occurrence. Quotations and stories retold here are therefore approximations of what I observed in the shelter, compiled to represent typical conversations and interactions at the shelter as closely as possible.

In the beginning, I often initiated conversations through lighthearted lessons in Nigerian pidgin and questions about “abroad,” an umbrella term that seemed to capture anywhere worth going. Nigerian “Nollywood” ﬁlms and local hip hop music videos regularly provided easy entertainment and good fodder for chatting about men, ambition, and travel. But more than anything else, most of the women there already wanted to talk about the shelter, without really much prompting on my part. Idle and frustrated, residents were eager to vent their complaints—to me, to the counselors, and to anyone else who might listen.

Everyone Wan Go

Frustrations about the shelter bubbled up amongst different residents throughout the day, as women took turns growing impatient with their detention there. These outbursts were often jarring at first, to myself and to other residents as well, but grew to be a rather mundane part of the shelter experience. One day, for example, the electricity was out, as usual. That meant no one could watch television, so a few residents gathered to fix their hair in the salon—a dingy box of a room on the ground floor with a big mirror, a few plastic chairs borrowed from the dining room, and makeshift sinks set up to drain over buckets. One of the girls was

seated in front of the mirror as the “master trainer” divided her hair into even sections for small wire-wrapped knots. A couple of the others stood around them watching lackadaisically.

They were all bored but complacent, for the moment. Florence, on the other hand, was exasperated. Instead of standing with them, she was seated against the opposite wall reading. Her hair was tucked into a dark colored cap, and she wore a ﬂimsy orange lycra halter top over blue jeweled leggings. She had just arrived a few days previous, while most of the other girls there had been in the shelter for weeks. She unfolded a worn King James Bible across her lap, hung her head low, and began to pray in heavy whispers into folded hands. Her face moved into earnest expressions of despair and her breathing became deep, determined, agitated. I walked to take the seat next to her, the only empty one left, and heard her softly saying pidgin that she wanted to go: “I wan go…I wan go,” she repeated.

She looked up to smile brieﬂy as I sat down, and then she returned to her prayer. I could not help but wonder if some of this urgency was being performed for my beneﬁt.

Later she would show me the passages she had been reading. Among them was Psalms 23:

4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staﬀ they comfort me.

5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

Florence read this passage and others like it over and over, in the same heavy, hurried whispers, for some time that morning. Eventually she ﬁnished and closed her eyes, brooding. Suddenly, she looked up and moaned, “I wan goooo,” startling me and everyone else in the room. She sighed heavily and hung her head low before bellowing again, “I WAN GOOOO,” echoing down the halls.

Though she was the one to give voice it to that particular afternoon, this listless exasperation was not unique to Florence. At the shelter, “I wan go” functioned almost as a mantra among residents, providing the script for nearly every interaction they encountered. To visitors who asked their name and age, I wan go.

To empty rooms in moments of frustration and exhaustion, I wan go. And of course, to the kindhearted counselors and curious anthropologists who asked what was wrong or did they have comments after group counseling or anything else really—I wan go, I wan go, I wan go.

I address the issue of detention more thoroughly below, but counselors themselves avoided discussing the topic with residents when they could, even outright denying the plain restrictions on the mobility that deﬁned the shelter experience. In reply to I wan go demands, some would blame the security provisions of the neighboring government oﬃces that kept them from freely going outside. “You are all free,” they would declare, “This place is not a prison. The only freedom you don’t have is to go outside. And he only reason you can’t go out there is because of the other agencies. If not for them you can go around the compound. So please, you are free…” But of course, I wan go clearly was not just a demand to leave the building, nor was it even only a demand to leave the shelter. Everyone there had

been restless to start, eager for new opportunities and looking for them in travel. I wan go was a protest of their detention, but also a protest of Nigeria, of being still stagnate, of feeling stuck in more ways than one.

This complaint of I wan go became so common in the shelter that staff themselves just seemed impervious to it, sometimes slightly annoyed by its repetition but never surprised or challenged by such demands. It certainly was not taken as evidence that NAPTIP’s official policies against involuntary detention were somehow being ignored, and I never witnessed a case where it actually initiated processing for early release. Perhaps because they never seemed to be taken seriously, many residents grew more and more dramatic in their demands to be released, offering graphic ultimatums in moments of intense frustration and dismay at their detention.

One day I was gisting with some residents in the fashion design room, cramped with three foot pedaled sewing machines, only one of them operational.

One of the girls, Victoria, had already trained as a tailor before migrating to

Greece, and she was hemming some pants from a sack of donated clothes distrib- uted the night before. Behind her, Rose reclined into the lap of a younger girl,

Yemi, as she ﬁxed her hair into a slowly emerging checkerboard of short braids.

When one of the counselors stopped by, the two immediately started whining and pleading with her—”I wan go, I wan go…”

The counselor interrupted and implored them to give her a proper greeting, but instead Rose paused and just repeated “I wan go,” softly with a mischievous smile, not even lifting her head from Yemi’s lap.

“Ah!” the counselor exclaimed, feigning great oﬀense, but still smiling beneath her furrowed brow. “See, you don’t greet me, so you will not go. Not like that. If you greet me, you will go, but since you did not, you can not!” she joked.

Rose replied in Yoruba, reluctantly greeting her properly before repeating that she wants to go. The counselor laughed it oﬀ again, saying she should do better next time. She started to leave when the other girls began grumbling, too, switching between Yoruba and pidgin. The counselor herself did not bother even trying to reply and just waited, staring at them impatiently.

Fed up with the counselor’s refusal to engage their complaints, Yemi ﬁnally raised her voice and exclaimed, “Ah, this place is a prison! NAPTIP is a prison! You shouldn’t keep us here, locked up, with no phone, no way to go outside!” Everyone else quieted and Yemi lowered her voice. “I could just go, just walk out,” she says.

“If I don’t go, I will kill myself…I will stab myself…” she whispered, trailing oﬀ. The quiet fury in her voice was chilling, even as I reminded myself that it was hyper- bole.

The counselor appeared less shocked and more annoyed. “We must do investigation,” she explained tersely, growing exasperated with her complaints. “So we cannot just let you go. We ﬁrst must do our work. And are you even made to work here?” she demanded. “What work have you done? No, you are just to sleep and eat and that is it, so you cannot call this place like that.” She paused. “If God wants you to go today, you will go,” she said ﬁnally. “And if God wants you to go next week, no amount of shouting or crying or talking will change the day.”

The two girls retorted together that it was still unfair to keep them there, especially to not even let them keep their own phones. Recently intercepted residents were not typically allowed contact with their families or anyone else, except occasionally under strict supervision, often weeks into their stay.

“Most people are not given their phones for your own safety and protection,” the counselor explained, “and you were even lucky you were allowed to make calls.”

“No! It was not enough!” they both replied. Rose said that when she called her family, they asked her to call back in 30 minutes, and by then she was no longer allowed to use the phone.

“It’s not fair because others are even allowed to go out and keep their phones,” Yemi complained.

“Those are former victims who have been through the process,” the counselor replied. “That is the rule and regulation, so there is nothing I can do.”

Yemi groaned and quietly threatened violence again as the counselor just spun out of the room in a huﬀ, refusing to indulge their unruliness any further.

“I’ll kill myself, I’ll stab myself in this prison,” she grumbled. “I don tire- ooo!” she repeated (I’ve grown tired of this place!), louder so the counselor could hear. “I wan go!” she hollered down the hall. It was quiet for a moment when she

finally stopped, until everyone cracked into a nervous laughter, breaking the remaining tension in the room. At first Yemi laughed too, but then she stopped smiling and swore that she was serious. “No be lie-o…” she trailed off.

Protests Large & Small

Given the ubiquity of these complaints, it may be hard to understand why women did stay in the shelter. Certainly, there was at least half-hearted talk of es- caping it, although never (in my presence) did these seem to be serious delibera- tions. A typical outburst was once prompted by a conversation about diﬀerences between the US and Nigeria.

“I wan go!” Prescious exclaimed, laughing and groaning as she stood from the couch to grip the bars over the window and hang her head back limp, mocking defeat. She was 14 and had been referred to NAPTIP after coming to Lagos to work as house help. “If they just let me go, and maybe gave me some money for transport, I’d ﬁnd my way back. I know the road.”

“Oh really?” Rose asked, calling her bluﬀ. “You can just go to fetch water”—the only time they are allowed outside—”and run from there. You can go if you want. Just run away. It’s not far to the bus stop. You can ﬁnd your way, if that’s what you want.”

Precious gazed dramatically across the horizon and joked back that maybe she will.

“Well, don’t go that way,” another girl warned, joining her at the window to survey the compound neighboring government and paramilitary oﬃces. “At that gate, is the police. They will shoot you when they see you. And the other way, is more government. They will shoot you. And the other way too is guards. So you have to be careful, but if you run quickly, you can do it.”

“I will go,” Precious swears. “I will ﬂy, I will ﬂy to America!” She stretched her arms to hang out from the window bars again, laughing and smiling at me.

I never personally heard conversations of escape go much beyond this type of joking, but stories of much worse did circulate around the shelter. When I was traveling out of town one week, a counselor told me that a new resident had tried to jump from the second ﬂoor veranda roof, injuring her ankle when she fell short of the adjacent cement and barbed wire wall. Another once showed me photographs of evidence from a more elaborate escape attempt the year before my research began, when a small group of residents broke bathroom mirrors for weapons and tried to melt the padlock with matches to escape. The shelter was certainly secure enough to physically prevent anyone from leaving, as I was reminded whenever I walked out with staﬀ at the end of business day, closing the padlock on the stairwell security gate behind us.

The counselors grew sometimes convinced that people especially desperate to go might have been traﬃckers themselves. Traﬃckers also were believed to use juju oaths to commit women to their travel and debt contracts (Cole 2006; Dijk

2001), so some speculated that residents may be so terriﬁed of retribution that they become possessed while at the shelter. Regardless, such attempts did little to make anyone question the fairness of detention policies. Like many people who dedicate their careers to helping others, counselors and other NAPTIP staﬀ simply believed their good intentions and protective instincts superseded the concerns of these women, who just must not have understood the reasons for such dramatic interventions (cf. Agustín 2007). Still, counselors were very aware of the frustrations of

residents and would not deny the urgent despair so many of them expressed. As one staﬀ member exclaimed to a resident who had been whining I wan go, “You think you are the only one frustrated here? See these windows. They were broken by people very angry, I would say even more than you. In fact you are not the worst; many are worse. They broke these and the mirror upstairs. So do not think you are alone. We know you are not happy here.”

Residents found more subtle ways to protest shelter detention policies as well. Another day in the salon, I was gisting with Florence and some of the other residents as we took turns brushing each other’s hair. The master trainer was present, but no one was interested in learning that day. Bored, the trainer ﬁnally asked Florence permission to restyle her hair. Before she traveled, Florence had her natural hair braided into rings close to her scalp and sewed in a merlot-colored synthetic “weave-on” trimmed into a shoulder length bob. Weeks into the wear, the extensions were growing loose and misshapen. Even after it had been brushed, the unseemliness of this style was apparent to everyone, especially the master trainer. She reminded Florence that she too claimed to be a hair stylist and should know better. Florence admitted to me later that she would never wear it like that outside the shelter, but for now she refused the trainer’s help all the same. Instead, she simply replied to the trainer that she wan go.

“I’ll be leaving soon, so I won’t be needing to ﬁx anything,” she insisted.

When the master trainer pushed her to just let her redo the roots, Florence declared adamantly, “Even if I remain at the shelter for one year, I will still just wear this same piece the entire time!”

Florence might have just been annoyed, acting stubborn and difficult to make a scene and frustrate the staff. That was certainly how the trainer treated the comments, rolling her eyes at her melodramatic declaration. Yet, the protest, while subtle, was not entirely trivial. In the Nigerian context, it did merit at least some attention as a daring move. Women’s hair care in there (as elsewhere) was a tremendously important component of maintaining one’s appearances, and weaves in particular were a regular gift of boyfriends and suitors. All the women at the shelter, and even some of the men, would have noticed the subversion. Furthermore, an overgrown weave can be quite physically uncomfortable, itching under the braids in spots difficult to scratch. Worn for too long, and they can even start to smell.

These were exactly the implications Florence made by threatening to grow hers out. Begoña Aretxaga (Aretxaga 1995, 1997) writes about the bodily resistance of members of the Irish Republican Army held as political prisoners in the late

1970s. In what became known as the “Dirty Protest,” they refused to bathe or dress according to the prison rules, eventually living naked and smearing their own bodily fluids (excrement, urine, and menstrual blood) on their cell walls. Florence’s own protests, of course, were not nearly shocking, nor were the circumstances of her detention as dire. But, to a lesser degree, in refusing to fix her hair, and in refusing to let the hair dresser fix it in particular, Florence too rejected the staff’s attempts to ease her experience of detention with superficial acts of care, and instead left the increasingly unkempt evidence of her captivity atop her head for all

to see. She would not go home for another three weeks, and she never touched the weave until then.

Defending Detention

Given the persistence and intensity of residents’ demands to leave, it was both surprising and disconcerting that the involuntary detention of human traf-

ﬁcking victims is ostensibly prohibited by both Nigerian law and NAPTIP policy.

The 2003 legislation founding the NAPTIP agency provides the following rights for all victims of traﬃcking: “The Agency shall ensure that…a traﬃcked person is able to return home safely, if he so wishes and when he is able to do so,” and that

“where the circumstances so justify, a trafficked person shall not be detained, imprisoned or prosecuted for offenses relating to being a victim of trafficking, including non-possession of valid travel stay or use of a false travel or other documents”

(Sections 50-51). The 2008 National Policy on Protection and Assistance for Traf-

ﬁcked Persons is even more explicit, stating directly that “A victim shall not be compelled to stay in a shelter to undergo rehabilitation” (22).

The degree to which these policies were ever enforced, however, remains unclear. The 2008 and 2009 US TIP Reports notes that “The government places foreign victims in shelters under guard until they are repatriated,” but also says that “there were no reports of victims inappropriately incarcerated, ﬁned, or penalized for unlawful acts committed as a result of being traﬃcked.” Gallagher and

Pearson (2010) note the irony of this conclusion, suggesting that all such deten- tions should by that very fact be considered inappropriate. They also observe that

Nigeria is the only country to even be obliquely reproached for practices of involuntary detention in the TIP Report, despite oﬃcial condemning such policies elsewhere—suggesting that the State Department does little to evaluate this aspect of counter-traﬃcking programs over all.

Meanwhile, even while oﬃcially discouraging involuntary detention, the

TIP Report also provides a context for incentivizing it. In 2008, still under a second tier ranking, the US State Department recommended that the Nigerian government increase occupancy at their shelters, noting that on one visit the Lagos unit housed only 15 victims despite a maximum occupancy of 120. The following year, the Report noted approvingly the increased number of housed victims (averaging between 30 and 40 people) as evidence of an intensified effort to fight human traf-

ﬁcking, helping Nigeria earn its ﬁrst top tier ranking. However, the same article recommended that the government “ensure that victims’ rights are respected and that they are not detained involuntarily in shelters.” That is to say, the TIP Report cited increased numbers of victims at the shelter as partial reason for improving the overall score, while implicitly recognizing that at least some of these victims may be there involuntarily. (That report also repeated the above quoted statement regarding “no reports of victims inappropriately incarcerated”—but without explanation of any reliable reporting system in existence either).

In this regard, the shelter exists as a public performance of the state’s intervention campaigns, necessary proof of their eﬀorts and justiﬁcation for ongoing funding and political support.

Efforts to manage qualitative reviews were even more explicit. Over the year I spent at the shelter, I witnessed several fact finding missions, diplomatic representatives, local journalists, and foreign scholars come and go. Most of these visitors were accompanied by officials from the zonal headquarters, who otherwise rarely visited the shelter itself, but only one involved active anticipation—the US

TIP Report evaluation. The new zonal head came the week before to meet the staff and tour the premises and then approved a sum of money to be used for cleaning up the shelter. NAPTIP staff usually excused the dilapidated condition of the space by saying all funds were being invested in the new building, so at first I mistook these activities as evidence for a change in plans for the move. “Not exactly,” Ben trailed off, trying to be delicate. “We want to do a full cleaning, top to bottom,” he explained. Even then I did not imagine the scale of renovations they had in mind.

On the day of the inspection, I arrived a half hour before the envoy was due. Otherwise unused offices were packed of people from the zonal office, all busy in intense conversation. The counselors, by contrast, each waited silently at their desks. Some sat with the residents in the vocational training rooms down- stairs. One was busy reorganizing and cleaning all the books in the library, stack- ing them in tall crowded piles on the middle table of the small room. Everyone seemed self-consciously “in position” for their arrival. I found Ben in his office, who, feeling restless himself, offered to show me around. We went first to the common room, where I noticed that they had removed the old tattered and broken upholstered chairs, as well as the stacks of plastic chairs that usually crowded the room. They took out the second broken television and the small piles of Nol-

lywood DVDs on the player. The two white boards remained propped up against the wall, both still covered with writing lessons and the alphabet from Friday’s nonformal education session.

It took me a minute longer to notice that the couches had been replaced as well by two in pristine condition. Astonished, I ask if they were brought in from the zonal headquarters, and Ben laughed, confessing they had actually kept them down the hall for some time, locked in one of the many extra rooms used now only for storage. “You’ve had these the whole time?” I demanded, laughing with disbelief, “The whole time we’ve been sitting on mice colonies and other bugs?!” He smiled and assured me, “Well you don’t have to worry about bites now. These ones are very clean. But trust me, if we’d brought them out earlier they’d look just like the others. So we were saving them for something like this, and don’t they look great!” The staﬀ thus spoke openly (with me) about these material renovations and preparations for the TIP Report delegation, and were proud of the presentation they were able to make. They may again believe too strongly in the nature of their cause to ever recognize victims as being marshaled and deployed in the same manner, but the incentive structure persisted nonetheless.

Reasons to maintain regular shelter occupancy rates included not only for the immediate display and quantiﬁcation of victims served, but for the other points of evaluation that may be improved indirectly via involuntary detention as well. The TIP Reports also cites improved prosecution statistics as another reason for improving Nigeria’s ranking, potentially if indirectly encouraging the involuntary detention of alleged victims even further. As Gallagher and Pearson note, the

special attention governments provide to human traﬃcking victims is not only a sign of benevolence, but must be recognized as a strategic concession in order to recruit witnesses crucial to successful convictions in human traﬃcking cases (76-

77). They observe that this play is especially important in the context of the TIP

Report, which raises the stakes for conspicuous interventions:

Even absent manipulative intent, human rights can very easily become a casualty of states’ eagerness to demonstrate their anti- trafficking credentials to others. In the current international cli- mate, which is largely dominated by an aggressive unilateral monitoring regime, the compulsion to be viewed as doing something about trafficking is strong and universal. Against this backdrop, shelter detention is one of a growing number of potentially prob- lematic practices that are linked to, and justified by, the anti- trafficking imperative. (80)

Indeed, the 2010 TIP Report likewise notes that virtually all successful convictions of Nigerian traﬃckers have hinged on the testimony of victims, and maintaining access to procure information from victims is one of the stated aims of sheltering, listed at this chapter’s opening. While I never heard counselors directly encourage residents to testify in court, they often encouraged women to “open up” and be more forthright in sharing their true travel plans and intentions, a process I will discuss further in the following chapter. (My research permissions did not grant me access to ongoing legal investigations, so I did not participate in or observe

NAPTIP victim interviews intended solely for that purpose.) The process of rehabilitation itself could certainly contribute to that end indirectly as well, as we will see below and in following chapters.

Taken together, these factors contribute to a cogent state interest in the involuntary detention of alleged human traﬃcking victims, even while oﬃcially prohibiting that practice. Yet, the goals of this dissertation are not to evaluate if this

process is lawful, if it is effective, or even if it is moral. Ultimately, I aim to understand how this political and legal context for intervention shaped the day to day programs and other happenings at the shelter, and what that reveals about broader logics of governance and intervention around migrant women’s bodies. To that end, we can follow some of the different explanations for these practices that shelter staff offer to residents themselves and to others.

Protecting Women

First and foremost, women were told that they must stay at the shelter for their own protection. Counselors painted gruesome pictures of the risks they may be under as (alleged) human trafficking victims. They feared not only the retrafficking of the victims, but the increased aggression of traffickers who had been foiled by the NAPTIP intervention and now faced potential criminal charges. I heard one story in particular relayed to several different women throughout my stay:

Even this girl, who used to stay in this shelter, has been calling me. She is telling me that this guy—Mister California, the traﬃcker, the recruiter—he is bothering her family. Her mother is not even staying in her own place, because of his harassment. That is why we at NAPTIP must do our jobs very well. To protect you.

The idea was that these women were especially vulnerable during the investigation process, and that the six weeks to conﬁrm these accusations was a worthwhile sac- riﬁce in case the allegations were well founded.

So-called “closed shelters” are often justiﬁed in these terms, although growing numbers of counter-traﬃcking advocates and scholars argue actual risks

vary by victim and need to be balanced with the tradeoﬀ in freedom of mobility on a case-by-case basis (Bjerkan 2005; Brunovskis and Surtees 2008; Gallagher and

Pearson 2010; Surtees 2008). By contrast, at the Lagos shelter, all newly-identified victims were assumed to be under the highest danger of being exposed to their traffickers. Gallagher and Pearson point out that this assertion is tremendously gender biased: “Female victims of trafficking are widely considered to need this protection more than their male counterparts. Females, both women and girls, are also perceived as less competent to make decisions about their own safety, well- being, and future” (2010, 97). This reasoning was almost explicit at the shelter, as

Ben once explained the shelter’s gender policy to a visiting team of traﬃcking awareness volunteers.1 Noting that all of the residents at the moment were female, one visitor asked if it was an all female shelter, and was there another for male victims?

“Most victims are female,” Ben explained, “so we don’t want to put male victims of this age with these girls, especially since most of them are abused in different ways. So we will just put the younger boys in this place.” She repeated her question, asking if there was a different shelter for trafficked men then. “No, not really…” Ben said, trailing off. “It’s more like a different package. Male victims are more easily resettled with their families, so usually we can just do that quickly, whereas with the girls, it is more complicated. We can usually just hand the boys over to their families to be reunited. Males will just want to hustle, so we have to

1 National Youth Corpers doing mandatory year of service after graduating from University each spend one day a week doing “community development,” including a post with the NAPTIP enlightenment branch.

respect that. But with females we have to develop a business plan, do all these things. There is more risk with females because they are more vulnerable to attack.

So we have to do what we call social inquiry, to inspect the family because we have had some cases where the traﬃcker harassed the family so we have to make sure that thing has died down before we return the victim there.”

It is worth noting that there may be good reasons for victims of different types of trafficking rings to be systematically subject to different kinds of intervention. Within West Africa, men are more likely to be trafficked (or recognized as a victim of trafficking, anyway) for labor exploitation, often doing manual work only a bus ride or two away from their home town. It is possible that the agents direct- ing these networks are consistently less aggressive in recovering lost clients/ victims than those managing the international movement of women to Europe, thus necessitating less severe precautions for their safety. Without the dynamic of sexual exploitation, these men would also be less likely to be seen as requiring psychological services hypothetically associated with rehabilitation. However, from

Ben’s explanation and others like it, it was unclear if that is the logic at the shelter.

He simply asserted that women were “more vulnerable to attack” without further elaboration, reinforcing Gallagher and Pearson’s observations as he consigns the male victims to returning directly into a high-risk life of crime and “hustling.”

These gendered discrepancies bely a deeper diﬀerence of approach between male and female victims as well, beyond their need for protection. While in the above conversation Ben reluctantly accepts men’s own proclivity towards hustling, the “diﬀerent package” of rehabilitation services for women he alludes to in prac-

tice aims to do just the opposite. As I will explore in the next chapter, time at the shelter is used to reduce victims’ future vulnerability to trafficking by effectively trying to prevent them from hustling in the first place.

Bureaucratic Process & Patience

The second and signiﬁcantly more ambiguous explanation for detention was that the women must stay at the shelter as long as their cases were under investigation. This claim was related to their protection, as staﬀ insisted they could not fully assess the safety of their return before fully understanding the case. But more often, counselors just made vague reference to proper process and procedure—ironically, perhaps, when used to elide explicit policies prohibiting involuntary detention.

If any elaboration of the investigation process was oﬀered, staﬀ usually insisted bureaucratic delays responsible for uncertain and protracted release decisions. Prudence once explained it as follows:

We are also working closely with your case oﬃcer in [the NAPTIP zonal headquarters oﬃce in] Ikeja to do everything properly. You know you were not brought her by this agency alone. You were brought here by another agency, so it takes time to do things right, so that we can report back to that agency that we handled everything correctly. It takes time, but it is not for nothing. We will leave no stone unturned.

In pointing toward these other agencies and emphasizing a methodical investigation process like this, Prudence achieved a few things. First, she avoided blaming

NAPTIP for anyone’s original interception and detention—appeasing those residents who still did not see their experiences as traﬃcking or as warranting intervention in the ﬁrst place. Second, she suggested that even if those agencies were

corrupt or mislead, NAPTIP was actually taking longer because they were doing things properly and would not just be hurried along by a well-placed bribe or connection. (For all of its hassles, Nigerians also recognize how hard life would actually be without corruption, if one actually had to pay every bill and wait in every line instead of just people buying oﬀ.) Instead, this logic renders NAPTIP the vir- tuous agency, playing by the rules and giving due diligence to each case, even if it meant making the residents wait.

Of course, the Nigerian government is notoriously corrupt and does little to inspire good faith in its citizens, especially those already being detained against their will. Promises that cases were being investigated oﬀered no satisfaction to residents of the shelter, despite countless formal and informal speeches on patience throughout my research. It was a recurring theme in weekly group counseling lectures, in particular. One such Tuesday morning, we were rounding up a lecture instructing residents that patience is a virtue, that everyone must have patience to get along with each other, and, of course, that they should all wait patiently for NAPTIP’s work to be done before they can go. Just before concluding the session, though, Ben came into the room and jumped in with a slightly diﬀer- ent take on the matter.

“Well,” he said, “what I can say, is the most important thing is, you must know why you are being patient. There are some times when it is not necessary to be patient. And people will just tell you, be patient, so they can deceive you. They will just say, ‘no wahala [no problem], we are taking care of everything, have patience’—when really you should not be patient.” I believe he was alluding to the

women’s alleged traffickers and other potential sources of exploitation, but it was hard not to apply the same admonishment to the counselors. “So what you need to do is ask questions, and know why it is that you need to be patient. Then in those situations, definitely, you should be patient. Like here you know we are working on your case, so you should be patient,” he clarified. “It is then that good things will come your way. We are working on your case, and this again is not a permanent home, just a temporary transit space. So if you have patience, you will go, everyone will go.”

In moments like this, Ben demonstrated great empathy with residents, an- ticipating how frustrating such appeals to be patient must be. Having missed most of the main lecture, he even inadvertently indicted his colleagues for oﬀering advice of this sort. And yet, he too ultimately produced the same appeal without anything closer to an acceptable explanation, as if “we are working on it” really satis-

ﬁed such demands for information. He often encouraged people to ask more questions like this, but rarely did they seem to yield real updates.

Another time, he told a particularly upset resident, “You have to ask your counselor, ‘please, how far have you come on my case?’ You can ask questions and be informed. And please, it is like a tea kettle. Do you know why the tea kettle makes noise? First it is to tell us that it is ready. But also it is to release steam, so that it does not explode. You have to vent your anger, to release your steam, so you don’t explode.” A professional, Ben never spoke ill of his colleagues to me directly.

Yet his own style and dedication to the victims—engaging their complaints, at least attempting to oﬀer sincere explanations—often set him apart. In more frus-

trating moments, he might recognize that discrepancy, and I suspected at times he really did want to help residents motivate his otherwise often unhelpful colleagues.

Yet, his quick transition from substantive inquiries to mere ventilation of frustrations may belie the more likely eﬀect of these pursuits—letting the residents feel more engaged in the process, without actually revealing anything at all. Unsurpris- ingly then, most residents balked when he suggested it, and those who actually tried always reported back that their case workers had just insisted they were “still investigating.”

Conclusion

Ultimately, women were not just patient with their detention because they were asked to be, any more than the padlocks, barbed wire walls, and armed compound guards alone might have kept from them each from at least attempting to escape. Beneath these cues were more engrained understandings of state authority, especially under the capricious and corrupt specter of the Nigerian government. People expect that state oﬃcials wield power arbitrarily in Nigeria. While that sometimes leaves space for negotiation (and bribery), it often leaves bureauc- racies impenetrable and unforgiving. As author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie com- mented in a national newspaper interview, “Ours is a country in which the individual is abused and made to feel helpless by the state” (Adebanwi 2007).

The manner in which people make claims on the state can be said to reveal a certain logic of citizenship, but in Nigeria, where people expect so little from the state, the absence of such claims also prove telling. In their book Encountering the

Nigerian State, Adebanwi and Obadare describe feeling confounded at the discov- ery of a dead body in Nigeria, not because of the shock of a human corpse left to decay on a public road, but because of its ordinariness. They are, they realize, without redress, unable to even call upon the state to dispose of such a horriﬁc sight.

The question, therefore, of how a citizen (one without a “connection” to holders of state power) is supposed to link up with the state (in moments of distress, say) goes to the heart of the state-society conundrum in Nigeria and arguably the rest of postcolonial Africa. If a “citizen” constitutively lacks the modalities and social instru- mentalities of demanding egalitarian intervention from the state— as it is understood and assumed to exist—and its apparatuses, institutions, and representations, can we reasonably speak of a state, let alone a state-society compact? How can this kind of state (which in practice is everything but kind) be properly and correctly concep- tualized without falling into the trap of name-calling that has recently dominated academic theorizing—and, we dare add, totaliz- ing—of the state in Nigeria and Africa at large? Given the scenario adumbrated above, are there really “citizens” in Nigeria, even though there are those who are formally called citizens of Nige- ria—as Femi Taiwo (2000) competently alerts us? This antino- my—between citizens in and citizens of, Taiwo pursues, is an indi- cation of the ideological vacuity of the concept of citizenship in a typical African postcolony (Adebanwi, 2009: 360). (Obadare and Adebanwi 2010)

At the shelter, women found themselves not only without the assistance of the state, but actively being persecuted by it. That they ultimately yielded to this detention at all further illustrates the abjection they expected as citizens in or of

Nigeria. Importantly, women did not know NAPTIP policies prohibiting involuntary detention, or at least they did not cite them in their protests at the shelter.

However, even if they had known these policies existed on paper, state agencies are inconsistent enough that I doubt it would have provided much consolation.

Likewise, they also did not invoke a language of rights or due process that one

might expect in other contexts such as the US. There were no such cries of dismay, of “you can’t do this to me,” or “I have a right to see a lawyer/judge/parent.” They adamantly protested their detention, demanding release as each repeated I wan go throughout the day. They understood this detention as an excessive act of an authoritarian government. By the same token, they ultimately knew that such severe forms of intervention were, in practice, quite within the state’s prerogative, however unfair, and that there was little they could do to change it.

Given this context of intervention, it was not surprising that counselors ultimately also often distanced themselves from the state apparatus and apparent arbitrariness of the NAPTIP agency. Ben did so in acknowledging staﬀ recalci- trance when he urged women to follow up with their counselors, and others too often related with the victims in this way. After a particularly volatile I wan go outburst, Prudence accused the residents of being unappreciative of their goodwill accordingly:

By the grace of God, you will go before Christmas. I have spent many Christmas here, and New Years too, calling my family to greet them on the phone, but I don’t want to do that this year. You will go. Even you Mary, your papers are ready, it is just money that is keeping you here. Do you think the counselor who took those other 8 girls on Saturday did not actually pay for the fuel? Do you know how long it will be for her to be reimbursed? Me, if I could just buy a plane ticket to get you home I would. We are all just trying to make you happy, so we will do things even government should not be doing. Like those three days I spent to return those girls to Enugu. It could be June before I see that N30,000 ($200USD) [reim- bursement], or even December next year. We all will make that sac- riﬁce, just to see you happy, but you don’t appreciate it. You just say, me I wan go, me I wan go. You won’t even hear that at other shelters. Sandra, did everyone just scream that at the Abuja shelter? No, it is only because we are free to laugh and play with you that you think you can just cry me I wan go all day long. And tell me, what is the worst that can happen? Yes you will have food and you

will even have gifts. Last year, who was it that came. I will even give some from my own money, just to see you happy.

In the absence of eﬀective state claims, and in the presence of much more nefarious expectations for state authorities, these personal exhortations were among the most inspiring to women at the shelter, who would often recall particular counselors fondly months after their release. While women at the shelter protested the basis and conditions of their detention wholeheartedly, most slowly learned to respect individual counselors in some capacity. Their ever-partial sur- render to the rehabilitation process can thus be understood as acquiescence to capricious state bureaucracy as well as the aﬀective and charismatic authority of creative state agents.

CHAPTER TWO

Convincing Victims

The National Policy on Protection and Assistance to Traﬃcked Persons in

Nigeria describes the purpose of the shelter as follows:

2.3 Sheltering

There is need (sic) to provide immediate shelter and rest for TPs [Traﬃcked Persons]. The shelter oﬀers protection to the TPs in re- gaining their self-esteem, and provides the opportunity to face future challenges.

OBJECTIVES

(i) To provide temporary accommodation for TPs;

(ii) To provide opportunity for obtaining additional information from victims;

(iii) To oﬀer psychosocial and legal services to TPs;

(iv) To provide accessible recreational facilities;

(v) To oﬀer cultural, spiritual, and vocational guidance;

(vi) To provide clothing and medical services

(vii) To ensure warm, protective and supportive environment for personal development

(viii) To create opportunity for knowledge enhancement

These goals are generally consistent with international trafficking interventions as described in the United Nation’s Guidelines and Standards for aiding trafficked persons. Like the international models, they are designed with the prototypical human trafficking victim in mind. She would be rescued directly from a situation

of sexual exploitation, such that obtaining information from her and providing legal services to her would be compatible aims. She also might be gratefully repatriated to her home country, accepting and in need of psychological care, and interested in vocational training for career advancement. The preface to the national policy frames the guidelines exactly in these terms, describing how “victims of human traﬃcking are usually subjected to various forms of physical assault, exploitation and abuse resulting in highly traumatized individuals.” NAPTIP staﬀ often relayed a similar narrative of severe abuse and trauma to visitors, sponsors, and even victims themselves. They were quick to recount the horrors of human traf-

ﬁcking, always listed with a display of both disgust and pity: forced prostitution, dehydration, coercion and humiliation. “You will drink your own piss!” one counselor regularly proclaimed. I believe they genuinely saw their own work in this light, too, at least when considered abstractly. However, in practice, the cases they saw were quite diﬀerent.

As the previous chapters describe, by the time of my research, the heyday of counter-trafficking efforts surrounding the initial NAPTIP legislation had passed, and conventionally trafficked women, for lack of better phrasing, were few and far between. During the year I spent at the shelter, I met only one woman who came close to fitting this profile, and even she had organized her own return to Nigeria rather than relying any outside intervention for rescue. In contrast, as described in the previous chapter, most of the women at the shelter had been stopped en route, had not personally experienced exploitation, and did not see themselves as vic-

tims. Accordingly, they were resistant to their original interception as well as subsequent detention and rehabilitation at the shelter.

Women intercepted before any exploitation or trauma had even occurred did not warrant standard psychological intervention, and, at least on a case-by- case basis, the staff realized this too. Not only did those women not see their experiences as trafficking, but the counselors did not necessarily see them as traumatized either. The premise for early interception was of course that these women were in the process of being trafficked, and would have suffered abuses if not for their intervention. Regardless, counseling remained a primary component of the shelter program. What does it mean then to rehabilitate someone who has not (yet) experienced trauma?

This chapter argues that in this context, rehabilitation and counseling were designed to address women’s vulnerability to being traﬃcked. Their original traf-

ﬁcking was used as proof of that vulnerability within them, and it was presumed to persist again after release. Within the NAPTIP organization, this fear of retraﬃck- ing was an openly acknowledged motivation for intervention, and counselors regarded a woman’s commitment to not migrate again as the mark of successful rehabilitation. Rehabilitation thereby became more about correcting future practices and less about treating past harms. This answer seemed to be coded in some of the other phrases quoted above as the objectives of the sheltering policy as well: “future challenges,” “vocational guidance,” “knowledge enhancement.” I will therefore describe how rehabilitation was not invoked as a psychological paradigm of trauma therapy, but as an institutionalized form of “personal development.” Fur-

thermore, I maintain that these discourses of vulnerability and speciﬁc tactics of reform implied that they women at the shelter at least partially culpable for their own alleged traﬃcking, beneath the veneer of innocence implied by victimhood.

I describe this process as preventative rehabilitation—a systematic reforma- tive effort to prevent women from being trafficked again after their release from the shelter. This strategy involved promoting alternative educational and vocational opportunities in and out of the shelter, but, even more importantly, it entailed using the time in the shelter to convince residents that such opportunities were worth pursuing, especially over other invitations to migrate. While the content of these debates are pursued in later chapters, I use this chapter to explore the program’s focus women’s interior selves or subjectivities—on their thoughts, desires, and dispositions that allegedly made them “vulnerable” to being trafficked in the first place.

Using the analytical framework developed by Foucault in Discipline and

Punish, this chapter compares the shelter program with other forms of counseling and intervention, including prisons, penitentiaries, militant amnesty programs, and HIV support groups, as well as international standards for assistance for victims of human traﬃcking. It disentangles the rehabilitative aspect of counseling at the shelter from the investigation agenda by considering how these personal reform goals simultaneously enhanced—but could not be reduced to—the criminal investigation and prosecution objectives that rounded out the NAPTIP agenda. I use Foucault’s discussions of correction and confession to examine the pressure counselors put on residents to “open up” about the truth of their travel plans and

intentions to work abroad, arguing that these appeals were used not only to advance external investigations but also to index a woman’s acceptance of the NAP-

TIP narrative and the deeper levels of personal reform that implied.

Ultimately, I argue that these reform tactics and strategies push against the reading of the NAPTIP shelter as merely another case of African authoritarian violence and corrupt state services, for both academic theorizing and the women at the shelter themselves. Although they initially interpreted their interception and detention as injustice typical of the corrupt state, many slowly came to consider the supposed good intentions of the NAPTIP staﬀ and agency mission, especially through the personal attention and guidance they received from counselors at the shelter. I therefore use encounters between them as a site to examine citizen-state relationships forged at the brink of governmental intervention.

Discipline Beyond Detention

Counselors never cited rehabilitation as a reason residents needed to remain in the shelter in discussions with the women themselves. Instead, they would merely encourage them to choose to use the time productively, for reflection and planning. Indeed, it remains difficult for me to say with certainty how important this practice of rehabilitation was in causing the de facto detention practices at the shelter, as opposed to other prosecution, protection, and other agency motivations discussed in the previous chapter. But whatever the prior reasons for holding them, rehabilitation efforts were central to women’s experience of actually being in the shelter, once they were there. That is, while other priorities may have impelled

the locks and walls keeping them in place, there was a didactic element to daily life and conversation there that cannot be explained by the usefulness of detention alone. Foucault draws a similar distinction between detention and discipline in prisons. He argues:

[To have a positive technical role] the carceral apparatus has recourse to three great schemata: the politico-moral schema of individual isolation and hierarchy; the economic model of force applied to compulsory work; the technico-medical model of cure and nor- malization. The cell, the workshop, the hospital. The margin by which the prison exceeds detention is ﬁlled in fact by techniques of a disciplinary type.(Foucault 1995, 248)

It is in this positive technical role that I am most interested—the margin by which the shelter program exceeded the mandates for protection and investigation described in the previous chapter, using the time there to not only hold them but convince them to adapt another life path.

For example, within my ﬁrst few days of staying at the shelter, I found myself jarred by residents’ regular protestations, and by the counselors’ regular dis- missals of them. Not certain what the policy still was, I went ahead and asked Ben, a senior counselor, “So, if they want to go home, can they?”

“Well, if they keep saying that, I wan go, eventually we will refer them to

[the zonal director], and he will listen to them. He has the authority to decide, but ultimately he too wants to see a happy ending. So he will ask them, do you want to go to school? And the person might say that they do but only if their school fees are paid, so he will agree: if you go to school NAPTIP will pay your school fee. But that means they have to stay and co-operate.”

I asked him again, “But what if they still really want to go? Will you just let them?”

Probably misreading my own sympathies, he insisted, “We will not just let them go,” shaking his head as if almost oﬀended by the insinuation. “It is our job to convince them. But in the end if they still really want to go, we will still not just let them disappear. We will at least refer them to an NGO or something.”

I tried to clarify once again. “So, you cannot force them to stay here? Or you can only force the young ones?”

“No, we do not force them,” he repeated. “It is no use to force anyone; our job is to convince them that this is for the best.”

Ben thus insisted that these women could eventually negotiate their way out of the shelter—a scenario I never witnessed in the entirety of my research, despite the ubiquity of I wan go demands. But tellingly, he sees these protests as directly related to his work at the shelter. “It is no use to force anyone; our job is to convince them that this is for the best,” he explains. For women in that state of mind, demanding to be released and resisting rehabilitation programming, the purpose of rehabilitation, in his words, is to convince them that they need the help of the shelter. In practice, this meant convincing them that they were being traf-

ﬁcked, that they need to reconsider the choices that lead them there, and that they need to make a new plan for themselves. Successful rehabilitation, required convincing residents to stay and submit to the NAPTIP program, including (ultimately

flimsy) incentives to stay in school or pursue other vocational training through local NGOs. Like Foucault’s account of imprisonment, rehabilitation here could be seen as “an art of effects, based on the possibility of repetition (the future) not crime itself (the past offense)” (1995). With recidivism recast as retrafficking, reha-

bilitation was intended to address those future “vulnerabilities” to ensure that everyone, in theory, sees “a happy ending.”

Reforming Resistance

Implicit in this model of intervention was that women who most protested their detention at the shelter were also those who most needed to be rehabilitated there. In this regard, I wan go laments were used as an index of women’s persistent vulnerability to be retraﬃcked, rather than as a legitimate demand of a responsible adult. Gallagher and Pearson (2010, 78) suggest that, in this context, it is actually quite common for staﬀ at shelters around the world to outright deny de facto detention practices, as Ben seems to do here. It is a common consequence of over- whelming good intentions and determination. Yet while Ben himself was uneasy with the idea of involuntary rehabilitation (”it’s no use to force anyone”), others counselors at the shelter took this line of thought a step further, disregarding even the idea that women should ever be able to refuse their services. For those counselors, it was to some extent even expected that residents would want to go. If their job was to convince them to rehabilitate and changing their goals, it made sense that they would never consent to it. To them, those who resisted intervention clearly needed it the most. Counselors sometimes referred to these residents as “brainwashed” by their circumstances, who just could not see the harm of their own choices and of their treatment by others.

Much anthropological work in recent years has explored the strategic performance of trauma in refugee and humanitarian cases, especially regarding the

right to immigrate (e.g. Feldman and Ticktin 2010; Ticktin 2011; Fassin and Recht- man 2009). In those cases, migrants have to present signs of their personal trauma histories, often written on the body or psyche, to state authorities in order to support legal claims to residency papers and other resources. These stakes are actually inverted at the shelter. There, the authorities try to convince the migrants that they have been abused, or were near it anyway. At the shelter, the state is the one who needs alleged victims to see their experiences dangerous and warranting extreme intervention, retroactively justifying their involuntary interception and detention. Recall again the counselor who always repeated to residents of the shelter that they would have had to “drink their own piss” on journeys across the Sahara.

In the course of my research, I did meet a few women who had stories more closely resembling the archetypical traﬃcking cases of forced prostitution, and some who really could not return home—women whose families were responsible for their traﬃcking, and orphans who had been exploited by foster relationships.

However, the few residents I met of this sort were also exceptional in that they did not mind being at the shelter in the ﬁrst place. All the restrictions and discomforts of daily life notwithstanding, they did not mind waiting, having a place to stay, and holding out hope for material support in the future.2 However, by the same token, this group also did not receive same level of attention the other residents experienced. They just did not need the kind of counseling, the same kind of convincing,

2 This observation is not intended as a barometer for traumatic pasts and worthiness of support; there are certainly many reasons to resist detention even under the most desperate of circumstances. However, the existence (though rare) of consenting rehabilitation participants demonstrates the ability of some victims to recognize better opportunities, suggesting the potential for a voluntary program of rehabilitation, discussed further in the dissertation conclusion.

that the others required. Indeed, they were consistently the darlings of the staﬀ, spoken of highly as well-behaved and level-headed. They were invited to speak to guests and reporters at the shelter more often, and were often more willing to do so. The ones who wanted to leave, on the other hand—those who wanted to resume traveling, or even just to go home—they were the ones who needed rehabilitation. Their desire to leave was implicitly considered direct evidence of an impatience with the process, a denial of the intervention’s purpose, and a rejection of

NAPTIP altogether. They were the ones who needed to be convinced.

This logic also inverts the common critique of human trafficking interventions that define the “worthy” victims as those innocent and naive women, forced into prostitution and so on (Doezema 2010; Anderson and Andrijasevic 2008; An- drijasevic 2010; Brennan 2008; Kempadoo 2005b). While subsequent “empowerment” selections reinforced these values, as discussed in Chapter 6, the approach within the shelter was different. Instead, it assumed that those women who were most in need of attention at the shelter are those apparently complicit in their own trafficking. By wanting to travel, and potentially wanting to enter the sex industry abroad, they became culpable. Their desire is dismissed as naive and misdirected, warranting exactly the kind of paternalistic intervention NAPTIP provides. As a result, the rehabilitative effort betrays a deeper ambivalence surrounding the prevailing attitudes toward victimhood at the shelter, consistent with the treatment of sex workers as objects of both pity and disdain, as both victim and whore (Agustín

2007; Chapkis 2003; Doezema 1999). Women at the shelter were at once believed victims—passive, naive, unable to have consented to these choices—as they were

also deemed culprits—responsible for their own vulnerabilities and requiring great intervention for personal reform. As such, it is their own desires and inclinations that most needed change, eliciting more attention from staﬀ, especially debating the merits of these choices.

Total Personality

The varying content of these debates is considered at length in each of the following chapters, but the overall ethos of convincing remains central across them. Counselors thus used every opportunity to encourage women to use their time at the shelter for reﬂection and and reform. Ben even once compared the place to a training bootcamp. A resident was complaining about the shelter, spe- ciﬁcally that she was not able to manage her normal routines of hygiene, beauty, and self-care there. Ben swiftly interrupted her complaints to share a long story about his NAPTIP training. For six months, he was not allowed to do his own routine either. He described getting up by 5 am every morning, running until 6, exer- cising for another half hour, and following a routine the entire day, explaining they had no time of their own to go into town or do what they wanted.

“All that,” he concluded, “is to say that I know how it feels, to be living under regimen.” The girls began to protest that it was not the same, but he continued. “I know what it is like, but I also knew I was there for training. I was able to prepare myself mentally. If you don’t see this place as training, you will have a problem. So, what is next? That is the question.”

“I wan go,” Sandra replied earnestly.

“Yes, yes,” Ben conceded, “of course everybody wan go, so that is not the question. The question is, what you are going to do when you get there? You have to have a plan.”

“Me, I will go to US! Follow my friend,” Sandra declared, grinning at me.

“Be serious and think about what she would like to do,” he insisted, lowering his voice. “You can use this place to improve yourself.”

Ben’s reference to the bootcamp evokes a another state rehabilitation program making headlines during my fieldwork—an amnesty program for militants in the Niger Delta passed under then President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in 2009 and executed under current President Goodluck Jonathan in 2010. Like the shelter, it offered a form of intervention framed explicitly as “rehabilitation,” but one that emphasized reorienting people for the future more than treating traumatic experiences from the past (see also Tashi and Lere 2001 on the use of counseling to re- solve religious conflicts elsewhere in the country). Under this program, the federal government collected guns and other weapons from over 20,000 young men in southern Nigeria in exchange for intensive vocational training. The men were invited to choose from 150 different skills courses in the area, but also were required to participate in a common residential rehabilitation program set up at old military camps in the area.

The curriculum in the common session was by no means limited to practical job skills, even if that was how it was originally presented to participants. As reported in the national press:

During the arrival of the ﬁrst batch of the former militants to the camp, a member of the Amnesty Committee on Rehabilitation and

Reorientation, Mr. Selekaye Ben Victor said, “the orientation has begun. These brothers that you ﬁnd here will be here for two weeks during which they would learn that in a society there are rules. And that is basically why they are here. They are here to be transformed. There are experts here to see to that. They are here to learn how to live in a civil society.”

In Mr. Selekaye’s own framing, it was a civilizing mission as much as an economic solution, promising to “transform” them for life in a “civil society.” The curriculum reportedly included lessons in non-violence by an American scholar, for example.

This model extends Foucault’s framing of reformatory imprisonment—whereby “one punishes not to eﬀace the crime [as in earlier models], but to transform a criminal (actual or potential)” (1995, 127)—except here the participants were not imprisoned at all, but oﬀered on an entirely voluntary (though highly incentivized) basis. Former militants all agreed to this training, whereas the prison and the shelter both remain involuntary. Indeed, the militants not only traded their own weapons for the opportunity to participate, but local newspapers reported protests by excluded applicants after the initial quota of participants was

ﬁlled. Even if these men did not seek out the sort of total transformation described here, the promise of job training (at a true diversity of positions, no less) provided some leverage for their cooperation, and there is no evidence that men were subsequently detained for training and rehabilitation. It is (ironically) the question of coercion and consent, then, that distinguishes the human traﬃcking interventions from militant amnesty program, undergirding the women’s adamant protest of them.

Studies of other counter-trafficking programs affirm this disciplinary ethos of intervention as well. Based on fieldwork at shelters in Southern and Eastern

Europe, Brunovskis and Surtees (2008, 63) argue that in these programs, “to be a good victim…is not to be too assertive, to be malleable, to change and ‘to learn’,” including acquiring a professed aversion to migration. Bjerkan and Dyrlid (2005,

142) make report similar patterns in Serbia and Moldova, where rehabilitation was perceived as a “transformation of deviant identities” or a “correction of personali- ties,” such that shelter beneﬁciaries were expected to reﬂect on their own values and priorities. Beyond the therapeutic or economic support, these transformations were promising to make “victims” better people. Or, as one of the counselors once put it to a frustrated resident, “Ok, so we at the shelter, we are not just here to tell you, no you cannot travel. We want to make sure you are learning things while you are here, so that when you leave, you will be improved. You will go back to your place, and your mother will say, is this girl, who is doing this thing?” It was a project of transformation.

Regimens for Reﬂection

Of course, while this reform eﬀort was concerted , it was far from the regi- mented lifestyle of Ben’s paramilitary training or even the amnesty curriculum for

Delta militants. Foucault argues that a prison, “though an administrative apparatus, will at the same time be a machine for altering minds,” where “work on the prisoner’s soul must be carried out as often as possible” (Foucault 1995, 125). Erving

Goﬀman describes similar spaces as “total institutions” (1961), where “all aspects of life are conducted in the same place and under the same single authority.” The shelter resembles Goﬀman’s general model of underlying features in a number of

ways—strict enforcement of house rules, rewards of minor privileges to do ordinary things, and resistance by disengagement. However, Goffman also suggests that a central feature of total institutions is that “all phases of the day’s activities are tightly scheduled [such that] the contents of the various enforced activities are brought together as parts of a single overall rational plan purportedly designed to fulfill the official aims of the institution” (44).

These accounts characterize the initial shelter years, when residents’ days were filled with a long string of organized activities, but they may seem less relevant to the idle gisting of residents observed more recently. When NAPTIP staff and administration lamented this change, they blamed not only a lack of funding but also a lack of interest amongst residents at the shelter. As has been explained elsewhere, if Nigeria’s original human trafficking victims and NAPTIP residents were (thought to be) more genuinely unknowing of the type of work and working conditions awaiting them in Europe, they may have seemed both more worthy and more appreciative of actual vocational training courses and other opportunities at the shelter. When I was there, by contrast, it was often assumed that most women at the shelter more or less knew that they would have to enter the sex industry abroad. Many, like Florence, had already completed various vocational training courses and apprenticeships before deciding to travel. Accordingly, they had little interest in pursuing the educational and vocational courses NAPTIP promised. The two courses available within the shelter interested no one, except out of occasional boredom or necessity; people tended to use them only when someone actually

wanted their hair done or if they needed to tailor some clothes. It seems ﬁtting then, that fewer and fewer courses have been oﬀered over the years.

Here I want to suggest, however, that the scarcity of formally dedicated programing did not necessarily detract from the mission of the shelter, especially given the diﬀerent goals of preventative rehabilitation. With resources for education and training depleted, residents were generally left to each other and their own diversions, and even scheduled activities were more or less optional. If anything, they were subject more to informal lectures and debates than to prearranged activities. Counselors are constantly urging residents to “use their time in the shelter” like Ben does above—not to learn a skill, but to think. To use it wisely was to examine the choices that got them to the shelter and reconsider the plans they will make once they leave.

In that sense, even idle, ostensibly unplanned time still may have served the purpose of the institution overall, consistent with Goffman’s characterization. He observes that in those cases where no or little work is required, “inmates, un- trained often in leisurely ways of life, suffer extremes of boredom” (45), but here that boredom could serve a purpose. Indeed, Goffman predicts this usage of time too, though perhaps inadvertently. He argues that residents of total institutions often feel that “time spent in the establishment is time wasted or destroyed or taken from one’s life,” but that as a consequence that time becomes “bracketed off for constant conscious consideration,” suggesting that “perhaps the high level of ruminative self-concern found among inmates in total institutions is a way of han- dling the sense of wasted time.” He describes this general process as follows:

It seems that in many total institutions a peculiar kind and level of self-concern is engendered. The low position of inmates relative to their station on the outside, as established initially through the mortifying processes, seems to make for a milieu of personal failure and a round of life in which one’s fall from grace is continuously pressed home. In response, the inmate tends to develop a story, a line, a sad tale—a kind of lamentation and apologia—which he constantly tells to his fellows as a means of creditably accounting for his present low estate. While staﬀ constantly discredit these lines, inmate audiences tend to employ tact, suppressing at least some of the disbelief and boredom engendered by these recitations. In consequence, the inmate’s own self may become even more of a focus for his conversation than it does on the outside. (52)

At the shelter, counselors actively encouraged this kind of consideration, as a way to specifically not have their time there all be a waste. By encouraging this introspection, staff members discredited some of the explanations victims offered for their current state, but also help developed alternatives. The effort to “convince” them was actually helping them rewrite the script themselves. If, as Goffman suggests, idleness can be the inadvertent impetus for such musings, then the open calendar was actually consistent then with exactly the kind of rehabilitation that the counselors sought to provide.

Opening Up

This process of eﬀecting deep, personal reform dovetailed with other objectives of the NAPTIP mission in important ways that I do not mean to understate.

Most pressingly, successful rehabilitation in these terms would directly enhance ongoing investigation by securing victim cooperation with NAPTIP staﬀ. Counsel- ors at the shelter were constantly urging women to truly “open up” about their travel plans and experiences to NAPTIP staﬀ if they wanted to be released. Disclo- sure helped move the investigation forward and was also used a as a way to win

favor with authorities at the NAPTIP headquarters. In this second half of this chapter, I will explore how the transformations promoted by counselors, especially captured in this plea to “open up,” were important but not reducible to the confession and cooperation priorities of the NAPTIP agenda.

The national rehabilitation policy directly lists obtaining additional information from victims as one of several purposes of sheltering. On that level, forced rehabilitation practices might be read as another straightforward practice of a cruel and corrupt state. If one considers then that most women at the shelter were there against their will, detention could even be read as a form of torture, leveraging release for the exchange of information about trafficking schemes that the women otherwise would not have shared. As mentioned previously, the few successful convictions of traffickers in Nigeria hinged entirely on victim testimony, and conviction statistics remained an important measure of effectiveness for the

US TIP Report rankings. While counselors at the shelter were officially separated from the investigation and prosecution teams across town, everyone understood that opening up to the the shelter staff might enable further cooperation with other officials within the agency.

Eﬀorts to “convince” residents within the rehabilitation process then must be interpreted within eﬀorts to convince them to cooperate with NAPTIP more broadly. However, I believe it would be a mistake to frame them as only serving this immediate need. Here, I use Foucault’s theory of the confession to argue that

“opening up” revelations served not only to legitimize and advance the prosecution of alleged traﬃckers, but also reinforced deeper rehabilitative goals of the shelter

program. That is, “opening up” was treated as an index for individual’s acceptance of the NAPTIP program, the traﬃcking narrative, and the broader range of advice and counseling they proposed.

Residents were told they would be held in the shelter as long as their cases were being investigated, so “opening up” and cooperating with the case oﬃcers was the best way to hurry that process along.3 “You say you wan go,” counselors would regularly admonish, “but you’ve not even talked.” As Ben once explained,

“It’s really important to open up to your counselor. I am not anyone’s counselor here, but I can tell you that if you open up to them, they might just go the extra mile on the matter. But if you are just quiet then no one will know what is on your mind.”

Counselors even insisted explicitly to residents that confessing would not only hurry the process, but free them entirely. For example, in the ﬁrst group counseling session for a newly arrived group of women, many kept demanding to know how long they would have to stay there. Ben then explained their detention as follows: “You are not meant to stay here more than six weeks. But it could be that the oﬃce asked for some papers, and by law then you are technically free but you are holding yourself. Some people are here to try your case. They are holding someone in a cell to prosecute...But that is why you must be open with your coun-

3 As a condition of my access to the shelter, I had no access to the investigation process as such, so I can’t speak to how these interrogations differed from the ones offered by the investigation and prosecution teams based out of the zonal office across town. Still, counselors regularly insisted they were working closely with their colleagues to parse out the details of each case, and—with no ex- pectation of therapeutic confidentiality between counselor and resident—they operated on the assumption that “opening up” in counseling was the equivalent of opening up to the entire NAPTIP staff.

selor. Don’t hide your story. Tell the truth.” In more intense moments of argument and frustration, these explanations easily slid into threats sounding much more sinister. A counselor once admonished Florence this way, insisting “If you just laugh, you will laugh with your counselor all the way through New Years. If you don’t talk, you will see Christmas in this shelter I promise you. You think all these people who are going, you think they are just picking them and taking them? No, they have a file, and that file has to be complete. If you do not talk for that file you will stay for shelter.”

Occasionally these tensions would erupt into full arguments and shouting matches, residents emphatically retelling one story, counselors still refusing to believe it. Florence was particularly stubborn in this regard. A few weeks later into her stay, I was observing a literacy course in the common room, when Florence returned from a meeting with the investigators down the hall. They were visiting from the zonal headquarters to talk to her about her case. Florence walked in, interrupted the class, and ﬁrmly declared to the room—without context—that she

“didn’t know the girl” repeatedly. She repeated that this girl was not her friend, and she never knew her before that day. She explained later that she was referring to a woman who had met her at the airport and was being held elsewhere for Flor- ence’s alleged traﬃcking. The investigators kept badgering Florence about the woman in their meetings, soliciting more information about their relationship and travel arrangements.

At ﬁrst I took Florence’s unsolicited declarations to the class participants and instructor as a sign of her growing paranoia and frustration—aﬃrming her po-

sition to the other students and the teacher alike, even though the teacher herself was neither a regular NAPTIP employee, nor was she formally involved in the investigation process. The teacher spent only a few hours in the shelter each week and rarely indulged such drama in the classroom. I was therefore much surprised when she delayed the lesson further to entertain the conversation with Florence.

“For the third time today,” she said, “it’s just time to tell the truth about all of it, and stop denying everything.

“Which truth do they want to hear?” Florence demanded, “Which truth?? I gave them my brother’s number. Me, I just wan go!” She paused, exasperated.

“You want to go? But you’ve not talked, Florence,” he said.

“What do you want me to say?” she pleaded.

“What did I tell you the day that I took you, when we were in the van?” he said, feigning patience with her.

Everyone in the room was watching as Florence shrugged that she did not know and the counselor looked to her travel companion. “He said that we were lying,” she recalled.

Growing angry again, Florence repeated herself once more: “I never met that woman before and she does not know about me. I didn’t know her before. We just met at the airport, where I saw her. I didn’t go follow her—when we reach the airport [in Gambia] my brother was to come pick me.”

“Na lie,” the counselor replied ﬂatly (it’s a lie).

Exchanges like this one demonstrate the how the antagonisms between shelter staﬀ and residents about detention policies often led into more direct in-

terrogations about the truth of their travel plans. The counselor puts the burden of transparency on Florence’s shoulders. From the start, he insisted, they have asked that she be forthright with her travel plans, and that she should not expect to go until she “talks.” Florence implied that she would be willing to say whatever they want her to say, but ultimately stuck to the story she had been been using all along, denying that she knew the woman accused of traﬃcking her.

What Florence did not know was that her travel companion had already

“opened up” to the counselors with a diﬀerent account of their travel plans. Pa- tience never told Florence that she had already talked, but she often complained privately to the counselors that they did not hold up their end of the bargain. Ben once explained frankly to her, “Okay, ﬁne, but the stories still have to match up.

Even if you have said everything, there are two others, and their stories have to match up too. And right now your own matches with one, but not the other…” He trailed oﬀ for a moment before saying directly what he had been implying for some time: “If that girl Florence doesn’t tell the truth, it will remain stuck, because the stories will not match.”

Confessional Technologies

Exchanging information for release functioned on one level as a straightforward kind of extortion. However, it also had the potential to shift deeper relationships between residents and counselors, especially in light of the personality projects discussed in the ﬁrst half of this chapter. The reform agenda was made diﬃcult by the well-engrained distrust women had in NAPTIP, not just for the

mistreatment they experienced in detention, but due to a greater distrust of the

Nigerian government, especially its police and paramilitary agencies.

In this context, women would lie about their travel plans to NAPTIP staff and other authorities precisely because they already held such suspicion and disregard they hold toward their own government. Distrust of both the state in the abstract and state officials in practice is well-founded in Nigeria, and would very well preclude candid disclosure with border agents and NAPTIP investigators from the start. Furthermore, the women knew they were traveling illicitly, and many were at least initially detained on these grounds. On top of all that, detention at border checkpoints and at the shelter would only encourage these suspicions, no matter how much officials might suggest it was for their own protection. Residents plainly felt alienated from the investigation supposedly being launched on their behalf. As

Florence would often declare, “They are investigating, abi? (Right?) Please let me investigate too.”

Counselors knew that residents experienced their time in the shelter in this context, establishing an opposition between residents on one hand and NAPTIP along with the Nigerian government on the other. Counselors then reinforced the division by deriding most residents for being untruthful throughout their stay. The pressure to “open up” thereby defined the terms of that division, drawing a line in the sand that put people on sides. It implied that if residents did not disclose their own plans, they might have been complicit in their own trafficking and were now trying to protect not only themselves but their alleged traffickers as well. NAPTIP was in the battle against traffickers, and if residents did not prove to be on their

side, they must be with the other, where opening up was an invitation to cross over.

Threats about detention until disclosure were by no means empty, and women at the shelter slowly learned to perform their compliance to try to solicit release. These lessons were made explicit in moments of mentoring and peer ad- vising about how to navigate the NAPTIP system. One younger girl, for example, was scheduled for release one day after weeks in the shelter for working as a domestic “house help.” Thrilled at the announcement, Eze ran to her room, packed all her belongings, and left for the zonal headquarters, only to have “a discrepancy” show up in her file. She was devastated to find herself back in the shelter again and shaken by the renewed warnings from the shelter manager. Seeing her distress, some of the older residents offered to help her advance her case later that afternoon, revealing their understanding of the disclosure process.

Everyone agreed that she should first go beg for another chance to explain herself. Unsure of different staff members’ exact names, titles, or responsibilities, everyone was at least familiar with the hierarchy of authority within the agency.

They repeated that she consult “that oga [boss] lady,” and not just any of the counselors. Three of the older residents even bullied Eze a bit for lying about the case

—”stupid girl!” they repeated. Another woman interrupted to insist that she had already told the truth herself and gave all requested information about who had brought her there, and she could not understand why she too was not being considered for release. Unable to explain such inconsistencies in an already ambiguous process, the women ignored her and continued their inquest.

They urged Eze to again explain what happened. “We are three who came… including my brother and my sister…” she mumbled, stammering and frustrated.

Eze repeated that she truly could not remember some things, but other girls helped her recall street names and neighborhood landmarks from stories she had told them in passing over the weeks they had shared in the shelter. Slowly they put together details. One woman found writing materials and everyone leaned over her lap as she composed a statement, hoping to clarify whatever discrepancy had kept Eze from leaving. My name is Eze, and I am from Anambra State, it read so far.

“And who invited you to travel?” Rose inquired next, assembling Eze’s story into a series of coherent steps, from her Uncle’s invitation forward. She wrote them down in formal English and assured Eze that it all would be settled soon.

Cristiana Giordano (2008) describes an similar process of narrative construction among human trafficking victims in Italy. She observes how staff at a psychiatric hospital assisted women applying for resident benefits to reconstruct their stories into a cogent, recognizable form that would work for residency and benefits applications. The residents at the shelter learned the same interrogation and narrative style from their own meetings with NAPTIP staff, including both case workers and counselors. Their reproduction of it amongst themselves affirms the sense they held of “what they want to hear,” hoping quite explicitly that such disclosure would help secure Eze’s release.

“Opening up” in this context is not merely important for providing new information. NAPTIP investigators already (felt that they) understood the details of

Florence’s case from her companion’s account of it, and Eze here provided no new

or important details that could be bartered for her release. While there was an element of extortion in holding women until they spoke, it cannot be accounted for by the content of their confessions alone. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that in the 18th century, there was a dual purpose to confession, especially for those who had been tortured prior to actual conviction. First, it “signed the truth of the preliminary investigation”—an important point for the counter- traﬃcking organization, which in addition to needing to prosecute criminals, also needs to justify the dramatic acts of intervention it has already made on victims’ behalf. Second, and more pertinent to the shelter regimen, Foucault observes that

“through the confession, the accused committed himself to the procedure” (Fou- cault 1995, 39). In the same manner, “opening up” indexed residents’ cooperation with the NAPTIP program, not only for prosecution purposes, but in the rest of the rehabilitation process. It was this latter function that was intertwined with the rehabilitative spirit Foucault describes for prisoners of a later epoch, where a “commitment to the procedure” of the shelter also indexes an acceptance of NAPTIP’s narrative.

In this sense, “opening up” is important not only to establishing the truth acts of trafficking committed and advancing prosecution of traffickers, but to reforming the dispositions and vulnerabilities that made each woman subject to trafficking in the first place. Here, the identified victims’ interior selves become subject of knowledge and reform, like the delinquent in Foucault’s account:

The oﬀender becomes an individual to know. This demand for knowledge was not…to provide substance for the sentence and to determine the true degree of guilt. It is as a convict, as a point of application for punitive mechanisms, that the oﬀender is consti-

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tuted himself as the object of possible knowledge[—the delinquent.]

… The delinquent is to be distinguished from the oﬀender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him. The penitentiary operation, if it is to be a genuine re-education, must become the sum total existence of the delinquent, making of the prison a sort of artiﬁcial and coercive theatre in which his life will be examined from top to bottom…It is a bio- graphical observation of the delinquent ‘should go back not only to the circumstances, but also to the causes of his crime; they must be sought in the story of his life, from the triple point of view of psy- chology, social position and upbringing, in order to discover the second and the bad antecedents of the third… it establishes the ‘criminal’ as existing before the crime and even outside it.

For rehabilitation to be successful, then, the shelter must act not only on the incident of traﬃcking, but the range of dispositions and desires that made their traf-

ficking possible. Where Foucault describes the construction of a “dangerous” individual, the victim is constructed as a “vulnerable” one. Both embody some assessment of future risk, putting information about past offenses in service of future risk reduction, where retrafficking (like recidivism) serves as the primary motivat- ing logic for intervention. In this manner, the demand to “open up” serves both the prosecutor’s interest in the truth of the act as well as the counselor’s interest in the truth of the person.

Trauma in Africa

As predicted in Foucault’s “triple point of view,” there is a psychological element to this kind of disclosure as well. Indeed, it may be tempting to dismiss these interventions as merely ‘bad’ therapy, where residents are crudely forced into divulging revelations about past traumas. Indeed, mental health services are in-

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deed rather rudimentary in Nigeria, but they also were just not deemed as relevant for the cases I saw at the shelter.

As described above, since the women I worked with were rescued preemptively, no one expected them to have actually present any signs of past traumatic experiences. Indeed, even the few rather obvious potential symptoms of trauma I observed at the shelter (all amongst younger, domestically-traﬃcked residents), such as bed wetting or sobbing in ﬁts, were rarely interpreted within a psychological paradigm. Instead, those instances were dismissed as childish attention seeking or even demon possession. Needless to say, no one considered whether such acts might also be the result of the trauma of interception and detention as well.

There was a single trained psychologist on the NAPTIP staff in Lagos, but he was reportedly only brought in to counsel the most “severe” cases (US TIP Re- port 210:257). He was based entirely at the separate office of the zonal headquarters and often seemed to function more as an administrative figure. He inter- viewed women occasionally when they were brought to the offices for investiga- tory interviews, rarely making appearances at the shelter itself, and even then usually only as a part of a larger tours with high ranking NAPTIP officials and important donors and guests. Of the dozen or so counselors who actually interacted with residents on a day to day basis, only a couple were even formally educated as social workers. The rest boasted various university degrees, including business, math, and economics. As typical for the much-coveted, salaried positions with the federal government, all had been hired through political connections and nepotism at the main headquarters—stories separately retold to me in reference to an uncle who

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got someone’s application in front of the right eyes, a cousin who had lived near the Executive Secretary years previous, and so on.

Over the years, several US TIP Reports noted this lack of proper trauma treatment skills amongst staff, recommending improved training for everyone who interacted with victims. NAPTIP has obligingly convened several workshops to this effect, but the agenda and program notes from at least one such event suggest that much of the actual training offered was peripheral at best. A four day workshop on

“stress and trauma management for victims of human traﬃcking” was organized by NAPTIP in collaboration with the United Nations Oﬃce on Drugs and Crime

(under which the 2000 UN counter-traﬃcking protocol was passed) in September of 2010 at one of the major state universities near Lagos. Each day consisted of morning and afternoon sessions, making eight sessions total. Four of those sessions appear to have been basically recycled from corporate human resources lectures (”Developing a positive attitude to work,” “Why employees resist change,”

“Health and stress management in the workplace” and “Emotional intelligence / well-being”). As is customary, the first and last sessions were reserved for open and closing ceremonies. Therefore, out of a four day workshop, only a single day was dedicated specifically to teach counselors and other stakeholders how to better deal with victims of trauma and human trafficking. Still, the effort was noted approvingly in the subsequent annual review of the US TIP Reports.

The state of mental health services in Nigeria is similarly dire. In their study of humanitarian intervention, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman (2009: 187-8) observe that Africa has been largely left out of the global trauma aid industry, re-

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ﬂecting a persistent sense of Otherness founded on racial diﬀerences. Even Nigeri- ans believe that “people don’t get depressed in Nigeria” (Anya 2012). One exception to this may be the relatively recent emergence of HIV counseling and support groups over the last two decades, especially with increased testing and treatment made available through the American PEPFAR program and other foreign donors.

Other anthropologists, notably Vin Kim Nguyen (2010) have observed elsewhere a moralizing, almost evangelical pressure to “come out” as HIV positive that might be comparable to NAPTIP pressures to “open up.” However, much HIV programing in Nigeria remains premised upon the discreet management of care and disclosure of individual conditions (Rhine 2009). Instead, HIV counseling oﬀered in Ni- geria emphasizes practical advice about living with the disease, generally outside the psychological paradigm. In that regard, if HIV/AIDS counseling proves also to be more about prevention and transmission, it may then bear a stronger resem- blance to the model of intervention oﬀered at the shelter, which likewise favors information on vulnerability reduction and so on.

Conclusion

Understood in this context, the lack of trauma intervention in the medical, psychological paradigm at the shelter was in part due to its scarcity in Nigeria and in Africa more broadly. However, in its stead, was a diﬀerent sensibility about what women needed and how counselors could best help them. It was not merely “bad” therapy, a superﬁcial performance by a corrupt, weak, or inept state institution.

Rather, it was a diﬀerent agenda altogether. Indeed, the personal reform agenda

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described in the ﬁrst half of this chapter could be read as a much more ambitious project.

This distinction between projects is important to our reading of African state projects, which are too often analyzed exclusively along linear lines of good governance. Where states appear “weak” and “failing,” and governmental services like health care and community projects are often outsourced to local and international nongovernmetal organizations (Nguyen 2010). Literature on African statecraft, on the other hand, has emphasized how corrupt governments like Nigeria serve as mere facades, as spectacular simulacra oﬀered to appropriate international funding and good will, again evoking Mbembe (1992, 2000) and Bayart (2000,

2009). That the violence of detention at the shelter was defended as benevolent protection supports those canonical theories, too. However, within those walls, I want to propose that state counselors also cultiate a diﬀerent kind of relationship to residents, revealing a diﬀerent kind of African governmentality.

As implied by the penitentiary comparisons throughout this chapter, the actual practices of rehabilitation shared much in common with the form of discipline Foucault associates with modern reform institutions. Yet, counselors were left to justify these kind of state interventions in the absence of reliable faith in state institutions and governmental authority. Even the women at the shelter seemed to ﬁnd this exceptional, such that the counselors’ earnest attention to their lives and futures often came as a surprise. Counselors’ eﬀorts to defend NAPTIP intervention and change migrant women’s dispositions toward traveling out thus

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represent not only an alternative vision of rehabilitation, but an emergent ﬁeld of governance, forged in an otherwise corrupt and capricious state system.

While many women continued to resist and resent these advances, the following chapters will show how others found themselves occasionally relenting and often, in retrospect, appreciative of their efforts. While intertwined with the practices of involuntary detention described in the previous chapter, rehabilitation was ultimately presented not as a punitive measurement but a benevolent one, with some success in convincing women to change their view of NAPTIP and to truly open up to the possibility of rehabilitation there. This chapter has shown how tese efforts coincided with but are not reducible to other NAPTIP priorities around the investigation of human traffickers. The following chapters look at how this refor- mative process plays out more concretely around different specific topics —migration, sex, religion, and professional ambition. These cases further demonstrate the intimate tactics and technologies used to govern migrant women’s bodies at the shelter, not usually associated with migrant-sending or African states.

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PART II

Debating Women’s Choices

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CHAPTER THREE

Risky Moves

I was once visiting a former shelter resident when her precocious four-year old nephew snuck up behind me. He stole a kiss on my cheek and announced in pidgin that I should take him as my husband and carry am go back to my country.

I was used to visa marriage proposals in taxi rides by this point, but this seemed a new record. As a white American living in Nigeria, I was a steady symbol of the opportunities and exoticism of life outside Africa to nearly everyone I met, and it was a conversation seemingly everyone wanted to have.

Migration stories often start with why people want to leave their homeland.

But in Nigeria, like many parts of the global south, that task is at once too obvious and too elusive. When even small children appreciate the opportunity represented by a foreigner in the house, there is something more embedded at play. People do not necessarily think in terms of reasons to leave, gradually accumulating in some mental register until the push factors overwhelm any inertia to stay put. Of course, they can produce plenty of reasons if asked: poverty, lack of opportunity, wanting to try something new. But more often than not, those were the most unproductive conversations of my research—measurable on a societal scale, but with little meaning on an individual level.

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The desire to leave Nigeria was not a decision a person makes one day; it was the air everyone breathes. People called America “God’s own country,” with big smiles drawn across their faces—a phrase invariably followed by a vow to one day see the place for themselves. The Global Face of Migration survey, conducted jointly by IOM (the International Organization for Migration) and Gallup Poll in

2011, reported that nearly half (49%) of all adult sub-saharan Africans say they would like to migrate for work, at least temporarily. According to a 2009 poll, 38% would move permanently. A 2012 Gallup Poll reported that 16% of adult Nigeri- ans—about 15 million people—would want to migrate to US alone. In short, in places like Nigeria, the desire to travel out is ubiquitous and taken for granted.

Everyone wants to go, or so it was assumed. Anthropologist Charles Piot (2010) describes this sentiment as a “culture of exile,” a way of living life in the constant shadow of the foreign. It was this idea of the foreign, what Nigerians call abroad, that became the reservoir of hope and imagined opportunity for those struggling to move ahead in the lurching economies of Africa’s giant.

This chapter assesses how NAPTIP treated migration and mobility in the shelter, a component of the reform agenda described in the previous chapter. I argue that the counselors at the shelter treated the desire to emigrate as a source of vulnerability to retraﬃcking, thus prompting a consistent message discouraging migration throughout the rehabilitation process. I show how this tactic reframed a shared, social sensibility about the desirability of leaving Nigeria as an individual

ﬂaw. I argue that this was a gendered and classed distinction, permitting the continued mobility of Nigerian elites while dismissing desires of undocumented mi-

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grants as naive and undeserving. I make these arguments using ethnography of debates at the shelter about migration, including forced conversations about why residents had originally tried to leave and whether or not they would try to migrate again. I recount the ways staﬀ and residents sparred over the appeals of traveling abroad, the kind of work they hoped to ﬁnd there, and the risks they were willing to take on to do so. I situate these arguments with other strategies of migrant education, protection, and prevention, tracing how the NAPTIP approach

ﬁts within a broader spectrum of migrant-sending and migrant-receiving state intervention programs.

Imagining America Abroad

This collective interest in emigration is, of course, by no means unique to

Nigeria. Charles Piot (2010) describes the culture of exile as a physical and imaginary landscape permeated with signs of wealth and opportunity abroad. He recounts the phone booths, Western Union stations, and internet cafes that increasingly populate the streets of Togo, where living abroad becomes the purest collective fantasy entire communities and even the nation:

It would not be exaggerating too much to say that everyone in Togo is trying to leave—by playing the [visa] lottery, by trying to get into European or American universities, by arranging ﬁctitious mar- riages with foreigners, by joining churches that might take them abroad, by hoping to be signed by a European soccer team, by joining the fan club that accompanies the national soccer team over- seas. (4)

That determined ambition was certainly evident in Nigeria as well, and it was demonstrated with particular enthusiasm at the shelter.

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After relying upon America smalltalk so much in my life outside the shelter, it was no surprise that residents there also sought me out to talk about “abroad.”

Sometimes they had serious logistical questions, but as often they approached me with a simple sense of curiosity and wonder. Indeed, these were often the ﬁrst conversations people would broach, easy ice breakers for the odd oyibo (white person) hanging around the shelter. Importantly, this was not unique to the would-be migrant women either, who of course had already pursued interests in emigrating.

Again, I was most impressed by the by the adamant interest in travel expressed by the younger residents of the shelter, who also shared in that fantasy.

One morning while making my normal round of greetings at the shelter, a younger girl of about twelve, Titi, grabbed my hand and lead me up to the common room, smiling sheepishly and talking softly in mixed pidgin and Yoruba. I could not understand most of what she was saying until I recognized the usual phrase: “carry am go—carry am for US?” I should take her home with me, she said.

It was a fairly common if half-serious request, and I replied with my usual jokes about ﬁtting her in my suitcase and how she would have to eat our bloody under- cooked steak. She recoiled at the thought and squealed with delight, drawing the attention of some of the other residents down from the hall—mostly adolescents brought in a sweep of house-help investigations. The eldest among them, Precious, quickly promised that she would eat the beef, anything, to be able to come with me. Disgusted but not discouraged, everyone agreed, still laughing at the thought.

If children in the US fantasize about futures in professional athletics, children in

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Nigeria dreamt about traveling (or, better yet, as Piot suggests, playing professional football in part to be able to emigrate to the US or Europe).

One of the residents joked that she would borrow my hair and wear it like a wig to pass as American when she travelled. And not just my hair, but my skin too, she joked. Maybe when she follows me to US, she said, her skin will change to that color. To my surprise, another older resident actually insisted that it was possible, explaining in earnestness that she used to watch the E! channel on satellite television, where she saw this doctor, “this doctor one thousand, or something,” she said, looking at me, gesturing with her hands. “He makes those breasts?” “Dr.

90210!” I exclaimed, laughing to myself at the lessons they must have learned about America from the salacious reality show about a plastic surgeon in Los An- geles. I started to say something about the harms of popular skin lightening creams, but no one was interested in the sanctimonious lecture. Titi nodded but repeated playfully that she would just take my skin then anyway, and my hair, and then go to US. The American imaginary was a powerful one, even for these young teens.

Hope teased her that it doesn’t matter because as soon as she talks—”as soon as you say wetin instead of what or dey instead of is” — they would all know she was a Nigerian and send her back—a prudent recognition of the Bourdieuian habitus of nation and class beyond mere phenotype. Everyone guffawed as Hope offered exaggerated imitations of how the conversations would go, doing her own best nasally American accent and showing how her pidgin would still slip out. I did her one better and for a moment suppressed my own pidgin-inflected rhythms of

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speech that had become second nature over the past few months. They stared at me wide-eyed and silent for a moment, almost unable to understand my natural accent. We quickly broke back into laughter, but it was a bittersweet one, momen- tarily entertained but ultimately disheartened by the incommensurability of these barriers.

With a sigh, Hope continued on about how life must be abroad. She argued that in America, there was not corruption like there is in Nigeria—that you could not pay a bribe to avoid your electricity bill or police fine, for example. I intervened to suggest that we do have corruption in the United States too, but of course it was different. Hope agreed. “It must be different,” she said, “because Nigeria’s own celebrities will go to US, but American celebrities will not want to come to Nigeria.”

She recalled how hip hop megastar 50 Cent had come for a few concerts in Lagos and Abuja, but how so many others had refused. “Even when Rihanna came to Ni- geria, she had her own hotel basically, they just bought the whole thing so she wouldn’t go anywhere…But most people won’t come here, and it’s because the US has more.” Indeed, this self-aware barometer of national worth is a relative feature in Nigerian media. A news story about “the world’s most famous American reality show celebrity” Kim Kardashian’s paid visit to Nigeria, for example, opened with the following declaration: “Despite what is considered as Nigeria’s many draw- backs, the nation remains yet a destination point to several international person- ages, including entertainment celebrities, music stars and exponents” (Abad-

Santos 2012).

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Finally, one of the Togolese boys declared that did not think he really would want to go, arousing great doubt and outrage amongst the rest. “Really?!”

Hope demanded, “you don’t just want to go, to see how it is? To see how the people are, and those things?” She quickly began expounding on the novelties of

American life. “In the US, there is light [electricity], all the time. And they just have to pay for it, so when people go out, they will off the lights, off the television, and all of that, because they will pay the fee if they use too much. And then, if someone is making too much noise, they will call the police, and he will come to the door and say, I’m sorry, but you are arrested for making noise, and he will take you and make you pay a fine. The police there do that kind of thing!”

It seemed like a strange set of stories to relay, but I could immediately see how mesmerized everyone was at the claim. In Nigeria, the police would not show up for serious crimes, let alone something as strange and innocuous as noise pollu- tion. Neither was their interest merely in reliable police infrastructure. Lagosians will blast music from 6 am if they have electricity, and neighbors call over only to ask to repeat favorite songs, or maybe turn it up even louder. The fantasy of exile was not merely one of ﬁnancial success, though it is certainly that as well. Life was not only imagined to be better in the US, but it boasted additional appeal of an exotic way of life. In an explication of transnationalism theory in anthropology,

James Cliﬀord (1997) proposes that we need to develop a framework that allows us to understand experiences of migration, displacement, and diaspora as a form of

“travel,” inequivalent but comparable to the bourgeois forms of tourism and exploration that characterize other forms of mobility. The consensus in the room about

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the different appeals of traveling to America, both practical and romantic, affirmed the depth of these desires beyond straight economic disparities. In that swell of anticipation and aspiration, Titi finally turned around from playing with my hair and put both her hands on the bars over the window. “I wan go!” she bellowed out over the compound.

Scare Tactics & Horror Stories

It was amidst these beliefs and ambitions about living abroad that counselors were tasked with the unenviable job of convincing the would-be migrant women at the shelter to not try to migrate again. Since most of the shelter residents had been stopped preemptively while en route to foreign destinations, the

ﬁrst step in this process was to convince them of the danger of their original travel plans—essentially to try to convince them that they were being traﬃcked, and to take seriously the horrors of what that meant.

One day after group counseling, one of the residents was complaining in pidgin “wahala...I wan go...dey wahala”— saying that he was sick of their trouble and just wanted to leave. He repeated this sentiment over and over, until one of the counselors snapped back at him: “you sabi wetin dey bi wahala?”—do you even know what real trouble is? “No more talk of wahala,” they warned. The irony of the accusation was not lost on me, as the counselor accused the purported child traf-

ﬁcking victim, a Togolese boy about 12 years old, of not knowing true suﬀering.

The boy resumed mumbling—”I wan go…wan go”—but this time Florence was the one to interrupt. Amused at their mutual frustration, she bellowed mock-

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ingly “YOU DEY GOOOOOO…” (you are going!) until the whole room was silent, and then ﬁlled again with mischievous giggling.

Convinced that the boy’s whining and Florence’s outbursts showed they were not taking the program seriously enough, the two counselors began expounding on all the gory clichés of human traﬃcking once again—modern day slavery, forced prostitution, and so on.

Florence protested their claims, saying that those stories did not apply to her. The counselors countered that of course the traﬃckers would not tell her the truth, because then she would not make the journey, “so they deceive you.”

“My own brother DECEIVE me?!” she exclaimed, outraged.

“Your blood brother?” one counselor asked.

“He’s my cousin,” she conceded.

“Well, they deceive,” another counselor aﬃrmed. “You are even lucky that

Gambia is so close. If you go to Egypt, you know they go by desert. And then, most of them, they drink their own piss!”

In confrontations like these, the counselors aimed to convince the residents of the shelter that they were nearly subject to these dangers, encouraging them to have more patience with their current situation in light of more extreme suﬀering avoided. But they were also urging them to consider a diﬀerent path, warning them that next time they try to travel, they may not be so lucky. Other horror stories included even more graphic accounts, telling of women forced to have sex with dogs, most travelers dying in the desert crossing, and so on. While such cases have been documented, when I pursued the origin of these tales, counselors were

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apt to site popular ﬁction, Nollywood ﬁlms and UN-sponsored documentaries alike. They rarely actually retold the travel experiences of women under their care.

These sorts of clichés recurred in donor-funded workshops and politicians speeches in local newspapers throughout my fieldwork, emphasizing in dramatic terms the scourge on humanity, the blight of the nation, and the abject suffering of women and children. The stories took on mythic proportions, not unlike those found in other counter-trafficking campaigns around the world (Andrijasevic 2007,

2010; Cheng 2008, 2011). They were repeated in NAPTIP’s broader public enlightenment campaigns as well, which issued foreboding warnings via radio jingles, billboards, and posters at airports and international borders about the dangers of women’s migration.

Some of these narratives were based in the truly horriﬁc experiences of land journeys to Europe. Women and men really were deceived in all manner and ways, died in dessert crossings, and were coerced into forced labor, sexual or otherwise.

It is not that such tales were entirely fabricated, then, but that their deployment among women already identiﬁed as human traﬃcking victims should draw some skepticism about how extreme cases of can be used to justify the detention of a much wider class of migrant women. This model of intervention—both in the initial interception and in the rehabilitation espoused at the shelter—disavows all

“vulnerable” women’s travel ambitions without exception. It oﬀers no alternatives to mitigate the risks described and thereby implies that not migrating at all as the only apparent solution.

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Figure 2 “Fight prostitution” Figure 3 “I’ll get you a job in Italy”

Figure 4 “Die in hot deserts or drown in seas”

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Blindly Optimistic?

While archetypical stories of human traﬃcking were used to summarily discourage all interests in migrating, more nuanced deconstructions of residents’ original plans pushed toward this same conclusion as well. Still dismissive of women’s intentions, counselors in this tactic worked to break down the logic of their choices to expose the misguided nature of their eﬀorts. They variously framed women’s migration plans as naive, materialistic, and even lazy.

The following group counseling session was typical.

We began by introducing ourselves to new arrivals in the usual way: me by introducing myself and my project, and the residents by introducing themselves and saying they wan go. Prudence, the lead counselor for the day, rolled her eyes a little and began.

“Ok the topic for today is contentment. Sabi wetin bi contentment? Na big gramma’, abi? Is this grammar too high? Can you understand? Shall I lower it?”

Another counselor nodded. “Ok, what of satisfaction? Do you know what it means to be satisﬁed?” she continued. “What does it mean when you eat food and feel satisﬁed? That is satisfaction. Has anyone ever felt good about something they have done? Something that made them feel, ahehn, that was nice...No one? What about you, Florence?”

“When my uncle asked me to come to Gambia. I felt happy to travel. Happy to go abroad,” Florence replied brusquely, glaring back at her. It was just her second day at the shelter, and the scowl rarely left her face in their presence.

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Prudence just nodded and moved along. “And you, Patience?” she asked her travel partner.

“For me it is the same. We were to travel together, and I was so happy to go,” Patience added softly, looking down into her lap.

“Well,” Prudence continued, “some people can be satisﬁed with one naira.

They take it home, and think to themselves, ahehn, I have this naira. But others, they go out, they want more. They are not satisﬁed with 100 naira, or 500, or 1,000.

So some people even have something, but they still aren’t satisﬁed. No be happy o.

I have my own food but I see someone else and want his. I have my own this shirt but I see Uncle Ben’s and want his. Some of us, our families are not too rich and not too poor, but no dey satisﬁed with what you get.”

Some of the women in the room scoﬀed at thought. It was true that the majority of people in Nigeria managed to live on less than $2 USD a day, but suggesting that anyone would be content with these conditions seemed particularly cal- low. Along with the residents, I too found it hard believe people would be “satis-

ﬁed” with 100 naira (about 60 cents USD). Yet the lessons was typical of the rehabilitation message: to be satisﬁed with less, and to not desire the wealth that appeared to lure ambitious youth abroad.

Prudence tried to resume her lecture, but a Togolese boy interrupted with a story of how a rat had bit into a bag of instant noodles and a new bar of soap gifted to him from a recent group of visitors. Florence snidely quipped that the rat was not contented, not satisﬁed, and everyone laughed heartily. The metaphor was ef-

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fective: an animal with a uncanny but seemingly insatiable desire for consumer goods, but one denigrated as a disgusting, intrusive pest in the process.

“See! This is therapy,” Prudence said as our chuckles quieted down. “Before you were tense and upset and now you are laughing. This is group therapy.” She tried to carry the good energy back toward her discussion. “So when you were not satisﬁed, what happened? How did you feel? When you got to travel, you were sat- isﬁed, but what about a time when you weren’t?”

Florence replied that right now, she was absolutely not satisﬁed. “I’m not satisﬁed here,” she explained, begrudging the language, “because I want to go to

Gambia. I have family there now. I have a plane ticket. I wan go,” she declared

ﬁrmly.

Prudence nodded and played along. “Ok…so, I’ve never been to Gambia so let me ask you,” she replies, in a tentatively friendly tone. “How do you know what it is like there? How do you know this salon, where you would work, is as big as he says? How do you know there is room for you?” Counselors often used this tactic with residents at the shelter, angling to expose the shallowness of their plans and the risks to which they had thus been exposed in their own naiveté.

The Florence and Patience both replied that, yes, they had seen a photo of the place, and that it was very nice. “It’s my uncle’s, so I know,” Florence reminded them.

“Ah, but you can ﬁnd this here,” Prudence insisted, implying that even if it were true, their eagerness to travel was still misguided. When they insisted the prices in Benin could not support them, Prudence proceeded to analyze the costs.

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“What is the price then?” Prudence pressed. “300 naira? With that, you no dey satisﬁed?” They shook their heads. “What of 500 naira? 1,000? 2,500 naira?”

The two girls started to laugh, still shaking their heads no, suggesting that she would never ﬁnd a price in Nigeria that would be worthwhile. “Ok so say Hope comes in for plaits. And then I come in for Ghana weaving. And Titi too. So it’s 1.5,

2, 2.5 [thousand naira — about $10 to $15 a piece], and together you can make 5,000 or 10,000 in a day! It is good now.” It was the equivalent of $30 to $60 USD, but the women still looked skeptical. Maybe if they could really make this, it would be a different story, but Florence would explain later how hard it is to make any profit at all as a hairdresser, especially if you have to work under others like she did, waiting to find the capital to open her own salon.

“Or is their money just better than our money? You just like Gambian money better?” Prudence asked, teasing them with an expression they used often to dismiss any desire for foreign currency.

“What is even the money there?” she pressed, now calling into doubt their knowledge of the destination again.

“Dalasi…” they responded in unison, softly.

“No, no, it’s shillings now!” two counselors corrected them—wrongly.

Florence looked a little dejected at all of this, and ﬁnally just said, “I’m willing to suﬀer to go.”

“Better to suﬀer there and make it than to just suﬀer here,” Patience agreed.

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Another counselor interceded. “But how do you know you will not suﬀer there? Even after 2 weeks, or 1 month, your uncle will not be smiling at you any longer.”

The girls shrugged.

“How much was your ticket?” another one asked.

Florence said that her ticket cost N70,000, or nearly $500. “I will have to work for it for 1 year,” she added.

“But why go there? You like their money more than our money?” Prudence repeated. “You have a house now, you can start there, in the street, in your own place.” The girls replied that there is no space in their area. “Even if there is no space there,” she answered, “you are telling me there is no space on the next street? You start there. You start anywhere.”

“It’s a village…” they said.

“Well, even in a village now people are going to salon. You are just not thinking of all of your options,” Prudence insisted.

In conversations like these, the counselors alternated tactics to discredit the women’s desires and plans to leave Nigeria. They questioned the reliability of their knowledge and suggested that they failed to make any rational, informed decision about it. Counselors implied that they did not know enough about the debt or employment conditions, and also underestimated alternative opportunities for work within Nigeria. Both their logic and their sources deemed to be unfounded, counselors insisted the women must have only been charmed only by a blind faith in what is foreign—“you like their money better than ours.”

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Later that week, Ben articulated this perspective directly as he pursued these questions again with Patience, who had been traveling with Florence. He was asking her more about the place—”Did you see photos of the shop where you were to work? How can you know what it is like there? You have never been there, and I have never been there. How can we know?”—when he leaned toward me to explain his take on it all.

“I have seen that there is an excitement that comes with leaving and getting ready to leave, where people feel like it is all going to happen, and they have complete faith in the plan, and don’t want to believe any other facts. There is optimism that comes with it, and I know how people don’t want to consider the rest. Abi?” he asked her. Right? He looked to Patience, and she nodded respectfully, almost repentantly, before he continued. “And with that excitement about leaving is this anger about Nigeria, too. The grass is always greener, they say. People think other places have jobs and everything that they can’t ﬁnd here. So they lose faith in their country.”

He shook his head in pity. He at least seemed to sympathize with the determination and optimism these women could feel upon traveling, even if he eventually dismissed it as misguided. His assessment of their despair regarding Nigeria also seemed accurate, explaining Patience’s own frustrations that had started their conversation that day, when she complained about having “nothing going,” no money, no opportunity to use her skills. Yet, to dismiss it all as “the grass is greener” also seemed unfair. I waited to hear if Patience would challenge him on this point, but she just looked down and shifted in her seat, uneasily. She eventu-

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ally nodded in agreement again, but exactly which part she was aﬃrming, I was not sure.

Worthy and Unworthy Travelers

A major point of irony in these conversations was that counselors were in no way immune to the desires they so adamantly repudiated at the shelter. NAP-

TIP staff, like everyone else in Nigeria, also talked constantly of wanting to travel out. So staff members asked me about US social work courses, conferences, and other counter-trafficking programs that they might participate in, almost daily. In- deed, that I knew so little about equivalent job opportunities in the US was a regular source of disappointment. Like nearly everyone else I had met in Nigeria, most directly or indirectly asked if I could help with papers at least once in each relationship.

In a typical conversation, I had literally bumped into a senior NAPTIP staﬀ member while waiting for a meeting at the zonal headquarters. We made small talk, bringing him naturally to visa inquiries with a few easy steps: “how’s your family, how’s US, you know I’d like to go there sometime…” We had this conversation nearly every time I saw him, a half dozen or so times total, and I proceeded with the usual script. First he asked if I would be able to help him obtain a visa, and I evaded the question. I replied I would be so happy to see him in the US, eventually explaining that I could not be much help with the visa since the government would not really listen to me. He insisted that they would, and I mumbled something about not being established enough, still a student myself.

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Sensing some frustration and aggression in his continued skepticism about my support, I went to excuse myself, but found myself surrounded. Several other

NAPTIP staﬀ had now gathered around us in the hallway, also eager to near my advice for traveling out. One had an uncle in Oklahoma—was it near me? Another went to Maryland once to see his sister. Encouraged by their shared desires, my friend played deﬁant, and demanded to know why it was so hard for him to get a visa. I shook my head sympathetically, repeating that I would really like him to come, and in fact I would like everyone to be able to travel, especially since I had admittedly seen the joys of being able to travel so freely. There was an awkward silence, and I found myself continuing on to add that even getting my visa for Ni- geria was not that easy—that they make me apply repeatedly and pay hundreds of dollars in additional fees even when I had another visa that should technically be still valid. I said this as if it was the same or at least comparable frustration; I knew that really it was not.

Despite their shared enthusiasm for going abroad, these NAPTIP employees would see no contradiction in their position, discouraging victims from wanting to travel abroad while actively seeking out those opportunities for themselves. They would travel for professional development and tourism, with all of the legal rights and documentation that (they assumed) should come with it. There was an echo here of Clifford’s own observations that in the American tradition “good travel (he- roic, educational, scientific, adventurous, ennobling) is something men do” (Clif- ford 1997, 31), except here the ideology is elaborated further along lines of class and education, justified in legal categories that reproduce these distinctions. There was

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an appraisal here that went beyond the legal risks implied by traveling without papers, and begged the deeper question of who and who should not travel.

This distinction is consistent with that drawn across the Nigerian government that conveniently collapses all smuggled migrants as either victims or criminals (Vanderhurst 2009). Indeed, the two are also collapsed under the 4.8 million euro project funded by the EU and organized through the UNODC, entitled “Pro- moting Better Management of Migration in Nigeria by Combating and Reducing

Irregular Migration that occurs, inter alia, through Traﬃcking in Persons (TIP) and

Smuggling of Migrants (SOM).” Interventions like these oﬀer a paternalistic guise to the class politics of emigration that underly diﬀerent kinds of migration regulation.

Governments have long defended restrictions on citizens’ mobility for their own protection. Originally, states reserved the authority to deny mobility to its citizens outright, but it grew apparent that these eﬀorts were neither eﬀective nor ethical. When a consensus around citizens’ right of exit emerged in the 18th century, humanitarian reasons to restrict mobility quickly took their place. Emile Zol- berg argues this was the case when the British consul promoted supposedly “populist” laws to improve the safety of Atlantic ships to the US:

Observing the substantial influx of skilled British artisans into the United States despite the prohibitions on their exit, the British consul in Philadelphia, Phineas Bond, suggested in 1788 an alternative strategy that would “restrain for the present and finally annihilate” the traffic altogether: raise the standards of comfort on passenger ships to such a high level as to make the cost of the crossing pro- hibitive for the emigrants and simultaneously unprofitable for the shipper. (Zolberg 2007, 38)

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Where straight prohibitions on exit were ineﬀective or impolitic at the time, similar restrictions were thereby defended as protective, much like the restrictions on exit enforced on women at the shelter.

Scottish landlords in the same period were also eager to keep their tenants from emigrating. They spread rumors that Scots were more crowded than blacks on these ships until the Scottish Parliament imposed its own tonnage restrictions in 1803—evoking the embarrassing rumors of young Nigerian women eagerly ﬁll- ing bus caravans and metaphorical slave ships described in the introduction. Zol- berg argues that although the Scottish laws were likewise praised for their apparently populist origins, they were actually motivated by a commitment to eliminate migration by undesirable groups. Indeed, the comparison to chattel slavery is one of embarrassment as much as it empathetic, implying that Scots should not de- grade themselves with such desperation. Posed as a benevolent paternalism, this classist distinction also echoes the sometimes quick rush to slavery analogies in contemporary campaigns against human traﬃcking that can elide the desires and concerns of women and men actually pursuing these options.

Travel Assistance

Consistent with the distinction between their own travel ambitions and those of the residents, counselors at the shelter oﬃcially only intended to discourage undocumented migration. To that end, they would regularly insist if NAPTIP investigation revealed that a woman’s travel plans were legitimate, they would help her travel after all. Of course, embedded in these promises was the assump-

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tion that people with authentic travel papers were categorically distinct from human traﬃcking victims. On the other hand, it suggested that those who did not have proper documents were legitimately detained as human traﬃcking victims.

This part of the profiling process affirms that, in effect, it was not only migrant sex work targeted in these campaigns, but all kinds of women’s mobility.

While this promise of help for documented emigrants was a implausible condition for most of the women there, I did see evidence of its sincerity in at least one case. This woman resided at the shelter when I ﬁrst arrived in Nigeria, and although I barely got to know her before she left, her story was repeated several times throughout the year following. Once, when Florence was feeling particularly forlorn and moaning “I wan go,” I even heard the woman in charge of vocational training in hair dressing retold her case. As Florence complained about the

N87,000 (about $600) lost on her ticket after she was kept from boarding the

ﬂight, the trainer assured her that not all was lost. “Aunty...Eh, what was her name?” the trainer asked us, knowing we’d all heard the stories before. “Aunty

Helen. Aunty Helen was here but they replaced everything. It was all genuine, so if everything you have is genuine then they will replace it too. They can buy you a new ticket and even replace your visa if your visa expired. They will go to embassy, no problem. They won’t charge you a fee or anything, if everything you had was genuine.”

Another day, Ben had told the story as well: “What happened was she went to travel, and then the man at the airport, he asked her for a €100 bribe. She refused, but she ﬁt the proﬁle—a certain age, a look. So they had to investigate. And

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then she had to improve her passport, because she had the old one, so we had to help her get the new e-passport.4 But when she was ﬁnished I took her myself to the airport, and she showed me the man. She had ﬁled a complaint with his supe- rior even. But she had genuine papers and she left.”

In these conversations, Aunty Helen’s case was supposed to provide hope to women like Florence that NAPTIP was not only out to discourage migration, but would in fact assist people too. Of course, these narratives always emphasized that any such assistance would be contingent on the fact that her papers prove genuine and valid. Indeed, in Helen’s case, they even helped improve her documents by helping her to update her passport to the newly introduced models with electronic chip technology. Hers was the only case of travel assistance I ever saw or heard of, and it seemed to be the exception that proved the rule. The implication was that if you “fit the profile” but could not demonstrate proper paperwork, then the case could be still categorized as human trafficking and fall subject to full NAPTIP intervention.

Indeed, although Helen had her papers returned and then updated, other residents had trouble recouping their own passports at all, long after they had left the shelter. Such a prolonged seizure of travel documents may also be an side effect of the ineﬃcient bureaucracy and corruption at NAPTIP administration, as would be expected in the rest of the Nigerian government. NAPTIP may have also kept the documents because they were altered or falsiﬁed, but the women at least experienced it as further forced mobility restrictions, especially where they be-

4 Nigeria issued a new passport regime with electronic chip technology in 2007 to combat rampant problems with passport fraud and duplication.

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lieved the passport to be valid (separate from European visa entries or lack there of). Florence’s frequent complaints about all this inside the shelter prompted even greater suspicion about her plans for traveling after leaving. She was still without it when I completed my original phase of ﬁeldwork, more than six months after her release.

While it is perhaps not surprising, that the Nigerian government was committed to assisting only documented migrants to travel, it is worth noting that it are far from the only option available. David Fitzgerald (2008) describes Mexico’s evolving border policies, which transitioned from strict border enforcement and police work to migrant aid and assistance during the same time that NAPTIP was developed. He recounts how Mexico’s emigration control police force “Grupo Beta” originally expanded during the 1990s to target illicit smuggling activities, but ultimately decided that migrants could not be constitutionally prevented from leaving the country, so in 2001 transitioned to new intervention tactics:

Grupo Beta gave up its control functions altogether to focus on protecting undocumented migrants from bandits, conducting rescue operations, and supplying information about how to cross safely…In 2005 it began distributing more than a million copies of an educational booklet for undocumented migrants with detailed tips on how to avoid the major risks of undocumented crossings: carry water, follow power lines north, always keep the coyote in sight, etc. A disclaimer on the back of the booklet summarizes the federal government’s current stance toward illegal migration: “This consu- lar protection guide does not promote the crossing of the border by Mexicans without the legal documentation required by the government of the United States. Its objective is to publicize the risks that [such crossings] imply, and to inform about the rights of migrants regardless of their legal residence.” (2008)

Some people argue that in Mexico, the federal government’s argument for a consti- tutional right of exit is a convenient way of legitimating their minimal eﬀorts to

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restrict unauthorized emigration, balking a responsibility to enforce the border and protect their citizens. However, those critique conflate enforcement and protection, much like border security efforts that have been supported under the banner of human trafficking prevention.

If we can recognize cross-border mobility as inevitable, more substantive information campaigns like Mexico’s can better serve the interests of whatever spectrum of citizens attempt the crossing, independent of other campaigns that may discourage that choice. Nigeria, on the other hand, offers little in the way of mitigating such risks. In a sex education analogy, it is abstinence-only intervention, where women at the shelter are taught to abstain from migrating entirely and given no tools to address the admittedly real dangers that undocumented migrants face. Though NAPTIP does warn women (both at the shelter and at large, in wider enlightenment campaigns) about false promises of employment, they do not offer concrete resources for assessing such offers more thoroughly, or even for research- ing the reliability of information offered by travel agents about different destinations. Sometimes counselors suggested women could contact different consulates for these details, but there was little support for the process beyond that, and certainly no institutionalized effort like that of Grupo Beta.

Insecurities of Staying, Going

For all of my skepticism about the anti-migration message counselors all espoused, I too found myself sometimes sympathetic to their concerns. When some residents of the shelter would talk oﬀ-handedly of traveling without docu-

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ments or with hired agents at exorbitantly high prices, I felt obligated to interject about the extraordinary risks these implied. And I, too, was constantly dismayed at the blank stares and shrugs I would receive in reply.

I was at the shelter one day, talking with a handful of residents the pros and cons of leaving Nigeria, a conversation that we had made dozens of times. Each of the women there had been intercepted trying to travel to Europe without papers, and they kept asking me, half-jokingly, if they could follow me to the US when I left. Perhaps spoiling the fun, I admitted in seriousness I wouldn’t be able to help them ﬁnd visas, and then we began debating the importance of having your papers in order before traveling. I described some of the vulnerabilities associated with undocumented migration in the US. I said, for example, that it can be bad because if you are not paid your wages, or if your contract is otherwise not honored, you may not want to go to the police. Your travel sponsor can increase your debt, and there is little you can do to ﬁght it. If you do not have papers, I explained, sometimes the police will not listen to your complaints, and could end up putting you in detention, without the legal recourses available to full citizens.

The girls listened to me politely, but were not nearly as shocked as I had expected. I felt indignant at such hypothetical threats, but they remained entirely non-plussed. But you could be deported! I insisted, and ﬁnally they agreed this would be shameful. Still, they were undeterred. How were they not outraged? I thought. How did these regular abuses of migrant labor not burst their hopeful impressions of life abroad? At ﬁrst I started to think it was because they really didn’t believe that the US or Europe could be that bad. Perhaps like the counselors

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in this way, I may have assumed they too were convinced by their own idealistic views of the world. But, over time, I have come to see it diﬀerently.

It was not that they failed to understand realities of life abroad; I simply did not understand life in Nigeria. The threats I earnestly listed as risks undocumented migration—unreliable police support, labor exploitation, unstable housing, and a general sense of insecurity in daily life—were all well established parts of ordinary life in Nigeria. No one turns to the police for help; they are more known for extracting bribes at police checkpoints and beating those who refuse than they are for actually ﬁghting crime themselves. Employers regularly delay wages for months at a time, not only among petty traders but across the entire civil service (including NAPTIP staﬀ) and other large scale operations.

Anthropologists of migration have written astutely about how illegality and deportability are experienced in day to day life as a constant sense of insecurity

(Coutin 2000; De Genova 2005; De Genova and Peutz 2010). Importantly, life in

Nigeria was also characterized by a constant sense of insecurity, and this was especially true in Lagos. It was a lesson I learned over and over again, as different friends took me around town, to different neighborhoods and different markets, teaching me how to be in the city. You smile too much, they would say. Do not invite that person to approach you; he will be a thief. Clutch your bag like this when walking through a crowded space, or better yet, never carry a bag and take only your cheaper phone, always held in a closed fist. See these people moving like that? It could be because a police is beating someone down the road, so we should move here to watch the crowds, and avoid any stampede.Walk strong, tough, with

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swagger. Don’t trust anyone. This is Nigeria, they would warn me, na wa o — it’s a war out there.

In short, women at the shelter were simply not impressed by my exhortations because so many of the vulnerabilities of life without papers outside Nigeria are actually not all that diﬀerent than those people face everyday in their own country. Issues of police harassment and labor exploitation were expected parts of life, and although I found the prospects of living without the protection of the law to be harrowing, many of them already faced such insecurity on a daily basis. Just because these threats were so commonplace in Nigeria did not numb anyone to their injustice; each girl present might express great outage over these issues in other contexts. However, in the course of this conversation, it did little to make the question of traveling without papers seem as dangerous as I had imagined.

Risk, Chance & Opportunity

I was not alone in these sentiments at the shelter, and I often found Ben displaying uncommon sympathy with the residents. Given the time to parse out details of his philosophy of intervention, he was happy to concede migration itself was not the problem. Instead, he too worried about how migrants became de- pendent on and indebted to their smugglers/travel agents/sponsors both while traveling and once abroad, leaving them without recourse if anything went wrong.

“I want you to go,” Ben would sometimes tell residents, “but then you should save your money, so then when you travel, you can do it independently.”

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By travel independently, Uncle Ben meant to do it without the “sponsor” who would ﬁnance and organize initial travel as a loan, sometimes up to $60,000

USD. These arrangements are often the grounds for exploitation that becomes human trafficking, though the point at which that line is actually crossed from debt to indentured servitude or trafficking is often difficult to identify.

Of course anyone would agree with Ben that traveling independently is preferable, including women at the shelter. But, much like the admonition to just obtain proper documents before traveling, it simply did not seem a to be an option. They all wanted to travel in part to find money, precisely because they did not have savings, nor any access to capital. While traveling out did not guarantee success, there was little hope of finding it by staying in Nigeria. Ben was pursuing exactly these questions with Patience, one day, and offered her the following advice:

Do you think that you are the only one in this condition, here? Go to the airport. Most ﬂights to the US and the UK are long and they leave at night so you can arrive in the morning. So go there around the evening time and you can see everyone—checking out, checking out. But if you then go to arrivals, you will see people being thrown back, thrown back, because they didn’t have the proper business.

Ok, you are going, but what is your business there? Like my friend, from Michigan, in US, he called me to say they were deporting 34 Nigerians—34!—who were involved with credit fraud. And you are a second class citizen there, so people do these things. Like this business here—it has a bad reputation, like when people hear you lived in Oshodi and they say ehehn, they will say that if they hear you work in this place, because they can do any fraud. If you want an American passport, they will make one, and it will look genuine.

But you don’t want to have that mindset, that anything I can ﬁnd I will do. You want to have this standard, and then don’t settle for anything less than that. You don’t want to do just any business. So, ok, you are going to Gambia, but what are you going to do?

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She paused, hesitant as usual, and then tried to tell him as much. “But there is money to be made there,” she insisted. “You can make lots of money there...”

“Yes, yes, ok, I want you to go,” he repeated, “But I want you to be independent. I don’t want you to go running—”

“But I am running,” she interrupted. “I am running …to Gambia. There is no food to chop. I am running.”

“Well that is exactly the mindset I want to change,” Ben announced, proud to have isolated it. “You to not be running—just…going.” I think Ben’s primary point throughout this conversation is that desperation breeds bad decision making, enticing people to take on risks not worth the reward. However, his alternative solutions for her current needs—no food to eat, no jobs to be had—are no more satisfying. Patience saw traveling as a chance for her to do something, to take control, to make something from nothing, or to at least try, even if the odds are against her. His only answer was for her to wait longer.

She paused for a moment, thinking about what he had said. “We were not going for business,” she insists, “just to visit.”

Ultimately, this disposition toward risk in both staying and going illustrates further the ordinary precarity of life in Nigeria and in post-colonial Africa more broadly. Mbembe has described this approach to life as a series of calculations and ritual, where mimicry and mathematics submerge the ordinary insecurities of daily life:

Here, the course of life is assimilated to a game of chance, a lottery, in which the existential temporal horizon is colonized by the immediate present and by prosaic short-term calculations. In the popular practices of capturing the ﬂows of global exchange, rituals

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of extraversion are developed—rituals that consist of miming the major signiﬁers of global consumerism. (Mbembe 2002, 271)

In Nigeria, counselors’ warnings about the risks of migrating also fell on deaf ears, including the danger of travel, the insecurity of being without documents, the burden of enormous debt, and total logistical dependency on individual travel agents. However, to blame this callousness on stubborn naivety or blind optimism ignores the broader context for these concerns, where great uncertainty already plays such an important a part of ordinary life. Mbembe’s description of playing the odds can thus be translated to migration impetus as well. Beyond conventional push/pull models of migrant decision making, his observations suggest that there is also a more unconscious habitus of risk and mobility that supplies social ﬁeld for these decisions.

The women’s desires to leave Nigeria then were not a simple story of poverty, nor of youthful greed, naiveté, and delusion. They were the shared sentiment of a national fantasy to escape the ordinary insecurities of daily life in Nigeria, that made staying put feel like as much of a risk as trying to go. Completing years of vocational training, only to be unable to make a worthwhile income using the skill.

Relying on narrow and unreliable networks of kin and romantic partners for money. Overcrowded households, accessing electricity for a sporadic two hours a day, sitting in traffic for several more. As I heard time and time again, “Better to suffer there and make it, than to just suffer in Nigeria.”

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CHAPTER FOUR

Waka Waka Baby

Waka Waka

The Nigerian pidgin term waka waka garnered global attention as the title lyric from Colombian pop star Shakira’s energetic anthem “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa),” produced for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, immediately before

I began my ﬁeldwork. The phrase, however, has a history in world music much longer than that. Shakira recorded her version with the South African band

Freshlyground, but sampled heavily from the 1986 makossa release “Zamina mina

(Zangalewa)” by Cameroonian band Golden Sounds.5 Although most of the lyrics in that version are in the central African Fang language, the term “waka waka” itself was borrowed from West African pidgin. It literally translates to walk about, originating in the English term from neighboring Nigeria, but used more broadly to mean to go, to come, or even just to do. The phrase is now most often used to describe someone who is very busy running around town, often with a foolish or misguided frenzy. However, when used to refer to women, the phrase takes on more speciﬁc connotations as a euphemism for transactional sex—a woman who is running between diﬀerent men’s houses.

5 According to Golden Sounds leader (and now-retired member of the presidential guard) Jean Paul Zé Bella, their version parodied the rich military leaders of the time, building on a song original dating back to World War II soldiers (Mackey 2010)

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This gendered meaning was invoked in the wildly popular “Nwa Baby

(Ashawo Remix)” by Nigerian artist Flavour, an buoyant love song about seducing a woman he suspects is a sex worker, sung in a mix of Igbo and pidgin English.6

Although already a few years old by the time of my ﬁeld research, it was a constant presence, blasting from electronics shops and distant neighborhood parties alike.

It was the tune DJs used late in the evening to transform local eateries into more lively dance parties. Women especially would rush up to bounce and sing along:

“Waka waka baby, Wuru wuru baby, Corner corner baby,” they would croon. A clever play on words, the lyrics imply that the object of his aﬀection is tricky or crafty, using a pun to mean she not only hangs out on street corners, but also that she is not straight or straightforward. These are not quite insults, though, as he describes how charmed he is by her wiles; the title of the song translates aﬀection- ately as “Young Baby,” and he insists he wants to take her home to meet his parents. The derogatory term for sex workers in Nigeria is the Yoruba ashawo (cf.

Chernoﬀ 2003), and he sings it stilted, halfway in a whisper “Ashhh…Ashhh…” Men and women dancing to this song gleefully raise ﬁngers to their lips with this hushed line, just as he does in the music video, before he proceeds to playfully mixing up the syllables, and, as one internet commenter explained it (Tampico

2011), thereby removing some of their sting: “Ashawo—awusha—awusha—ashawo, eh, eh, eh, eh,” (yes, yes, yes, yes).

While enjoying the Flavour song at parties is far from a full endorsement of its message, when I asked my friends about the lyrics, they agreed about its charm.

6 Readers are strongly urged to avail themselves of the delightful music video, available on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMSTYtMSbL0

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She is playing him, and he knows it, almost respects it, making them more like equals in the game, they explained to me. It was not only an impossibly catchy pop song, then, but a beloved deconstruction of the gender roles and strategies men and women in Nigeria have come to expect from each other, an at times gleeful mixture of seduction, romance, opportunism, and exchange. It was a story the young women I knew—both in and outside the shelter—very much identiﬁed with and even admired.

The phrase is thereby appropriated for this chapter for a number of reasons.

First, it describes women’s physical mobility (running from place to place) with a sense of eagerness and determination, however hopeless. In that sense, it works to capture a sense of social mobility as well, or an attempt at it anyhow. Indeed, Ba- sile Ndjio (2009) reports that in parts of Cameroon it is used sometimes dismissively to refer to emigrants as wanderers, or those who are lost and not properly attached to their homes and families. He associates it with an ambivalence toward migration in the grassland region east of Nigeria, where migration is at once lauded and derided a particularly individualist or self-centered form of ambition.

In Nigeria, it is likewise used metaphorically to mean any sort of “useless somebody.” However, in Flavour’s framework, it at once reflects the blending of sex and success for Nigerian women, and the sort of amused candor with which women sometimes discuss these things. Together, the phrase invokes for me the conflu- ence of sex, migration, and aspiration that is implicated in the government’s campaign against human trafficking, described in this chapter.

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This chapter first explores the ambiguous categories of transactional sex women navigate and situates these experiences vis a vis their expectations for work abroad. To my surprise, there was relatively little direct discussion of commercial sex work or prostitution at the shelter itself. Instead, it was invoked indirectly through moralizing speeches around greed, ambition, and patience. These speeches resonated with a broader cultural consensus that sexual attitudes among women were a problem, appropriating familiar discourses of shame to disparage their entrance into different sex economies. While these discourses exist around women’s bodies across Nigeria, I argue that their particular expression and enforcement within the trafficking paradigm and shelter program represent a special concern around migrant women, who threaten to ruin not only their own reputation, but the country’s more broadly. Thus, to conclude the chapter, I turn to the other vocations the shelter program encouraged, and the failure of these options to provide compelling alternatives to shelter residents.

Sex, Money and Respect

During my ﬁeldwork, I lived at a privately run women’s dormitory near the

University of Lagos, colloquially referred to as a “hostel.” While chosen as a matter of convenience, it turned out to be a veritable immersion experience of its own.

University students in Nigeria are especially notorious for relying on men to support them as they ﬁnish their schooling, from older sugar daddies that pay for their accommodations to male faculty members that extract favors in exchange for better grades (as one girl explained me, you don’t have “keep” all of them, but it is

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prudent to befriend one “prof” who would discourage the rest). When I moved into the hostel, I chose a ground-ﬂoor room facing the central courtyard, in the hopes I might better enjoy an evening breeze. I did not realize it at the time, but in doing so, I had even placed myself among the most assertive women in the building—those who used the easy access to the gate and adjoining buka eatery to allow men to come and go from their rooms.

While virtually all of the women staying at the university hostel depended on various men and boyfriends for income, their strategies were much more di- verse than courtyard hustling alone. A popular YouTube video compilation of interviews with female university students in Nigeria captures this sentiment (Batta- box 2012). Each interview follows the prompt “How many boyfriends can a Nigeria girl have?” The dozen or so respondents vary and a couple of them answer only one, but the consensus is at least two or three. “Three is responsible,” one puts it— implying not only that any more than that may be foolish, but that any less is reck- less as well. Women see managing these relationships, then, as a part of being a responsible, independent woman. Anthropologist Jennifer Cole describes a similar set of social circumstances in Madagascar that support women’s parlay into transactional sex:

Any young woman in Tamatave knows that to build up a respect- able position in society, she must acquire money, food, clothes, even housing in part through her relationships with men. Likewise, parents hope their daughters will ﬁnd men to support them, and they are generally pleased when they do. From early on, girls learn to exercise their powers of seduction, and…they are proud that they can do so. Women’s ability to earn money and obtain resources protects them. Sometimes it can be even more important than con- tracting a proper marriage. (Cole 2010, 79)

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In contexts like these, it is not only that women can take advantage of men for money, but that they should. As Cole’s informants teased each other, “Aren’t you young? Don’t you want things?…Are you going to just leave our vagina to rot?”

(ibid 113).

Cole draws one exception to this sensibility, framing Pentecostal Christian- ity as an alternative source of social ties, resources, and hope for a promising future—what she calls an act of “seeking.” She presents Pentecostalism and transactional sex functioning as two divergent and mutually exclusive paths, and describes any overlapping practices as merely transitional. However, the women at the shelter—like most people in Nigeria—were all religious, as I will discuss at greater length in the following chapter. Both in and out of the shelter, residents attended church once or twice weekly, prayed daily, and used religious idioms to evaluate and articulate their life choices. Nigeria consistently ranks as one of the most religious countries in the world, and perhaps because religion has so permeated public culture, it coexists alongside a wide range of practices that lie outside oﬃcial church endorsement. Most churches in Nigeria discourage all premarital sex, let alone transactional sexual relationships and prostitution. Most women

(and men), however, reconcile these expectations in practice, even if they continue to wrestle with the tensions they produce.

Associations between sex and exchange can be partly traced back to ideologies around bridewealth and other cultural traditions, but should not be dismissed as mere vestiges of the past. Rather, as anthropologists and others have demonstrated, these values have taken on new meaning in the context of economic crisis

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and increased material inequality. The literature on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Af- rica pays special attention to the importance of resources derived from sexual relationships in women’s daily lives, producing useful concepts like “transactional sex” to describe how exchange is invoked in ordinary relationships outside formal prostitution or sex work (Hunter 2002). Other authors have cautioned against explaining these practices strictly in terms of economic necessity, noting that women use income from these relationships for consumer luxuries beyond mere subsistence

(Leclerc-Madlala 2008). In additon, as Lynn Thomas and Jennifer Cole (Cole and

Thomas 2009a) argue, the economic strategizing implied by these narratives sometimes obscures the aﬀective bounds tied up in the same processes. Pointing to historical and contemporary cases across the continent, they argue that “material provision and emotional attachment as mutually constitutive” (Cole and Thomas

2009b, 20). For women in Africa, maintaining transactional aspects of sexual relationships is not merely a survival mechanism or supplemental income, but an in- herent value in and of itself—an index of sincerity and respect within the relationship, as well as demonstration of a woman’s individual self-respect, independence, and responsibility.

African ideals of love and relationships like these can feel counter-intuitive to Western ideals of romance in general and of some strands of feminist thinking in particular. At its most benign, Euro-American ideals often suggest that love is tainted by material exchange, including ideologies around gift-giving that obscure the practicalities of ﬁnancial dependence where it does exist. As described in previous chapters, some feminists take this belief further, arguing that the exchange

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of money for sex and romance inherently objectiﬁes women—a belief at the foundation of abolitionist counter-traﬃcking projects. However, in Africa, the problem is inverted. Simply put, if in the West people think that having sex for money is inherently exploitative, Africans would argue that having sex without exchange is inherently exploitative. Indeed, African women did argue this with me, rather often. Friends at the university dormitory and at the shelter alike expressed such concerns when I admitted to not feeling comfortable accepting gifts or meals from certain male friends of my own, even platonic ones. They not only laughed at my earnestly egalitarian sensibility, but warned that the men could easily take advantage of me that way.

Cole and Thomas point out that Western intervention based on similar assumptions about sex and exchange also misread local values and ideas of gender empowerment. These interventions strongly resonate with counter-traﬃcking campaigns launched in the same guise:

A long train of Western observers—ranging from nineteenth- century missionaries who denounced bridewealth as the buying and selling of women to contemporary AIDS activists and scholars who interpret transactional sex strictly in terms of economic survival—have missed this subtle and ubiquitous intertwining of emotions and materiality. (24)

That is, to see the exchange of sex for money as coerced by either culture or by economic necessity misses the great value these practices of exchange have for women in Nigeria today.

Spectrums and Stigma

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Part of managing these relationships was keeping multiple “boyfriends” at once, as the above-cited video implies. The purpose was to diversify, not only in number but in type. “Every system has backup,” one woman explains in the clip.

Each woman lists the different men she is seeing—one for paying the bills, one kept back at home, another whom she truly loves. Footage of one scrolling through her blackberry phone (itself likely also provided by a man) reveals them listed by name—My Love, Expenses, and so on. Florence made a similar distinction between boyfriends she kept. She truly loved her “fiance-boyfriend,” but understood he could not yet afford to provide for her. She also called others boyfriends, but had entirely different expectations for them, closer to sugar daddy roles. As Corn- wall (2002) points out for married women, in cases like this, taking other lovers can actually “shore up” relationships suffering for lack of resources.

These ideals of good boyfriends co-exist along a broad spectral of sexual economies: at one end, good husbands and potential husbands or “fiance- boyfriends,” and at the other, straight commercial sex work, and plenty more in between. All would effectively providing material support within sexual relationships, but with very different idioms of exchange. While the conversion of money for sex then is not in itself unusual, then, not all points on the spectrum are en- dorsed by individual women nor by broader social sensibilities.

One end of the boyfriend spectrum is populated by relationships skewing towards what is more recognizable as commercial sex, but they too varied by type.

The women I knew at the shelter and the youth hostel alike all called that lowest form of commercial sex “dirty prostitution,” referring to women who hung around

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street corners or cheap hotels, charging a flat rate for specific acts. “Hustling” was a step up, referring to women who went to restaurants, bars, and clubs looking to pick up on men—social environments that seemed to provide more grace to the encounter. Since women there could ostensibly pass as patrons, some establish- ments actually kept policies prohibiting single women from entering altogether, though these were (unsurprisingly) selectively enforced according to a woman’s class, style of dress, and relationship with management. Most men (and women) believed women could be found hustling at virtually any busy bar or club around, and different women’s personal reputations for hustling often depended on their access to higher-end destinations. While men met in these contexts would not count as boyfriends due to the finite nature of the encounter, they too could move across the spectrum. Repeat meetings with the same men effectively qualified them as “boyfriends,” along with the moral and economic obligations that entailed.

The most common, discreet, and ambiguous form of hustling was known as

“going on runs,” situated between the boyfriend idiom and commercial sex work.

Like hustling, it involves a plain intention to procure resources in exchange for some kind of companionship. But unlike other forms of hustling, it is arranged in advance, and encounters can often last for full days or weekends, often for special events and holidays. In American terms, it is more like an informal escort service.

Friends exchange invitations and contacts to other willing women they know, creating social networks of women to meet diﬀerent men’s interests. A man might call one “sugar baby” and invite her and some friends to come to a party, for drinking and dancing at nightclubs, or a weekend birthday celebration, or to entertain visit-

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ing colleagues. These outings are not necessarily sexual, though women expect

“thanks for coming” gifts and “transportation allowances” in exchange for their attendance.

At the hostel where I lived, women would came back each weekend with stories like these. One said she went out with the heir of prominent fast-food chicken restaurant. He spent 100,000 naira on the bar bill, but “only” dashed 7,000 naira ($50) to each girl, when they had been hoping for 10-20,000. Everyone sym- pathized with the disappointment. Another jumped at the chance to relay a story of a party once out of town, for comparison: “This man set everyone to stay in his guesthouse—like each with a room self contained. And there was just serious money. Like he kept a ghanamustgo [nylon duﬄe bag] full of money to be giving giving out. And just as thanks for coming he could give 10K, 20K, 30K. But he was very old old man, and he told all of us—these my friends, they are billionaires! Not millionaires, billionaires! So do not collect small money-o. Take 20, 30K. They have

[it]. And if you come again the next morning, take 50!”

Going on runs like this was preferred because of the freedom it granted women in determining their commitment (including gifts just as “thanks for coming”), as well as the potential for higher returns. And since it is often irregular and out of the way, it was also more discreet. Yet at the same time, that discretion only seemed to only enhance the sense that everybody was doing it. As one woman from the hostel described to me:

Like before, I wasn’t doing runs, didn’t know anything about it. But I was singing in this choir for St. Dominics, and we traveled to Ondo State to sing for the funeral of this big man. He was like [former president] Obasanjo—hotels, serious money. So we were

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singing for him, and he set us up in this big guesthouse, and everything. But then I go and see all these girls from that my former University hostel. It’s like Lagos was empty for everyone to come to Ondo! And those girls. I was asking, what are they doing there, and they just saw to watch very closely and I will see. Then I didn’t know anything about this thing but I think in this Lagos everyone is doing it. Even pastors’ wives, she will do it.

Women at the hostel agreed that women get involved in these things for diﬀerent reasons, some of them out of boredom, ambition, or convenience, and others out out of necessity. “But even they who are desperate,” I was told, “They will do it today and eat to be a better person tomorrow.” All the same, it was not something to broadcast outside of the immediate friends they used for networking. “For hustling,” one explained, “everybody can do it, but it’s not like you’re telling everybody. You may not want your boyfriend to know, but even he, he might know and is not say anything, because he too is chopping that money. If he really doesn’t want, he will give you something. Or, if you don’t tell him, you can still ask him, say, I have no money for this thing, and he will give. And of your friends, you don’t want everybody knowing, but those you trust, or those you are doing runs with.”

Women at the shelter expressed sensibilities around sex and exchange consistent with these accounts from the women’s dormitory, especially as I was able to conduct follow up visits in their home communities. Florence and other women there had no qualms about admitting that they spent time with certain men for the money. “What else am I supposed to do?” Florence would say, shrugging it oﬀ.

Still, they adamantly derided women engaging in commercial sex within Nigeria, contemptuously calling each other ashawo (whore) in arguments. Women who had been traveling to Europe also used such accusations against Lagos women brought through the shelter from hotel raids, socially distinguishing their own in-

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tentions of entering foreign sex industries from those women merely conducting

“dirty prostitution” in Nigeria.

This distinction was important to women both in and outside the shelter. I visited Florence in Benin City several times after her release, in the months immediately following and in the years since. Each time she introduced me to her “ﬁ- ancé boyfriend” (now husband), as well as other men she was seeing. Once we went to a popular outdoor patio bar, famous for the highlife dancers on stage and the hordes of girls working out front — “dirty prostitutes” Florence said under her breath as we walked by. A few minutes later, one of those same women tapped me on the shoulder. It turned out to be another former resident from the shelter, who had been turned over to NAPTIP after police raided a hotel in Lagos.

I had visited her a few nights previous since coming to Benin and we chat- ted casually. Meanwhile, Florence just glared at us from the table with her boyfriend and his friends. When she left, Florence demanded to know how I knew the girl, and did I know she was a prostitute. I know her the same way I know you, I tried to explain discreetly, but Florence was clearly not impressed. Later that night, we were getting ready to leave when the boys dashed across the street to buy some barbecue meat and other snacks. She and I were left to wait at the entrance, next to all the women loitering and looking to meet men. Florence grew nervous and admitted she was annoyed, worried that someone could see her and think she was doing “dirty prostitution” as well. I tried to joke that she would never dress as she was for that work—wearing rubber sandals and her hair tucked into a ﬂoppy cloth cap, but she still made us move over to a quieter area where the cars were parked.

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These remarks, of course, she made just hours since returning from “going on runs” for several nights with another man, and immediately after trying to get me to go with her to visit the wealthy politician she was also seeing, who would have taken us to some of the nicest clubs in town. A former city counselor, Flor- ence was then visiting him a couple times a week, and he lavished her with expensive gifts, nice restaurants, and generous “transport money.” He let her enjoy a lifestyle she would otherwise not have access to: comfortable, air conditioned homes, expensive dance clubs, and ﬁne gifts. She was candid about the many reasons she kept him around, especially as her steady boyfriend was still unable to properly support and marry her.

While Florence primarily saw men like the politician as avenues to make and enjoy money, they oﬀered more than that too. Her diﬀerent relationships re-

flect not only a difference of resources, but one of expectations. As Florence explained it, she was able to enjoy some things with her politician that she would never do with potentially marriageable men, or the man called her “fiancé- boyfriend.” For instance, the latter did not think that Florence would ever drink or smoke. He was quite surprised, even a bit put off, when I order a Star beer over dinner one night, teasing that women could not drink, practically speaking, because who would be taking care of the household and preparing meals and that kind of thing. Florence rolled her eyes as he spoke but later explained that since she wants to be a good wife for him someday, she would never insult him or embarrass herself by doing those things around him. The politician, on the other

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hand, loved taking her out to clubs, where she could regularly enjoy Smirnoﬀ Ice cocktails and cigarettes.

Metaphors of Mobility

It is no coincidence that these diﬀerent sexual practices are described through metaphors of movement and mobility: waka waka, hustling, going on runs, as well as its synonym, parole. Going on runs in particular often involves actual out of town travel, but all of them invoke “transport money” as a euphemism for compensation. In her book Sex and Salvation, Jennifer Cole (2010) describes a strikingly similar linguistic turn for women in Madagascar. There, the term vehi- vavy mietsiketsika translates as girls who move, and is used to describe “young women who enter the sexual economy with an eye to learning a livelihood from men.” While the term is used derisively by some, “still others say that a girl who moves is responsible and knows how to search for money.”

Even when these excursions don’t require travel across distances, they often provide entry into another class and social world. In big cities across Nigeria and in

Lagos and Abuja especially, that takes distinction on special race dynamics as well.

Dating local Lebanese men (often second and third generation in Nigeria) was a particular source of prestige amongst women, and they often reported with pride when their aristo boyfriends kept white friends as well. Jennifer Cole and other anthropologists like Denise Brennan (2004) have documented how local sex tourism industries represent paths or hopes for paths to migration for local women. While the Nigerian industry is less formal, the steady circulation of expatriate workers

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from oil, telecom, and foreign consulates, as well as the long-resident minority

Lebanese population, maintain steady aspirational status for the women. While women at the shelter didn’t make these connections themselves, their research suggest that the local economies of sex with foreigners often kindles women’s broader migration ambitions.

Florence and other women at the shelter often stated clear boundaries about what she would and would not want to do, insisting that that at least in their home towns they did not partake in straight commercial sex work. This may seem to be what awaited most of them in Europe—short term encounters with men on street corners and other non-discreet venues. Yet, for women like Flor- ence, who took great pleasure in going on runs but would never work independently in a club or hotel, working in European sex industries may still boast all the advantages of the former.

She and others realized that the Italian sex industry, especially that seg- ment available to African migrants, resembled the type of one-oﬀ transactional sex they so often dismissed as “dirty prostitution”, but it also took place across class

(and race) hierarchies that could make going on runs so appealing, or at least they may have imagined it so. Along with the glamour of a European destination, the women assumed at least that they will have a largely European clientele, along with the (not entirely unreasonable) hopes of transitioning some men from being clients to more regular “boyfriend”/patron status. And although the debt they took on to migrate was signiﬁcant, so too were the potential returns, especially as evi- denced by the continued conspicuous consumption of established migrant

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women’s families in Benin. And since it happened away from the home, even if in public venues, it was still discreet like hustling. Leaving would still would generate rumors, just as women often gossiped about who spent their weekends on runs.

However, there was a plausible deniability that one could maintain, especially with enough proﬁt to counterbalance the stigma of sex work. And ﬁnally, like Florence’s local elite boyfriend and my friends’ visiting foreign lovers, exotic European men were imagined to allow the same indulgences one would not enjoy around potential husbands and other social networks.

The truth is that I can not really say whether or not the women I knew at the shelter were actually willing to enter the sex industry at their destination. By the time I had begun my research, the counter-trafficking campaign in Nigeria, and especially in Benin City, had been powering along for several years. Counselors and other stake holders often suggested that this campaign was so effective, that no girl could possibly accept a travel invitation without considering this risk, and I think there is some truth to this assumption. NAPTIP officers boasted that their message was so pervasive in Benin, and that, as a consequence, the stigma and stereotypes of daughters abroad was so severe, that everyone now knows the kind of work available to Nigerian women in Europe. Many, they suggest, would play along with the cover job, usually in hair dressing, knowing the real work that would await them.

Women would often even insist the same thing about each other, but they rarely admitted as much in their own case. Once inside the shelter, most women adopted a stance of denial and innocence — refusing to admit they would ever do

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such a thing. Even the few women who came in from hotel raids, who were actively working in the commercial sex industry and not merely traveling with the possibility of entering it, would often deny their own history, each insisting she was just visiting a friend there and so on. They did this to me, but also to counselors, and their stories were constantly shifting.

Florence divulged as much to a teacher at the shelter, for example, but it was diﬃcult to say how serious she was. One particularly diﬃcult day for the twice-weekly nonformal education session, the class gradually kept derailing from a lesson on Rights, much to my own chagrin. Perhaps because it was essentially a vocabulary lesson from a United Nations handbook written for small children, no one seemed to be interested in the subject. The teacher gave up and tried to make small talk with the younger residents before turning to Florence. Florence returned her stare directly, unimpressed and determined not to relent to her patron- izing inquiries. But the teacher ignored her attitude and pulls up a chair—just to talk, she said.

“So, you want to travel out, abi? That is why you are here?” the teacher asked softly.

“Yes,” Florence grunted.

“To do what? What business?”

“Any business. Any business I can do to make money,” she mumbled, sigh- ing heavily, still annoyed with the badgering.

The teacher leaned in. “Ah… any business? Even...if it is to use this??” she whispered, motioning both hands downward.

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Florence paused for a moment and she turned directly to face the teacher again. “I will use it!” she declared deﬁantly, shrugging oﬀ the implications.

The teacher turned away to at me, eyes wide, shocked either at the fact of her willingness or just her willingness to be honest about it, I could not be sure.

She looked a little embarrassed, maybe for them both, and began to quietly discourage her. I could not make out everything, but I heard her say “na wa o”— a pidgin recognition of hardship—as she warned her about AIDS and God’s judge- ment.

I am still not sure what Florence really meant in this exchange. When Flor- ence said “she’ll use it”, I do not think she necessarily intended it as a sincere confession of her deepest thoughts. But I do think she was sick of the feigned concern and dismay the shelter staﬀ ritually displayed, not even limited to the counselors but the outside teachers and trainers who come in as well. It was probably more accurate to say that she was teasing the teacher in this instance, testing her reac- tions to such earnest and sanctimonious warnings. Indeed, she might just have been parsing her own thoughts about it, considering that this could have been her fate, and trying out the idea that she could in fact do it willingly. It is really not possible to say, but that is not really the point, either.

It was only after months of conversation, usually including follow up visits to people’s family homes, that anyone would eventually admit their original intentions with me, including Florence herself. Clearly, there was a stigma associated with their consent to these choices that inhibited their disclosure earlier, as well as the risk of contradicting other narratives in the ongoing NAPTIP investigation.

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Without exactly understanding the process, women understood that their stories not only might determine their immediate release, but also could shape their eligibility for “empowerment” materials down the road, as discussed in the following chapters. What is important, then, is less whether any given women “actually” agreed to enter prostitution, or if she “really” knew what kind of conditions that would entail. Instead, it is the quite normal sensibilities that make these seemingly bright line distinctions less useful in the immediate environment, where foreign donors and Nigerian staﬀ alike perform a sense of concern over women’s practices that seem otherwise absolutely normal.

Shelter Interventions

Perhaps because of this context, shelter staff themselves rarely discussed prostitution with residents of the shelter directly. The above instance with the teacher was notable for its directness, but along with the master vocational trainers and cooking staff, she was not expected to participate in these aspects of rehabilitation anyway. The counseling staff, on the other hand, might have dismissed as lacking tact, or useless for the lies women would offer in reply. Instead, they were more likely to speak around the issue of transactional sex—a surprising choice given the centrality of sex work in the trafficking agenda, the normality of sexual talk amongst young women in other contexts, and the official responsibilities the shelter staff profess for rehabilitating women through education.

I thus (perhaps naively) expected a more candid style conversation, including lessons on safe sex, sexually transmitted disease, and resources for abuse, akin

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to other sex worker outreach programs around the world. Instead, what NAPTIP staff offered were moralizing condemnations of greed, materialism, and restless- ness, echoing the same sentiments expressed around young women in newspaper opinion columns and popular Nollywood film narratives. If transactional sex was widely acknowledged as a cultural reality among Nigerians, it was as adamantly derided as cultural problem—particularly characterizing women as manipulative, impatient, and materialistic. (Cornwall 2002). Churches, NGOs, politicians, and ordinary people all lamented the moral depravity and greed of Nigeria’s women that were supposedly corrupting the youth generation. The following vignette is instructive.

“Today we are going to talk about patience,” the group counseling lecture began. “The shelter is one example of patience because we have told you that you will go but you are still screaming. God will ordain the day you will go. Last week, everyone was just shouting, I wan go, I wan go. We know. And the reason that you are in the shelter is that you are not patient.”

The counselor recognized that no one wants to be in the shelter, but used this only as evidence that they needed the kind of counseling that rehabilitation promises—to learn to be patient, and so on.

“You want everything but you are not willing to wait for your time. You are looking at ﬁne cloth and you want it but you are not willing to suﬀer. Because you are not patient is one of the reasons you are in the shelter today. You want everything. Just want to get it, get it, and it will lead you to the shelter. Determination

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can change to desperation. But to be patient is not to be lazy. Fine, we have to struggle, but only desperation will make someone...misbehave.”

She was talking about prostitution as an immoral shortcut to wealth and riches. The discourses of greed and impatience are similar to those seen in the migration debates in the previous chapter, but here take on speciﬁcally gendered overtones, such as a woman’s vanity for desiring ﬁne cloth.

“You are innocent girls and do not know,” she said, ostensibly excusing their bad decisions. “You refuse to go to school because you want ﬁne cloth like that girl but you don’t know how she gets her own money. It will lead you to that.

Following men—men are human being and they can deceive you and even if anything happen to you he can deny you.”

As seen in debates around migration choices described in the previous chapter, the counselor again frames women’s decisions as naive and misinformed, invoking speciﬁcally gendered language to dismiss their foolishness. While calling them “innocent” regarding the question of engaging in transactional sex, she still insists they are guilty of the underlying moral wrongs that supposedly incentivized that behavior. Rather than provide practical advice on how to organize or defend themselves from abusive men, the counselors thereby shamed women for entering these relationships, implying such abuses are just inevitable. Without any tools for mitigating these risks, counselors instead relied on moralizing condemnations and absolute prohibitions, still without directly even mentioning sex, sex work, or other transactional relationships.

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The lead counselor for the session leaned back in her chair, having ﬁnished the main lecture for the day. Perhaps sensing that these stories were actually not so foreign to the women in the room, another counselor soon jumped in and quickly removed any ambiguity about the purpose of the lecture:

“Have patience because just taking short cuts, like doing prostitution for material things, your new things will be gone in three months. It will soon be in your record if you are not patient.” She elaborated that these were not only moral wrongs, but would do immediate harm on women’s reputations. “Go apply for a post and it will destroy your career. Do prostitution and no one will want to marry you if you are a prostitute. No one will respect you, as a lady. If you look at your achievements, those clothes will be gone but if you make a good name for yourself it will not deteriorate. Those things, though, will not last long. Some of you want to have nice hair weaving but what about your dignity? What have you really achieved? What you are losing is not worth what you are gaining. All clothes, that is all. If you have a shop, though, people will greet you—good morning madam— but these customers you have are not treating you with respect. What are you going to tell your child when he asks Mommy, who is my Daddy, or, Mommy, what do you do for a living? If you are working in a salon, people will respect you more.”

Counselors often invoked the Yoruba saying Oruko rere san ju wura ati fa- daka lo, meaning “a good name is better than gold” to support points like this about the importance of maintaining one’s reputation. As the women slinked in their chairs around me, they too read the counselor’s instruction about stigma as a partial endorsement of it, reproducing the slut-shaming cultural narratives that

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permeated public discourse about young women more generally. Speeches like these were insensitive and ineﬀective, alienating the women they are ostensibly aiming to help. They also demonstrated a persistent paternalism in the NAPTIP mission that failed to take seriously the ambitions of those women targeted for intervention, while attempting to impose a conservative set of values by means of shame and force, disciplining migrant women in a Foucauldian sense.

Making a New Plan

These lessons were intended to help women reject sex work in general and migrant sex work upon their release and reintegration from the shelter. Counselors urged them to think of alternatives—to ﬁnd a new plan and accept a more modest lifestyle, in both the material and sexual senses of the term.

“So if you leave this place, plan for your future. I want you to think, please, why am I here in this shelter? The mistake you have done—are you going to go back to that place?”

“No, no,” the girls mumbled, penitently.

“Maybe the way you talk to your parents, the way you move around. Think about it,” she continues. “Don’t just say, Me I wan go, Me I wan go. Think about what led you to this place and think about the steps you will take after it. This is an opportunity to plan your life. If you are just thinking how to get that bobo (boyfriend), how to get anything, you will not be planning your life. If you are complaining that the soup is not sweet, there is no meat, you will not be planning your life. But you were eating ﬁnd food before? Some of you, you want jollof rice, but

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garri (cheap dried cassava) doesn’t kill. I have seen so many people hawking pure water, and they are going to school. That is how life is, rotating.”

“God says in the Bible that your body is your temple and the more men who come, you are destroying your temple. Some of you know what I am saying but others I know will just say, ah, I don’t care. But those people who are coming, they are killing you. I beg, just use this place as an avenue to ﬁnd a new road. I am trying to talk to you, but I am not trying to disgrace you or embarrass you. I beg, don’t let your present determine your future.”

NAPTIP incorporated training schemes called “empowerment” into reintegration plans for select women who were successfully rehabilitated. Meanwhile, programs inside the shelter oﬀered parallel training—informal education classes on basic literacy, writing, and math skills, and vocational training in hair dressing and tailoring. But most counselors were quick to admit that few students would really develop from these programs alone. After all, no one was intended to stay in the shelter for more than six weeks according to the national rehabilitation policy, and they knew that would not allow enough time to learn usable skills. When pressed, the staﬀ could come up with one or two exceptional stories of how one small child, who lingered in the shelter for months after his embassy refused to recognize him and kept delaying repatriation, actually learned to read in the shelter. There were stories like this, but in the end, the vocational training classes seemed intended to do something else altogether.

“You know there is this girl who was here in 2005,” Ben once told Patience.

“I went to her graduation on Thursday, because after she was here, she chose to go

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back to school. She came to Lagos because she was orphaned, and the family members that took her in, they abused her, and left her. So, she decided to come to Lagos…to hustle…if you know what I mean—”

Patience interrupted him. “That’s not her fault!” she said, defending the girl.

“Of course it’s not,” Ben agreed, “but then she had to choose to return to school, to do something new.”

“It’s been two years since I was in school,” she admitted. “But there are no jobs, and I can’t work, so I had to take this opportunity. If I leave now I will return to my mommy’s house...but I will leave again. I will travel to Gambia.”

Classes at the shelter were designed to address exactly the kind of resigna- tion women like Patience expressed in this instance, as Ben encouraged her to consider the other girl who chose to make a new life for herself. Rather than teaching new skills, the more important goal for vocational training seemed to be teaching residents that they could learn new skills at all—that they could sit in a classroom, even if they had dropped out years before, or that they can enter new programs and take on new professions. No one was going to learn to be a hair dresser while in the shelter itself. But, the better-founded hope was that she would accept it as a possibility, and a goal for her own future, one to contemplate and embrace and pursue in earnest after returning home. Again, the classes serve the personal re-education Foucault describes, where (ostensibly) compulsory work helped eﬀect the internal transformation of prisoners beyond the task at hand (Foucault 1995,

248).

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Consistent with those deeper rehabilitation goals, women’s plans for the future functioned as a sort of litmus test for the eﬀectiveness of rehabilitation. An- other day, I was sitting in the common room with all of the two dozen residents who were at the shelter. They had been forced to assemble there for nonformal education classes, but were so grumpy about it that the teacher had again given up, and just sat and stared at them, arms folded across her chest, like a unspoken silence contest.

Florence pointed out from a seat in the corner that since she was not teaching anyway, and since they electricity was on for the ﬁrst time in days, she should just permit them to watch television. When the teacher refused with a shrug, Flor- ence grabbed a marker from her and insisted, “here, let me teach then.” She marched to the original dry-erase board and wrote in large letters, I want to go home.

“To do what?” the teacher asked.

Please let me go, Florence wrote next.

“To do what?” she asked again.

When Florence did not respond, the teacher said, “no, write it,” meaning write a response, but Florence writes the question, To do what?

Another case worker present joined in to get her to respond. I want to do hairdressing work, she ﬁnally wrote in silence.

“You want to learn, or own your own shop?” they asked her.

“I’ve already learned!” Florence exclaimed, once again exasperated by the idea she was unqualiﬁed. It happened almost every day. Embarrassed, the counsel-

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ors made vague promises about possibly being able to help with that, but then grew quiet again in the face of her frustration.

Here, the futility of the counselors’ empowerment plans become painfully clear. Florence already trained for two years as a hair dresser, but could not make real money working in someone else’s shop, and she could not aﬀord to open her own. That frustration had actually motivated her to leave. But the counter- traﬃcking campaign hinged on the idea of rehabilitation through vocational training and reorientation, primarily in catering, tailoring, and, of course, hair dressing.

If the market had not been not saturated enough already, there are over 140 regis- tered counter-trafficking NGOs now offering this kind of training in Florence’s hometown alone (IOM). The chances of women like her securing a stable income as a hair dresser were arguably less since the counter-trafficking campaign began.

When forced to make a choice, and when trying to convince the counselors that she really would not travel again if they would just let her go, she acquiesced and wrote it on the board. She declared she would work as a hair dresser, but it still felt half-hearted. As she had told me before, back home in Benin, she could make more in one night with a generous aristo boyfriend than she would make in a month working at someone else’s hair salon.

Conclusion

Like debates about migration, these arguments about sex work and alternative income sources ultimately proved futile. They pitched women’s individual ambitions against broadly shared cultural sensibilities that took for granted how

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mobility, sex, and ambition are so often intertwined for women in Nigeria. They deployed discourses of shame and fear to intimidate women into change, reinforcing social stigma that made many women in sex industries vulnerable to abuse in the ﬁrst place. In short, they failed to take seriously the how these women saw the world and what they wanted for themselves in it.

In some ways, none of this is surprising; of course these programs fail. It is a story we have heard a million times, and that anthropologists are perhaps particularly fond of telling. Global aid agendas are ill-suited different cultural contexts and practicalities of local life. African governments ride waves of foreign funding and political pressure to pursue ineffective projects that misread people’s real needs. It is an important though well-established critique in academic literature on human trafficking as well: campaigns against human trafficking hinder women’s migration and often hurt the women they aim to help. Empowerment programs do more harm than good. Good intentions bely unintended consequences, and so on.

However, that was not the whole story here. In the following chapter, I will consider how a diﬀerent form of these debates was eﬀective, persuading women to reconsider their choices, and revealing the exceptional logics of governance in the process.

This happened when the counselors invoked God.

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CHAPTER FIVE

God Rescued You

The conversation was so familiar that they seemed to carry on almost out of habit.

“I wan go,” Florence repeated.

“So open up,” the counselors replied, matter-of-factly, back and forth once again.

Eventually, accepting the impasse they had reached, Florence gave up and tried to change the subject. She insisted that it did not matter anyway; she just wanted to go home now, to start her business, back in her home town.

I thought she was partly acquiescing, saying what she assumed they wanted to hear, by stating intentions to ﬁnd work at home instead of traveling out. But then she added that she just will need her international passport back from the

NAPTIP staﬀ ﬁrst, and then she would go.

“Your passport?!” the counselors exclaimed, exasperated. “Why do you need your passport if you don’t need to travel?”

“It’s not only for travel. For bank,” she said, “and school.”

“No, you can’t use it there...” they replied, suspiciously.

“Ok, I want to go to Libya. Not Gambia, now it’s Libya,” she teased them, smiling, testing their reaction. They were not amused.

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“Look, if travel is what is in your mind,” one of the counselors ﬁnally conceded, “then it doesn’t matter what you say, that you don’t want to travel. God will let you go because he has already rescued you once.”

“God wants me to go,” Florence insisted, her brow lowering as the humor dropped from her voice. “I prayed for direction before traveling. God wants me to go.”

“Everyone who tells you not to travel, you hate,” the counselor replied, “so that is why God let you go so far. But when you got to the airport, he rescued you...but he may not do it again.”

Florence glared back at them as if she was about to speak, but then paused, stood, and walked to the window in silence. She was still looking out at the parking lot below with her back to the rest of the room when the rest of the counselors slowly made their way back to their oﬃces, shrugging their shoulders at me as they left.

In confrontations like these, the back and forth of the usual debates could quickly prove fruitless. Residents demanded to know why they are being held, counselors demanded to know why they were traveling, and no one was left satis-

fied with the answers offered in reply. Even when Florence tried to change the subject, the staff turned back again to her plans to travel. But then one of the counselors mentioned God.

It was not exactly that religion here united residents and counselors. In- stead, faith in God provided a common ground to argue everything else. It was a usefully diﬀerent register than the truth telling matches over what any given resi-

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dent really wanted to do. The suggestion that it was God’s plan to rescue her moved their conversation beyond whether or not Florence was actually being traf-

ﬁcked, or what risks she had entertained, or what her travel agent had planned to do with her. Instead, more important than her own intentions, or her sponsor’s, or even NAPTIP’s, was what God wanted for her. The counselors contended that God actually was guiding the whole process, both when he “let” her go in the beginning, and when he later intervened to keep her from completing the trip—sending her to NAPTIP instead. Florence, too, believed God had guided her, but out of Ni- geria, and not toward the shelter. Who was correct, which path God had ordained for her, and, most importantly, what this meant for her future plans, ultimately proved a more engaging debate than simply throwing accusations around of lies, betrayals, and abuse.

The terms of this debate were familiar grounds for both Florence and the staﬀ alike, reﬂecting the broader hermeneutics of Christian religious practice in

Nigeria. In this popular style, heavily inﬂuenced by African Pentecostalism, the continued discernment of and submission to God’s plan comprise the primary practice of an ethical life. Pentecostalism is characterized by a belief in direct experiences with the Holy Spirit, in baptism and in daily life. Southern Nigeria is pre- dominantly Christian, and Pentecostals constitute about 3 in 10 Nigerians total

(Pew Forum 2006). Still, even more identify as “born again,” and Pentecostal theology has strongly inﬂuenced popular religious thinking and popular culture across Christian denominations. The practices of self-examination were therefore

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common to people’s faith lives around Nigeria, but they took on new signiﬁcance in the shelter, growing in both intensity and meaning.

The high stakes and stress of this moment in each woman’s life was not dif-

ficult to imagine. For many of the shelter residents, the decision to leave their homes had been an assertion of independence and adulthood, a determination to take control of their lives and make opportunities for themselves where none existed. It was not one any of them took lightly. Many women, Florence included, reported spending days in sustained prayer and contemplation, even fasting before deciding to go, and repeating the process again before actually traveling. Then, in the climactic thrill of leaving—coming to Lagos, entering a the international airport, holding a passport, often for the first time—all plans were swiftly aborted with their interception by NAPTIP. From the exhilaration of travel to its devastating interruption, they soon find themselves detained various border point holding cells and eventually at the NAPTIP rehabilitation shelter. There, trapped indoors, staring out windows, hoping for NEPA to bring light for just a few hours of idle entertainment on the grainy rabbit-eared television, few had anything better to do than to sit and stew in their own thoughts. It was on top of all of those factors that the shelter staff actively demanded this kind of introspection, stating directly that this was the very purpose of rehabilitation, and God’s purpose for putting them there.

This chapter discusses how shelter staﬀ and residents alike invoked God’s plan in trying to understand the experiences that brought them to the shelter. In formal weekly worship sessions, mundane oand comments, and ongoing de-

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bates like the one described aboe, counselors regularly claimed that God must have wanted everyone to be at the shelter. “Why else would you be here?” they would say, self-evidently. These comments prompted intense self-reflection that residents seemed to find important and meaningful, unlike much of their other conversations with staff that were often riddled with sarcasm and irreverence.

Heated arguments over diﬀerent possible fates—what would have happened had they not been intercepted, which of these paths God had actually destined for them, and what they should do about it now—consistently made each woman at the shelter contemplate, articulate, and defend her life choices, while suggesting she rethink any lingering resentment over her current circumstances. This chapter locates these debates within broader cultural theologies of suﬀering in Nigeria and other recent scholarship on African Christianity. In particular, I use Ruth Mar- shall’s ethnography of Nigerian Pentecostalism, Political Spiritualities (2009), to show how these ordinary religious practices take on special meaning within the state-run rehabilitation program.

There are two major implications of this re-appropriation of religious practice inside the shelter. First, I examine how the assertion of God’s Plan reframes the actions of state agents involved in residents’ original interception as well as their ongoing detention, eﬀectively absolving the agency for any wrongdoing. Sec- ond, I consider how this claim reframes the residents’ own personal choices, prompting them to reconsider their past, present, and future. Both of these reca- pitulations advance NAPTIP’s systematic discouragement of women’s migration and encouragement toward alternative vocations on release, as discussed in the

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previous chapters. What is interesting here, then, is not merely the message, but the method. The previous two chapters described how these arguments about sex and mobility were sometimes pursued directly, evaluating options and risks they entailed. This chapter, on the other hand, considers how these same arguments play out in a diﬀerent register, that sanctioned by God himself.

By asking what was at stake in these intense personal and theological debates, this chapter demonstrates how the rehabilitation process aimed to reform both women’s interior forms and their relationship to the state, with implications for how we imagine postcolonial subjectivity and African citizenship. Brenda

Chalﬁn (20082010) describes the importance of aﬀect and identity in encounters between Ghanaian customs agents and citizens in airport inspections procedures.

Here, I identify a more specific form of identity established between sovereign and subject in religion—suggesting these exchanges represent a instance where state officials have re-appropriated a form of governmentality offered by African Pente- costalism, what Mbembe (2002) has characterized as l’état de religion.

Suﬀering and Smiling

To understand how staff and residents would interpret God’s hand in leading women at the shelter, one first must understand the broader theological understandings of suffering or theodicies that frame their interpretations. Rather than taking suffering as a human universal and starting point for academic inquiry, anthropologists have argued that suffering is experienced, articulated, and understood in different ways, both within and across communities, in a concept Arthur

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Kleinman and his colleagues have termed “social suﬀering” (Kleinman et al 1996,

1997; Kleinman 1997; Das et al 2001). For many Africans, like much of the rest of the world, hardship is experienced and understood through a distinctly religious idiom, whether inside the shelter or in day to day life. Accordingly, this section will introduce the cultural context of suﬀering in Nigeria, particularly as it has been shaped by recent trends in Pentecostal theology.

There is a long history of popular and academic writing in theodicy, exploring how different religions reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world with the idea of an all powerful god. In Nigeria, this paradox seems to take extreme form, as the country boasts a number of seemingly incompatible distinctions—great suffering, great happiness, and great faith. Despite massive oil reserves and natural resources, over two thirds of the population live on less than $2 a day. Horribly inadequate infrastructure yields perpetual power outages, fatally neglected road systems, and a practically nonexistent social safety net. Transpar- ency International consistently ranks Nigeria as among the most corrupt countries in the world. And yet, in 2003, a report in UK New Scientist Magazine named Ni- geria the happiest country in the world. Then a 2011 Gallop Poll declared it the most optimistic.7 Another survey, conducted by the Bertelsmann Foundation in

2009, marked it as one of the three most religious nations, alongside Brazil and

Morocco.

These statistics have inspired a ﬂurry of proﬁles in popular news media out- lets, often featuring trite observations about the indomitable Nigerian spirit, like

7 The latest poll of this sort—a UN survey conducted in 2012—ranked Nigeria 100th for happiness.

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“the joy [that] comes from seeing and living through the worst that life can oﬀer.”

Most reports also try to draw links between the three accolades, suggesting that unflappable religious faith drives both optimism and happiness, despite great material disparities in wealth. There is likely some truth to this claim, especially if one listens to Nigerians explain these distinctions for themselves. However, to offer it blithely risks invoking the rather condescending belief that religion blinds the poor and oppressed to their own suffering. Those same writers, for example, are wont to quote the great activist Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, who famously sang about how Nigerians were always “suffering and smiling.” “Suffer suffer for world, enjoy heaven,” he admonished, in a sort of pidgin appropriation of Karl Marx’s infamous characterization of religion as an opiate for the masses. Marx, too, was concerned with the relation between religion and happiness, specifically, arguing next that “the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions”

(Marx 1977).

By this logic, Nigerians’ happiness is merely an illusion furnished by religion, a denial of the real horror of their conditions; however, even a cursory look at the other statistics in these reports reveals the instability of these claims. The same survey that ranked Nigeria happiest in the world placed them square in the middle for rate of satisfaction. That is to say, just because Nigerians are happy, does not mean they are duped into believing their circumstances are acceptable. Indeed,

Nigerians are also widely lauded as their own strongest critics, with a self-

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deprecating sense of humor on national problems like corruption, lack of basic amenities, and endemic poverty (Smith 2007). Far from accepting these problems as inevitable, Nigerians are acutely aware of the injustice of their suﬀering, especially in the context of local and international disparities of wealth despite the huge oil and gas reserves subsidizing the national economy. The diﬀerence, then, is not that they accept these problems, but that they still only think of them as temporary—the optimism designation thereby buttressing the happiness one. “No condition is permanent,” according to the popular maxim adorning the sides of commuter buses all over the country.

The stress on the ephemerality of present hardship represents the more direct link between religious faith and these strange points of Nigerian exceptional- ism. The great promise of Nigerian Christianity in its modern incarnations is that regardless of your suﬀering now, God has great things in store for you. As articulated in the massively popular anthem “E no easy” by hip hop duo P-Square, and in countless other pop and gospel songs like it, “No be everybody wey sleep for night, wake up see the light. See the future is bright. And e dey enta for eye. Make you do your best. Baba God go handle the rest.”8 It is less a matter of closing one’s eyes to present injustices, and more about looking toward the future.

While it may seem pedantic, the distinction is crucial. Some religious traditions do emphasize a tolerance of present suﬀering. Buddhism is an obvious example, and many strains of Christianity, including several early Nigerian Pentecostal sects, also encourage an ascetic, minimalist lifestyle promising true reward in the

8 Translation: Not everyone who sleeps wakes up in the morning. Your future is bright, you will see. Make sure to do your best and Father God will take care of you.

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afterlife. This philosophy may indeed be something closer to the delayed gratiﬁca- tion that Fela sang against in the 1980s. Most contemporary churches in Nigeria, by contrast, promise decidedly worldly rewards. A part of a global Biblical inter- pretive trend popularly called the “prosperity gospel,” believers are promised great material wealth and success while on earth, in addition to the riches of heaven. In- deed, this sense of faith-based entitlement—further emboldened by Nigeria’s massive oil reserves and population advantage—arguably makes Nigerians even more acutely aware of the injustice of their current hardships, not less so. To incite

God’s plan at the shelter, then, is not merely to dismiss it as a part of all man’s sinful condition on earth. Rather, it is to invite a speciﬁc interpretation of its deeper purpose in each woman’s life on their way to greater things.

If this destiny of riches was something one just waited for patiently, lulling people into passivity as they await their fate, then perhaps Fela’s critique would apply, but neither is that the case. Rather, as Ruth Marshall (2009) argues, Pente- costal teachings emphasize that the promise of God’s riches requires constant effort to achieve, both spiritually and materially. This eﬀort is evident in every corner of Nigerian life: Nigerians are nothing if not entrepreneurial, widely known to be creative, ambitious, and even unrelenting. More pertinent to the discussion here, the spiritual work required for success is considered just as important.

Merely believing in God is not enough to secure his miracles. Nor will following a simple set of rules guarantee any person’s virtue. Rather, realizing God’s plan for the future requires a perpetual interrogation of the present, to avoid the devil’s

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temptations that are constantly posing as divine, and to instead follow the signs from God that will guide the path to success.

This distinction between passively and actively seeking one’s destiny coin- cides with Marshall’s (2009) overarching argument about Pentecostal theology in

Nigeria, and about social science accounts of religious belief in general. She describes how much spiritual practice, especially in the third world, are often described as a reaction to bad circumstances. This secular sentiment in academia is perhaps not far from then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s infamous comments about the American working class “clinging” to religion (as well as guns and xenophobia) in the face of joblessness. But while his comments inspired a backlash of criticism for being insensitive and condescending to people of faith, sociological analysis of religion has for years oﬀered thinly veiled arguments along the same lines, but without the reprisals (see also Asad 2009). These explanations, Marshall argues, not only fail to respect or reﬂect the meaning of religion to those who practice it, but also fail to provide a true sociological explanation of how and why certain theological trends gain popularity over others at any given time. Instead, she argues, they posit such a general hypothesis that, in explaining all religion away in one fell swoop, ultimately accounts for little of it at all.

She suggests we should understand religion in general, and Nigerian Pente- costals’ particular practice of it, not as a reaction to hardship, nor even as a way of merely interpreting hardship, but as a way of taking action on it. To Marshall, religion cannot be understood as only a set of symbols or codes to understand the world, but a set of guiding principals for acting within it. Being religious, in short,

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is an active state, a perpetual and dynamic way of both being in and acting on the world around you. Using Nigerian Pentecostalism as an example, she describes how popular theology promotes constant introspection and self-evaluation in order to submit to the will of God. Rather than teaching an ethics based on a universal moral code as common in other Christian churches, she argues born-again spirituality advances an ethic of individualism by emphasizing interiority, discipline, and techniques of self-fashioning, ultimately manifested in “submission and openness to the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit in everyday life” (ibid 10). As she explains:

That new self-knowledge has as its object protection, self-mastery, and spiritual empowerment, and it is explicitly linked to the creation of a certain style of life…Born-Again practices of the self in- volve acts and experiences of faith whose focus is on interiority, en- acting in various forms processes of self-examination and “giving an account of oneself.”3 These accounts focus primarily on the self’s own trajectory along the road to salvation and self-recognition, and thus constitute one of the principal techniques of subjectivation and modes in which obedience is created. (Marshall 2009, 129)

In this sense, submission itself is not a passive process, but rather one that requires the active interrogation of events and signs in one’s daily life. Likewise, although individualist in that each person is responsible for her own interpretation of God’s work, these analytical skills are still learned and practiced in community, and ultimately hinge on a testimony shared with others.

In the essay “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Achille Mbembe describes a similar process, whereby religion—particularly its manifestations in Pentecostal

Christianity—has become the primary “means of psychic negotiation, self-styling, and engagement with the world at large” (2002, 269). He continues:

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In contemporary Africa, it is the subject’s relation to divine sovereignty that serves as the main provider of meanings for most people. This can be said even though the various discursive formations whose symbolism is established in religious authority are far from being homogeneous. Almost everywhere, contemporary practices in the course of which divine power is mimed or staged are linked with the process of reinventing the self and the polis, in its twofold sense— earthly polis and heavenly polis (the Kingdom). Such a categorization does not reﬂect solely a division between this world and the beyond. It also indicates how the self arises from the interaction between the world of the empirical and what cannot be reduced to it. Through speciﬁc rituals and celebrations of various kinds, religious practice is becoming the site where the networks of a new, non-biological relationship among members of a family or even an ecumene are formed, at the same time as notions of divine sovereignty and patronage are transformed and new dogmas emerge. (ibid, 270)

By naming this shift l’ état de religion, Maguire and Murphy (2012) suggest

Mbembe purposefully calls forth a contrast with Foucault’s original l état du droit, or governmentality by rule of law. What happens, then, when this quite ordinary religious practice is taken up by individuals who acting as state agents, in the context of a state run (total) institution? In the shelter, it is NAPTIP counselors demanding that these women defend their own trajectory on the path to salvation, examine their own experiences, and, as Marshall describes it, “give an account of themselves”—all as a part of the shelter program. While ostensibly adopted by these oﬃcers merely as a culturally appropriate display of sympathy and support, this manner of introspection and meaning making acquires new meanings as it is reappropriated within the state rehabilitation model, revealing novel assemblages of postcolonial governmentality and resultant subjectivities.

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Trusting God in Government

The mode of engaging with the world that Mbembe describes is evident in the shift that takes place in the opening vignette, as counselors change tactics from inquiring about Florence’s own plans to inquiring about God’s. That shift requires a retrospective assessment of His signs and intentions, and implies this diﬀerent line of reasoning to explain the world. Drawing upon Spivak’s (2007) observations regarding the failure of modern scholarship to engage faith and religious practice,

Marshall describes a similar division, describing how the interpretative logic of

Pentecostalism contrasts with Enlightenment-based analytical conventions and categories:

In the place of a politics of reasoned deliberation, a politics of af- fect, motivated by the desire or passion for God; in the place of an agency born from the exercise of human reason, of man “making” his own history, the performative power of prayer and the agency of supernatural forces; in the place of a teleology of progress, or the manifestation of Reason in history, the urgency of the messianic instant. Direct, unmediated revelation from God takes precedence over other forms of evidence, and we see the deployment of forms of veridiction, or truth-telling, which rely on experiences of interiority: prophecy, dreams, or “seeing in the spirit,” as Pastor [M.O.] Ojewale puts it. (Marshall 2009, 10)

Translated to the point of view of the women at the shelter, in place of the residents “making” their own histories—weighing options, choosing to travel, accepting the risks—women like Florence instead defended themselves as having taken responsible action through practices of prayer and religious reﬂection. But, by the same token, events leading to their detention were not directly credited to the motives and choices of the individual players involved, but to God’s will.

Marshall compares this logic to that of a popular South African zionist who argues that God’s role in the history of mankind is most important.

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There is one enormous omission throughout the whole history that has been written by outsiders. The work of the Holy Spirit throughout our history has simply been left out. The events of our history have been recorded as if everything could be accounted for simply by sociology and anthropology. We would like to write our own history from the point of view of the Holy Spirit. (Marshall 2009, 9)

Florence, too, saw her own history as written by God, with her responsibility to study and contemplate his force in her life, the same way scholars examine political or cultural forces. Again, this is how she saw the world long before she reached the shelter, fasting and praying for days in her church as she contemplated leaving, and so on. But then at the shelter, the counselors oﬀered a competing interpretation of his plan, challenging the righteousness of her decision and prompting a different way of thinking about her time there.

Excerpts from some typical Wednesday worship sessions are instructive here. For example, one week a counselor oﬀered a sermon she titled “A Purpose

Driven Life:”

It means knowing the reason you are here and then living for that reason. Have any of you ever asked why am I here? Do you ever ask, why was I created and who was my creator? If you tried to travel, and you were stopped by immigration, and you were made to come to NAPTIP, are you asking, why did this happen, why am I here? Well, the answer is in Romans 8:28. ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.’ It means all that happens will come together in good. It’s good for you that you were stopped when you tried to travel. God doesn’t want you to suﬀer when you arrive there...All things are for good. If you are asking why can I not travel? Why am I not driving a jeep? Why am I not owning my house? The answer is that all is for good. It is for your own good you are not traveling. It is for your own good you are not driving jeep. It is for your own good you are not owning house. And through God all things are possible and it will come together and you will do those things.

Here, the counselor recognized the dismay with which so many of the residents

ﬁnd themselves, unable to understand or agree with the accusations that had lead

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to their stay at the shelter. But rather than recounting the purported dangers of traﬃcking, here she simply invoked God’s plan, assuring everyone that they were only stopped from traveling because God wanted it to be so.

Another worship session carried a similar message:

But remember that you are here because it was destined by God. Nothing happens that is not under God’s plan...And God wants you to learn something from being here…You must see any problems as challenges, not as barriers. You must see them as a bridge, to ﬁnd a solution. Don’t see us as wicked. Go’ment is trying to help you, trying to help you out of this problem. You may not see it as problem, but by the time you do it may be too late. So keep hope alive. Pray to God. Move closer to God, in whatever way—Islamic way, or Christian way, or other way... Don’t think that this is the end of the world. You may have so many opportunities after leaving this place. Find something to do after leaving here, whether it is education or training. If you do not, you might go back to where you were rescued from. Not everyone here has done something wrong. But please do not go back to it. Even if you were deceived, open your eyes. Don’t let people deceive you, because I am not God, but he will judge you.

In this homily, the counselor actually acknowledged the most fundamental contradiction of their rescue mission: that the shelter residents may not have seen their previous circumstances as a problem, and in fact saw their current detention at the shelter as a much bigger one. He claimed authority ﬁrst based on God, though, and then, through trust in God, encourages the residents to also trust government.

When he said that government is trying to help, this counselor was again

ﬁghting a deeply ingrained and often well-placed distrust of Nigerian government.

In a state where the police and soldiers alike are far better known for extracting bribes at checkpoints than for any public service, where people are more likely to call on local youth gangs (”area boys”) to catch and punish a thief, there is no

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strong reason for anyone to cooperate with the government on good faith alone.

Indeed, Marshall describes how Pentecostals in Nigeria have a long history of cri- tiquing corrupt government oﬃcers through religious references, even relaying a case about border control in particular:

In one booklet, Satanic Immigration Officers, we can read about the multitude of evil spirits (more than fifty thousand of them!) that attack individuals and block the flow of prosperity and miracles in his or her life. In a delightful rendering of the corruption experienced at borders, the author explains how “evil officers” stop the individual at “spiritual roadblocks” and ask him or her, “wetin you dey carry?” in order to seize it from him. (Marshall 2009:196)

It is these alternate narratives that the counselors and other oﬃcials must contest at the shelter, trying to prove that not only are their own intentions good, but that government in this case is working for good. Indeed, immediately before they were brought to the shelter, many women found themselves conditions in nearly identical to those described in Marshall’s booklet, stopped at border points by corrupt oﬃcers looking for bribes, including Florence herself.

In most Nigerians’ experience, the state in the abstract, but especially also as embodied in individual oﬃcers, is not to be trusted. Political theorists argue that the very idea of the state functions to legitimate subjection (Abrams 1988). As

Weber originally argued, the state is characterized by a successful claim on a mo- nopoly of violence. However, in Nigeria, that ideology falls ﬂat on its face, where the state lacks legitimacy and is considered only with grave suspicion. The idea that someone is a government oﬃcial evokes mistrust, if anything, and even the counselor himself recognized this—”don’t see us as wicked,” he implored.

Facing the challenge of reforming—and thereby governing—the women in this context, the counselor has invoked the sovereignty of God rather than the sov-

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ereignty of government. In doing so, he obscured the immediate corruption and capriciousness of the state, displacing it with God’s assurances of better things to come. In the end, he suggested, you don’t have to trust government directly to open up to your time in the shelter; it was not government alone who brought you there. Really, it was God’s plan, your destiny, and everyone there was only doing

God’s work. You could no more be angry at government than you could be angry at God, he implied.

Of course, Florence and the others hesitated in accepting this version outright.

Around the 50th anniversary of Nigeria’s independence, the staﬀ led a group counseling session encouraging patriotism and love for Nigeria. Inspired by frequent television programming and music videos proclaiming the nation’s achievements since colonialism, each counselor described what they liked about

Nigeria, listing things like a survivor’s spirt, increased accountability in government, and the mobile phone revolution. Then they turned the ﬂoor over to the residents, asking them to do the same. Florence refused, shaking her head with a sort of indignant dismay, saying Nigeria did nothing for her. In good spirits, the counselors together egged her on, saying Nigeria must have done something good.

“But Nigeria rescued you-o!” one suggested, smiling, maybe even teasing a little.

A pause. “God rescued me,” Florence whispered, earnestly.

“Through NAPTIP, he did,” a few counselors called back across the room.

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Florence rolled her eyes and slumped back in the couch, unconvinced. In moments like this, Florence seemed to have accepted God’s change of plans for her, but still could not reconcile that submission with the more immediate sense injustice she felt at the corrupt and coercive means state agents had employed in her “rescue.” She absolutely still resented the government still for keeping her when she refused to pay a bribe to an immigration oﬃcer at the airport—a standard tactic for Nigerian security forces of all sorts—but she was slowly starting to consider that that injustice still may have been God’s will.

In the introductory chapter, I discussed how Nigeria’s bad image around the world has explicitly shaped their counter-traﬃcking programs. But here we see that these performances of good governance are not only oﬀered for foreign audiences. Rather, the counselors see the residents of the shelter—the very people supposedly being helped by these programs—as also needing to be convinced.

These arguments reﬂect a much broader tension between citizens and the government of Nigeria, which rendered all forms of state intervention suspicious, again, often for good reason. Counselors, like everyone in Nigeria, are well aware of these state shortcomings, and actively confront them in their debates with shelter residents. They often eventually resign themselves to the residents’ mistrust of the state, give up on defending it, and focus on trusting God instead. In many cases, that was suﬃcient, mollifying resident’s immediate frustrations and complaints just enough to make them slightly more receptive to the rest of the rehabilitation program.

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Sermons of Submission

The second implication of invoking God’s plan like this reoriented women at the shelter even further. It asks residents to reconsider not only the immediate circumstances of their arrival and who was responsible for them, but the deeper choices and ambitions that brought them there in the ﬁrst place. As the counselors suggested to Florence in the opening vignette, it was only when she disregarded

God’s true plans for her that he intervened to stop her at the airport. This approach directs the residents’ frustrations inward, prompting further introspection and contemplation in an eﬀort to truly submit to God.

One worship session was typical of these eﬀorts, with a delivery that manages to be simultaneously eﬀortless and sharply pointed. I had just grabbed a

ﬂimsy white plastic chair to take a seat in the sun-drenched foyer, when everyone stood to sing the series popular gospel tunes that would open the hour. Each song blurred into the next, from the slow, mournful call for God to “Do Something New in My Life,” to the joyfully triumphant “Everything Na Double Double,” which prophesies how everyone’s wealth will multiply in thanks to God. Residents sang emphatically, swaying to the tunes and occasionally raising their hands and closing their eyes in praise.

About ten minutes in, the counselors near me started nudging each other and whispering. They argued over who would lead the sermon, at ﬁrst discreetly and then less so. The homily was usually oﬀered extemporaneously, loosely inspired by one of a handful of popular biblical passages, and the in the end they always closely resembled the lectures and lessons of the group counseling anyway.

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Eventually, Prudence gave in, rolling her eyes. She stepped forward to take over for the last song and then, with a deep breath, she began her sermon.

“I was not supposed to lead today. But the person [who was supposed to] is not around, so I will lead. I was just looking through my bible, and the spirit led me to read Psalms 23. Does anyone know Psalms 23? No?”

Florence grumbled from her seat, “We know it…we know it.” Prudence then looked at her expectantly, waiting for the recitation. “I can’t remember it,” Flor- ence trailed oﬀ.

Prudence turned to the room again and asked, “Ah, do you know, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…’”

“Yes, yes,” several girls aﬃrmed.

Prudence nodded and resumed. “So, many of us, we are…moody, shall we say. ‘I wan go,’ abi [right]? So let us read.”

She read the entirety of Psalms 23 aloud. Several girls mumbled in and out, reciting key phrases with her as they recognized them.

Prudence looked up. “So let us take it piece by piece now. ‘The Lord is my shepherd.’ Most of you left your homes for Nigeria or for Lagos or for another place. Someone must have brought you. But now we are talking about God. It was

God who brought you here to NAPTIP Lagos Zonal Shelter. And God will not lead you astray.”

The residents nodded along as she spoke. “There are people who passed through here and received items. You can even see their shops if you go down the road. They are thanking God that they came to the shelter. I pray that your stay

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too will not be in vain. You know the Fulani saying9—is it sheep leading the man or the man leading the sheep? It is the same with God. He will always be leading you.”

Everyone now seemed to be listening intently. A few counselors and even

Florence echoed, “Eh-heh,” before she continued.

“The next part: ‘he makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters.’ You will sometimes be tempted by things, but with God you can resist temptation. No one ever plans to ﬁnd trouble, but by the end of the day they will, so you have to have God to guide you. I pray you will make the right decisions with God’s direction.

“Amen, eh-heh,” a few more replied.

Prudence resumed reading. “’Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’—What this is saying is that when wahalla dey happen [trouble happens], you have nothing to fear. ‘All the days of my life.’ You no go worry. God no go forget you.”

“Amen,” the room repeated in unison.

“So I want us to rise up and thank God, for the day, for our food, for we are living. There are people who cannot eat, who are in hospital, but today we woke up and ate so let us thank God. I pray for the families of everyone here… I pray for our president and leaders that they may not be corrupt and work for the good of our country…I pray for Nigeria and our future…I pray for our visitors and those travel-

9 Fulani is one of the major tribes in Nigeria, predominately located in the northern part of the country.

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ing, that they may have safe journeys…and I pray that Mary’s dream of going home may come true...In Jesus name we pray.”

“Amen!”

On one level, there was nothing strange about Prudence’s choices here, to read this particular passage and to interpret it as she does. But in the course of rather banal, impromptu, and even obvious decisions like these, there emerged at the shelter a clear and comprehensive religious invocation against migrating. As opposed to the tired pros and cons arguments explored in previous chapters, though, here she invoked God’s authority to back her. She implied his warnings to resist temptation and avoid trouble, for example, are omens about the dangers of migrating abroad in search of material wealth. She delicately framed traveling as something guided by someone else, whereas “it was God who brought you to shelter.” Ultimately, in referencing one girl’s dream, she acknowledged the residents’ desire to leave the shelter, but overall implored them to have patience whatever their frustrations (”wahala dey happen”) and to trust in God that his plan for them was good, including the time they must spend there.

Another vignette offers a similar message, offered from a resident’s Bible wrapped in a pink camouflage cover she had carried while traveling. Ben actually invited me to lead that day and then said he too had prepared but would just let

God speak through him.

“If you fail to plan you plan to fail,” he said. “Our stories may be diﬀerent, but surely each one of you had a plan when you traveled. Was it you who made that plan, or did you let someone else do the thinking for you? And if you let

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someone else do your thinking for you, what are the outcomes? If you can survive the mosquitos here and the food here you will live and leave and you will need a plan. And I promise this is not the end of your life here. You will leave, and you will need a plan. So let us turn to Proverbs 16:1-9.”

Rose read aloud, softly, from her own Bible:

To humans belong the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the proper answer of the tongue. All a person’s ways seem pure to them, but motives are weighed by the Lord. Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and he will establish your plans. The Lord works out everything to its proper end—even the wicked for a day of dis- aster. The Lord detests all the proud of heart. Be sure of this: They will not go unpunished. Through love and faithfulness sin is atoned for; through the fear of the Lord evil is avoided. When the Lord takes pleasure in anyone’s way, he causes their enemies to make peace with them. Better a little with righteousness than much gain with injustice. In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.

The counselor then continued the sermon.

So what are the plans that brought you here to NAPTIP shelter and what are the plans that will lead you out? Everyone makes mistakes but the question now is what you learn from those mistakes. You had an opportunity and you took it. Opportunities will deﬁnitely come but you need to be ready for them. That’s one thing about adolescence, those years between childhood and teenage. In adolescence you crave freedom and think you can do anything to upgrade your social status, to run with the big boys or big girls in town. So you will make bad decisions to try to upgrade your social status.

But is that really God’s plan for you? Maybe I am out of school and I can’t ﬁnd a job so someone asks me to model outside the country. I make the decision because I think the pay is good but what of the rigors? Think of [footballer] Didier Drogba. If you want to play at his level, are you prepared to run every morning at 5 am? To train like he does everyday? If someone tries to make it sound easy, if you make a mistake, you will be the one to feel the pain.

And if God asks you on the day of blame, and you say “it was my friend!”, it will not be enough. It is like Adam and Eve in the Bible. Adam said it was Eve who made him eat the fruit from the tree of good and evil, and it was God who gave him Eve, but it was not God’s fault. Adam had to take responsibility. If you are wondering

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‘why me?’ then who would you rather experience what you experienced? They say experience is the best teacher.

Some of you didn’t know what you were going for and that is why you jumped at the opportunity to come back to your own place [Nigeria] and that is good that you made that choice. Now I promise you will go home but it takes time. Life is like a movie and we each have roles to play but God has the master plan. Whose plan do you think is better -- yours or God’s? For our own plan, we don’t ever have all the information, and that makes us weak and vulnerable, when people don’t know the right thing to do.

Not saying you shouldn’t plan, but that say e go betta (it will get better) and not suﬀer so much while you let God’s plan reach you. That is why we are here today, to ask God to let us fall into His plan.

If you go home people might be expecting you to return bigger, since you traveled. They won’t be expecting that you will return worse. They might even call you a loser. But we are not losers. Are there any losers here? No. Once you accept God’s plan you are on the expressway, but you don’t know where you are going. You have to ask God for directions. You say you need a plan. Say it out loud: I need a plan. If you don’t have a plan there is nothing God can do for you. You need a plan but let it ﬁt in with God’s plan.

Logics of Governance

To some extent, sermons like these served state interests through the convenient deployment of religious ideology, sincere as I believe the counselors were.

But if there is an easy dismissal in that interpretation, it misses the implications of that appropriation in the Nigerian context. That is, where state symbols bear so little legitimacy and where state agents are held in such high suspicion, religion proved a more powerful source of authority. This observation is common in observations of daily life in Nigeria, where churches so dominate people’s lives and beliefs. But to see those same eﬀects reproduced within the shelter walls returns that governing eﬀect back to the state. Here, the counselors are governing with God.

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The sincerity or obviousness of these choices does not negate their effects as a form of governance. No officials needed to sit down in a room to plan the ma- nipulation of human trafficking victims’ religious beliefs in order to keep them from traveling abroad, and obscure their own role in doing so. The Foucauldian framework of power and governmentality allows us to analyze the effects of this as an inadvertently state-sponsored message, even when it was not originally conceived or directed as such. He writes:

There is no power that is not exercised with a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality; neither the caste which governs, nor the groups which control the state apparatus, nor those who make the most important economic decisions direct the entire network of power that functions in a society (and makes it function); the rationality of power is characterized by tactics that are often quite explicit at the restricted level where they are inscribed (the local cynicism of power), tactics which, becoming connected to one another, attracting and propagating one another, but ﬁnd- ing their base of support and their condition elsewhere, end by forming comprehensive systems: the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them: an implicit characteristic of the great anonymous, almost unspoken strategies which coordinate the loquacious tactics whose “inventors” or decision makers are often without hypocrisy. (Fou- cault 1980, 95)

Applied here, neither the counselors at the shelter nor even the higher administrators and policy makers need be dismissed as hypocritical or insincere in their efforts to oﬀer spiritual support to residents in order to discern the emergent governmental rationality. The base of support and condition for these religious beliefs is found elsewhere, well outside the shelter and throughout Nigerian life. How- ever, in their articulation with other discourses and tactics shaped by state inter-

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ests and state oﬃcials, they ultimately form a comprehensive system with a clear and decipherable logic to reduce migration.

This logic is evident throughout the rehabilitation process, explicitly and implicitly established as a primary means for preventing the (re)traﬃcking of women. But here, the tactics shift, as counselors encourage women not to reconsider migrating under some cost-beneﬁt rubric, but instead turn attention to their innermost thoughts and desires, especially as they relate to their spiritual selves.

Reforming Sinful Pasts

When encouraging women to reconsider God’s plan for them, shelter staff often framed the resident’s earlier choices to migrate and even to enter foreign sex industries as primarily mistakes of misrecognition. In this narrative, residents sought but misinterpreted God’s true plans for them, but now, in the shelter, they were being granted the opportunity to re-evaluate and correct themselves. As a debate tactic, it gives residents the benefit of the doubt that at least their intentions were true, and stops short of accusing them of outright violation, as has been evident in the sermons and conversations present thus far. NAPTIP staff consistently frame migration as against God’s plan, but rarely was it actually characterized as evil or sinful, like when the counselor above describes the path to the airport as led by “someone else” but not necessarily by the devil or evil spirits, as would be common in Nigeria (Meyer 1995). But what about choices not defended as ordained by God—those which everyone seemed to recognize as actual sin?

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In general, at the shelter, this designation was reserved for oblique references to sex and sex work, and not for migration choices. Willfully engaging in prostitution or other sexually promiscuous behavior was not just dismissed as a mistaken interpretation of God’s truer plan. Rather, it was consistently designated by shelter staﬀ—and often by the residents themselves—as plainly sinful. These comments were consistent with wider cultural beliefs and discourses of shame described in the previous chapter, but they took a diﬀerent valence when invoked in the religious idiom of sin and submission.

Redemption of sinful pasts through faith in God is another prominent theme of Christian theology, and conversion narratives or testimonies of this transformation play an especially important role in Pentecostalism. While not claiming conversion itself (all of the shelter residents already identiﬁed as believers), here we examine how personal histories were reappropriated and interpreted in a religious model of transformation similar to conversion. It framed residents’ previous transgressions within a greater narrative of struggle and betterment, where the darkest sins can still be redeemed by God, opening up again the possibility for redemption on a new path.

The following sermon is instructive.

“It’s not by accident you are here,” the counselor began, following the usual series of songs and hymns. “God saved you; God rescued you. So don’t lose hope just because two were released yesterday and you were not. Your own time to go is coming. You have to have hope, and self-esteem, as we discussed yesterday. In the

Bible, turn to Romans, Chapter 5, Verse 16.”

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She handed the book to one of the residents for her to ﬁnd the page and read aloud:

Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justiﬁcation. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justiﬁcation that brings life for all men. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sin- ners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The counselor resumed, “even those in prison still have hope that one day they will get out. So for you, in the shelter, God still has a plan for you. Don’t give up. Even if before you traveled you didn’t have money to go to school or to establish a shop, maybe God has found another way to help you. Maybe that is why you are here.”

There was little risk in Nigeria that basing the rehabilitation eﬀort on a religious metaphors would be alienating to residents. In southern Nigeria, Christian- ity is so popular that staunch atheism is practically unimaginable to most people, and even indigenous, animist beliefs are often incorporated or combined in some way with the Christian gospel. The more likely scenario in the shelter was not that someone would not believe in God, but that a person may not prioritize God in her life, especially if she felt that they had already betrayed him so much that it was no longer worth trying. It was this logic that reﬂected in the above style of preaching, in an attempt to reach out to those who feel they may already be beyond his grasp.

The message shared in this passage is one of redemption, where sinful pasts are

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restored through faith in God. The counselor even explicitly compared their situation to a prison, evoking not only the patience required until release, but the reform of past trespasses toward a better future that can transpire in the interim.

This incorporation of dark personal histories is a prominent theme in

Christian theology. Scholars of Pentecostalism, in particular, have even observed the darkening of these narratives through exaggeration and straight deceit to con- struct more compelling conversion testimonies. Jennifer Badstuebner (2003) observes this hyperbolic style in her study of former witches’ testimonies at charismatic churches in South Africa, where her informants explained that “the bigger the sin, the more powerful the confession” (see also Marshall 2009, 153). At the shelter, as in the church, no sin is beyond salvation, and no victim is beyond reform.

Another worship session vignette, featuring some regular visitors to the shelter, helps us on these points. Three well dressed women in bright, closely tai- lored ankara dresses with large gele head ties had stood in the front of the foyer, calling one of the guards over to bring a small cooler and an oversized worn nylon totebag from their dusty hatchback vehicle outside. One of the counselors leaned over to ﬁll me in, explaining that they came from a local ministry group to the shelter every month or so, to visit the residents and oﬀer them prayer services. The women introduced themselves by name, one after the other. “We here to bring love,” the last announced. “We are here to tell you that you are loved by God, and you are also loved by us, every one of you. You are loved by God and he will come for each one of you on his time.”

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When the women invited the residents to lead them in worship songs, a woman in the front row began singing and others quickly joined her. The residents seemed to be in good spirits on this day, especially open to the guests, and several girls danced softly in place from their rows, with their heads down and shoulders shrugged, bouncing side to side.

After a few songs the three visiting women took their seats behind a small table and sent the residents to retrieve their Bibles from the bedrooms, donated in previous weeks by a Catholic priest who sometimes lead a Sunday mass in the shelter. One woman pulled out some extra vinyl-covered copies from the nylon bag, and then directed everyone to turn to John 11 for the story of Lazarus. Everyone scrambled to ﬁnd the chosen passage and then took turns reading, many girls stumbling over some of the King James translations. After they were done, one of the women retold the story in simple English from a Bible app on her mobile phone, pausing to elaborate on diﬀerent points. She emphasized how Jesus loved

Lazarus, but still waited two days to go see him, and that we could not necessarily understand why. “God has his own timing,” she said, “and we must be patient for him to help us.”

Next she instructed us to turn to Hebrews 13:6, turning her dogeared pages before any of us ﬁnd the passage. “So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me,” she recited. She told everyone that they had nothing to fear, but that they should have faith that things are happening for them, that God was looking out for them.

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Finally, the women invited all the residents to say prayers. Rose spoke up

ﬁrst, asking that her mother forgive her for her sinful past and accept her once again as her daughter when she returned. Mary asked next that God help and protect all those outside Nigeria. Another girl asked that she turn from bad to good.

After a long pause, Florence asked for the grace of God. “Yes, it is a good prayer,” one of the women said, “We all need it.”

When no one else spoke up, the women invited residents to come forward with private prayers if they wished. Several of the girls came forward and hunched down to their ears, whispering their requests as the women nodded and made notes on legal pads. After several minutes, when they were all ﬁnished, the women conferred quietly with each other. Then one stood to lead the ﬁnal prayer session.

“All of you have the same story, from the same sweet tongue,” she announced. “From what you are telling us, from what you are asking for, it is the same. Someone convinced you and your family that you will earn dollars. But you will do prostitution and you will not see the money. You will see 20 to 30 men a day, and they will even make you sleep with dogs, with animals, if you can believe that. But you must believe it. Some of you have even seen it.”

“Some have prayers of going back,” she continued, “but God sent for people to stop you from that. Pray for little money, enough to eat. Pray for money for vocational training, in fashion design or in hairdressing. Even in petting trading, or selling calling cards, you will eat.

“You all pray for forgiveness for a sinful past, and we pray also that your families will forgive you.”

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The residents’ small avowals of their pasts in this moment evoke the role testimonies in Christian religious practice. They oﬀered follow that same logic of disjuncture, recognizing their own sins and asking for that transformation “from bad to good.” In the prayers spoken aloud to the group and, evidently, in those offered privately to the three women, they each admitted their own wrongdoing and ask for forgiveness—from God, but also from their families. In her study of reformed witches, Badstuebner argues that confessors display and assert agency in publicly testifying to their pasts, describing them as “individual’s attempt to insert herself into the fabric of public life and through doing so attempts to alter that fabric to create a new space for herself” (2003). On a smaller scale, these acts may do the same, reﬂecting the gradual reorientation desired by counselors, and even, apparently, by residents themselves.

While I never witnessed a full conversion or conversion testimony inside the shelter, the accumulation of these moments, taken all together, evoke that paradigm of reform. The shelter environment seems primed for such an experiences, according to the norms and expectations of Pentecostal practice, as Mar- shall describes them. It is useful here to break down her account of these conditions (2009, 147), drawing forth the parallels between the conditions for conversion

(or at least how it is narrated) and the rehabilitative setting produced in the shelter. She describes:

The act of conversion, “giving one’s life to Christ” and “accepting Christ as one’s personal Lord and savior,” is presented as the moment of rupture that marks the end of the old and the beginning of the new.

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As suggested above, this break with the past echoes the counselors’ encouragement to retreat from previous paths and desires, and instead submit to a new plan for themselves.

If we examine the ways in which the experience of conversion is described as having been lived, we see that the individual invariably presents this spiritual moment as an intensely powerful and private dialogue of the self with the self…

This style of introspection is actively encouraged at the shelter, and, as again described above, is nearly inevitable given the boredom and monotony that characterizes most time there.

…yet one in which the individual recognizes him- or herself as being in the grip of a power that goes beyond the individual, a power that reveals itself in an imperious fashion, demanding that one cede or capitulate.

This passage characterizes exactly the style of imperious intervention proposed to be the residents’ own rescue by God. The shelter staﬀ, too, encouraged residents to submit to this higher plan for them, rather than resist his own eﬀorts. (Recall one counselor’s advice that “God rescued you once but he may not do it again.”) Mar- shall continues,

Converts commonly relate how they heard the “voice” of God speaking to them, how they had a vision or a dream, or were overwhelmed by a sudden physical feeling of spiritual presence, or how they were compelled by extreme experiences of fear or desire brought on by a personal trial or illness.

Counselors regularly recognized that the women are in a state of distress, though often the source of this distress was muddled, whether it was attributed to the experience of traﬃcking or the rehabilitation process itself.

The experience is invariably solitary, and tends to be linked to moments of self-reﬂection or reckoning.

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Again, self-reﬂection is a constant occupation at the shelter, both by direction and by default.

Beyond personal trial or trauma, converts often explain how the revelation came upon them after reading a particular biblical text or hearing a preached message.

Residents are encouraged to read the bible in their personal time (many often seeking this form of diversion regardless), and attend regular worship and praise sessions, up to twice a week, featuring the sort of targeted sermons presented throughout this chapter. And ﬁnally,

The altar call is a standard liturgical practice in all Pentecostal services, generally coming after the sermon, where individuals are urged by the pastor to come and give their lives to Jesus and repeat a profession of repentance and faith.

Without the full testimonies of faith, the public and private prayers that the women oﬀer in the above vignette and similar moments do not fully qualify as an

“altar call.” However, it retains some of the same characteristics, including the physical presentation of the body to God’s emissary there (here, the women leading the sermon), and the display of repentance to them. Taken together, we can again that the rehabilitation program oﬀered at the shelter works through a religious idiom, governing residents through the direct invocation of God’s plan and

God’s hope.

Testimony

The success of all of these projects, as with all forms of governmentality, is partial. Most women I knew at the shelter remained dedicated to ﬁnding God’s purpose for them, even accepting his apparent intention to put them in the shel-

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ter. But, like Florence, many were hesitant to fully embrace the NAPTIP narrative.

They often shrugged oﬀ some of those discrepancies in their pasts, where God’s plan was evidently executed through brutal and corrupt state agents, and focused instead on looking forward.

As described in the introduction to this chapter, accepting God’s plan for one’s future required one take action in achieving it. For women at the shelter, this meant seeking any advantage in release and resource decisions. While those “empowerment” programs are discussed in greater detail in the following chapter, at interest here is how these schemes continued to affirm God’s role in the rehabilitation process. Just as counselors often conflated submission to God and submission to the NAPTIP rehabilitation center, residents too reflected back these terms, per- forming their own eligibility for further sponsorship and financial support in something analogous to a religious testimony. We can thus conclude with one resident’s reading of what constitutes rehabilitation success and worthiness, as articulated in a heartfelt letter to the NAPTIP administration.

This case comes from a resident I’ll call Rose, who celebrated her 20th birthday inside the shelter. She was the youngest in a group of five women, most in their mid-twenties, who were stopped at a foreign African border checkpoint when another Nigerian in the region tipped off the local immigration police. In the shelter, the women in the group fought constantly about whether or not that man was right in his accusations against their supposed trafficker, but aside from a turbu- lent couple of days after her arrival, Rose mostly kept to herself and tried to stay out of trouble. She even earned a reputation as a reluctant but fair arbitrator of

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roommate disputes and did small errands for the counselors, fetching water for their bathroom and the like. Thus gaining favor with the staﬀ, one of them invited her to to write a letter to the higher NAPTIP oﬃcials if she wanted to help advance her case. Hand written on sheets torn from a donated workbook for the arithmetic and literacy classes, this is what she said:

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT TO THE HEAD OF MANAGEMENT AND STAFFS OF NAPTIP ORGANISATION

U all have been so nice to me and U all have been treating me so kind. Just the way U all have done to me the Most High God will do the same to you all, the blessings of the Lord in your life shall be so much that you all will have to cry for stop. God bless you all for your hospitality toward me, remain bless.

My coming to the NAPTIP was not a mistake and I know it’s all planned by God. During my stay at the shelter I discover that very step a man takes is ordered by the Lord so I wasn’t surprise when I found myself here in the shelter. From the day I step into the shelter I kept on praying and reading Bibles, Novels and there is this portion of the Bible I read that says “IN ANY SITUATION YOU FIND YOURSELF GIVE THANKS”. So I keep thanking God from that very moment and till the day I will leave.

I want to use this Opportunity to beg all staﬀ and the Head Man- agement of NAPTIP that I want to go back to school, I want to see myself as a great person, and I want to say that I am very sorry for my sinful past and I want to look forward to a brighter future.

After my Secondary School here in Lagos state, I went to my State, Bayelsa hoping there will be somebody to assist me farther my education but there wasn’t anybody. I kept on praying and believing because there is a saying wish they use to say “IF THE LORD IS FOR YOU NOBODY CAN BE AGAINST YOU”. In this world I have nobody but God and ﬁnally God has ordered my step to the NAP- TIP.

To the NAPTIP I see my helpers, my Fathers, Mothers, Brothers, Sisters and my Everything. I have come to notice that I adour most staﬀs and I learn from them and they also change my life: You people are my saviour. Please assist me and make my dead mother proud, don’t disappoint my dead mother dream. It’s means a lot to me.

I love all staﬀs of NAPTIP Organisation. Please God and help me.

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Miss Rose __

This letter articulates a sentiment I found to be genuine amongst many of the women who passed through there. At least as far as they cared to share with me, they really did feel God’s hand dramatically intervening to stop them from an earlier path, and they reported finding the advice of the counselors to be valuable in the end. Many internalized with earnestness the moral lessons offered by shelter staff, and took seriously all of the risks presented to them. However, the letter is less useful as a barometer of her own sincerity or commitment, than it is as the performance of it—a separate question entirely. That is to say, the ability to perform those affective states of submission to both God and NAPTIP neither con-

ﬁrms nor denies their genuineness, but instead reveals what women like this imagined to be the vision of worthiness and success desired by counselors and administrators.

There is an abundant literature on the rewards of adopting a “positive identity” to obtain resources within the HIV epidemic and aid industry in Africa

(Nguyen 2010), and similar accounts have been offered by those studying the counter trafficking movement (Giordano 2008). But here, in this purposeful display of gratitude, there is little hint at any sort of victim identity. Rose describes feeling saved, and even praises the NAPTIP staff explicitly as her saviors, but she does so in a religious idiom, not a raid-and-rescue one. In terms of the latter, she concedes only that her “coming to NAPTIP was not a mistake,” and says nothing of any dangers the agency might have protected her from. If anything, she shows contrition, apologizing for her “shameful past.” In this sense, she sees herself as

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saved, not from human traﬃckers, but from a path God did not intend for her. In requesting the further support of the agency, she gives thanks and insists she is on a new path to righteousness. This is the true conversion established as very purpose of rehabilitation, as described in chapter two when one counselor insisted that even though most residents want to go, their “job is to convince” them of the err of their ways.

Rose makes these claims entirely without reference to principals of governance or citizenship, exactly because those values are so debauched by the Nigerian state. When Rose and the counselors invoke the common language of God to replace them, I argue that they are forging a new or alternate mode of governance.

Brenda Chalﬁn (2010, 2008) observes how customs oﬃcers make similar moves in

Ghanaian airports, relating to travelers not through the stark division of ruled and ruler, but through more subtle plays of identiﬁcation and aﬀect. Ordinarily, the

Nigerian government was so absent from the daily lives of its citizens that these claims must be made anew. State ambivalence and neglect may be the norm in Ni- geria, but the women at the shelter were granted an exception—invited to make claims on the state for resources and supervision in a manner diﬀerent for other citizens. Ultimately, Rose bases her own claims on an inner conversion and religious idiom. While eligible for support through her participation in the rehabilitation program, participants’ needs still far exceed the supply, so she frames herself as more worthy of these resources by way of her submission and gratitude to God and NAPTIP alike. In fact, she turns the tables, now invoking them to honor God and his new plan for her, by materially supporting her revised ambitions.

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It is in these moments that we can see how l’ état de religion that Mbembe describes not only permeated the shelter life, but permeated the way NAPTIP counselors carry out their tasks of governing women in service of the state. With notions of citizenship and state services so vacant (or, worse yet, populated only by images of corruption and exploitation), counselors rely on a diﬀerent idiom to relate to the residents. Such displays of empathy through God are absolutely ordinary outside the shelter, but take on new signiﬁcance within it, as they articulate with the ongoing governmental project to manage this migration problem.

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PART III

Life After Shelter

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CHAPTER SIX

Earning Empowerment

Weeks of arguments and confrontations at the shelter ultimately culmi- nated in the question around each woman’s personal capacity for reform. Persis- tent debates over sexual behavior, migration aspirations, and God’s plan all pushed the women toward an understanding of their lives—past, present and future—con- forming to the NAPTIP mission. Guised as “good behavior,” staﬀ saw this compliance as an index of women’s diminished vulnerability to being retraﬃcked and therefore of successful rehabilitation.

One might imagine a program in which such messages and goals were made clear, but women ultimately left to adhere to them (or not) on their own, where only time would tell the true impact of such intervention. At the shelter, however, staﬀ were also continuously assessing each woman’s progress and making recommendations based on these evaluations. To some degree, women were led to believe that compliance and “good behavior” could help them secure early release from the shelter. At the same time, NAPTIP staﬀ made regular if vague reference to opportunities for help with school fees, vocational training costs, or start up capital once they were released for especially promising and well-behaved residents.

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Long term follow-up vocational training and provisioning program were referred to euphemistically as “empowerment” within the rehabilitation process and across the NAPTIP organization. Like other NGOs in the area, they assumed a very material meaning to the term. It speciﬁcally entailed the provisioning of material resources for education and vocational development after leaving the shelter.

A given woman was either empowered or not, or perhaps wait listed to be empowered later next week. Such a substantive deﬁnition ironically pulled at the original use of the term in development work as a deeper shifting of power dynamics and self-understanding (Friedmann 1992)—or at least their use belies the contradictions that exist within aid projects that claim such emancipatory potential.

This chapter explores how shelter counselors and residents attempted to convert their stories of personal transformation into support for release and reintegration or “empowerment” programs, and the promise those programs held for their future. From stern staﬀ lectures to wild detention rumors, I explore how women at the shelter tried to understand and navigate the ambiguous terms of these decisions. In particular, I trace the success and failure stories circulated by counselors and residents alike. I then follow one resident through an empowerment program to discuss the (unsurprisingly) uncertain potential it represented for her future. I compare the stories of women did and did not receive funding, to point toward how these programs shaped the residents’ immediate aspirations to migrate, as well as their broader relationship to the state and to the nation at large.

Ultimately I argue that these interactions reveal how Nigerians understand and

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manage the capriciousness nature of the state and the precarity of life in Nigeria more generally.

Redemption and Reform

Demand for empowerment programs amongst current and former shelter residents far exceeded the supply of dedicated NAPTIP funding. Since the sponsorship packages were limited, counselors and other NAPTIP staff were responsible for selecting who would be chosen for empowerment. Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish (1995) that penitentiaries divide prisoners into different groups — re- deemable versus repeat offenders. The latter are deemed to be rather without hope, based not on their individual crimes but “according to the dispositions they revealed” (126). Prudence, a counselor at the shelter, described their process in similar terms:

You know when they are staying here, we are not only rehabilitating them. We are also watching them, talking with them, to see how they are. There are some, who if you give them money or school fees, or apprenticeship fees, it won’t matter. Even after some months, you will just see them go. Like that girl Florence, all the time she is here she is saying she will still travel, so you will not be surprised that when you return to that place [her home, for follow up], she will be gone to travel out. So we don’t want to waste money by giving it to people like that, who are only going to leave without even completing the program. Instead we must give it to those who are really serious, who want the help and will stay.

Prudence thereby dismisses Florence as a candidate for empowerment not for her complicity in the original act, but for failing to reform herself afterward. Counsel- ors had to evaluate women based not only on their intellect and professional apti- tude, but even more on their evolving dispositions toward traveling out. As Ben once explained:

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You invest and you spend all this time and money and eventually they go and just get re-trafficked. Like this one victim—you remember Thelma? She was here a while back in 2007, and she was really bright. She had seven [secondary school] credits already, and five of them were A’s, including maths and English. After her rehabilitation, we bought a computer to empower her, so she could continue school. But by the time we brought it to her, she had already left again, retrafficked. Just one month later.

Their complaints here do not blame aggressive recruiters or greedy traﬃckers for

Thelma’s retraﬃcking. To them it was not a failure of to protect and support her, but in fact a demonstration of the futility of misdirected eﬀorts to do exactly that.

By their account, she was trafficked again because she wanted to be, was even determined to be. She did not want their help to start with, they assessed, and that was why it was a waste. It was not necessarily a moral evaluation, but a practical one, suggesting a different model would at least be a more efficient use of their time and money.

If NAPTIP cast a wide net in its initial interception and rehabilitation efforts, comments like these illuminate how they subsequently monitored those participants to make long term investments in in a more narrow victim population—those who sufficiently demonstrated that they would not be tempted to emigrate. NAPTIP staff would never have articulated this division as such, but they did regale residents with stories that presented the two archetypical options for residents of the shelter—the path of submission and sponsorship, or that of resistance and, to their eyes, retrafficking. The successful women in these stories not only passed through the shelter without complaint, but also went on to see great support and success under NAPTIP’s selective reintegration programs after leaving. They undertook years long training courses and ran profitable small busi-

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nesses that supported their families and comfortable lifestyles. These stories provided incentive for women to take their time at the shelter more seriously, a carrot of motivation in the face of bleak economic prospects.

There was one young woman’s story that got passed around most of all, partly because she still sometimes passed through the shelter. By the time of my

ﬁeldwork, Hope had been living under NAPTIP support for nearly four years, including government-sponsored accommodation, education, and job training. She revisited the shelter occasionally throughout my research year, whenever she got into arguments with staﬀ or roommates at the long term women’s shelter where she lived, also sponsored by NAPTIP. One day, in yet another group therapy session about being patient and appreciative, counselor Prudence asked Hope if she would like to share her experiences. She said that she didn’t mind, and Prudence went on to narrate it.

“Ok, just tell me if there is anything I am saying that is not accurate,” she began, nodding along to anticipate anyone else’s suspicions. Then she proceeded with the story.

Hope here ﬁrst came to shelter in 2006, just like all of you are here now. And when they came they were many. They said, me I wan go, me I wan go. But when it came time for them to leave, Hope and the other girl decided that they did not want to go, that they wanted to do something else.

So NAPTIP helped them ﬁnd another place where they could continue education. The other girl was in secondary school, but then she decided then that she wanted to leave the school and go back to her mother’s place. We all came and talked to her—I did, and the oga (boss) did. But she was determined to go back, so we let her.

Then only months later, her mother passed, and then she moved into her father’s place, but he kicked her out. Can you imagine?

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Then you can guess what she did—she called us begging to come back to us. But we had already signed those papers, closed her ﬁle, and we could not help her.

So now Hope has graduated with certiﬁcate in fashion design, but we do not even know what came of the other girl. Hope had patience to do the program, and that is what made the diﬀerence.

This retelling of Hope’s decisions extended the I wan go metaphor to its natural conclusion: it implied not only that residents wanted to leave the shelter, but that they would thereby also want to leave Nigeria, disavowing the goals of rehabilitation in the process. The counselor recounted how the other disgruntled residents had repeated the same demand, but that Hope and her friend in contrast decided speciﬁcally that they “did not want to go.” Of course they both still left the shelter, but under the auspices of NAPTIP support. If I wan go is a protest, then not wanting to go, or ﬁguratively wanting to stay, is here articulated as gesture of compliance with the NAPTIP program. That compliance again could not be reduced to disclosure of information to investigators or other concessions, nor was it merely a performance of deference to the bureaucratic authorities. Instead, it was a sincere change of attitude that was deemed most important. For the purposes of obtaining empowerment resources, that change of attitude must be demonstrated within the relevant phase of NAPTIP assessment.

Terms of Evaluation

In these shelter lectures about good and bad behavior, all forms of disobedience could be reread not only as a sign of general disrespect, but of speciﬁc dis- avowal of the NAPTIP mission. Reminders about such expectations were frequent and foreboding. Counselors announced to residents whenever they visited the zo-

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nal headquarters where release and reintegration decisions were made, reminding them that “everyone should be on best behavior—remember I told you I was going to Ikeja?” The shelter manager in particular would swoop in and out once a week or so, oﬀering lofty speeches about what everyone needed to do to impress her. In one lecture she declared to the two dozen residents that she had just been in conversation with the zonal director and that they should all improve their attitudes accordingly:

Well, I talked to the oga (boss) when I was there, and we discussed everyone’s cases, and as a result of that some of you will be going home soon, but there are some conditions. And I will be calling some of you up to my oﬃce later to discuss those conditions. We are watching everyone, and we are noticing who is having a good attitude and who is not. We are watching during group counseling, all the time, to see who is refusing to cook or refusing to do this or refusing to do that. We will see some leave by tomorrow if all goes well.

Days later no one had left the shelter, but counselors would still repeat her warnings about good attitudes and so on.

Residents strategized on their own and with one another, angling for advantages with counseling staff and administrators. They pursued a range of strategies to try to perform the “good behavior” demanded of them. Often they would alternate between earnest attempts at submission to the process and eventual exasperated frustration when that failed to produce results. (Indeed, the latter may be overrepresented in my notes and retellings, if only because quiet patience and compliance are more easily overlooked in favor of dramatic outbursts and confron- tation.) Some residents were transparent in their efforts to try to please counseling staff and other NAPTIP officials. “What else do they want to hear!?” Florence de-

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manded often, in part because she never mastered the obsequiousness demanded of them.

Here, cooperation meant more than the simple divulging of information about travel plans or known travel agents, or “opening up.” Others directly mim- icked the standards of successful rehabilitation as they understood them—transformation, confession, intentions to stay in Nigeria. Recall Rose’s letter again: “I want to use this Opportunity to beg all staff and the Head Management of NAPTIP that I want to go back to school, I want to see myself as a great person, and I want to say that I am very sorry for my sinful past and I want to look forward to a brighter future… I adour most staffs and I learn from them and they also change my life: You people are my saviour.” She frames her story as one of transformation and choice. These strategies entailed a subtle performance of compliance and good will aiming to assure NAPTIP staff of residents’ own personal internal reform.

Such strategies became explicit in conferrals among the residents, especially as new women arrived to the shelter. On one resident’s ﬁrst day there, she repeatedly screamed “I wan go!!” for over an hour from a bedroom. Her shouts echoed down the long dormitory hallway as we sat just one room over, lounging in bunk-beds for some mid-afternoon rest. Rose rolled her eyes at each outburst and told me that the woman had been annoying them like that all morning and the night before too. Finally they called after her and she came to the doorway, her eyes red, breathing heavily, and visibly upset. The other residents encouraged her softly to keep a better attitude if she really wants to go. “Listen, you shouldn’t just yell like that,” they advised. “If you really want to go, go talk to shelter manager

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upstairs. Don’t just yell at us. It depends on how you talk to them—you should be nice and not a problem, not angry and screaming, if you want them to work on your case.”

This tactful sensibility is a common bureaucratic tactic made all the more important when navigating the arbitrary powers of a corrupt state system. Expec- tations that politeness and respect should win favor among government bureaucrats are ubiquitous in Nigeria, particularly among those given great discretion to dispense social services. Citizen-state encounters often rely on a play of aﬀect and identity in Africa (Chalﬁn 2010), and charm and personal favor in particular are ordinary strategies for Nigerians dealing with bureaucratic barriers from police checkpoints to school enrollment (Smith 2007).

As people are accustomed to the withholding of basic bureaucratic due process that leaves suspected criminals stagnant in jails, it was not preposterous to for women to believe rumors about interminable stagnation at the shelter as well.

“If you give problems, you will be here a long time,” they warned the newcomer.

“There were some here before us, they were here for up to 11 months.” When asked to elaborate on this rumor, they just shrugged, making details seem less relevant than the threat implied by any such possibility. This understanding is consistent with a wider understanding of the Nigerian government, which is ultimately arbitrary and oppressive by nature, and only manageable through the occasional good favor (or bribery) of a well-placed bureaucrat. Where people can be detained for traﬃc violations and those accused of crimes my linger in jail indeﬁnitely, the sustained detention of a woman in the shelter seems only par for the course.

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There was one case like that during my tenure, preceding these women by only a few months, and her story very likely passed along by word of mouth in the cohorts between them. She was a Togolese citizen in her late twenties who had worked as house help in Lagos for years but was arrested and imprisoned when her employer accused her of stealing. She was eventually acquitted of those charges, but the investigation brought her work status under dispute. Although she was eligible to work in Nigeria under ECOWAS laws for regional migration, she had never secured the required paperwork to prove this and would have to return to

Togo. Somehow this became identiﬁed as human traﬃcking, and she then lingered in the shelter for months, supposedly due to an uncooperative embassy. But although her case was exceptional in a number of ways, it was retold generally in this purpose—a reminder that things still could get worse, and to play along with their rules to avoid such a scenario oneself.

Promise and Precarity

Most women would eventually leave the shelter with still only vague assurances that they would be considered for empowerment. Upon announcement of their release, however, such uncertainties were easily overwhelmed by the immediate thrills of going home, often with only a couple hours’ notice. There would be squeals of delight and running up and down the halls, collecting things and saying goodbye. Residents would pack their belongings in large nylon bags and knot them closed at the top, tucking in donated items like bars of cheap soap and personal rolls of toilet paper they used during their stay. When possible, NAPTIP would or-

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ganize several victims to leave together, to save on transport fees. Big group depar- tures always seemed to compound the emotions of the day, provoking special de- spondency of those left behind. After passing through the zonal headquarters of-

ﬁces, case managers or counselors accompanied all victims on the journey home, taking them on either agency vans or public buses on day long drives across the country. Upon arrival, they would ﬁrst introduce the women to a local NAPTIP of-

ﬁce, perhaps stay there overnight, and eventually escort them to the family home.

Although I never witnessed these reunions, I was told they were generally without ceremony or fanfare. The women themselves preferred to be discreet in their return, especially if they could boast of no additional support forthcoming.

In the end, only a handful of the women I knew were even contacted for enrollment in empowerment programs, while the rest maintained cautiously hopeful that they would be contacted soon. Almost a year after her release, Florence herself still held out some hope that her turn might come up. She even called a favorite counselor every few months to greet him and follow up on her status, just in case. In the meantime, whenever I would ask if I could call on her she would chuckle scoffingly and insist, “Of course! I’m around!” laughing at the thought that she would have something else to do. Tellingly perhaps, on more than one occasion I still did find her otherwise engaged when I visited, soon finding myself waiting at her family house as she returned from “going on runs” with different men.

When I ﬁrst visited her in Benin, about two months after she was released from the shelter, Florence was spending most days at home. She helped her mother run provisions stall out of the front of their house, selling Coca-Cola, small

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sachets of spices, and basic produce like tomatoes, onion, and yam. When I asked about her other plans, she scoﬀed at the idea of working in hair dressing, despite the years of apprenticeship she had already put in. “Working in someone else’s shop, they earn 10,000 a month ($65),” she explains. “The politician will give me that sometimes. I even visited my mommy’s friend the other day, and he gave me

20,000! He’s a married man, so he pays well.” Instead, she wanted to set up a fashion boutique. Her boyfriend’s mother ran a small but successful clothing and accessories shop with imports from her travel in Italy, and had suggested she might help her.

A few months later, she had set up a small shop with some money from her boyfriend, selling lotion, perfumes, small handbags, and accessories. She couldn’t aﬀord a full inventory, however, and had a hard time turning a proﬁt accordingly.

Behind a heavy metal gate left locked in her absence, the narrow room was only sparsely occupied, about 5x10 feet, with barren glass shelves lining the walls and a display box that sat mostly empty. She had stopped even going to the store every day, knowing she could still make better money by maintaining relationships with diﬀerent men. The rent will run out in a few months anyway, she told me. “At least it’s something,” she said, “something going, for now.” A year later, she moved her store to a corner of her brother’s barber shop, had invested in more hair products, and was trying to save up to buy a hair dryer. By December of last year, about three years since leaving the shelter, she called to say she was pregnant and marrying the

“ﬁancé boyfriend” she had told me about on the day she had arrived at the shelter.

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She hoped now his mother would ﬁnally help her with the shop, but otherwise was praying to God that they will ﬁnd ways to support themselves.

Empowerment in Process

The few women I knew with NAPTIP reintegration support were moder- ately better oﬀ than Florence and others like her, at least in the months immediately following their release. While Florence complained to me often that she had

“nothing going,” they were at least busy with training every day, and were provided a small stipend in addition to tuition. However, for most of women, transportation to the classes by public bus was up to 200 naira ($1.33) each way, and NAPTIP only provided a fraction of that (N2,000) per month. Training was a big time commitment, but many of the participants were only able to attend intermittently. Other women I knew sat idly in diﬀerent apprentice shop appointments, restless but at least trying something. One girl learned to sew and sell coral beading for traditional Benin weddings. Several others were in catering courses at a large youth

NGO in the town center. The four participants I knew from the shelter eagerly took me to see the program, ducking out of the meat pie lecture to show oﬀ their white hairnets and pale blue aprons. Many of the other woman there were from

NAPTIP too, they told me, and they prepared a spicy jollof rice for our lunch. They apologized for not having any meat to add, and I quickly insisted it was still quite good. They smiled politely, but one sighed that she still doubted whether they could make money with it and everyone agreed.

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Florence said that if she was granted empowerment funding, she would use the capital to purchase goods for her store, or if they insisted, to start her own hair dressing business. After all, she had completed training as a hair stylist a year before even coming to NAPTIP, and only had wanted to travel after struggling to make sufficient money in the field. By the same token, the catering trainees were rightly skeptical of their prospects for running effective businesses after their own training. Nevertheless, they at least felt encouraged to have something in the works. These strategies to diversify marketable skills and opportunities are typical in Nigeria and amongst the working poor around the world, perhaps especially where local economies hinge precariously on margins of only a few pennies at a time. Participants in these empowerment programs understood NAPTIP interventions within these models, offering but not guaranteeing only one more opportunity in a range of uncertain futures.

Eventually, if the select women finish their training program, they would become eligible for official empowerment, with the provisioning of materials to actually open their own businesses. At the close of my fieldwork, I observed one such two-day empowerment workshop at a new hotel conference room in Benin

City. NAPTIP officials, staff photographers, and invited journalists far outnum- bered the two dozen women invited to participate. It was no surprise that speeches at these publicity events elided the uncertainty these women still face in supporting themselves and their families, despite any (eventual) advantage offered by

NAPTIP capital. Instead, speakers recounted the women’s suﬀering and the hor-

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rors of human traﬃcking before turning to their great promise as renewed citizens and businesswomen.

On the first day, local NGO staff lectured on basic entrepreneurial and life skills like bookkeeping, marketing, and sexual health. On the second day, NAPTIP officers took turns bestowing each woman with business supplies—sewing machines, hair dryers, kerosine cookers, small fridges, and gas generators. I would learn later that many of these items were essentially props, as about half of the money expected from the national headquarters had failed to arrive in time. Nev- ertheless, the officials took turns holding the microphone and giving speeches to each woman as photographers documented the event. The recipients wore matching orange baseball caps printed with NAPTIP insignia and mostly looked to the ground, out of modesty or discomfort I was not sure. They were then ceremoni- ously transferred to two local NGO leaders who would be responsible for supervising their progress for the next six months. Both women gave speeches on the importance of hard work and strong character and passed around business cards to their delegated groups. Everyone parted with promises for follow up within in the coming weeks, especially for those still awaiting their actual empowerment materials. That process would ultimately take several more months to complete.

These deﬁciencies were not mentioned when the ceremony was broadcast in evening news programs and written up in several newspapers. NAPTIP hosted about a dozen others like it each year, and I twice caught glimpses of women I had known on national television, modestly smiling under the same bright orange caps, standing in rows behind men in suits and women in big gele head ties. The

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shallowness of the spectacle, especially with only prop donations, in some ways recalled former ﬁrst ladies projects — Better Life for Rich Women, Bitter Life for

Rural Women, and so on. But for actual and would-be recipients, the message was more complicated.

The women I saw in follow-up visits in the months and years since my

fieldwork at the shelter did not exactly expect anything from NAPTIP. They still knew better than to expect much from state agencies. However, they also listed it along with any range of things that might come together. When Florence described what she needed for the boutique, or for hair dressing, or to go back to school, she had many sources of support in mind. Among them, her fiancé, his family, other men, and her mother, but also NAPTIP. If simultaneously pursuing a wide range of opportunities is an increasingly important part of life for the precarious poor, then NAPTIP’s promises, however, shallow, remained one of many sources of hope on the horizon. While many knew this was optimistic, it was the best they had. Ultimately, it was not totally different from how they spoke about migration, both in their original travel attempt and in considering future possibili- ties. Neither did they then put full faith in the promises made by travel agents and

“traﬃckers,” but they were willing to give it a shot, should an opportunity materi- alize.

New Shelter, New Hopes

After years of anticipation and planning and about three quarters of the way through my ﬁeldwork, NAPTIP moved their shelter location. They left the

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massive government office plaza in the city center for a smaller building in a gated residential community on the outskirts of Lagos. For NAPTIP staff, this new location held the promise of a new approach to rehabilitation in general, but the perpetual delay in this move to the new space proved a fitting metaphor for the high hopes, good intentions, and frustrating deficiencies of their counter-trafficking efforts as well. I had been hearing about this new shelter since my original explora- tory trip to Nigeria years previous, when everyone assured me that by the time I returned each summer they would all be in the new location. Then, and every few months since then, funding would run out after brief waves of enthusiasm, leaving the space partially finished for years. This stilted process is relatively standard practice in Nigeria, where buildings are constructed and furnished in spurts in lieu of reliable lending sources, and where even state projects are subject to the volatile whims of outside sponsors and corrupt government directors.

The slow progress at the new shelter was little consolation to the residents of the old space, who were reminded regularly that their own rooms were not being maintained because the money all went across town, to a new building they all hoped to never have to see. On the other hand, this new space held real hope for the counselors themselves. As I hope has been evident, they were far from mind- less or heartless oﬃcers of the state, but were invested in the services they provided and even they could do better. This commitment included critically examining NAPTIP policy and practices especially around involuntary detention and rehabilitation. They too were unsatisﬁed with things at the original shelter, and often wished aloud they could better provide the residents with what they deserved.

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At the very least, counselors agreed this should include a more comfortable environment where they could feel at ease and at home. Other shelters around the country had managed this already, and as the largest shelter in the country’s largest city, Lagos was supposedly NAPTIP’s flagship center. Most of the staff took great pride in their work and were eager to provide the best possible quality of care. The new building was a significant step in this direction.Even more than an improvement in the physical environment, to them, the new shelter also represented a clean start, a chance to imagine all kinds of other programmatic changes they could make too, reflecting their own critiques of the models of interception, detention, and rehabilitation practiced at the old space.

Both of these sentiments were articulated in one conversation I had with a group of long-time staﬀ on a slow day, months before the new shelter was ready. I was bidding everyone farewell before the Christmas holiday (and still months away from the actual move), when Ben exclaimed, “When you return, we will even be in our new location!” smiled at the thought but knew to take it with a grain of salt.

Ben assured me that they were now painting it. Next they would soon ﬁnd the fur- nishings and other items to complete the space. I asked why they would not just move their current furniture, and Prudence shook her head dismissively. “Deﬁ- nitely not, we will need all new things,” she said. She ran her hand over her heavy wooden desk. “Some things could move with us, like this desk. But most, we will need new, to keep up the quality standards,” she explained. “We are always trying to improve.”

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I asked more about their funding, and Tunde explained that donations from local businesses often provided fewer restrictions and were more quickly available, compared to their perpetually unstable portion of the federal budget. “Collabora- tion with private partners is what we need,” he explains. “Then we could oﬀer nice things, better things, so we won’t be hearing that old song of me I wan go all the time. Cornﬂakes,” he suggested, invoking the middle class comfort associated with

American cereals in Nigeria. “More food, and it will feel more like a real home.” In this thinking, Tunde suggested that the primary cause of residents’ anger in the shelter was the poor living conditions there, or at least that improving those things would relieve some of their frustrations. Ben, however, had another take.

“It will be smaller, too,” Ben said, “but hopefully that will stop just anyone from sending us people who really don’t need to be here.” I asked him to elaborate, and he explained that the new place probably couldn’t hold more than 50 victims, as opposed to the cited 150 maximum capacity for the original building. “The years of [hosting] 80, or 100 victims are gone,” he explained. “This way we will be more select. Everyone now thinks, oh, they have space, so they send people here. The police, immigration, SS, and everyone.” Whether that drop could be attributed to better prevention, worse interception, or just the ordinary capriciousness of foreign-funded aid programming remains unclear to me. But Ben’s critique here was not merely a matter of reduced turnover; it was about the type of victim referred to the shelter.

“We should be able to sieve,” Prudence agreed. “We should be able to sieve out the ones that are most appropriate.”

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“Right,” Ben said. “And really, it should be voluntary.”

“It would be better to have just four or ﬁve victims, but ones who actually want help, rather than a shelter full of those who are angry to be there,” she continued. “We should ask them, do you want to go to shelter? Do you want help?

And then we could have a contract, so they know, this is why you are going. That way, when they are angry here, we can say, we all agreed. But as it is, they don’t know, they don’t want to be here, and it’s a waste. Like just for hospital, we have to get agreement, where they sign form. We had one incident, where a girl said that we made her go, that she didn’t want to, and the doctor still did tests. So now we just always sign form, even for tests or other things in the clinic here at the shelter.

But it should be the same for just staying at shelter, everything. That way we don’t waste time and money ﬁghting.”

“Eh?! But what about coercion and all that?” Tunde demanded. He reminded everyone how traﬃckers themselves will coerce and brainwash their victims, potentially impeding a woman’s ability to seek help on her own.

“Well, it should be for minors really, for those without anywhere else to go, and for those women who want to take refuge here,” Ben suggested. “Before, it was voluntary, but now they bring just anyone.”

The counselors here described an alternative model of rehabilitation based on consent and agreement among equals, as opposed to the paternalistic model of intervention and detention practiced now. Of course, their vision was actually represented in current policy. As described in the ﬁrst chapter, NAPTIP’s current Na- tional Protection Policy states that “Victims must be acquainted with these rights

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and their obligations as part of the rehabilitation and integration process,” and lists among those rights that “A victim shall not be compelled to stay in a shelter to undergo rehabilitation” (22). This policy was plainly not being enforced in the La- gos shelter, so I tried to get them to elaborate further.

“Well, technically,” Prudence explained, “technically investigation is supposed to ask us before they bring anyone, so that we can assess if this is the right place. But instead they just bring them here direct, without asking or even telling anyone.”

“And there is corruption too,” Tunde conceded. “Sometimes, immigration just wants bribe for border, for papers. But if you will not oﬀer bribe, they will call

NAPTIP—to punish the victim!” In this point, Tunde himself acknowledged the failings of the referral process while still supporting mandatory detention and rehabilitation. Counselors again recognized that most of their residents do not fit the paradigmatic rescue story, whereby victims are saved directly from slavery-like conditions. Still, like many others at NAPTIP and in the counter-trafficking field more generally, he believed that the potentially inappropriate detention of some may ultimately be necessary for the fair investigation and rehabilitation of those who need it most, and that their counseling and services could even benefit those who are not necessarily trafficked.

“Yeah, it should really only be for those who want to be here,” Ben resumed, reconsidering Tunde’s points about corruption, consent and coercion. “Although for some it takes time to see. Like, if you say someone should not litter on the street, there must be public waste bins for them to use. If not, what, they will ask,

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you want me to hold it in my hand? It won’t work like that. So if you’re going to ask them not to do that, you must give alternative. But once they’ve tasted foreign currency, once they’ve decided they want the ﬁne cloth, then it is hard to convince them that they can do well with just hair styling or tailoring. It takes time to see and understand.”

Ben here articulates the primary tension in the rehabilitation goals. It took time for people to see and understand that they have other options—that there are public services available that mean they do not have to throw away their lives, a metaphor often invoked by shelter staff. That hard task of convincing them to change paths is what Ben saw as his current responsibility at the shelter. But, as he said, “it takes time.” Even though he wanted rehabilitation to be voluntary, he conceded that most people would not accept it straight away. Persistent ambitions for bigger wealth available abroad would blind them to the more humble paths available in Nigeria if not given the mandate of detention to think about things more closely. He even lamented the undesirability of hair styling and tailoring, the only vocational training skills currently available at the shelter and popular choices for those receiving further training after leaving. As Florence and the other women knew too well, they offered still only a modest potential in career earnings. The concession that “it takes time” is a justification for involuntary detention, so that women are forced to take the time to more seriously consider these options, “to see and understand.” If rehabilitation were really only for those who wanted to be there, all of the participants would already share these goals. The counselors’ re-

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sponsibilities could shift from convincing them not to migrate to just developing need the skills and resources to do so.

We returned to these questions months later, when Ben and Prudence were still waiting for an opportunity to discuss their ideas with the zonal director. Their efforts were stymied by many of the same bureaucratic barriers that hindered general shelter improvements as well—inaccessible leadership, inconsistent enforcement of current policies, and the probable influence of political concerns in the daily running of the shelter. When NAPTIP finally did relocate the shelter months later, they had made no progress on these goals. The building itself was undoubt- edly an improvement, relatively new construction on a private gated lot. There was a paved courtyard in front where the younger residents could play football and the older ones could catch a breath of air, in contrast to the public parking space and armed guards surrounding the last. The power supply even seemed improved for a while, until NAPTIP refused to pay some outstanding fees from the previous occu- pant and the bill collector line cut entirely. Still, there was little sign of any bigger changes in victim detention or rehabilitation practices more broadly.

Uncertain Successes

Counselors at the shelter saw successful rehabilitation as marked by each woman’s commitment not to travel again. The reintegration packages were used as both motivation and means to make this commitment, helping to secure more stable futures in Nigeria. Yet where those packages, too, were insuﬃcient and unreliable, the question remained: would Florence still travel out? Would the others?

231

In the end, most women I saw in the months and years since my time at the shelter have treated the prospect of trying again to travel out with the same ambivalence, reserving it as a possible option on the horizon future, should the necessary components come together, no more or less likely than Florence’s in-laws supporting her boutique or the other women finding a profitable corner to hawk their baked goods. Indeed, one of the women I had followed to the catering class had insisted as much since we met in the shelter. She swore that if NAPTIP did not provide something, if she could not make it there in Nigeria, and she would still be determined to try her luck elsewhere if necessary. She said that she had told the same to the NAPTIP staff, eventually (by her telling) leveraging her threats for a reintegration package. Skeptical of her future prospects in the food industry, she too said she was just waiting to see. “If nothing is going in Nigeria,” she repeated, “I will still travel to abroad, to Europe probably. I will go.” In the meantime, her on and off again boyfriend had also returned abruptly from an attempt to go to Egypt, so for now they were trying to be more cautious.

Florence had grown more cautious of traveling as well. For one, she was afraid of being caught and returned to the shelter. But more than that, she t0ok to heart some of the counselors’ advice there and agreed that God must have stopped her from traveling for a reason. She told me that all the rumors and stories passed around the shelter, of the real stories of human traﬃcking—forced prostitution, rape, awful conditions, and, maybe worst of all, not even getting to Europe as promised—really did make her think. I asked how she felt about the agents who had oﬀered to help her travel then. Was she angry with them?

232

“Why? Why would I be angry?” she asked me, with a shrug. “They are angry with me. They say that I am the one who messed it up, and they think I should have given the bribe.”

So she told me she would not really considering traveling out anymore.

“Well, not unless it is with someone I really trust,” she clariﬁes. “The right person.”

That is to say, not just extended kin “family” but immediate family, of which she could list several candidates, like an uncle in Belgium, or her boyfriend’s mom in

Italy. Before her recent pregnancy and formal engagement, that was still what she was really hoping for. When we last spoke, she was still unsure.

233

CONCLUSION

Of Discipline and Desire

Given the skepticism that even counselors within the NAPTIP system had for the intervention services they were providing, I have no doubt that other NAP-

TIP officials and counter-trafficking stakeholders would also characterize much of described in these pages as bad policy and bad practices. Indeed, during the year of my fieldwork, Nigeria’s ranking in the 2012 US TIP Report dropped to the second tier for the first time since 2008. The reasons listed for the drop were many:

During the reporting period, the government did not demonstrate sufficient progress in its anti-trafficking law enforcement efforts. Roughly a third of convicted traffickers received fines in lieu of prison time, and despite identifying 386 labor trafficking victims the government prosecuted only two forced labor cases. The Na- tional Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons and Other Related Matters (NAPTIP)…did not increase its funding for protective services and its victim shelters offered limited reintegration services and were not always well-maintained. Despite documentation of a staggering number of Nigerians trafficking victims identified in countries around the world, the government inconsis- tently employed measures to provide services to repatriated victims. (US State Department 2012)

The report noted improved shelter conditions, but bemoaned the more limited umber of beds available. It disapproved of shelter policies prohibiting victims from leaving shelters without a chaperone, but noted that “Government officials ad- hered to the explicit provision of the 2003 Trafficking in Persons Law Enforcement and Administration Act, which ensures that trafficking victims are not penalized for unlawful acts committed as a result of being trafficked.” Suggestions for im-

234

proving the national ranking primarily emphasized an increase in the number of successful prosecutions, but also recommended that NAPTIP better “train police and immigration oﬃcials to identify traﬃcking victims among vulnerable populations, such as women in prostitution and young females traveling with non-family members.”

Although it maintained the second tier ranking, the 2013 TIP Report noted progress toward these goals:

The government has formal written procedures to guide law enforcement, immigration, and social services personnel in proactive identification of victims of trafficking among high-risk populations. Additionally, police, immigration, and social services personnel received specialized training on how to identify victims of trafficking and direct them to NAPTIP. Although NAPTIP has yet to establish an official national referral mechanism, authorities continued to utilize an informal referral process whereby the police, immigration, and NGOs could transport suspected victims to NAPTIP. (US State Department 2013)

These reforms have the potential to better “sieve” referrals to the shelter as Pru- dence described in the previous chapter, ensuring that women only enter the program under their own volition. However, the unwilling detention of women at the shelter never provided as a reason for the downgrade in ranking. Especially amid strong demands for a higher volume of victim participation, an expanded and for- malized referral system might serve only embolden security oﬃcers who are only now peripherally involved in or aware of NAPTIP services. The future of the NAP-

TIP services, and the type of intervention it makes, thus remain uncertain.

These evaluations of institutional eﬀectiveness, however, miss a number of other things that the day to day tactics of these might reveal. As this dissertation has argued, if we not only consider these interventions as “bad” in an evaluative

235

framework, but also consider how they might be productive in the Foucauldian frame, we can better understand the persistent political stakes shaping and shaped by these interventions.

Exit Denied

The first major implication of this work is that NAPTIP’s intervention were profoundly aimed at discouraging migration. It was never written in the federal counter trafficking law, the national rehabilitation policy, or self-representation in different media, but it permeated conversations at the shelter, directly and indirectly. Counselors agreed that each woman’s future migration was the best barometer of rehabilitation, defining failure and success as those who emigrated and those who did not, respectively. As suggested in the introductory chapter, this anti-migration impulse can be partially traced to the UNODC origins of the Pal- ermo Protocol. It is persistent across countless counter-trafficking campaigns around the world, and is a frequent feature of critical academic and activist as- sessments of them. This dissertation has proposed, however, that the particular politics of emigration in Nigeria, especially surrounding the status of migrant sex workers in Italy, has compounded this effect.

The relationship of a nation to its emigrants has shifted under diﬀerent economic regimes, a change Artistide Zolberg (2007) describes as “The Exit Revo- lution.” Under mercantilist economies, states shared a strong interest maintaining national populations. Economic strength was tied to population size, so having people was a positive resource. Emigration appeared against the national interest

236

and was regulated by sending states (however ineﬀective those regulations often proved to be). With the transition to capitalist economies and the emergence of social welfare governments, however, surplus labor became a burden on the state.

Flexible labor forces became more important than a strong or stable population. In these circumstances, emigration served a national safety valve, eventually leading to a laissez-faire system of virtually unregulated and sometimes exit. While modern developmental states sometimes bemoan the dearth of qualiﬁed workers in professional ﬁelds—the “brain drain” of medical workers being the most famous—today emigration is considered not only a safety valve but an important subsidy for residents who stay behind, living on the sizable remittances. Govern- ments, too, support this emigration and sometimes even subsidize it, such as state sponsored training programs for nurses and care workers in the Philippines.

In this context, one might expect the Nigerian government to permit the emigration of poor young women into foreign sex industries, at least economically speaking. Political-economic explanations of counter-traﬃcking programs identify

ﬁscal incentives in available foreign funding and political clout, but here I want to make a diﬀerent suggestion, one that suggests a deeper shift in the governmental strategies of national economy and development.

On the individual level, perhaps, the need for ﬂexible labor has not changed. Precarity has emerged a signature of late neoliberalism, certainly consistent with struggles poor women in Nigeria have faced for some time (Allison 2013).

However, the 2007 ﬁnancial crash popularized the growing sense that the distribu- tion of labor itself is secondary to the primary processes of contemporary capital-

237

ism. Here I speak speciﬁcally about ideas of “spectacular accumulation” and other idioms of investment and ﬁnance that emphasize appearances over the material

(Tsing 2005). Nation-states have not been excluded from this shift, mounting national “re-branding” campaigns in the names of countries and governments (An- holt 2007; Dinnie 2008; Nworah 2006). Politicians, bureaucrats, and academics in

Nigeria agree: rebuilding the country’s image abroad is the key to foreign investment and Nigeria’s future as a whole.

Of course, that national reputation is founded on problems much broader than the apparent promiscuity of migrant women in Northern Italy. However, I argue here that the discourse of human traﬃcking has enabled a much wider range of interventions that serve to advance this image project as a whole.

First, the very discourses of shame around these migrant women serves to displace the blame that may otherwise reside with the state itself. In Entry Denied

(2002), Eithne Luibhéid describes the American government’s history of excluding female migrants for reasons associated with sexuality, including suspected lesbi- ans, prostitutes, pregnant women, and others thought to be “immoral.” She describes how the Page Law of 1875 speciﬁcally targeted Asian prostitutes and eﬀec- tively barred all young Chinese women from entering the US. “Even when these acts had not actually taken place,” she observes, “the fear that they might occur was grounds for exclusion” (xv). Luibhéid argues that this is not only a practical concern (for the well-being of men who may be threatened by such women, not for the women themselves), but that these exclusions function to shape an idea of the nation—of who constitutes good citizens and why. In the current Nigerian

238

politic then, it is only those good citizens, those “good ambassadors” who are able to represent the country abroad.

Others are intercepted preemptively, not for any acts taken place, but for fear that they might occur.

The combined criminal and victims’ rights models of human trafficking interventions has also served Nigeria’s national project. The twin prosecutorial and rehabilitative arms of the counter- trafficking project allow the Nigerian Figure 5 “Be a Good Ambassador” government to enact both modes of governance simultaneously, for a specifically transnational audience typified in the US State Department’s TIP Report. The con- creteness of these rankings, and the transnational arena of trafficking interventions more broadly, resonate strongly with the internationally-focused agenda of the Nigerian government. Together, these conditions have favored aggressive intervention around young migrant women in Nigeria that is exceptional in comparison to ordinary people’s very limited interactions with the state in daily life.

The execution of that project, therefore, has revealed the novel practices of statecraft and citizenship that emerge at new sites of African governance.

239

Discipline and Desire

If the articulating politics of emigration and counter-traﬃcking motivated

NAPTIP’s intervention agenda, I argue that the creative practices of discipline and governance observed within the shelter made executing that agenda possible. At

first glance, the shortcomings of the agency are easily dismissed within a typical model of African government failure and corruption. Border police and even de facto NAPTIP detention policies exhibited the kind of spectacular state violence that Mbembe says characterize the postcolony. But within those walls, counselors conducted earnest reform projects that employed a different model of governmentality, one not usually associated with African state projects. For this reason, I insist that the totality of the shelter intervention cannot be understood as mere facade, as only these performances. Instead, I argue that these rehabilitation programs simultaneously achieve a second form of governance, one that is assembled piecemeal and ad hoc, in the absence of effective ideologies of the state. The kind of reform counselors sought—and, in some small ways, achieved— requires those

Foucauldian notions of discipline and subjectivation that are normally reserved for more “developed” states.

There is a teleology to Foucault’s historical narrative that seems to imply that the latter practices of governmentality are more civilized or modern, as opposed to the crude brutality of violence and charismatic power. I want to resist the impulse, however, to appraise these practices as inherently more progressive and benevolent. For one, they still relied on the violence of interception and detention, and would not have been possible otherwise. But beyond that, the process of reha-

240

bilitation observed at the shelter still advanced what could be considered to be de- structive and disempowering narratives of mobility and sexuality. The means of their delivery, though, reveals how state agents develop new practices of governance where these relationships are otherwise uncommon. The shelter rehabilitation program demonstrates not only that African states do exhibit the modes of

Foucauldian discipline and governmentality deﬁned as the “conduct of conduct”

(Rose, O’Malley and Valverde 2006; Dean 1999; Foucault 1991). It also shows us how African state agents forge these relationships, appropriating aﬀective, moral, and, most importantly, religious idioms for relating to women at the shelter and to convince them to change their lives. In this sense, the shelter is a frontier of statecraft and governance, where creative and committed state agents take up new bat- tles over the state of women’s deepest personal desires.

That such attention was directed to young migrant women bears little surprise in the history of Nigerian emigration in the context of counter-trafficking campaigns worldwide. The idea of human trafficking is powerfully for its apparently universal abhorrence, “a blight on humanity, a scourge on the nation,” as was so often repeated. “Modern day slavery” is perhaps even more so. However, the opposing movements operating within the counter-trafficking cause—abolitionists, labor rights activists, and, importantly, straight border enforcement advocates—reveal deeper politics and visions of justice at play. From the UN’s Palermo

Protocol, to global NGO movements, to national legislation, these contradictions have supplied a productive ambivalence in campaigns like NAPTIP’s, where women are treated at once as victim and culprit, innocent and guilty. Building spe-

241

ciﬁcally on Foucault’s model of the penitentiary, I argue that these distinctions are usefully blurred in the shelter, where risk of recidivism and vulnerability to traf-

ﬁcking inspire eﬀectively identical forms of intervention.

It is impossible to say whether women like Florence are, in the end, any better off for having been stopped at the Lagos airport, or for being put through rehabilitation at the shelter. By most counts, her days now look much like they did before traveling. However, the impact of these programs extends beyond the immediate lives they have touched, detained and reformed. As a site of migration management, counter-trafficking programs join a range of “humanitarian” protections that continue to effectively demobilize the migrant men and women they ostensibly aim to help. As a site of African governance and statecraft, NAPTIP is just one of many hyper-specialized social services that have supplanted the comprehensive welfare state in the late neoliberal era. These emergent models of justice, intervention, and citizenship are reshaping ideas of the nation-state, in Nigeria and around the world, and it is to these questions that Florence’s story can best speak.

242

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