Aware Migrants

Credits: Sascha Montag / Der Spiegel

  Four days and 15 hours before Majid Diallo will return to his village in northern Guinea and destroy the dreams dreamt by others, before he will tell his mother that he won't be building her a house, that he won't be able to gift the village a school, before he will tell the village elder that he won't help develop that mango plantation the villagers so desperately want, he walks down a deserted, dusty street to one of the many bus stations in Niamey, the capital of Niger.   He looks into the sky where the flying foxes are circling high above the sleeping city. A small man. Around 1.68 meters (5' 6") he guesses. A calm 27-year-old with watchful eyes and a threadbare training jacket over his muscle shirt. The handful of scars on his face look more like misplaced freckles than the reminders of the pain he suffered not so long ago.   He pulls his headphones over his ears. They make him look like Mickey Mouse, the others used to always say - the ones who are still in Libya. Or dead. He was lucky. Diallo is walking along Mali Bero Boulevard to the north, one of the broad streets in Niamey where there is never a traffic jam because there simply aren't enough cars. It is a city built on and covered in red dust. Almost every migrant from West Africa passes through Niamey on their way to the city of Agadez in northern Niger. It is from there that the smugglers set off through the desert to Libya, the beds of their Hilux pickups full of migrants.   Read more: Der Spiegel