AUTHOR: Sani Ladan
PUBLISHER: Plaza & Janés
GENRE: Memoir
READER’S NAME: Tony Beckwith
DATE: August 13th, 2023
Sani Ladan was born in Douala, a coastal city in Cameroon, West Africa. He grew up in a loving, close-knit family, and dreamed of becoming a journalist like his older brother. When he was fifteen years old, he realized that opportunities for higher education in his country were limited and decided to go to Nigeria where he thought he would be able to continue his schooling. Without telling his parents, he boarded a bus and set off on an odyssey that is the subject of his book.
Life on the road is hard, and things seldom go according to plan. Young Sani befriends people who have no intention of being his friends. His money and backpack are stolen at a bus station. He has to work to survive while he waits to enroll at the school he wants to attend, doing manual labor such as he has never had to do before in his comfortable life back home. He narrowly escapes being killed or kidnapped when Boko Haram attacks the village where he is staying. On the run, he heads north and ends up in a small town in Niger, where he finds work and a place to stay.
But conditions are unstable, and he must soon move again. By now his plans have changed and he decides to travel to the Mediterranean coast and try to cross over to Spain. He manages to get to Agadez, in northern Niger, which is at a crossroads on the routes taken by African migrants on their way to Europe. He explains that since the European Union began funding Niger (and other countries) to control the flow of migrants, a law was passed that made immigration illegal. Agadez then became a hotbed of extortion and abuse as criminal gangs preyed on vulnerable travelers. Ladan manages to navigate these treacherous circumstances and continue on his journey.
He and some other young Africans are crammed into a truck whose drivers promise to take them to the Algerian border, for a fee of 230 Euros. But, once again, they are betrayed and abandoned in the desert. With no food and little water, they start walking. One of the men dies and his companions bury him in the trackless sand. Miraculously, they encounter a passing caravan and a band of Tuaregs takes them to their destination. Once in Algeria, Ladan finds that his skin color is an issue. There is rampant discrimination against Black people, and he finds it hard to get work and survive. But he perseveres and eventually arrives in Ceuta, a Spanish port city on the north African coast. It is now two years since he left Cameroon.
After some more dangerous adventures and scrapes with the law—and moments when he nearly gives up and returns home—he makes it to Tarifa, on the southernmost tip of Spain. He and other migrants are held in appalling conditions in what is essentially a prison run by the Center for the Internment of Foreigners, where they are processed and either released or deported. To his great relief, he is released, and soon finds his way to Córdoba. And that’s when his life begins to change.
He connects with NGOs working in the academic field that help him take an exam which he passes and gets his high school diploma. He meets people who take him in and treat him like family while he tries to figure out how to sit for his baccalaureate without having a residence permit. Being a migrant, especially one from Africa, he is constantly running into administrative hurdles of this kind. There is a lot he doesn’t discuss or explain. A few more details about living on the streets, for example, would be a welcome balance to the sometimes rather gushing accounts of how people love him and support him in his efforts to get ahead. None of which detracts from his accomplishments, which are uniformly impressive. At times he sounds naïve, as when he complains about “absurd bureaucratic obstacles.” At others, he sounds much older and wiser, as when he talks about how other migrants are received—refugees from Ukraine, for example, who, in the words of several journalists “look like us and have blue eyes”—compared to how Africans are treated on Spain’s southern border.
Ladan has a degree in International Relations, among many other achievements, and has spent his adult life in Spain working with organizations that support immigration from Africa. He is deeply committed to the defense of human rights and the importance of education. Immigration is a hot button issue in many parts of the world, not least in the United States. American readers could learn from this book, which provides valuable insight into the reality of the journey undertaken by millions who risk their lives in search of a better life, and the cruel, often inhumane treatment to which many of them are subjected along the way.
