by Suketu Mehta
Favoui was held in a detention center in Morocco for four days along with her baby. Some of the prison wardens felt pity for her and brought milk for the baby. Since her son was born in Morocco and was a Moroccan citizen, she wasn’t arrested and deported and could move around Tangier relatively freely. Other female migrants would sometimes borrow her baby to walk to the market. “Every day is a story, every day is a life.”
Another of the migrant women had just had a baby Favoui would play with. After Favoui crossed, the woman followed. She met Favoui in Tarifa and silently held out her arms, empty. It had been a dark night when she’d crossed. The smugglers made the migrants wade out to the boat waiting at sea. She put her legs in the sea, holding her baby. A wave came.
* * *
Favoui thought she would cross through the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, which are on the Moroccan mainland. In the beginning, it was easy, and they didn’t have to brave the sea. “It’s only the barbed wire. We wait when the army is sleeping in their cots, and everybody starts running over the wire.” But then another wall of barbed wire sprang up around the enclaves, and a third. And now it’s like The Hunger Games; men run toward the triple fence on dark nights and attempt to climb it. On the other end they find Spanish policemen waiting for them with clubs. Only the strongest make it across all three fences, and through the wall of policemen; if they make it past them, they’re in Europe and can claim asylum.
When Ceuta and Melilla became tougher to cross into, the migrants started going with the fishermen, through Las Palmas into Tarifa.
The night Favoui crossed, she was with her eleven-month-old son and three months pregnant with her second son. She was in a group of migrants, taken by the smugglers over the Rif mountains and then to the sea at one or two in the morning, guided only by the light of the moon. They got to the boat, which had an African pilot. Some of the pilots have experience steering a boat; others don’t but claim they do. In return, they don’t have to pay the smugglers for their passage. Favoui had no idea if her captain had any experience or not. Plus, a boat meant for seven often carries forty or fifty people. In the open ocean, it could start sinking.
On the boat, she was one of two women, along with a bunch of men: Senegalese, Moroccans, Algerians. The boat went into the strait and started taking on water. “Everybody was shouting, ‘Ha Allah … ha’Allah hakku barrum navahal quai.’” When she heard that, she started crying. “Oh my God! Have mercy on me! Forgive me my sins! Save my baby!” The water kept coming, and people started throwing their possessions overboard, and taking their clothes off, to make the boat lighter. It was very early in the morning now, and the captain tried to steer the boat toward the Spanish coast, avoiding inhabited places. If they got to the beach, they would have to start running.
But before they got to the coast, they found themselves surrounded by Spanish police boats and a helicopter. They had come to rescue them because they saw the boat drowning. “Niño?” they asked. “Baby?”
So Favoui raised her hand. She was pregnant, vomiting. They took her to the mainland, to a shelter, gave her food and a medical checkup, and then took her to the closest city, Algeciras. There, after being briefly detained, she stayed for a couple of years and asked for and got political asylum, which was much easier to obtain than it is now. Then she moved to Tarifa and made a living selling trinkets and souvenirs on the streets of the tourist town. She also attended school and learned Spanish.
The local community helped her a lot, and she made friends. She got odd jobs cleaning houses, taking care of the parks, and working in restaurants in the evenings. It was difficult doing all this with two little children at home. So she had to pay for someone to babysit them, for €300 a month. Another €900 went for rent, and at the end of the month she was left with nothing.
Then she discovered that Spanish girls actually liked their hair African-style, and she offered her services. People around town got to know her; the summer visitors got to know her. Along with hair-braiding, she started making necklaces and buying gaily decorated African scarves and selling them.
Seven years after Favoui crossed, her husband joined her, and he now manages a campground in Tarifa. They have two boys—an eighteen-year-old studying sports medicine in college and a sixteen-year-old, who wants to study dentistry. After her husband came, she gave birth to a daughter, who will soon be eight.
She knows many people who go back home to visit. But Favoui has never been back, even after she acquired legal status in Spain. When she heard of her father’s death, she was very depressed and cried a lot. “Because he never see his grandchildren, because of my wrong decision.” Afterward, she said to herself, “I’m going back with everybody,” but she never had enough money.
Through it all, through the selling of things on the sidewalk, through the raising of three children, Favoui sent money back to her family in Nigeria. Since she opened this shop the previous year, her expenses have gone up, and it’s become harder to send money. So she’ll send €100 now and then to her mother, when she can, or €50. With the money she remitted, her mother could build a proper house and take care of Favoui’s siblings. Favoui is paying the bill for her brother’s university education. According to World Bank estimates, the 25 million emigrants from sub-Saharan Africa remitted $37 billion in 2017; Nigerians alone sent back $22 billion.
Meanwhile, Favoui is establishing a bit of Africa in Tarifa. Beautiful paintings hang on the wall of her shop, made by a Senegalese friend who lives in the town. She tries to help him out by showcasing his work, which her customers can buy. “Because we are trying to make the shop the Africa Home.”
You can tell from the way her customers interact with her that she is adored by the Spaniards in the town. She feels lucky and happy. “When I came, the first people I met, they were really so hospitable with me.” That convinced her to stay in Tarifa. She has felt racism; she knows it when she sees it, she knows it exists here too. But she feels that the town has taken her in. “They help me a lot because I have no brother, no sister, for seven years no husband, nobody. So they are all my family, just like I have my family here.” When she has an evening off, she’ll go to a Jehovah’s Witness meeting in Algeciras.
In spite of the glow on her face, Favoui’s body has finally caught up with her years of toil. She has arthritis. “I can tell in the body, because when I get home, all the body pays, because now I’m a little bit sick here since I’ve been working in the streets for twelve years. I have this problem of the bones. I have to take the injections every three weeks. Because before, I never take care of myself. When it was in the cold season, I sell the scarves on the street. So I have to wear my jacket and sit there, because it is when I sell. When it is summer, I am always there … So I try to be more positive, but sometimes I feel more down because I think of all my journey and I ask myself, ‘How can I be sick now?’ There are some times I cannot even open my hands.”
She works seven days a week; the store is open from noon to 9:30 p.m. But just last week her older son said, “Mama, you never take time off to be with us.”
“That touched me,” Favoui recalls. “So now I try to spend Friday with them.” But it’s Friday today, and she’s still working—she’s selling stuff in the store, she’s braiding hair.
The popular image of Spain is that of a country where people take two-hour lunches and then a siesta for another hour or two, and stay out eating and drinking until past midnight. We don’t think of Favoui, working till she develops arthritis so that the pleasure seekers can seek their pleasure. She needs Spain because her region of Nigeria has been robbed of its future; but what is equally true is that Spain needs Favoui, and her industriousness, to ensure its future.
“Have you ever taken a vacation?” I ask.
She laughs.
PART II
WHY THEY’RE COMING
5
COLONIALISM
When migrants move, it’s not out of idle fancy, or because they hate their ho
melands, or to plunder the countries they come to, or even (most often) to strike it rich. They move—as my grandfather knew—because the accumulated burdens of history have rendered their homelands less and less habitable. They are here because you were there.
Consider the subcontinent. For five thousand years we had been one people, ruled undivided from the borders of Persia to China by emperors from Ashoka to Akbar. Within this territory, boundaries formed, expanded, dissolved, merged. Periodically, parts of us broke off into independent kingdoms or suzerainties and then came back together. We were a nation of many different countries.
Then the British came and ruled us for two hundred years by pitting us against each other so that we couldn’t be pitted against them, and now for seventy years we have been split into three nations, between which it is nearly impossible to travel. And the governments of all three nations emphasize how “we” are so different from the others. One Friday evening during the fiftieth anniversary year of Partition, in 1997, I went to Wagah, the only land border crossing between India and Pakistan, to see the flag ceremony, which attracts people from both sides. I had heard it was a big draw, and I wanted to know why.
Well before sundown, the crowds started assembling. They were people from the surrounding villages as well as tourists from farther off, people dressed for a holiday, bringing along their children and picnic baskets. All around the border post, café chairs abounded under umbrellas sprouting, in between the Pepsi logos, the patriotic slogan “Mera Bharat Mahaan”—My India Is Great. Very loud Hindi film music was blaring from the Indian loudspeakers, for which the lyrics might have been patriotic, but they were being played at the wrong speeds, so it was difficult to know. This was answered from the Pakistani side with the following robust refrain:
Pakistan is ours
We are all Pakistani
Pakistan! Pakistan! Pakistan!
The barracks of the Indian Border Security Force (BSF) were decorated with its logo, “Duty unto Death.” This was next to a rack of rifles and a full-length mirror adorned on top with a bright red query: “Am I looking smart?” The BSF soldiers spent much time in front of it attempting to answer the mirror’s question. They resembled nothing so much as roosters, with a red-and-white comb adorning their turbans and white socks that went halfway over their polished black shoes. There was much good-natured shoving back and forth between the crowd of spectators, who moved forward inch by inch, and the soldiers, who tried vainly to hold their ground.
Then the drill sergeants on both sides called out, and the parade began. One of the BSF soldiers and, on the other side, one of the Pakistani Rangers, dressed in black salwar-kameezes, strode right up to the gate so rapidly that it seemed they must collide violently. But at the last minute, they stopped an inch from each other, thrust their jaws and chests out, hooked their thumbs in their belt loops, abruptly turned at right angles to each other, and goose-stepped away. Successive pairs of soldiers repeated this performance, a kind of strutting bravado, a jointly choreographed imitation of war.
Finally, twin trumpeters played “Retreat,” both flags were lowered slowly down a pair of crossed ropes—when they intersected on their downward path, both groups of spectators applauded vigorously—and the soldiers let the crowds rush to the fence. Hundreds of us ran up to the gate; there was tremendous excitement, and when I was at the gate, I could see why: if I stood up and looked, I could see, separated by an eight-foot gap, Pakistanis! I saw them all: Pathans in their knotted turbans, madrassa students with their skullcaps, the women in their salwar-kameezes; Baluchis, Sindhis, Punjabis. So … we looked at them, Indian Gujaratis, Kannadigas, Punjabis, Bengalis, and were amazed to see that they looked just like us.
But we were forbidden by the soldiers to touch each other, or talk to each other. We could not even wave at each other. Those who tried to wave had their hands slapped down by the soldiers—national secrets might be given away by hand signals. But we could take pictures. The only people in the gap between the two gates, the eight-foot-wide no-man’s-land, were two Japanese tourists with video cameras, turning their lenses on both sides indiscriminately. So we smiled at each other and took pictures with our little compact cameras. The massed ranks of Indians and Pakistanis, men and women and babies, on this Friday evening in May, when the sun was finally beginning to show mercy on the thirsty earth of Punjab, looked and gaped at each other and made contact by smiling.
Afterward, some of us who got special permission from the soldiers were allowed to walk to the Pillar, an obelisk set in the ground a few yards away from the gate, where Indians and Pakistanis can come close without a fence separating them, but still not touch or talk. Years later, at Friendship Park, I thought back to this moment, this other sanctuary spot. It had felt, oddly, more humane, more permeable.
The soldiers stood around with their backs to each other, mostly, and then someone on the Pakistani side talked to one of the Rangers, and he shyly came up to a friendly Indian soldier. The Indian checked to see if his superiors were watching, turned around, and then the two enemy soldiers were both standing together grinning for the Pakistani tourist’s camera. “Is this India? Is this Pakistan?” the tourists wanted to know again and again, asking the soldiers to point out precisely where the boundary is, what country this farmland belongs to, what country the obelisk belongs to, what country those trees and this piece of ground belong to.
* * *
In August 1947, the British left the subcontinent, leaving behind two countries: the secular state of India; and Pakistan, which defined itself as a Muslim state and was composed of Punjab, Sindh, the North-West Frontier Province, Baluchistan, and the eastern part of Bengal. After the exchange of populations was over, 11 percent of India was still Muslim, but most Hindus and Sikhs had left Pakistan.
Even at the peak of the empire, the British ruled the vast subcontinent with a relatively small force. They could stay in power because they deliberately followed a policy of “divide and rule,” sowing discord among the various religious groups of the subcontinent and showing special favor to the Muslim League to weaken the nationalist movement and extend their rule in India as much as possible. The partition of the entire subcontinent was foreshadowed by the 1905 partition of Bengal into the Muslim-majority East Bengal and the Hindu-majority West Bengal. This policy was further pursued in the setting up of separate electorates for minority groups. Thus, the 1932 Communal Award set up separate electorates and constituencies for, among others, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, tribals, untouchables, women, organized labor, businessmen, landlords, and academics.
Partition was an idea that was hatched in England among a group of elite Indian Muslims who wanted a separate homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims, whose rights, they believed, would not be protected in a majority-Hindu India. The ultimate effect of these intellectual propositions advanced in sparkling London dinner parties was that the common people back home saw the human beings they most loved—their small children, their mothers—slaughtered before their eyes. They were atrocities of the worst sort; people were killed in the worst way: roasted alive in their homes, clubbed to death with hockey sticks, hacked with swords, and left to rot in the heat; women were raped in the worst way, with their daughters and their fathers forced to watch.
Patrick Spens, the chief justice of the Federal Court of India and the chairman of the 1947 Arbitral Tribunal, was interviewed in London in 1963 about Partition. He was asked, “What were the causes of the bloodshed which followed the transfer of power?” Lord Spens replied, “The main cause was the haste with which we parted with India. The connections of centuries were severed within days without any proper thought … The Labour government here wanted to get rid of India as quickly as possible.”
In 1947, the British, having successfully ruled India for over two hundred years, were desperate to leave. They sent down a barrister named Sir Cyril Radcliffe and gave him five weeks to draw two lines down a map, separating a population of 400 million along religiou
s lines. He knew nothing about the region; he had never been there and couldn’t wait to get out. In the weeks before and after independence, people near the border didn’t know on which side they’d be; whether they’d be living in Muslim-, Hindu-, or Sikh-majority areas. So they fell upon each other, to drive the minorities out, in India and in Pakistan. Fourteen and a half million people had to leave everything and move across Radcliffe’s lines in a matter of weeks—the greatest mass migration in history.
The actual handover was done in haste, and the bloodshed that followed represented a gigantic failure of control by the British-led army and police forces. It was also a disastrous lack of foresight on the part of Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, and his superiors in London. Two million people died in the ensuing violence. And Radcliffe’s lines might come back to imperil the entire planet. Two of the three countries that the British created through their mapmaking are nuclear powers. They have gone to war three times since independence and are at constant risk of a fourth and final war.
The two countries also spend an inordinate amount of their GDP (2.5 percent for India and 3.5 percent for Pakistan, versus 1.8 percent for the U.K.) on buying arms to fight each other instead of feeding their people. The legacy of that botched mapmaking haunts the 2 billion people of the region today: the various communal outbreaks in the subcontinent are directly traceable to that colossal and premature sundering those seventy years ago. Much of the hunger and civil strife that persist in South Asia today have their origins in Partition. Here, as in so many places where Western colonialism changed the maps, there continues to be massive migration within and outside the region.