As the sweeps in Nampula made clear, mixed migration has its own complications. Migrants who hire smugglers run the risk of ending up in circumstances that are no better than the ones they fled: they may face exploitation and abuse by their handlers or corrupt officials they encounter en route. As smuggling becomes bound up with applications for asylum, mixed migration threatens to unravel existing protections for asylum seekers and refugees—and indeed, to increase nationalism, corruption, and overall hostility to the presence of any refugees at all. This is the brew that has helped strengthen Europe’s resurgent Far Right at precisely the moment when the need for shelter and support among Syrian refugees is greatest. In Mozambique, the government faces a quandary: if thousands of people claim to seek asylum only to disappear across the next border, how do you determine whose request for asylum is sincere?
More than 85 percent of the planet’s refugees live in the developing world.6 For the most part, they are concentrated in a handful of poor countries that lack the resources to provide for them and which have long shouldered more than their share of the global problem of displacement. These countries—Turkey, Pakistan, and Lebanon, but also Mozambique’s neighbors Malawi, Tanzania, and Kenya, among them—are often said to suffer from “hosting fatigue,” which means that they have gradually rolled back the rights afforded to refugees and asylum seekers on their soil, or become wary of granting them in the first place.
Hosting fatigue may be at its worst in Kenya, which has hosted large numbers of Somali (and, at times, Ethiopian and Sudanese) refugees ever since 1990. Though Kenya has never fully honored the protections guaranteed refugees under international law—few countries do—the plight of refugees living there has steadily worsened as the conflict in Somalia draws on. Today, more than half a million Somalis live in desperately crowded camps in eastern Kenya, deprived of the right to seek work or travel in society at large. Many have lived that way for years. In 2010, Human Rights Watch published a report called Welcome to Kenya, more than one hundred pages devoted to the illegal “interception, detention, abuse, deportation, and extortion of asylum seekers” by the Kenyan police.7 The following year, at the height of a refugee crisis sparked by the region’s worst drought in sixty years, Kenya refused to open a new $13 million camp funded entirely by the UN.8 In 2016, the Kenyan government moved to close Dadaab, often described as the largest refugee camp in the world, citing concerns that it played host to Al-Shabaab fighters and depressed the local economy. Kenya’s high court struck down the government order within months.9
It was around this time that I got to know Liban Ali, a chubby man nearing forty with a gray goatee and a worn, pockmarked face. The owner of the Somali restaurant in Bombeiros introduced us, saying he thought Liban had a good story to tell: Liban was Nampula’s foremost mukalas, or human smuggler. No one in the city bore greater responsibility for the mass movement of “alleged” and “so-called” refugees through the camp nearby, or for the ensuing corruption and resentment that led to the police sweeps in Bombeiros.
Now, though, Liban said he was retired and already had been for most of two years. He wanted nothing more than to work as an everyday trucker, hauling potatoes or bales of used clothing, but his reputation continued to haunt him: “Always, my name is going far,” he complained. “Everywhere, everywhere, they know me I’m working this job.”
Liban’s reedy voice was shaped by a classic Somali accent, with rounded vowels and a mixture of pillow-soft and rock-hard consonants. It was over ninety degrees outside, but Liban wore sweatpants and an anorak over a black fleece. “Now, anywhere when they get problem, everywhere, they say ‘Liban people, Liban people,’” he said. “I come like boss, but I don’t know nothing, I’m not working. No one give me money!”
When Somalia’s government fell, in 1991, Liban was only nineteen years old. For a year, he’d been a soldier in the army of Mohammed Siad Barre, a socialist general who took power in a 1969 coup and ruled for twenty-two years over an increasingly repressive military regime. Siad Barre’s ouster came under pressure from a coalition of militias tied to Somalia’s various clans, or ethnic groups. When Siad Barre fled Mogadishu, the militias turned on each other in the ensuing struggle for power, leading to the outbreak of the Somali civil war. The army disbanded, and Liban went immediately to fight with the Somali National Front, a militia founded by loyalists of the toppled president.10
For the next eight years, he manned a machine gun mounted on the back of a pickup truck and dodged shrapnel on the crumbling streets of Mogadishu. Recounting the experience, Liban rose from his stool and began to show off his scars. “I was fighting, nine years!” he said proudly, including the year he’d spent in the army prior to the civil war. There were scars from stitches on the back of his head; indents where shrapnel had gone through his upper lip; foreign matter lodged in his left shoulder; and large splotches on his torso marking the entry and exit of the bullet that ultimately landed him in a hospital in Nairobi, in 1998. Liban displayed all this with a lightheartedness that must have come from long exposure to violence. He spoke to me in jilted, broken English, but after more than a decade in Mozambique, he had picked up the nonverbal exclamations of a Portuguese speaker—“That time I was ready to die, because life is strong, ne? But now, eeeeeeee, even I don’t want to go back.”
Liban was the last member of his family to leave Somalia, which, he said, made it far easier for him to get as far as Mozambique. For the first person in a family to leave, he explained, “they have to sell cows, house, whatever they have, they have to sell to take him out. . . . The boy when he reach other place, if he work, he send you money, to take his brother. The one you push, he has to push the other.” As Somali refugees have been resettled at a trickle and established small businesses throughout the developed world in the last twenty-five years, funds have become available for the flight of family members who remain inside the country.
At the time, the smuggling networks were not so organized as they are now, and Liban continued south from Nairobi on his own, a practice now known as traveling “private.” Using money a cousin had wired from Stockholm via Western Union, Liban made his way through Tanzania by bus. He stopped in Dar es Salaam to buy a fake passport, then continued traveling south into Mozambique. For fifty dollars, a gregarious Somali smuggler named Al-Wez helped him cross into South Africa in the middle of the night. Then he took a train to Cape Town, where he lived with an acquaintance from Mogadishu. Other Somali merchants from Liban’s ethnic group banded together and gave him $300, which he used to start a small business.
He bought a folding table and sold cigarettes and shoes at the market in Mitchells Plain, one of South Africa’s largest townships.11 There was good money to be made, but almost daily, fellow Somali merchants were robbed at gunpoint. Some were killed. “I don’t like the life of South Africa,” Liban said sternly. “Example, South Africa you don’t have enemy, you don’t have problem. . . . You can’t come out nighttime, always there is gangee, always they have gun.” A look of alarm came over him. “South Africa, Somalia there is no different!” he exclaimed. In South Africa, Liban heard bullets every night, and he recalled thinking that Mitchells Plain was nearly as bad as Mogadishu. “In South Africa, I can kill you anytime. Kill someone, anyone, anytime. That’s why,” Liban concluded, “I say, eh, better then I go back Mozambique.”
Liban’s introduction to human smuggling involved a lot of waiting. When Liban returned to Maputo, Al-Wez sensed an opportunity to expand a flourishing business and took him in on the condition that Liban work for his keep. Each morning, he rose and made his way to Missão Roque, a hectic crossroads just north of the city. All day, he stood on the side of the road and scanned the arriving buses for people who looked like him—the toothy, light-skinned faces of Somalis standing out in a sea of Mozambicans. During the day, he lived on a diet of roast corn and peanuts he bought from hawkers who flocked to the open windows of departing buses. When he saw Somali faces through the bus window, Liba
n called out to them: “‘Come, come.’ When we talk Somali language, they come out,” Liban said. He brought them to Al-Wez, and Al-Wez brought them to South Africa, passing through a sliver of Swaziland on the way.
These Somalis were coming as he had, “private”—on a series of jitneys through Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique. At times, they traveled alone, and at times, they banded together in small groups, navigating on the strength of a few words in English and Swahili. Border crossings were the only segments of the trip that required much discretion. There, they negotiated with handlers they met on the spot, hiking through the countryside to avoid immigration officials.
After a few months, as he made contacts with peers in the business, Liban came to the conclusion that Al-Wez’s generosity wasn’t quite what it seemed. Smuggling is a lucrative line of business; doing Al-Wez’s legwork for pocket money and room and board soon lost its appeal. Let Al-Wez get fat on his own, he thought. Liban rented a small house and stopped bringing Al-Wez business. “I come against with him,” Liban said smugly. In retaliation, Liban claimed that Al-Wez began using the Maputo police force as henchmen for hire: “When I get three, four Somali in my house, he’s coming with police. . . . He show my house the police, ne? They take the guys to give him.” Each time, Liban pleaded with the police and claimed that he was only giving a bed to Somalis in need. The circus played out daily for months. Liban gradually befriended the officers who came to arrest his charges. “Now already I know small português,” he recalled. “Every day. You know, no one can come every day to arrest you, ne? I know all police already. After . . . I start to fuck him,” Liban went on. He began bribing the police himself, so that they raided Al-Wez’s house and brought the customers to him instead.
As the conflict in Somalia wore on and members of the diaspora sent money back home, the stream of young men being “pushed” out by their relatives only grew, and Liban’s business grew along with it. Cell phones facilitated the creation of a tighter, more efficient smuggling network. “Eeeeeeee, it’s facilitate, mobile—everything,” Liban said. “I told you, that time, I was Missão Roque, to wait the bus. No connection. Now, you don’t wait. Now you receive the call. That time, I was staying what they call first bus station, I staying there, all day, my friend. Suffering!” Liban grimaced, then made a look of hopeful surprise.
“After, we get the phone. Telephone . . . Bus is coming—” He held out a thumb and pinkie to his right ear, miming a telephone: “‘I’m in the bus, my friend, I’m here Inhambane, now we sleep, tomorrow we come.’ Okay, give me driver, I want to talk the driver, or what they’re calling another one’s working bus, okay. ‘Amigo, está a onde? Where are you?’” Liban imitated a high-pitched Mozambican bus driver: “‘Amigo, está aqui, Maxixe, estamos a vir, a noite.’ Okay, I wait nighttime there.”
Liban Ali, pictured outside a Somali restaurant in the Bombeiros neighborhood of Nampula, claimed to have “retired” after years spent smuggling migrants from end to end of Mozambique in a fleet of jeeps and minibuses.
By working with associates along the whole route instead of employing lookouts to check for new arrivals at each juncture, smugglers were able to organize the entire itinerary from Mogadishu onward, cutting down on the need to haggle with customers at every stop, and reducing everyone’s chances of being caught. The top smugglers in Nairobi soon formed what Liban mundanely calls “agencies,” as though they booked package trips to Club Med. He rattled off a list of names: “Biggest agency is Al-Jabr, second is Dahare, Bachir.” A few smugglers even opened offices in Mogadishu, Liban said.
What kind of offices? I asked. Liban seemed confused by the question.
“Human trafficking office, like normal office,” he said. Above the storefronts, there are painted signs that say things like, “Wherever You Want to Reach, We Can Take It You.” There is a northern route—through Sudan, Libya, and Malta, to “whatever place you want” in Europe and North America, at roughly $25,000 a head—and a road south, to South Africa, which, at the time of our conversation, cost $3,200.
The smugglers, as Liban described them, are not strict competitors. They pool their customers to make a full load, and they each specialize in a portion of the itinerary, bundling passengers for discounted rates and paying one another on commission. This allows them to share equipment like cars, trucks, and boats and to move customers reliably even when there are fluctuations in business.
By 2002, Liban aligned himself with Al-Jabr, a smuggler based in Nairobi, but who had employees throughout the route. Liban no longer worked alone, and he was no longer confined to the short stretch of road between Maputo and the South African border. Traveling exclusively at night, he worked on commission, driving all the way through Mozambique in cars belonging to Al-Jabr and filled with charges from as many as three or four agencies. In his characteristic halting patter, Liban explained the routine: “Sometime you sleep in Rio Zambeze, in the bush. Because the people, no one can see. Night is driving. When they come daytime, example five o’clock, six o’clock, you put the bush. You go bringing water, bread, they stay there.” He put both hands in front of him, as if to tell me to stay put. “Nighttime load again . . .”
Liban was paid handsomely: $400 a head, minus a fee for renting one of Al-Jabr’s cars. Payments were arranged through an informal network of Somali-owned “banks” known as hawala that make immediate transfers among cities throughout East Africa. To verify each transaction, hawala bankers rely on predetermined bits of personal information, like birthdays and the names of relatives. “They ask you questions, same like Western Union: when you reach Somalian bank, my name Liban Ali, I waiting money from there, exactly capital city or that city, who send is my friend flan-flan-flan, his name. Telephone number is is-is. Password number is is-is. They give you money!” Liban exclaimed excitedly. “How you know? It’s same like Western Union. . . . You don’t need even document to show.”
On the road, Liban confirmed his movements by cell phone, receiving half his pay at pickup and half at delivery to the next of Al-Jabr’s associates. “Because this is connection, they controlling from Nairobi, all the way. Nairobi, they got all office there.” If anything went wrong—car problems, checkpoint police that demanded larger-than-usual bribes—he said, Al-Jabr withheld payment or subtracted it from the next job. “When you catch problem on the road, he catch you his money,” Liban warned. “His money, he never lose.”
Smuggling routes are notoriously elastic. When he first began working for Al-Jabr, Liban’s portion of the trip took him from the Malawian border, in Milange, along a boomerang-shaped route that cut through most of Mozambique. A dozen Mozambican towns rolled off his tongue with familiarity: “I take his people Milange: Milange, Morrumbala; Morrumbala, Chimuara; Chimuara, Rio Zambeze; Rio Zambeze, Caia; Caia, Inchope. Inchope—” He broke off laughing before he could get to the route’s end, in Maputo.
Soon after he started working with Al-Jabr, Liban recalled, a growing number of police checkpoints in the south made it foolhardy to travel along the highway outside the capital. Liban began taking men to the Zimbabwean border instead, allowing for a different point of entry into South Africa. At the Zimbabwean border they relied on Mozambican boys and teenagers: “You drop them the border. Three kilometer the border. You drop. There’s small boys there. Those Somalian and Ethiopians, they don’t know the road. The boy Mozambican, ne? He know how to jump the other side, still he bringing, immigration.”
Later, Al-Jabr and the other smugglers began to use a coastal route as weather permitted. Migrants traveled overland from the border town of Doble, in southern Somalia, to the Kenyan port of Mombasa; then, by dhow—a large wooden boat with triangular sails—from Mombasa all the way to the northern beaches of Mozambique. “Very dangerous,” Liban said. “The boat is going with air. It’s not engine on this boat.”
In traveling south with their human cargo, these dhows reversed a trade route that Arab merchants first plied more than a thousand years ago, carrying
ivory, gold, and slaves north from Mozambique.12 It was the southernmost extension of a trade network stretched all the way up to the Red Sea, along the Arabian Peninsula, and down the Indian coast. Although the destinations and terms of the trade have changed, the Mozambican coast remains a point of transit for much the same cargo—ivory, precious stones and metals, and able-bodied men.
At times, Liban said, the men were let off in the middle of the bush, and Al-Jabr’s associates hired locals to spend days walking them through sandy forest and thorny scrub to the nearest road. Sometimes, the dhows were able to continue farther south to the small port of Moçímboa da Praia, a picturesque town bordered by white-sand beaches and mangrove forests. There, eighty kilometers from the Tanzanian border, Liban waited in a guesthouse near the colonial slave market in Mocímboa Velha, and he loaded his passengers as soon as they were off the boats. Tapping an open palm against his fist, Liban made the hand signal that jitney drivers use when they can’t take any more passengers. “Cheio!” he said—“Full.”
Over the years, Liban came to take police corruption for granted. He paid the police well, gave them few surprises, and gradually built up a thriving business, using four cars of his own to lead nocturnal convoys through the country. He had two Toyota minibuses and two double-cabin Nissan pickup trucks—“D40!” Liban said proudly—which made for a total capacity of more than 110 people on any given trip. Often, Liban acted as the “spotter,” driving ahead in a small car to negotiate a smooth transition for the unusual cargo behind him. Arriving at each checkpoint, Liban paid the officers according to the number of people he was transporting, and in return they let the other cars pass without pause.
Go Tell the Crocodiles Page 14