Rose took part in a black magic JuJu ritual before she left Benin City, but she doesn’t like to talk about it in detail because she still believes it could bring her harm. She is visibly nervous at the very mention of it. She says that she had too many bad experiences not to believe in the curse. She says the JuJu is still inside her. “The curse cannot be broken,” she whispers. “Not even prayer can get rid of the JuJu.”
She doesn’t like Sister Rita hearing her talk about the fear she still has, and she will not share a single detail of her particular ritual or the witch doctor who performed it. “I can’t. Talking about it will wake the JuJu, so don’t ask me any more,” she pleads. Rose likes to hold the hands of people she is talking to and her hands are always ice cold and clammy, which she says is because of the curse and how the spirit has deadened some of her soul.
Fear of and belief in the curse is a secret that all the women keep from the sisters at Casa Ruth. It’s better if the nuns believe they’ve left the black magic behind. The girls won’t even discuss it inside the shelter. Rose says they are afraid it will capture the nun’s good heart if they even bring it up. “Sister Rita is such a good woman,” Rose says. “She has God in her and the JuJu feels it when she is near, but no one is completely safe.”
Rose did know that she might end up in sex work when she came to Italy back in 2011. She had heard rumors of the sort in Nigeria, but had hoped it wouldn’t happen to her. In any case, she didn’t think she was attractive enough with her short, robust stature. Instead, she thought that she was coming to Italy to continue her work as a hairdresser and braider, which was her profession in Benin City. The JuJu ritual, she thought, was just a promise to pay back those who helped arrange her journey once she started earning money. Her parents even cobbled together what money they had to send with her. They viewed it as an investment so that she could soon start sending money home to help them.
In a village in Nigeria’s poor Edo State, a family can live comfortably for €200 a month, and Rose thought she would surely be making at least that every week in Italy. Like so many of the other victims, she also met a woman who told her she could help her get to Europe through her church group. This woman is the one who arranged the JuJu curse, which was performed as soon as Rose was told that there was work for her in Italy.
Rose came to Italy when Gaddafi still held power in Libya, before sex trafficking was the lucrative business it is today. She was among a growing number of Nigerian women coming into the country under a system that was different from what it is now. She had to pay smugglers for her own transportation costs, which were mild by comparison to what they are today. She was able to move quickly across the Sahara Desert and didn’t run into any trouble to speak of in Libya beyond the regular inconveniences that go with such an underworld journey.
When Gaddafi was still in charge, the rampant kidnappings and brutal detentions weren’t part of the migrant trail like they are now. People didn’t die waiting to cross, but they did perish at sea in far greater numbers than they do today. Libya was a police state where many things happened outside of the norms of international law, but it wasn’t lawless.
In Libya, Rose paid all the money her family saved for her to a smuggler for the sea voyage to Lampedusa on a rickety boat. She estimates that it was around $1,000 (approx. €900), although she can’t be sure because at the time she didn’t know simple math or the value of money. Now the voyage can cost €7,000 or more per person. Because Rose came to Italy long before Mare Nostrum and the charity boats started carrying out active rescues, she came on an old fishing boat that had to make it all the way to the island, which these boats generally did by crashing straight into the rocks. The ship she was on was at sea for more than a week before they finally wrecked on the shore. Like Joy who traveled across the desert, they had no food or water and they had to drink their own urine to survive.
The Italian Coast Guard knew in advance when boats were on the way to Lampedusa, but back then nobody thought to rescue them. The 2011 film Terraferma depicts the way it used to be, when fishing vessels couldn’t even help those on sinking migrant boats they came upon out of fear their boats would be sequestered and their crew charged with abetting illegal immigration.
People died so frequently that bodies often washed up on the Italian shores, and fishermen caught skulls and bones in their nets so often that they just threw them back into the sea rather than spending the time it would take to report the discovery of a body part. It wouldn’t have been of much use even if they had, anyway, since smuggler ships don’t have passenger lists and the dead are rarely identified.
I showed Rose some old pictures that I had kept on my phone of the smuggler-ship graveyard on Lampedusa, which is stacked high with the carcasses of hundreds of old smugglers’ boats that were hauled off the shoreline. She swiped through them with the nostalgia one might have when looking through vacation pictures. “Is it this one?” she said, enlarging the picture to get a good look at the wreck. “No, maybe it’s the one behind it.”
Within a month of arriving in Italy, Rose was in Castel Volturno working two different patches of sidewalk, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. She stayed on the streets for three long years. Men often refused to pay her, telling her that she wasn’t attractive enough to get paid for sex. She was frequently beaten by her madam when she worked all day and didn’t bring in enough money. Her eyes swell with tears when she recounts how the clients often forced her to do degrading acts, beating her when she refused.
The sex acts forced upon Nigerian women are made all the more degrading because they often involve men who do not wash before picking up the girls. I have been told by many women that they carry around wet wipes and ask the men to clean themselves before they will perform oral sex, but many refuse because there is a sick pleasure in forcing a woman to put her mouth on an unclean penis. Hand jobs are also common, with women being forced to let the men ejaculate in their mouths. Full intercourse is less common, in part because it is more expensive and entails going to a connection house or finding an area outside. Men who pay for sex often do not wish to have sex in their cars out of fear they will make a mess that their wives or girlfriends might find. Women told me stories of intercourse turning into anal rape, or how men insert objects like tree branches or metal pipes into their anuses or vaginas.
Many of the clients who pay for intercourse do ask for anal sex, which is something not all girls concede to, and certainly something they charge more for if they do. Some of the sex slaves who are forced to turn up to twenty tricks or more a day admit to applying a deadening cream to their vagina or anus so they don’t feel anything at all. More than one woman has mentioned an injection like Botox that can be self-administered, essentially to make repetitive sex less painful.
Dolly, the window girl in Amsterdam whom I met in Lampedusa in 2011, said she eventually got off the streets in Italy because so many of the men in northern Italy wanted threesomes or were sadomasochistic and used bondage or filmed the acts and then posted the encounters on social media porn sites. “I didn’t want a film out there,” she said. “What if I have children some day and they find it?”
The scars on Rose’s body are like a roadmap of the hell she has endured. Cigarette burns from one client, a bent and broken pinkie finger from another. Rose’s story seemed especially brutal. But when I asked Sister Rita why Rose was so unlucky and why she had so many more scars from her ordeal than the other women, she corrected me. The only difference between Rose and the others was that the other women don’t talk about or show their scars.
Rose lived in a rundown connection house off the Via Domitiana, where she would bring men from the street. The house was in the complex of single-story villas built for the Coppola Village estate, but no one had ever lived there, so there were no appliances and the plumbing was very basic, with a toilet that had no seat on it and just one sink that they used for cooking and bathing. A thin tube was attached to the sink since there wa
s no shower stall or bathtub. The villa had no heating and in the winter months they had to use a propane heater that sometimes sparked and caught the curtains on fire.
The kitchen was set up as a sort of bar with cocktails and some snacks locked up in cabinets. Her madam sometimes had parties in the connection house, inviting Nigerian men who would come for shots of whiskey or vodka or other liquor and then pay extra to take girls to the back bedrooms. The charge for Nigerian clients was far less than what they could charge white men, so the drinks were a way many of the madams made up for the low prices. It was not uncommon for a few madams to throw these parties together, bringing other women to the house, which meant many of them used the beds for sex and then slept in the same beds on the party nights, even though they only had one set of sheets that had to be washed by hand and left to dry in the wind.
She said sometimes she worked twenty-four hours a day, often turning a dozen or more tricks without sleeping. Her goal was to pay off her madam, but she somehow never got ahead.
Rose wasn’t formally educated in Nigeria and although she could recognize letters and read some simple words, she was not skilled at all in math. As a result, she had no accurate means to keep track of the money she paid to her madam. She had no choice but to trust that her madam was correctly deducting her earnings from her debt, which should have been less than the usual €60,000 since she paid her own transportation. But whenever she asked, it seemed she had been charged for more clothes or rent or food and she never caught up. She had no basis from which to argue, however, because she didn’t really understand the numbers. Many of the women keep their own tallies of their debts, but Rose could not.
Eventually, she fell in love with a young Nigerian man whom she met at an underground party in Castel Volturno Destra, the part of town where most Africans live, held at a former pizzeria where Africans would gather to share traditional music and food. These parties are different to the parties at the connection houses. No money is exchanged and no one has sex unless they want to.
Rose’s boyfriend knew what she did for a living, and while he didn’t judge her for it, they had understandable issues with intimacy at the beginning of their relationship. Yet, she was able to develop a deep emotional connection to him over time, which allowed her to trust a man in a way few women in her position ever do.
Rose’s boyfriend was also bound by the JuJu curse. The ritual used on men is slightly different from the one women take part in and often includes flagellation and other forms of self-torture. He was recruited as a drug mule for the Nigerian gangs after his asylum was denied while he was staying at CARA Mineo. He was from Borno State in the north of Nigeria and had left to avoid being recruited by Boko Haram militants who had convinced many of his friends to join their cause in its infancy, long before they gained notoriety by abducting the Chibok girls in 2014. He was denied asylum in 2012 and given ten days to leave Italy, but the authorities didn’t give him any financial support or a plane ticket to do so.
As he was plotting how to get back to Nigeria, he met a man who told him that he knew about a job in Castel Volturno where he could eventually get legal documents to stay in Europe. The man gave him a phone number and told him to go to the city of Catania where a friend would help him get hold of a job. In Catania, he met many other Nigerian men as well as many men from Ghana who were also denied asylum and trying hard to make a plan to stay in Europe.
Many of them wanted to try to get to France where there are far more African communities to disappear into than exist in Italy. Some of the men ended up taking the train to Ventimiglia on the border between Italy and France near the French and Italian Riviera, close to Nice. From there they were told they could hire men who would take them across the border through the mountains if they couldn’t cross by train. Rose’s boyfriend didn’t want to go to France, so he waited around until a man came to take them to Castel Volturno. Once there, he was given a job running drugs from one crack house to another on an old bicycle. At first, he had to wrap the drugs in packets around his legs until he understood how to recognize cops and other threats, including rival gang members who might steal his precious cargo. Eventually, he carried the drugs in a backpack.
Rose and her boyfriend left the Via Domitiana together after she became pregnant with their daughter. But not before Rose was beaten senseless by her madam, who was angry with her for not being more careful. Rose forced her clients to use condoms by lying about being HIV positive. In order to separate the act of paid sex from the intimacy she shared with the man she loved, she didn’t use a condom with her boyfriend, she says, even though she knew the risk of pregnancy was high. Her madam told her to keep working during the pregnancy, saying she could take some time off after the delivery. She would arrange for a babysitter, but, of course, Rose would have to pay extra for that.
The thought of raising a baby in a connection house where she was forced to have sex with strangers in the next room was unacceptable to her, so she made a plan with her boyfriend to run away.
Once Rose and her boyfriend escaped the Domitiana, however, her battle was far from over. Her boyfriend took a job as a bricklayer at a construction company run by the Camorra near Caserta and Rose stayed at Casa Ruth until their baby, Faith (a common name for babies born under Sister Rita’s watch), was born, in part to try to improve her reading and learn simple math. Eventually, Rose found a job with a company that provided cleaning services for an American military base near Caserta. The nuns and other women took care of Faith at Casa Ruth while she worked.
But the people running the company that cleaned for the Americans were corrupt – and mean. Rose was beaten, verbally abused and paid slave wages for excruciating work under often-dangerous, toxic conditions. She finally left the cleaning company, but not before her manager threatened to kill her and her baby. Rose left anyway. As she tells it, this is the work of the JuJu inside her soul for betraying her madam.
Shortly after leaving the cleaning company, Sister Rita convinced Rose to start working at the New Hope Cooperative, which is a sewing shop run by Casa Ruth to help sustain the women rescued from the streets. She and her boyfriend eventually moved into a small one-room apartment in the center of Caserta and they plan to get married one day. Sister Rita has pushed Rose to challenge herself, telling her that she will only succeed if she takes safe risks. To do that, Sister Rita is training her to run the till at the boutique. Several months after I first met Rose, I returned to New Hope and bought a hand-sewn notebook cover made from dark-green fabric that came with a green pen with the New Hope logo. Rose counted my money and gave me the change and carefully wrote out a receipt as Sister Rita looked on with the pride of a mother whose child had just graduated from Harvard.
Still, Rose worries about the JuJu curse. She has become a devout Christian and she has tried to replace the fear of the spirits she believes still possess her with faith. But even that is difficult. Her eyes well with tears again as she explains that she hopes all the gods will forgive her for what she has done – the JuJu “god” for breaking the curse, and her Christian god for what she says are her sins of selling her body on the street.
But the worst part of Rose’s story is that she still plans to pay her madam back one day, even though she is free from the slavery that kept her on the street. It is common for women who escape the streets to continue to feel the weight of the financial burden, often convinced they still owe the hefty debts or something terrible will happen to them because of the JuJu. “That’s the only way to really break the curse,” Rose says. “How can I not pay the debt?”
Using the curse to exploit vulnerable women is a genius scheme that works thanks to the Nigerian madams, who are skilled at manipulation, because they, too, were almost always victims themselves. They know what works best.
In any other circumstance, it would seem absurd if someone produced a bill for €60,000 that could only be paid back in €10 hand jobs, €15 blowjobs and €25 intercourse. But somehow the victims
truly believe that they owe that much, and not even for the privilege to live freely; they pay that much to live like prisoners and slaves. Part of the misconception is that they see Europe, even their prison-like conditions in the dirt-poor city of Castel Volturno, as advanced. There are basic amenities like running water and electricity that many didn’t have back home. This seems to skew their perception of what being here is worth.
The madams, too, convince the women that heat and electricity and running water are outrageously expensive. It is impossible for the victims of trafficking to understand just how inflated the cost of living they are charged for really is. But what is most heartbreaking is how many women simply accept what they are told. It underscores their vulnerability and the damage poverty and manipulation have done to their resolve as human beings. They lose confidence and, with it, often their perspective about what anything is worth, including themselves. They are tied to both the curse and the lies that accompany it.
The JuJu ritual varies depending on the black magic doctor performing it, but invariably includes some form of animal sacrifice, a promise of obedience, threats against the womb and the swearing of one’s soul as collateral for eventual debt.
Some women are forced to eat still-beating chicken hearts cut and torn from the live fowl in front of them. Others witness or even take part in the bloodletting of goats and are then either coerced to drink the blood or directed to prance around smoldering rocks with the dead animals on their back, the warm blood running down their spine. Some witchdoctors use sharp razors to remove parts of the women’s nipples or tufts of their pubic hair to leave in Nigeria. The scars left by the cuts are filled with dirt to bind them to their homeland. Most women are forced to leave a package of their body bits in Nigeria, which they are convinced can be used to control them from afar.
Roadmap to Hell Page 8