Within minutes, the woman who had provided a glimmer of hope to a troubled town was rushed off to the Pineta Grande clinic in a noisy parade of ambulance sirens and police lights that most assumed were surely from yet another act of random violence in the community. Doctors couldn’t revive her and she died in Castel Volturno a few hours later, at the age of seventy-six.
As truly tragic as her death was, her legacy lives on in Castel Volturno in ways that it would not have had she simply left the stage and flown back home. There seemed to be a certain symbolism in the icon taking her last breath in such a troubled place. She was the ultimate martyr for racial tensions and she died in a place in which the hope for unity seemed a lost cause.
After her death, the Mondo Senza Confini (World Without Borders) Miriam Makeba Cultural Center was founded on the Domitiana.74 It has meeting rooms where frequent musical events are held and an area dedicated to African culture, with art and clothing. Money is raised to give scholarships to those Nigerian descendants who want to pursue education elsewhere.
Makeba’s life work is celebrated with concerts and special cultural events every year. But even more than that, her death seemed to galvanize the African community to demand rights and recognition, and, though it has been an upward struggle to achieve anything close to equality, the fight hasn’t been lost completely. There are young Africans in Castel Volturno who want more than what is their perceived destiny and while there is little representation on the city council or even within the Italian community at large, the parallel culture does try to make its voice heard on issues that are important to them, such as ensuring their children can attend local public schools with native Italians.
Before performing what was her last concert, Makeba spent time at the Fernandes Center, which is something between an emergency room, a refugee reception center and a safe house in an old military barrack.75 It is a place that every single African in the area knows as somewhere they can always be seen by a doctor, dentist or eye doctor, get a warm meal or spend a safe night no matter what documents they have or what their legal status is. The local doctor at the center is Renato Natale, the former mayor of Casal di Principe who, like the center’s director Antonio Casale, is also on the Camorra’s hit list. It was fitting that Makeba’s last public speech of unity took place there. “When you separate people, they never get to know each other and they learn to suspect each other,” she told the gathered crowd a few hours before her last concert. “But when you bring people together, they get to know each other and to know about each other’s problems and they find out that we all have the same problems as human beings. Thus we are not afraid of one another.”76
Director Casale believes that the key to stopping the criminality is giving skills to the Africans who live in Castel Volturno so they have alternatives to the criminal world, though without opportunities, those skills are often wasted. Intensive and situation-based Italian classes and technical courses teaching basic skills are provided for free as a priority to facilitate integration. Fernandes was in place long before the Italian government even recognized the migrant crisis. Now that most of the people who come to Castel Volturno are sucked into the trafficking ring or involved in organized crime, their programs have been adapted to include legal services and counseling for women who try to break away from their madams and the JuJu curse.
One of their more successful programs is a soccer camp that has become something of a recruitment center for various amateur Italian soccer teams who look for standout athletes among the migrants. Many of the young men who arrive in Italy by boat harbor dreams of becoming European soccer stars like Gambia standout Ousman Manneh, who came to Germany by way of Italy as an unaccompanied minor in 2014 and quickly rose through the ranks to become a professional player for Germany’s Werder Bremen team.
Some of the soccer inspiration comes from the fact that Naples’ professional soccer team Napoli also trains in Castel Volturno, albeit in a heavily guarded exclusive golf club with a sea view that they were able to acquire from the sequestered Coppola property. Three soccer pitches with perfectly groomed natural grass and an exclusive hotel behind tall fences and armed guards are a world away from the rest of Castel Volturno, though the club’s captain, Marek Hamšík, from Slovenia, lives in a refurbished apartment on the seaside. No one bothers him, and though he tends to socialize in the much more upscale nearby town of Pozzuoli, he has boosted the community’s image in numerous ways.
In what remains a unique opportunity anywhere in Castel Volturno, let alone along the entire migrant trail, Fernandes offers a special program to identify skilled and educated migrants, especially those who have finished high school or university. Blessing is the perfect example of the smallest demographic of trafficked women, often ignored because their needs aren’t considered as acute as many others. The vast majority of those arriving by sea don’t even have basic math or reading skills. Many of the women I have met can only read numbers to twenty. Some can only write their own names. Illiteracy among migrants is astonishingly high, and most cannot even fill out asylum applications on their own.
Fernandes also helps run the Speranza (hope) Project in conjunction with missionary nuns from the Santa Maria dell Accoglienza reception house. It isn’t exactly like Casa Ruth, in part because its location, on the Domitiana itself, makes it almost impossible to keep women who leave the streets safe and hidden. There is also a sense that the nuns at Santa Maria seem somewhat less intuitive than those at Casa Ruth, relying more on God’s will that everything will be OK rather than realizing that, according to man’s will, everything won’t. The sisters at Casa Ruth are every bit as religious, but they are also far more realistic.
Women who escape their madams run a great risk of being kidnapped or killed wherever they find safety, so those who shelter with the nuns at Casa Santa Maria really do have to stay within the confines of the building. Some move on to Casa Ruth if there is space, but most live in what amounts to a prison-like situation until they can get their documents and move on or go back to Nigeria. There are babies here, too, but that doesn’t make the house seem any more hopeful.
For all the good the center does, it is under constant scrutiny by law enforcement. In early 2017, two Nigerian men were caught selling heroin to a group of young Neapolitan men at the famed Palazzo Grimaldi, a popular spot for drug trafficking. The Neapolitans escaped and the two Nigerians tried to reach the Fernandes Center. They were caught before entering the gate, and police immediately called for a complete search of the premises. They found nothing, but those who would like to see all Africans deported from Castel Volturno questioned why the men thought they could find safety there and whether or not the center was doing all it could to root out troublemakers.
Still, one of the great benefits of such a long-standing establishment is that it provides a point of reference for the area. It is here that the African NGO known as Cultural Video House, which has offices in Naples, was able to find a pool of amateur actors and do development research in relative safety for a web series they produced called Connection House.77
The show seeks to expose the drastic problems in Castel Volturno through lighthearted comedy, which they somehow manage to pull off without seeming overly flippant. The premise of the show centers on Lorenzo, the spoiled son of a wealthy Neapolitan businessman who has fallen into difficult times after the family business fails. Lorenzo inherits his grandmother’s house in Castel Volturno, which he remembers fondly as a place where he spent summers when the Coppola Village was still swanky.
As it happens, the nonna, or grandmother, takes in a group of undocumented migrants in her later years, including Nigerian women (one of whom is a sorceress) and men who work odd jobs of questionable provenance.
Unemployed and out of money, the grandson gets sucked into the world of illegal workers. He soon finds himself at what the show calls Kalifoo Ground, which is the real-life area where undocumented workers meet each morning to wait for farmers and construction b
osses to choose them for labor-intensive work, much like what happens outside of the Cara Mineo center in Sicily. The plots all follow a similar theme, where Lorenzo, stripped of his civil rights as an undocumented worker, has to skirt the system and learns quickly that the only way to survive is to live outside the rules. It would be hysterical if it weren’t based entirely on fact.
There have been other creative interpretations of the dismal life in Castel Volturno. Most notably Là-bas: A Criminal Education, a drama by Neapolitan director Guido Lombardi. The film is the dark version of Connection House, showing the real tragedy where the web series finds the comedic silver lining. Là-bas won a Future Lion award at the Venice Film Festival and a Flash Forward award at Busan in 2011.
Those who do try to shine light on the grave situation are really islands in a sea of indifference. Even documentaries that focus on the migrant crisis, such as Fire at Sea, which was nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar in 2016, tend to attract those who already care about migrants rather than spreading the true stories to a wider audience.
Katja Meier is a Swiss writer who self-published a book in 2014 called Across the Deep Blue Sea: Good Intentions and Hard Lessons in an Italian Refugee Home about her time helping out at a refugee center in rural Tuscany, where she lives with her Italian companion and their two sons. Her experience ended with her losing her job for bucking the system and trying to make the refugee center into something more like what Sister Rita runs at Casa Ruth, where women can find a way forward. Two of the Nigerian women in the center were clearly in touch with pimps and madams. They received troubling calls and ran away, came back again, and then ran away once more. The others were constantly coming back to the shelter from weekends in the city with wads of cash that Katja had good reason to suspect was earned through prostitution.
I met with Katja after her book came out and we discussed the question of whether regulating sex work in Italy would help some of the women who are trafficked and protect those who chose sex work out of an absence of alternatives. I had never agreed with that theory, but she made me consider the fact that even though these women are not prostitutes in the true sense of the word, they quite possibly would be more protected if the industry was not just legal, but regulated. But she also recognizes the potential minefield of addressing sex worker rights in the context of sex-trafficked women.
Katja is convinced that the women she dealt with resorted to prostitution out of a sense of financial desperation. She says that, like many young girls who go to Los Angeles or London, the Nigerian girls she worked with seem to have come to Europe with what she describes as “dreams and goals like all young women their age.” And if sex work was how they might achieve it, “that’s what they would have to do.”
If that’s the case, that they weren’t in fact trafficked but instead found themselves choosing sex work because it was the only way to financial stability, they would benefit from regularized prostitution and sex-worker benefits. The trouble is, it is almost impossible to know how many women choose prostitution, how many resort to prostitution when they have no money, and how many are truly trafficked.
The United Nations has done what it can to lay out precise boundaries when it comes to distinguishing between sex workers and those who are trafficked for sex. The UN “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons”, also referred to as one of a trio of Palermo protocols signed in 2000, defines human trafficking as “involving actions by a third party (e.g. recruitment, transportation); use of force, deception or other fraudulent means; and purposes of exploitation (e.g. forced labor).”
Writing on the topic in The Lancet, Shira M. Goldenberg, PhD, a gender specialist at Simon Fraser University and part of the Gender & Sexual Health Initiative of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, makes an important distinction. “The conflation of sex trafficking and sex work on an ideological and political basis has historically fueled repressive policies that have undermined efforts to advance the health and human rights of sex workers,” she says.78 Essentially, treating sex workers like women who have been trafficked denies legitimate workers important rights like safe work environments and the ability to pay into a structured health care system.
When I reached out to her for this book, she explained that most countries that have signed onto the Palermo Protocol should already have had existing laws in place to address trafficking in persons, which, she says, “certainly represents an egregious human rights violation and is known to occur among both men and women and across many different sectors of work.” She says laws surrounding sex work should focus on legitimate prostitution, which she defines as the consensual exchange of sexual services between adults. “Conflation with trafficking and the singling out of the sex industry within dominant anti-trafficking discourse is often based on moral assumptions and political agendas, rather than evidence,” she told me. “Rather than conflating sex work and trafficking, efforts to ensure access to safe working conditions and decriminalizing sex work can reduce marginalized individuals’ potential vulnerability to workplace exploitation since they no longer have to operate in a clandestine fashion and have been widely demonstrated to promote the health and human rights of sex workers.”
When women are identified as truly trafficked, the next hurdle is what to do with them on a long-term basis. No one can live at Casa Ruth forever and other entities under the Church lean towards repatriating Nigerian women, which is a topic of considerable debate. Sister Eugenia Bonetti is an elderly Italian Consolata Missionary nun who spent a quarter of a century working in the slums in Kenya before being called back to Italy to work with the increasing number of Eastern European and other women working on the streets as prostitutes in central Italy. In 2000, she was asked to start a program called Slaves No More, to help rescue sex trafficking victims off the streets and get them out of detention centers. Now her group has an extensive network of nuns who work all over the world to help victims of trafficking.
In Rome, she and her nuns work tirelessly to free women from the notorious Ponte Galeria detention center on the outskirts of the city who are kept behind the type of reinforcement one might expect to see at a maximum-security facility for Mafia murderers. Most of the people who end up in Ponte Galeria have been convicted of crimes like petty theft and carrying false documents. They have invariably exhausted their opportunities within other migrant reception centers. If they end up in Ponte Galeria, they are at the end of the line. They will either be deported back to their countries of origin (if those countries accept them), or commit suicide waiting.
Sister Bonetti and her network of nuns have been counseling women here for more than a decade. When they can, they accompany the women who are being deported back to Nigeria where they are met by others in Sister Bonetti’s group to offer them shelter while they try to plan their next steps. Going home is not easy for the women. Most often they try to get back to Europe.
Sending trafficked women back to Nigeria has drawbacks beyond the original lack of opportunity that led them into their trafficker’s trap. First, if trafficked women are owned by a madam or took a JuJu curse, they could be killed for failing to fulfill their promises. I once met a woman waiting to be returned to Nigeria in the Ponte Galeria detention center who had received regular photos of a man holding a machete to her mother’s neck demanding she repay her debts or her mother would die. Another woman waiting for deportation had decorated her holding cell with Christian verses and prayers. She wore multiple rosaries around her neck, clinging on to any hope at salvation from the JuJu curse that she could find. She was terrified that she would be killed when she returned. She had left the package required by most witch doctors of her personal bits, a few toenails and locks of pubic hair. She was sure that when the man who administered the curse saw her, he would take her life.
If their families knew they were forced into sex slavery, they could be rejected. Either way, going back is seen as a failure by most of the women, no m
atter how horrific their time in Europe may have been. The vast majority of the women who make it all the way to Italy only to be sent back are devastated.
Sister Rita also works closely with Sister Bonetti and is part of the Slaves No More network. When Blessing returned back to Nigeria with Pozzi the journalist, Slaves No More chronicled her journey as part of a campaign to show trafficked women that they can, indeed, go home. What they left out was the fact that Blessing, like so many other women, couldn’t actually tell her parents what she’d been through. And while she spoke at a church similar to the one where her original recruiter found her, she sadly had little impact. As we’ve seen, even her own sister was almost trafficked in spite of knowing what can happen.
Sister Rita prefers to integrate women saved from the streets into Italian society, but she has sent a number of girls to Sister Bonetti who wish to return to Nigeria. IOM also repatriates people from Libya back to Nigeria. They only help those who volunteer to go back, meaning if the women are still en route to Europe, they don’t stop them. But when they do send those who want to go back, they try to facilitate a smooth return when they can.
Slaves No More also works with the Italian group Talitha Kum, which, when translated from Aramaic, means “Little girl, I say to you, arise!” the words Jesus speaks to a twelve-year old paralytic in the Gospel of Mark before she gets up and walks, according to the Bible. The group has more than a thousand nuns and religious women active in seventy-one countries who provide shelter and counseling to help victims get out of sexual exploitation and try to carve out a new life. The group’s leader, Sister Gabriella Bottani, has been especially focused on helping women to understand that they are victims and not to feel guilty for what they have done, no matter what their legal circumstances might be. “So often they don’t even know they are victims,” she says. “Some are in denial out of fear or anger or embarrassment, but getting them to admit they are being victimized is the first step in rescuing them.”
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