Mark*, a young refugee from Cameroon

I’m from southwest Cameroon. My father, who was Beti [an ethnic group in Cameroon], was Captain of the Guard at the army base in Kumba. He was killed because he opposed the country’s Anglophone minority. I didn’t live with him, but with my sister and her husband in Douala. My mother’s still alive. She’s in Boulou, but I don’t know where. It’s a really long story, and I don’t want to talk about it.

When my sister’s husband died, I had to leave Douala. I went to Bamenda to live with my big brother and my little sister. I had to stop going to school; I was in the 3rd year of secondary school. But, on 1 January 2017, my big brother, who’s against the regime, told me to leave.

Bullets were flying in all directions in Bamenda. My brother told me his rebel group wanted to give weapons to the children, even the girls. Things had become really dangerous. He told me I had to leave the country. I said, “I’ll go, but where to?” He didn’t answer. He sent my little sister and me off with Moussa, who took us to Nigeria.

My little 13-year old sister and I walked across the border in Bamenda. We found Moussa and passed through Nigeria via Lagos. At the border between Nigeria and Niger, people smugglers take you by motorbike to their ghetto and then put you in a car.

There are loads of checkpoints in Niger, but as long as you pay the police let you through. In Niamey, 27 of us climbed onto a pick-up. We were so many different nationalities—Ivoirians, Cameroonians, Gambians… The arrival in Agadez is well-organised. You arrive at the station and motorbikes come and pick you up.

The police know exactly what’s going on, but they take money and turn a blind eye. The Nigerians took us to a closed camp 20 minutes from the station. It was a two-storey house with people upstairs and downstairs. Nobody was allowed out. They told us the police don’t like seeing migrants.

We spent a week there and one evening the problems began. Several Arabs came to get us late at night. They knew the right time to cross and the routes to take through the desert. All they gave us was a five-litre can of water and some tapioca with powered milk.

In the desert I saw the epicentre of people trafficking. Pick-ups crammed with Ethiopians and Eritreans joined us in the middle of the desert. There were 32 pick-up trucks, and we must have been 700 migrants. We took off in groups of five trucks.

After five days of driving through the desert, at 10 am in the morning bandits attacked us. The attack lasted two or three hours. They started shooting and I told my sister, “Get down and go in the cave.” My friend told her to go the other way and that’s when a bullet hit her in the ribs. We wanted to take her to the hospital, but we couldn’t. The poison in the bullet killed her. Seven or eight people died in the attack. Nobody’s going to give you any help over there.

When the bandits took off, all the drivers said was, “Haya, haya!” (Hurry, hurry). We didn’t even have time to bury all the bodies. I had a sheet in my bag. I wrapped it round my sister’s body and buried her. When I lost my little sister, I went crazy. All I wanted was to go home.

We continued driving through the desert, but only during the day. They’d stop the cars in the evening so they wouldn’t be seen. The journey took a long time. They used their Thuraya phone to communicate with other people smugglers. We had nothing left to drink or eat, and a friend showed me what to do when water runs out. You pee in a can and drink it.

Several days later we arrived at the Libyan border. We stopped off in Gatroun. We rested, washed and we were able to change our clothes. Then they took us to Sebha, which is where their base is.

When we got to Sebha, the boss asked us for our full names and noted them down. He told us, “You’ve been sold by Moussa. You have to call your families so that we can let you go. Then you’ll go to France.”

But I had no one to call, and they tortured me in every way possible. They beat me with pipes and hurled cement blocks at my chest. They yanked out one of my teeth with a crowbar and I bled so much my head swelled up like a balloon. They started raping the women, even the little girls, right in front of us. They’d hit their mothers when they tried to help them.

I couldn’t pay, so I was sold several times over. First it was to a Ghanaian who works with the Arabs. He demanded 700,000 CFA francs (around €1,070) to let me go and send me to France. I was sold again, still in Sebha, to a Libyan who demanded 200,000 CFA francs (around €300).

But the prison was the worst. There were around 2,000 people in one yard. When one of the guards had smoked, he’d come and beat us up. He was capable of beating people to death by slamming them against the wall. We couldn’t escape because, although there wasn’t a roof, they’d strung up high-voltage wires over the yard that fried you if you touched them. We couldn’t sleep at night. There wasn’t enough room to lie down so we had to keep sitting up. We’d eat in groups of 15 at a time. We’d mix Maggi cubes and salt in tins of tomatoes. People died every day, from starvation, or because of the torture.

I was sold for a third time and taken to Zawiya. In Tripoli, I was sold for the fourth time. That’s when I managed to escape… I don’t like talking about everything that happened, looking back at the past.