“Where are we going, Mom? Why are there so many people on this boat?” The question was obvious, but the answer was diabolical and Ndeye Sarr clarified the interrogation of her nine-year-old daughter as best she could: “I don’t know, but I think we’re going to Spain. The girl insisted, “And can we bring my brothers?” I don’t want to go alone. “No, it’s too late, we can’t get out of the canoe,” the mother concluded, trying not to get dizzy. A journey of seven days and seven nights on the high seas began.
The story of Sarr, a 30-year-old Gambian woman and mother of five children, is an extraordinary story as she ended up almost by accident on the boat that left Gunjur, a fishing village in Gambia, and arrived at El Iron Island on the 4th. October. But it is also a daily story of poverty, violence and abandonment that drives hundreds of women to throw themselves into the sea with their children in their arms, with the only conviction: “I had no other choice.”
Sarr devoted himself to finding charcoal for cooking and selling it to his neighbors. With this she alone provided for her five children aged three to eleven, but hardly because she was unable to endure unforeseen events. For example, when the roof of his house collapsed in the middle of the rainy season and he had to distribute the children around the neighborhood because no one was sleeping there. She was getting fed up, worried, and already pondering the idea of going to Egypt to clean houses, but she couldn’t imagine what would happen that morning as she went looking for coal made and met some men who were putting supplies in a boat.
“What are you doing?” he asked her. They wanted to go to Spain, and Sarr, seeing his chance there, ran home, took his nine-year-old daughter with him, asked his mother to take care of the rest, and returned to the beach to get on the boat. He paid the fine with the just over 30 euros he had saved for the roof. “I don’t regret it, it’s the only way I can give my children a chance,” he says quietly.
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Women are silent protagonists on migration routes. They can be seen in the images taken by photojournalists who manage to capture the moment of their disembarkation in the various Canary Islands ports, but then they somehow disappear. They are housed in special centers for the most vulnerable migrants, take to the streets in groups and avoid them because they fear being punished if they go after journalists. They are rarely talked about.
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The Canary Islands are once again in an emergency situation with more than 7,500 migrants arriving in the last two weeks alone. They travel in boats that leave from Morocco, but above all in huge canoes that leave from Senegal, but also from Mauritania and Gambia. Men are almost always crowded there, but more and more women can be seen.
Of the more than 20,000 people who have landed in the Canary Islands, they represent 7%, according to the Red Cross. This is a modest number, but the percentage is up compared to 5% in 2020, when the Canary Islands route was heavily reactivated. These barges have also brought 53 babies who are still breastfeeding and nearly 150 children up to 11 years old. And although men also care for their little ones, most of these children are accompanied by their single mothers.
“Traditionally, migrations to Europe have been led by men,” explains Cristina Manzanedo, lawyer for the Ödos program, which is dedicated to welcoming sub-Saharan women who arrive in Spain alone or with young children. “Years after their arrival, husbands managed to bring their wives with them, but the pattern is changing and in recent years we see women emigrating independently of men, although they continue to occupy a subordinate position to them.”
“Mom, what’s all this?”
In the same canoe that Sarr and her daughter were traveling in, another three-year-old girl was asking questions. “Mom, what is all this?” But this mother couldn’t even find the words. “Couldn’t answer. It was the first time in my life that I got on a boat and I was very confused… I only saw sea and sun, sea and sun,” recalls Sainey Njie, 23 years old. The journey of this barge, which traveled more than 1,700 kilometers with more than a hundred people on board, was relatively calm, but was particularly complicated for the women who were on board, with no experience at sea and responsible for their babies. “The journey was very tiring. I brought food for my daughter but it wasn’t enough for us and we ate just enough to survive… The water ran out before we arrived,” Njie recalls.
Sainey Nije, 23, poses with her three-year-old daughter at the animal shelter in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Alvaro Garcia
The young woman walking with her little girl through her shelter in Santa Cruz de Tenerife is the youngest of five siblings who lost their parents when they were children. “I only know who my mother was because of the stories they told me, I don’t remember her,” he says. It’s the only time tears well up in his eyes.
Njie left school at the age of 11 to work and sell fish. At 15, her uncle forced her to marry a man ten years her senior, another child and forced marriages that still shape the reality of millions of African women.
She hated this man, but she had two children with her, the little girl who traveled with her and a five-year-old boy who stayed in Gambia. She eventually managed to separate, despite the stigma that still haunts divorced women.
“I know it is a radical change to come here, but I was alone and this was the only way to give myself a better life and provide for my children,” she explains in English. “Everything was too hard,” he claims.
The young woman, like the other women who spoke to EL PAÍS, remains silent when asked about some episodes of her life. Extreme poverty is the engine that drives them, they say, but the figures on inequality and violence against women and girls in many African countries give clues to what they are not saying.
In The Gambia, for example, 46% of women between the ages of 15 and 49 have experienced physical violence at least once, according to a 2020 report from the National Statistics Office. And 41% of married women reported suffering some type of violence from their husbands, be it emotional, physical or sexual. Despite their important role as contributors to the family economy, dozens of other data show how far Gambian women are from equality.
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Manzanedo denounces how “invisibility” affects all of these women, “regardless of their context.” For them and their children. “They are a minority, there are no detailed figures about them and their circumstances,” he explains. “We know very little and without information there is no good public policy that can address the needs of these profiles.”
The heat is suffocating in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The thermometer reached 35 degrees late Thursday afternoon and the women left the reception center to seek refuge under the trees of a nearby park. They almost always go in groups, dressed in tracksuits given to them by the Red Cross when they arrived on the island or in clothes donated by neighbors. The children flutter from hand to hand as they converse in Wolof, a language shared by Gambians and Senegalese. But one of them is always silent.
Poverty and secret journey
Aisha Kunta, 18 years old, a young Gambian woman who came to El Hierro in a Cayuco.Álvaro García
Aisha Kunta, 18, is the youngest of the adult women who have arrived alone on the islands in recent weeks. She describes herself as a girl who could only rely on herself. “I am the oldest of five siblings and lost my mother in 2015 and my father in 2017,” she begins. “I left school because no one could pay school fees and went to work selling fruit to support my brothers. I had no one to help me,” he laments.
Kunta came to know about the departure of the canoe from Gunjur a few days before. He distributed his brothers among relatives and left. Since her arrival, she has only spoken to one of them, a nine-year-old boy who told her he missed her. And Kunta is silent again. “I’m pretty sad,” he says, looking at the floor.
Without the small community of survivors who gather in the park every day, Anna Jarju, 28, would lose her mind. He can’t stop thinking about the five children he left behind with his mother in Karteng, a 20-minute drive from where the canoe that brought the four protagonists of this story left. “It’s the first time I’ve been away from them, I feel a lot of pain,” he says.
Anna Jarju, a 28-year-old Gambian, is one of the hundreds of women who came to the Canary Islands via Cayuco. Alvaro García
Jarju is the only married woman in this group, but she has excluded her husband from all decisions. “I didn’t tell him because otherwise he would have stopped me from leaving,” he explains. “He looked for me for a week and thought something had happened to me,” he remembers.
The woman describes a life of “total poverty.” He grew tomatoes and onions on a small plot and sold ice cream when he had to let the land rest, but his salary did not reach 45 euros a month. When asked if he believes he made the right decision and whether he regrets getting into the canoe, Jarju puts a hand to his forehead and looks up: “The question is not whether it was the right decision was or not, but rather: “I had no other option.”
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