HOUMEDI

“One day they come and ask you, ‘who knows how to drive the boat?’ and even if no one answers, they put you in charge and those who are forced can’t say no. That time it fell to a guy like me; he had to take 100 people to Italy, including me, without even knowing how to swim. We got lost, the boat broke down, many people died. Fortunately, the Italian coast guard came to meet us, loaded us and took us to Lampedusa.”

Houmedi, 28, who fled Togo when he was 16 because of ethnic-religious conflicts, with his story, brings to light a phenomenon within a phenomenon, that of ‘scafisti (smugglers by boat) per caso.’ There are many of them: according to some studies done by NGOs, tens of thousands. They not only risk dying at sea, but also – very often – being arrested as traffickers. They are the many ‘Io capitano’ who are doubly victimised.

“Seeing so many people die next to you is terrible, an atrocious part of my journey.”
He was spared no suffering in the previous stretch. From Togo to Benin then to Niger and then to Libya. “I was arrested three times, they stole everything from me, sold me to a trafficker, just like that, like I was a commodity. I was working not to earn money but to be a free man again.”

He now lives in Treviso.
“How did I resist? The desire to see my family again.”