My name is Tosin Uka, a Nigerian born of Igbo father from Anambra State and Yoruba mother from Osun State. This is the story of my life which, as it is now, dances on a pivot of deadly fate. The first part of this narrative is mostly a mental reconstruction of my lost manuscripts. The last part of it was added while I am here on the waiting room of fate.

Part One
I left Nigeria for Spain in August 2015, but all I can say of my present location is that am in Libya. Where in Libya, I cannot tell. I was led here in blood-clotted chains together with sixteen other young men and two girls in our envoy headed towards the Mediterranean Sea. We were still at a desert called the Sand Sea, led by a navigator and his assistant, when some Tuaregs, maybe Berbers — they were some Arabic- and French-speaking gunmen — surrounded us and marched us to a slum, or slave market, as I later learnt.
After one month of exposure in the open slave market, I suffered serious fever and was transferred by my captors to a more comfortable camp replete with tents, which had interiors that looked like hospital wards. I was put in one of the tents where an Arab nurse attended to me every noon. My second caregiver there was a cook that served me breakfast and dinner. She’s a Liberian and I made friends with her. Madam Charity, in addition to food, provided me with writing materials with which I scribble the story of my unfortunate life. I could only hope that it won’t be the last story that I would tell. Madam Charity said that my life has been placed in the hands of the Arab nurse. Her medical report is like a law and it’s final. As Madam Charity was leaving my tent one morning after serving my breakfast, she turned and spoke to me, with great concern and piety written all over her face.
“You’d better recover quick, son,” she said. “Your marketable price is five hundred dollars and you can’t expect your captors to spend up to a hundred and fifty trying to fix you up. They’ll come soon either to sell you off or, if you’re still not certified healthy...” she paused suddenly, dreading the next line.
“And if am not certified healthy, then what?” I said coldly, trying to mask my own fears.
“Usually the traders like to count their loss before it became a real loss for them,” she said quickly and darted out of the tent. I got her real message. I’d be shot if I didn’t get well soon. At least that’s not the worst fate as far as this abyss goes. The traders hardly ever waste a life. They either sell in whole or in parts by tearing the captive open and take their organs while the victim stays awake and watches.
Before I tell my background story, I want to state clearly that every black person here, including workers like Madam Charity, are all slaves. Even though she visits the local market to procure food, not even Madam Charity knows the name of this place. She’s also hoping to one day get out of this place in one piece. It’s a real tough system here; a whole village or group of villages under the absolute control of the slaver cartels, but more on that later.

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I wouldn’t be in this servile condition if not for Francis Agu, my old classmate at Nawfia Comprehensive Secondary School. Francis was huge, four years older than me, with thick black skin. He wasn’t a bully for his size, but even student functionaries gave him his way more often than they’d accord to an average junior student. Francis used to be my best friend in our first two years of secondary school, but our gapping each other became more pronounced the more I removed myself from the herd of his other wilder clique. Even at that, Francis, who was older and much stronger than me, continued to hold a lofty respect for me, being the first to holler at me each time we crossed path. I in turn respected him very much even though we never walked closely together since our third year at school. During our fifth year, Francis became the student functionary overseeing general manual labour.
Shortly after becoming our new labour prefect, Francis became the hero of all students, and the darling of the authority. Nevertheless, his undoing came the day he led a group of thirty students to attack another school, two miles from our school. Francis called it an avenger mission — to break even with Kabe College, whose student had wounded one of our own students. Francis and gang carried out the attack during school hours, dispersing the students hours before dismissal. The matter was officially filed by the affected party, and although the authorities of our school denied having any knowledge of such bestial behaviour by their students, Francis disappeared since that day both at school and on the streets.

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I wouldn’t be in this servile condition either, if not for Benson Odoh, my friend who is a native of Onitsha. Ben, first son of a poor, single mother, left for South Africa in 2010, returning to Awka in 2013 throwing lots of money around.
Ben, tall and light-skinned, is that kind of sociable fellow that could pay whatever price to ensure everybody around him felt happy. He never said ‘no’ to a friend’s request. We all rallied around him on his return, flirting around town everyday for the two months that he stayed in Awka. On one of such ecstatic evenings with Ben in a hotel garden, he told of his adventures in foreign lands.
“First off, in 2010,” he said, demonstrating with his hands like a rap artiste, “I flew into South Africa to hustle; you know how they do over there. South Africa didn’t favour me a bit. All those kinds of businesses I should have met up with, were close-ended. I stayed on the streets for five months with nothing to show for it. What can a big boy do ... I ball out and pursued the way of Dubai — you know what am talking about. Mehn! The Emirate was TOUGH. Dubai isn’t what you think it is. Certainly not for a lone hustler and even to land a legit, shitty job for support was next to impossible. Any brother who’d made it there had to be a stooge. I cursed the damn place and moved on, this time to Malaysia for a change...”
All eyes were upon Ben, our new celebrity, as he told his story. We were sitting in a semi-circular formation, buried in his narrative, knowing that this guy in front of us had really made it in terms of money. And it wasn’t only because of the big chains hanging from his neck or his non-repeated changes of designer wears. We had no doubts about the depth of his pocket because, throughout his stay in town, he was permanently lodged in one of the best hotels in town. For the duration of the two months that he stayed, all his close friends, about thirty of us, were constantly eating and drinking in exotic restaurants while Ben cleared the bills without flinching. We were thirty in number, but that was excluding girls who came in their troupes. Needless to say, all the girlfriends that we never had practically threw themselves at us without minding what we did with the next girl. It was that fun.
According to Ben, he relocated from Malaysia to China, and then Germany, before he moved on to Spain where he met The Bull, the guy who changed his life completely.

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Ben went back to Spain but words about him continued to float all over town. Among his peers, we discussed nothing outside Ben and how his new status has inspired us. Most of all, we wondered who The Bull actually was, and why Ben always seem enraptured whenever he pronounced the name. How powerful might this strange guy be in Europe, that someone like Ben could serve him for just eight months and become so rich?
It wasn’t until ten months later, on December 2014, that I met the one they called The Bull. Ben, who had come home for his younger sister’s marriage ceremony, drove me and four others in his car to Udi in Enugu state to see his infamous boss.
We veered off the express way onto a narrow-asphalted road, which led into the first gate of our destination while a village track-road continued onward, not tarred. After a minute cruising across the villa, being our destination, we reached an imposing marble mansion and stopped. When I alighted, I turned back to look at the direction from where we came; more than two hectares of land lay before my face, having its own football pitch, basketball court, a cattle ranch, and facilities which I hadn’t the time to process before Ben pulled me along by the hand.
We entered a posh lounge in the marble mansion where The Bull was concluding a meeting with four elderly men. That gave me ample time to admire the interior of the mansion. The ceiling was unusually high, ignited evenly by light rays permeating the translucent emerald stones used for the ceiling. Two golden chandeliers hung down from it, glistening multi-coloured lights. The elderly men stood up and went in turns to have a handshake with The Bull, who gave a fat, brown envelope to each of them. That was a farewell gesture telling us to proceed rather than continue to wait for the visitors to leave the lounge. We resumed walking, while I still admired what surrounded us. The walls were made of rough but polished marbles, adorned with some giant frames of oil colour paintings. The glassy floor squeaked under our feet as we walked past the visitors, who left through the door that we had come in. I was wondering why the floor wasn’t as slippery as it looked — almost like a mirror — when someone bellowed my name.
I jerked and carried my face up in reflex action. It was our host calling out to me. He walked up and took me in his tight embrace.
“I can’t believe it,” he said in a deep, gasping voice. “Where have you been all this time while I’ve been looking for you?”
I wrapped my own hands around him but was too weak and overwhelmed to give him a reply.
“Never mind, brother,” The Bull continued. “I was too rough that I never cared to find out where you lived.”
It was then that I broke a laughter.
“Oh my God!” I said at last. “Francis, the gentle mafia, so it’s you?”
The Bull eased his embrace, took some steps back and looked me from head to toe. Then he broke a laughter and grabbed me a second time in his embrace.
Francis Agu, my former classmate and protector, is that big boss they call The
Bull. I believed it was fate that brought us together again when I most needed a friend who was well connected.

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On that Sunday of our visit, we stayed on with Francis, The Bull, until 6.15pm. Good time was spent listening to his story of travails, adventures, and glory. I was delighted to know that Francis’ age-long storytelling wit still lived with him. He told of his apprenticeship in auto spare parts trading after his dropping out of school. That only lasted for two years before he was sent packing by his master for allegations of infidelity. Francis said that soon afterwards he secured a job as an auxiliary driver with a government hospital. He stayed on the job for a year and got fired after being involved in a road accident which was entirely his own fault. After that came his two-year period in depression, a period in which he had attempted suicide on four different occasions.
Francis then told us how an uncle of his who was a dealer in brocade and lace cloth materials had taken him along to Senegal to purchase his merchandise, where Francis himself disappeared on arrival at Senegal. Next thing, Francis took to the streets, and then, according to him, something led to another and he was in Europe. He established a successful business in France, later extended to Italy and Spain.
At home that night, I couldn’t sleep, ruminating on the offer that Francis had made to us. He had promised to establish as many of us who would agree to come work for him in Europe. With Ben sitting under the same roof with us as a living testimony of what Francis could do, the spell was all over us. At first, I had my reservations since the terminal journey was going to involve an illegal passage across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe — Francis was blunt on that. When he made that known to us, I quickly protested, citing the case of Sinai kidnappers who abduct illegal migrants, stealing their vital organs — at least that’s what I saw on a CNN documentary. To that effect, Francis laughed and told us that he never operated along Sinai. “Sinai might be cheaper,” he said, “but the risks are high.” From him we learnt that he’d smuggled more than six hundred young Africans through Libya into Europe. Only three lives had ever been lost to him.
As of 2014, I’d never heard or watched any ugly documentary of illegal migrants going through the Libyan route. I laid on my bed thinking about this, with my gaze fixed on the ceiling. At last I took the hard decision. I would do it. The time was about 2.30am; then I slept off.

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We agreed to go work for Francis in Europe and the 17th of August, 2015, was fixed as our departure date. That day came and I went to Murtala Muhammed airport in Lagos to join eighteen others whom had paid the logistics fee of N700,000 or $1,950.

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