Dangerous Passage

Last year, thousands of illegal immigrants from Africa attempted to enter Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. Many came from as far away as Central Africa, smuggled across the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean by traffickers who did little to ensure the immigrants’ safety. News media were rife with reports of such journeys that ended in tragedy — arrest, deportation, injury, violence and death. Moved by these stories, Kojo Minta, C’09, traveled halfway around the world to explore the forces behind human trafficking in Africa.

“I wanted to know what main groups and what methods were involved in trafficking people from Africa to Europe,” Minta says. “I initially suspected that the Tuareg, a semi-nomadic group that inhabits the Sahara, played a large role because they are one of the few groups that can navigate the desert.”

Funded by Penn’s University Scholars program, Minta — a history, classical studies and religious studies major — spent several weeks in Mali and Morocco interviewing a range of sources, including the congregation of a local church, American Embassy officials and members of the International Organization for Migration. To track down one interview, he found himself driving miles across the Sahara on a motorcycle. In the process he discovered a complex system of people and methods behind trafficking.

“Human trafficking is very opportunistic,” Minta says. “The Tuareg were involved, but so were many other groups and professional organizations. Some traffic for only a couple of months; some do it as a profession.” Minta explains that the many routes smugglers can take to breach European borders are enabled by networks that cross the Sahara. For example, one route involves Tuareg smugglers delivering immigrants across the vast desert to another group of smugglers in Morocco, who then prepare boats to move them across the Mediterranean to Europe.

“I was surprised by how interconnected northern and sub-Saharan Africa are,” Minta says. “Those outside the continent often view an irremediable divide between the two regions based on ethnicity, language and culture, but in actuality the two are tightly linked in many ways.”

Minta says conducting interviews about a topic as sensitive and explosive as human trafficking posed a tough challenge, even with his skills in French and Arabic. However, this on-site fieldwork was also essential in allowing him to challenge and expand his initial hypothesis about the Tuareg.

“It’s easy to do research in a library and remain in a certain frame of mind,” Minta says, “but when you are situated in an entirely different place, you are forced to slip into another frame of mind. I know that my research would not have been as successful if I had not had the ability to look people in the face and hear, in their own words, the stories of their struggles and triumphs.”