Kingsley Ofosu lived in Ghana, in a town called Takoradi which is built around a natural harbour on the edge of the Gulf of Guinea. His mother worked in the street market, selling tomatoes, and his father scratched a living in a mining town called Tarkwa 50 miles inland. He had two brothers who shared a bed with him and a third who slept on a mat on the floor. His family called him by a pet name, Cudjoe.
He left school when he was 16 and although he could read and write and he was naturally an intelligent and confident boy, he had no work nor any prospect of any. Instead, he played football and wore the Number Nine shirt for the Takoradi town team which played in the Ghanaian second division. They paid him just about nothing, but he loved it.
When he was 19, he met a girl called Agnes, who worked as a seamstress and sold her clothes on a stall near his mother’s in the Takoradi market. He asked her to go out with him and then he asked her to marry him. At first, she refused because her parents had always told her that she must marry a rich man. Ofosu told her to forget about her parents. “Your life is yours,” he told her. “They must live their lives. Forget about them and listen to me.” But she still said No. It took him two months before she finally gave in and they held a small wedding party in her parents’ home.
Once he was married, he was determined to support Agnes without going to her parents for help. He gave up his football and every morning, at seven o’clock, he went down to the office of the Ghana Port and Harbour Authority in the docks that sprawl along the Takoradi water front and he stood with all the other men (sometimes several hundred of them), all of them hoping to be signed on for a day’s work loading cocoa bags into some visiting ship on its way north to Europe. It was the only work in town. If he was hired, he went home with 2,000 cidi in his pocket -about £2. But often he went home idle.
For three years, he and Agnes struggled through. They lived and ate and slept in a single room and shared a kitchen and a toilet with 15 other families. Then last year, two things happened. First, Agnes fell pregnant with their first child, which was due to be born in December. The news made Ofosu more worried than ever about money. He hated the hardness of their life. Sometimes, when he went off to the docks in the morning, Agnes would call after him and ask him to buy something on his way home and he used to feel so humiliated to turn up at her seamstress stall in the market in the afternoon telling her that he had bought nothing, because once again there had been no work. He had no idea how he could afford a child. And then – just like one shaft of sunlight in a storm – Ofosu won the Lotto.
He always bought a ticket, every week, and he never thought he’d win, but in August last year, he won one of the big prizes -500,000 cidi, as much as he would earn if he managed to work every day for a whole year down in the docks. And now, he made a decision. In a way, he had already made it several months earlier but it was only now, now that he had some money in his pocket, that he admitted what the decision was. He was going to leave Ghana.
He would stow away on one of the boats that sat in the docks with their gaping bellies and he would go to Europe and once he got there he would study and learn a skill – engineering, he would learn to be an engineer – and then he would come home, in three or four years, however long it took, and finally he would be able to support his family. He would have to leave Agnes. She would be on her own when the child was born. He would have to leave his parents and his friends and the only town he had ever known in all his life. It might be hard. But he knew he would do it.
*
Kingsley Ofosu is an unusual man. He has that peculiar quality that creates natural leaders, a way of seeing around a problem as soon as it occurs, a certain hidden strength that sometimes simply looks like luck. It was only this special character which enabled him to survive the ordeal that lay ahead.
Ofosu was setting out to follow the footsteps of thousands of Africans who have become exasperated with their existence and who have been almost taunted by the wealth of the developed world (pumped into their lives each day in recycled television shows). He was joining a migration which is gathering momentum to become one of the decisive human developments of the next century, the great northward flow of the poor millions searching to join the 20% of the world’s population who enjoy 80% of its goods.
No one knows for sure how many have set out for this Promised Land because most of them never make it. And unlike previous generations of migrants who struggled across the globe to reach America or Australia, these huddled masses are defeated not only by disease and fatigue and natural disaster but, more potently, by man-made obstacles deliberately placed in their way.
Kingsley Ofosu had no idea what was waiting for him. He had never heard of Fortress Europe or the Schengen Convention or any of the concoction of laws and regulations which have been devised by Brussels and its satellite governments in the last decade to repell poor outsiders from its walls.
He had certainly never heard about the cunning new laws of “carrier liability”, which mean that any ship or aeroplane which is caught carrying a migrant without a visa is fined heavily (£55 million of fines in the last six years in Britain alone). He had no conception of the violence and terror which these new laws had now placed in his route.
With his Lotto winnings and his great dream, all Kingsley Ofosu knew was that he had to try. As it was, when he stumbled finally into Europe, he was dazed and gaunt and dirty with his own blood, he had lost every penny and all his possessions, and he was telling a story that no one wanted to believe.
*
That autumn, of 1992, Ofosu laid his plans. He spoke to Agnes and she agreed that they must take this chance, though it was hard (and all the harder now that Agnes was seven months into her pregnancy.) She gave him all her savings and asked him to send her clothes for the baby as soon as he could and a sewing machine, too. He went to the bank and changed Agnes’ money and all his Lotto winnings into Western currency – one thousand, five hundred American dollars. It would be enough to keep him alive in Europe while he found work and a college where he could study.
He shared his secret with his younger brother, Albert, who was 19 and already the father of three children. The two men were close, they worked side by side in the docks, Albert still called him Cudjoe as he had when they were children, they had always been together and now they decided that they would travel together. Better than that, they would travel in a group: they would be able to help each other and then be friends for each other in Europe. By the middle of October, the two brothers had invited six other dockers to join them on their journey.
On the morning when they set out for the docks, it was raining and there were few people around. Down on the water front, they could see the outline of a cargo ship, the McRuby, owned by a shipping line in Hamburg, manned by a crew of Ukrainians, loaded with hundreds of tons of cocoa beans and ready to strike out across the Gulf of Guinea later that day. There was supposed to be a guard but he had gone to watch another ship docking. There were no locks and no barriers. Quickly and quietly, the eight men jogged up the gangway and down into the depths of the McRuby.
The cargo hold was as big as an aircraft hangar, and one end of it was piled high with transport containers. Ofosu led the others up the side of one of the stacks, up towards the shadows near the ceiling, where they could lie unnoticed, and he was ahead of the others, climbing up as quietly as he could, just lifting himself on to the top of the stack when he realised to his horror that there was a man there ahead of him, watching him in the darkness.
As quickly as he saw him, Ofosu realised that this man was frightened. He was also black. He spoke to him in Fhanti, the dialect of Takoradi. The man stared blankly. Ofosu tried English and rapidly discovered that this stranger was also a stowaway heading for the Promised Land. He was from Cameroun, he had scrambled on board a week earlier when the McRuby had put into Douala. His name was Andruse. Ofosu welcomed him to their group. They settled down in the shadows and several hours later, at about one o’clock in the afternoon, with the engines humming in their ears, they realised they were at sea. It was October 24.
It was comfortable in the hold. Most of the time, the electric lights were on and there was some kind of ventilation system which kept them cool. Andruse told them that in all the seven days he had been on board, the crew had never come here, and so they scrambled down from the containers and made themselves a nest on top of the cocoa bags which were piled ten feet deep across the floor. They used the far end of the hold as a toilet. They had brought bread and maize and enough water to last them a week and now they lay back in the cocoa bags with their legs crossed and their hands behind their heads and they talked about Europe, laughing quietly together at their plans.
On the fifth day, they woke to discover that their water had run out. The plastic bottle had leaked during the night and now they had nothing to drink. They had no idea how far the McRuby had travelled but they reckoned it would be at least another two days before they got to Europe. They talked together and they agreed that they would have to go out into the rest of the boat to find new water. Three of the dockers volunteered, Ben, Bob and Ebow, who was only 17, the youngest of the group. That night, once the boat was dark and quiet, they crept out of the hold and, within half an hour, they were back, clutching a new container, full to the brim with fresh water, all of them sharing their triumph.
It was the next morning when the sailors discovered them. Ofosu never knew how it had happened – whether they had seen the three dockers looking for water or whether it was just bad luck – but as he lay on the cocoa bags that morning, something made him look up and on the far side of the hold, he saw six white men walking towards him and two of them were carrying guns. The men scrambled onto the bags and towered over the group of stowaways lying there.
One of the men with a gun spoke in English. “Where do you come from?”
For a moment, no one dared to speak but then Ofosu replied and told the men the truth.
“Where do you want to go?”
“To Europe,” Ofosu told him. “We want to go to Europe.”
“Have you got money?”
Ofosu nodded.
“OK. You give us all your money. This evening, we come back and you give us all your money. OK?”
The men turned and left the hold, noisily locking the doors behind them, leaving the stowaways to talk. No one was sure what was happening here, whether these men were just thieves or whether they were willing to help them. Ofosu said they had no choice; they would have to hand over the money and hope for the best. Albert had brought $1,000 which he had borrowed from a relative. One of the dockers had a couple of crumpled dollar bills. Ofosu had leant some of his American cash to the others, who said they would pay him back when they had jobs in Europe. Now they collected it all together and found that between them, they had $2,600 and 300 German marks which Andruse had brought with him.
By the time that evening came, they were feeling better. If the men had wanted to rob them, they would have taken their money immediately. The sailors were going to help them. In exchange for all the money, they would give them food and a better room. The stowaways felt so much better that they decided to eat all their remaining bread and maize. At about midnight, the six sailors returned, two of them carrying guns again.
“Where is the money?” It was the same man who spoke. He was not much older than Ofosu and he had a black moustache.
Ofosu was about to hand over the bundle of notes when he suddenly wondered whether these people were really able to help.
“Who are you?” he asked. “How many are you?”
The man told him there were 24 crew on board and that he was their chief officer. “We have found a nice room for you to sleep in.”
Ofosu shrugged, handed over all the money, stood up and walked slowly out of the hold with the others, leaving the debris of their six days of dreaming behind them. He wondered what kind of room they would have, how long it would be before they fed them and gave them water, whether they could bathe somewhere too, and he was still wondering all this when they arrived on a deck towards the nose of the boat where the chief officer gestured towards a doorway in the floor.
“Is this the nice room?”
“Yeah.”
And as soon as they had climbed down inside, even before the door slammed shut above their heads, they knew they were in a very bad place. It was small – maybe six foot along each wall – and dark and dirty with a lot of rubbish and grit on the floor. The noise from the engine was fierce here and, for the first time on their journey, the sea outside was rough and sickening. They sat together, cursing themselves for trusting these men and for eating all of their precious bread, but there was little to say. After a while, they arranged to take it in turns to lie down and try to sleep, first a group of four and then the other five.
For two days, they lived like this with nothing but fear to distract them. The smell of their urine filled the air. Outside, now, a storm was blowing. On the third day, they were so desperate with thirst and hunger and sickness that they dared to start banging on the wooden door, calling out for water. Hours later, one of the sailors came and pulled open the door and dropped three plastic bottles of water down among them.
“Bring us food, bring us food,” they shouted.
The sailor locked the door and walked away. The nine stowaways shared out the water, one bottle for three of them. Ofosu sat next to his younger brother with no way of consoling him. Their only hope was that they would arrive in Europe soon. This was their ninth day at sea. It could not be far now.
That night, the six sailors returned and the one with the moustache told Ofosu that they had to get out, three of them first and then two at a time.
“Why?” said Ofosu. “Why do we get out?”
“Because we have the nice room for you now.”
Ofosu argued with him, told him he had promised them before and then thrown them into this hole and, anyway, why couldn’t they all come out together. The sailor said the captain didn’t know about the stowaways and they would have to pass close to the bridge to get to their room so they had to go in small groups. Ofosu didn’t trust him. He turned to the others and they spoke together in Fhanti. No one knew what to do. Ofosu said he could go up first and have a look. Albert asked him to stay. In the end, they decided they had no choice. They would have to trust the white sailors. Bob and Ben said they would go, and Andruse agreed to join them in the wet night air.
The others waited, listening to the wind crashing through the ocean. Fifteen minutes passed. Three sailors returned and two of the dockers went with them, Ebow the 17-year-old and Charles Amoah. Fifteen minutes later, John Parh and Emmanuel Quoicoe went up the swaying stairs, leaving only Ofosu and his brother Albert sitting in the dirt together, full of uncertainty and, as soon as the sailors came back, Ofosu knew he was right to be anxious and he told Albert in Fhanti: “Look, he has blood on his shirt.”
The two brothers allowed themselves to be steered up the stairs to the rain-swept deck. Ofosu was in front. Albert was behind with a sailor on each side of him. “Albert, be careful,” Ofosu called back to him. Now they were approaching a room. Inside, stood the rest of the sailors. At least one of them had a gun. There was no sign of the other stowaways. As he reached the door, Ofosu wanted to run. He looked to his side. There were two men in the way. He looked back and one of the sailors stepped forward and swiped him on the right side of his skull with an iron bar. Ofosu stumbled away from the room and blood started falling into his eye.
He staggered sideways, barged into the two men next to him, saw the open deck and started to run. Behind there was a scream. It was Albert. “Cudjoe! Cudjoe! They are killing me!”
Ofosu glanced back in the darkness and saw Albert now, gripped on each side by the sailors and, in the instant that he turned, he saw the sailors heave and hurl his younger brother over the side, down into the boiling ocean. Ofosu ran.
He heard shots, two of them, but he had no idea whether they were shooting at him or at his brother screaming in the water and he had no time to think. He saw a dark doorway, he spun into it and found himself back in the hold, back amongst the cocoa beans. It was no use hiding there. He ran for the stack of containers and monkeyed his way up the side, right to the top, where the shadows were, but he was still not safe, so he tugged himself up into the thick steel girders that laced the underside of the ceiling and pulled himself into their darkness.
A few minutes later, the lights came on in the hold and down below him, Ofosu could see the sailors fanning out through the cocoa bags, flashing torches into dark corners, talking to each other in voices he could not understand, two of them still carrying guns. He wanted to pray but he was afraid they would hear. One of them started climbing up the stack of containers, waving his torch. At one moment, he was so close that Ofosu could have reached out and touched his head below him. The sailors searched for ever but then they gave up and turned off the lights and melted away.
Ofosu lay without moving. The slightest sound might finish him. His ears combed the silence listening for clues. Were they still in the hold? Had one of them stayed behind? He was hungry and he was thirsty and his head hurt where the sailor had hit him. He knew there was nothing he could do about any of that, but finally when he was sure there was no sound and sure there was no movement and he knew he was alone, he allowed himself to cry.
For three days, he lay there, praying and hoping, occasionally dropping asleep for a few minutes only to be jerked back to life by his fear, occasionally freezing rigid with terror when the sailors returned and resumed their search, cursing and shaking their heads. The engines still groaned in the background. Where was Europe? When would they ever find land again? By the third day, he was so thirsty that he pulled off one of his shoes and pissed into it in the hope that he could drink it. He couldn’t make himself do it. That night, at last, the engines died and he heard unfamiliar sounds, the hoots of other boats, the shouting of other voices.
For several more hours, he lay still in the girders, waiting for the sailors to search for him one more time, hoping that perhaps they would think he was dead. Then, at about two in the morning, when he was sure it was quiet, he slipped down the side of the containers to the door at the end of the hold – and found it was locked. He headed for the other end of the room but as he walked he felt something snag against his leg. It was a thread. The sailors must have stretched it there to see whether he was moving around, and now he had broken it. Now, they would know he was still alive. Fumbling in the dark, he did his best to tie a knot in it and decided he did not dare to go all the way to the door at the other end of the hold. It was probably locked anyway.
Kingsley Ofosu sat on the cocoa bags and prayed and after a while be wondered about the ventilation that had always kept them cool. He walked over to the nearest vent and, peering up inside it, he could see a dim light at the top. The tunnel reaching up was very dark and steep but he knew it was his only chance and he was about to start shinning his way upwards when the depth of his problem suddenly struck him. Supposing he did get out without being seen by the crew? Supposing he managed to find the police? They wouldn’t believe him. The crew would deny everything. Then he would be in trouble. They might even put him back on the boat for the crew to take him home.
He went to the nearest cocoa bag, worked his fingers into a hole in the sacking and put a fistful of beans into his pocket. He took out his wallet with his Ghanaian health card and the picture of him and Agnes in the flap and buried it between two sacks of beans. Only then did he return to the ventilation shaft and start kneeing his way upwards into the dark.
At the top of the shaft, he ran into a metal grille which completely blocked his way and he had to slide back down into the hold and bring back an iron bar to prise it off its screws. He broke through and, in his fear, he stumbled out of the shaft and fell awkwardly onto the deck below, twisting his ankle. He rolled behind a container strapped to the deck while he dealt with the pain and got his bearings. He was in a harbour, that was clear, and he was not far from the gangway leading down but he was afraid that the sailors might be watching it.
He waited for more than an hour, checking and rechecking and finally, with his heart racing, he ran out from behind his container and simply launched himself over the side of the boat, down onto the tarmac below, and sprinted for cover. Careering into the night, he came to a road. There was a car coming and he started waving frantically to get it to stop, but it swerved and sped by him. He ran on and he met a man walking.
“Police station! Where is the police station?”
The man shrugged. Ofosu had no idea where he was. It was obviously not Europe. He had seen pictures of Europe and it was full of beautiful buildings and wonderful things. This was not Europe. There was nothing beautiful here at all. He guessed he must be on some island. He ran on. There was a sign that said something about Security and he wondered if it was the port police, but the building was locked and dark. All the time, he had in his mind a picture of the metal grille he had broken at the top of the ventilation shaft. If the crew saw that, they would know he had escaped and they would come looking for him. And it was beginning to get light.
A street-sweeping car came lumbering down the road and he managed to stop it and lean up into the cab. He saw two men staring at him, completely surprised. He shouted “police, police” and they started to gesticulate, pointing out the route. Scared to go back on the road, Ofosu pointed from himself to the seats and asked to go with them. No, no, they said, and pretended there was not enough room. He saw one of them looking to the blood that had spilled onto his shirt from the wound in his head and he knew they were frightened of him, so he ran off again alone, doing his best to follow the route they had shown him.
When at last he found the station he repeated the word “problem” until they led him to an office where, he guessed, he was to wait for someone who could understand him. On the wall, he saw a map, and across the top of it, he read the word “France”. For a moment, he was confused. He had seen pictures of Paris and they were nothing like this. He was afraid that he was in the wrong place, that this whole journey had been for nothing. A new policeman came through the door.
“Europe?” he said.
“Yes,” said the policeman. “You are in Europe now. In Le Havre.”
Ofosu told his story. The policeman shook his head and frowned and called another officer. Ofosu told the story once more.
The senior officer stared hard at Ofosu. “You are sure of this?”
“I am sure,” replied Ofosu. Then he stood up and emptied his pocket full of cocoa beans onto the desk.
The officer nodded. “OK,” he said and took out pen and paper.
At seven o’clock that night, the Commissioner of Le Havre police led 27 of his men and three border policemen to the McRuby. Down in the hold, they found Ofosu’s wallet. They summoned the captain and asked him to allow his men to take part in an identification parade. Ofosu sat on one side of a porthole looking out on to the upper deck where the crewmen appeared one by one. Without hesitation, he picked out five of them. One of the six attackers was missing. Police searched the whole boat and down in the engine room, they found a well-built man with a black moustache hiding among the machinery.
Two days later, all six were charged with piracy, murder, attempted murder and theft. Later that week, the captain, too, was charged with complicity. The French authorities told Ofosu he could stay in France, at least until the trial, when he could give his evidence.
*
Kingsley Ofosu is still in Le Havre. The sailors have confessed what happened to the French police and even led them to one of their guns, which they had dumped in the harbour water. They say they were afraid of getting into trouble if they arrived in Europe with the stowaways on board. They say they, too, are poor and that some of them handed over stowaways in Rotterdam last year and that the owner of that boat was so angry at being fined under the new laws that he docked the money out of their pay to teach them a lesson. They seem to think there was nothing unusual in what they did to the black men.
Ofosu cannot understand them. He sits in a cafe and he remembers his brother Albert and all his friends, and he worries about Agnes, who has no money, and about his young son, Kingsley Junior, born last Christmas Day, who has been ill and who has no medicine, and when he realises yet again that he has nothing to give them, no way to help them, he pulls out a handkerchief and knuckles it into the tears in his eyes. The Promised Land has been hard on him.
He has no job. He lives in a hostel for homeless men. They give him 120 francs pocket money each week. French journalists have queued to interview him and bought him clothes and a watch and a bright red baseball cap with an American emblem on its brow. No one calls him Cudjoe any more.
Several months after he arrived in Le Havre, his family held a funeral service for Albert in Takoradi and he sent them a video cassette, made with the help of a French television crew. “I told them it is not like I planned. Too many people here have no work. I have no work. I tell them ‘Don’t do it, don’t stow away.’ I wouldn’t even advise my enemies to stow away. I tell them it is not paradise here.
“I thought if I will come to Europe, I will feel free and I will not worry again in my life and I will have what I need – job. I thought it will be paradise here. Now, I forget about work. I don’t understand why they killed my brother and my friends. I’m not thinking about working or anything else, just about people who will be killing. I just eat and sleep and eat and sleep.
“I don’t want my son to live the same life I have led. I don’t want my family to suffer. We are all in the same world. Some people are suffering and some people are enjoying and I don’t know the reason why.”
