The first French phrases that Nigerian teenager Sara* learned when she arrived in the city of Bouaké were:Alors beiser” And “very sweet”, initiating sexual activity and then pretending to experience pleasure during the act.
Her mother’s best friend’s daughter told her she was going to Ivory Coast to sell body lotion. Instead, an older woman—a “madam”—who paid for her travel expenses without her knowledge, sent her to brothels in the city every night.
Sara says she gets paid 3,000-5,000 Central African francs (CFA) – between £3.90 and £6.50 – for each “short-term” bed she sleeps with, and 25,000 CFA for a night’s stay. The money is split three ways between the brothel, Sara and the madam.
Three months after arriving in Bouaké, Sara is still waiting to earn enough money to pay off the CFA2.5 million she owes the lady for travel, clothing, food and bribes to return to Nigeria.
“HE [the madam] “I couldn’t call home for the first month because I had my Nigerian SIM card with me when I came here,” says Sara, who now uses the name Sugar and avoids revealing her real age.
Human trafficking is a major crisis in Nigeria, with between 750,000 and 1 million people forced into begging, prostitution, domestic servitude, armed conflict and labour exploitation.
Some of them are smuggled out of the country. Sara is one of thousands of Nigerian female sex workers scattered across towns and cities in Ivory Coast, according to Nigerian officials who spoke to The Guardian.
Girls and women are often trafficked by agents who take advantage of Nigeria’s record unemployment and operate under the pretext of offering better-paid jobs. A decade ago, the Nigerian naira was worth three times the CFA; today, N1 is equal to 0.38 CFA.
With its stable economy and the legality of prostitution but not soliciting sex, Ivory Coast has become an attractive place for sex work. Some victims are ladies who use other girls as a source to get back the money they spent and regain their own freedom.
Recruitment agents across Nigeria travel to rural areas or post to job seeker groups on Facebook, vaguely mentioning lucrative jobs and sending photos of girls and women they hire to ladies they know.
Recruits are taught to tell immigration officials, who are sometimes unaware of what is happening or don’t feel the need to conduct due diligence, that they are crossing the border to go to the nearby market in Cotonou, Nigeria’s auxiliary port.
Many recruits say agents known to be related to them do not accompany them on the journey, but give their numbers to other agents who guide them through the porous border. Lacking identification, they sometimes gain access by paying bribes of 1,000-2,000 CFA, paid in advance to the driver by the agents.
Unlike Sara, most sex workers trafficked from Nigeria live deep in the jungles of Ivory Coast, far from the eyes of the law.
Tengréla, 7 km (4.3 miles) from the Malian border, has several artisanal mining camps where men from Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea use them to earn money before returning home. Nigerian sex workers, aged between 14 and 38, also live here in small settlements of makeshift tents made of black nylon held together with sticks.
In maquis, the name given to small bars in the Francophone part of Africa, which are women’s places in the settlements, both immigrant groups mingle, first in the public area and then in the private area.
“There’s a weird belief in some gold mining areas that sex helps you find gold, which in turn helps you find gold.” [fuels] “The demand for sex trafficking,” says a former Nigerian official who previously served in Ivory Coast. “Cocoa [production] “Societies also place high sexual demands on men to satisfy them.”
The Guardian spoke to at least two dozen girls and women in the jungle, some as young as 15. Some said they were starved or beaten by angry customers for refusing to work. Many barely spoke French and said they did not know the country well enough to flee.
Nigerian authorities, who have managed to repatriate girls trapped as sex workers, say they have seen girls as young as 13 in the interior.
“Most of the girls we find claim to be over 18 and doing sex work of their own free will, but often you know from their physical appearance that they are not,” says the former Nigerian official. “The tests to determine their age, such as a wisdom tooth scan, cost around 50,000 CFA, so you have to talk to them, but if they insist, you send them back.”
Ivory Coast has a law criminalising human trafficking, but it is barely enforced and the country has been criticised by the US State Department for its failure to address the problem.
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Ivory Coast’s notorious escadron police unit has burned down some of the settlements where people traffickers operate, but new ones continue to emerge, partly because security guards in the forest are allegedly demanding bribes of 1,000-2,000 CFA per week for each girl they abduct.
Adekoye Vincent, spokesman for Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (Naptip), declined to comment when asked about girls being trapped as sex workers in Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast’s national police and gendarmerie did not respond to requests for comment.
For Sara, the wait to return home continues. She was at secondary school in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, before dropping out to go to Ivory Coast. These days, she is learning how to trade condoms for other products.
“I really don’t like what I do here. I miss my people at home,” he says.
* Names have been changed