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The village of lost souls
Some 400 young people from Oussoubidiagna in Mali have died trying to reach Europe, but their families survive thanks to those who made it.
Tens of kilometres from nowhere is a village called Oussoubidiagna that is inhabited by ghosts. Maps say it is in Mali, in the Kayes region in the northwest of the country, but what do maps know? With no running water or electricity, no hospital or high school, no factories or shops, in its rain-flooded streets and among its muddy houses, a few young people peep out from time to time, their eyes wandering between here and there.
They dream of leaving, as their older brothers did, today in France or Spain, or like the 400 who have disappeared on the roads over the last 20 years, swallowed up by the earth or the sea. Mamadou Cissokho, the first mayor of the village (population 4,000) and now president of the Felascom Community Health Association, is the only one who has taken the trouble to do the maths. All lost, all ghosts, first on the route to the Canary Islands or the Strait, now swallowed up by the hell of Libya or in the Mediterranean. Behind every Open Arms, every Aquarius, every drifting boat, fence-jumper or cayuco, there are hundreds of Oussoubidiagnas.
At the age of ten, Habibu Cissokhó was already wielding the hoe with mastery and bending his back in the peanut field. Two decades later, he felt he was getting old in the same furrow. He decided to go on an ‘adventure’, as they call the journey he undertook to leave home. ‘We got together on a beach in Mauritania. We were, I don’t know, 75 or 80 people. There were people from Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali. We were afraid, but nobody wanted to look back,’ she recalls. After six days at sea, the island of Gran Canaria. ‘Two died’, he adds, as if to say “we were cold” or “it was windy”, as if it were just another circumstance of the journey. Three weeks later he was expelled. Back to square one.
Tens of kilometres from nowhere is a village called Oussoubidiagna that is inhabited by ghosts. Maps say it is in Mali, in the Kayes region in the northwest of the country, but what do maps know? With no running water or electricity, no hospital or high school, no factories or shops, in its rain-flooded streets and among its muddy houses, a few young people peep out from time to time, their eyes wandering between here and there.
They dream of leaving, as their older brothers did, today in France or Spain, or like the 400 who have disappeared on the roads over the last 20 years, swallowed up by the earth or the sea. Mamadou Cissokho, the first mayor of the village (population 4,000) and now president of the Felascom Community Health Association, is the only one who has taken the trouble to do the maths. All lost, all ghosts, first on the route to the Canary Islands or the Strait, now swallowed up by the hell of Libya or in the Mediterranean. Behind every Open Arms, every Aquarius, every drifting boat, fence-jumper or cayuco, there are hundreds of Oussoubidiagnas.
At the age of ten, Habibu Cissokhó was already wielding the hoe with mastery and bending his back in the peanut field. Two decades later, he felt he was getting old in the same furrow. He decided to go on an ‘adventure’, as they call the journey he undertook to leave home. ‘We got together on a beach in Mauritania. We were, I don’t know, 75 or 80 people. There were people from Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali. We were afraid, but nobody wanted to look back,’ she recalls. After six days at sea, the island of Gran Canaria. ‘Two died’, he adds, as if to say “we were cold” or “it was windy”, as if it were just another circumstance of the journey. Three weeks later he was expelled. Back to square one.
A fisherman crossing the Senegal River in Kayes Province, Mali.
Young girls from Oussoubidiagna carry plates of food on their heads for their fathers or husbands who work in the surrounding fields. These girls go to the house of one of the families who has a relative living in Europe and can therefore afford to provide food for relatives and friends working in the fields.
Habibu Cissokhó, who was expelled from Gran Canaria in 2008, tried again in 2015. First he went to Equatorial Guinea, where he raised the money by working as a bricklayer, and then he headed for Europe again. But he also ran into Libya. ‘The first boat was shipwrecked, there were 130 or so of us and half of us died. We weren’t far from the coast, so I swam back,’ he says with a blank stare. ‘In prison, if you don’t pay, they beat you. We slept on the people who died the night before,’ he recalls as he touches his forearms with both hands because that must have been where the smell and the memory stayed with him.
The people of Oussobidgiana say it used to rain much more, there was work, crops flourished in the fields. ‘Now we can’t stop the young people, we have nothing to offer them,’ adds community leader Mamadou Cissokhó bitterly. In the photo, one of the young men shows us his harvest, which at this time of year should be above his head, but barely reaches his knees.
In a room clad only with a carpet and two wooden benches, a group of teenagers shelter from the rain in this waning wet season. Kalillu Diallo, youth representative in the communal council, explains it in his own words. ‘You are at home, your friend or your brother is gone and everyone talks about them as heroes, with admiration. We know the dangers, they don’t hide anything from us, we know the dead, but it’s a gamble. Win or die. The last sentence hangs in the air, slips before the kids’ eyes, drifts away towards the wet street where huge puddles are already starting to form. They smile. A few years ago the government started to build a place for them, the only one in the whole region, but the work stopped. They don’t know why. Nor did they ask.
Sanou Sakiliba, with her grandchildren and daughter-in-law, showing the photo of her husband who disappeared in Libya. In the house of 50-year-old Sanou Sakiliba, you can hear the daily hustle and bustle. Children running around, the bustle of food, people passing by and ghost-like pictures on the walls. This woman’s armour is indestructible. Her eldest son, Fassara, left one day. With her help, with everyone’s help. As he was only 16, they forged him a passport with two years left on it so he could get a visa. Plane to France. Fourteen years now and still no papers. Still, he is a blessing. ‘He helped us build the house and if someone gets sick I call him and he sends us money,’ says Salikiba. In Oussoubidiagna, they know this well. Where you have to pay even for an injection, a few banknotes are the difference between life and death. But another son of Sanou Sakiliba wanted to emulate his brother. In 2014, aged 26, he set out on the road to Europe, which at the time passed through Libya. ‘He was already married and had two children, but he couldn’t buy them shoes or even a simple soap to wash themselves, so how could he say no if we all wanted him to succeed,’ explains his mother. They knew that he came to the beach and that he got on a boat until they stopped knowing. Then nothing. Silence. ‘For a year I was trying to find out, I called everyone in Libya, his friends, those who saw him, the traffickers. Until I got tired. He is dead.’ Boubalé Cissokhó was the boy’s name, that even ghosts carry a name wherever they go.
Moriké Cissokhó was kidnapped and beaten in Libya until he was able to pay for his release. He tried four times to reach Europe. They dream of leaving, as their older brothers did, today in France or Spain, or like the 400 who in the last 20 years have disappeared on the roads, swallowed by the earth or the sea. Mamadou Cissokho, the first mayor of the village (population 4,000) and now president of the Felascom Community Health Association, is the only one who has taken the trouble to do the maths. All lost, all ghosts, first on the route to the Canary Islands or the Strait, now swallowed up by the hell of Libya or in the Mediterranean. Behind every Open Arms, every Aquarius, every drifting boat, jumping the fence or cayuco, there are hundreds of Oussoubidiagnas.
At the health centre, two-year-old Moriké Dembelé is fighting for his life. He arrived with severe malnutrition complicated by oedema and bodily injuries. ‘He is improving, thank God,’ says Dr. Ibrahima Traoré. His grandmother Coumba Baradji looks after him because his mother has to take care of his five siblings.
A couple of fishermen try to catch some fish using the artisanal fishing method they have been practising for years.
In the semi-darkness of her room, the sixty-year-old Teguida Diallo clings to the only photo she has left of her son Makan Kanouté like a shipwrecked sailor to his board. ‘He died at sea,’ she says. That’s all he knows. That and that there were many others from Oussoubidiagna with him. ‘I think there were 17 of them on the same boat,’ he adds. Around 400 young people from Oussoubidiagna (Mali) have died trying to reach Europe, but their families survive thanks to those who did.