John Ampan
Post
25/01/07, Klaus Brinkbäumer, John Ampan's Four-Year Journey from Ghana to Europe
John Ekow Ampan's trek from Africa to Europe is a tale of desperation. During his four-year journey from Ghana to Spain, he was deported and imprisoned several times, and yet he remained determined to reach the European Promised Land.
There are journeys that change a traveler, that transform him into a different person. And there are travelers who, by the end of their journey, want nothing so much as for life to return to the way it used to be. But they discover that there is no turning back, that their world has changed irrevocably.
For John Ekow Ampan, Africa was his home throughout his journey. Then he lost his security -- his friends, his customers, his language and his laugh. He wanted to become a European. Today he dresses like a European, works like a European and buys European TVs and washing machines.
"But I'll never be one," he says.
Ampan, 46, wears his hair cropped close to his head and sports the crescent-shaped scar of the Fante tribe on his left cheek, a mark of belonging the Fante slice into their children. Wearing a green T-shirt, grey Levis, a blue cap and headphones, John is returning home with gifts for his children -- they fill many, many plastic bags.
ABOUT THIS SERIES:
People flee from wars and famines, but often it is the search for a better life that drives hundreds of thousands of people from poor countries to set out abroad each year. During a trip that lasted seven weeks, SPIEGEL reporter Klaus Brinkbäumer, 39, and photographer Markus Matzel, retraced the odyssey of 46- year- old John Ekow Ampan, a Ghanian father of three, to Europe. Before he managed to reach Spain, on the promised land, the European continent, Ampan numerous setbacks and even arrests on a trip that took four years to complete. Accompanied by SPIEGEL, Ampan made the journey once again -- retracing his route through Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, Morocco and all the most important stations in his journey. Brinkbäumer documented his journey in a new book published in Germany this autumn, titled "The Dream of Life." Three days ago, John called his wife Vida in Ghana to tell her he was coming home. "No," she said, "don't play games with us, and don't make that kind of promise. I'm not telling the children anything. I don't want them to waste their time hoping for a father who disappeared 14 years ago." For more than a decade now, the African family's connection to their father has a been, at most, a once-weekly phone call lasting perhaps all of one minute, e-mails and the €200 a month he sends from his home in Europe to the Ghanaian capital of Accra each month.
Those 14 years will come to an end on a Monday evening at 6:12 p.m., when John's flight touches down in Accra. Alice, his youngest daughter, has never met her father, never played with him. Letters and phone calls have been their only link. But she knows that the €200 he has been sending, month after month, are the reason she is able to go to school.
John goes to the baggage claim, takes his bag and walks, without smiling, to the exit. A poster proclaims: "Germany 2006, we're on our way" -- a reference to Ghana's national football team, which will be greeted with enthusiasm in Europe.
Europe is decidedly less welcoming to those who are now leaving West Africa. They embark on their journeys filled with a mix of despair and hope, but few ever reach their destination. Most end up in jails or camps, fall ill or die, or fail because they run out of money or are turned in to authorities. Some have almost made it but, after traveling about 5,000 kilometers (3,107 miles) cross-country, their inflatable boats sink during the final, 14-kilometer (9 mile) Mediterranean crossing, and no one ever learns that they made the trip in the first place.
Africa, with its population of 910 million, is home to 14 percent of the world's population. Seventy-one percent of Africans are younger than 25. In sub-Saharan Africa, 45.7 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Of the 38 countries the International Monetary Fund (IMF) classifies as "highly indebted poor countries," 32 are African. For every 1,000 children born in the countries south of the Sahara, 102 die before their first birthdays. The average life expectancy in these countries is 46 years, and the most common cause of death is AIDS. There are 30 million guns in circulation south of the Sahara.
More than 17 million Africans are migrants or refugees.
No one could be better qualified to serve as a guide for anyone hoping to understand this mass migration than John Ampan, who experienced everything there is to experience on his four-year journey. Living in the Spanish region of Andalusia for the last ten years, he now helps those who arrive here from Morocco. He is also willing to retrace his steps and embark on his journey a second time, from Ghana, through the Sahara Desert and to the Mediterranean coast.
He walks to the exit and the doors open to a blast of hot, heavy and humid air from outside. "Finally," says John, quietly.
Station One: The journey begins in Accra, Ghana
They stand facing each other, unable to speak, John on one side of the fence and his wife, Vida, on the other. A matron in a yellow dress, she wears her hair in a bun, a towel stuck to her cleavage to wipe away the sweat -- and she smiles.
Alice, their 14-year-old daughter, is at her side. She wears a short blouse with narrow straps on one side. And she wears headphones, which she doesn't remove.
Glenn is also there to greet his father. The 18-year-old soccer player is nicknamed "Pelé," after Abédi "Pelé" Ayew, a Ghanaian sports legend. Glenn wears knee-length jeans and a T-shirt, smiles guardedly and is silent and unmoving.
And then there is Eva, a 20-year-old college student, her slim body squeezed into tight jeans. She raises her arms as if to stretch her spine, adopting the pose of an adolescent showing her father how beautiful she is.
John approaches his family, opens his mouth as if to speak and then closes it again, and his wife closes her eyes. The two raise their arms to embrace but then drop them to their sides again.
They stand facing one another. Vida and the three adolescents smile shyly, the youngest extends her arm but drops it again, and John pushes his baggage cart and approaches his family. They stand there, silent, as he embraces his wife. They stand there as strangers, the children not recognizing their own father. Who is this man?
"Dad?" Alice asks.
After five awkward minutes, they begin making smalltalk -- chatting about the luggage, who will take which car and where to find the taxis.
The Ampans live in the port city of Tema, 35 kilometers (22 miles) from Accra, in a neighborhood called Community 5. Tema, population 100,000, is a city of crumbling buildings and sandy streets. The family owns a small stone house with a small roadside bar Vida runs in the front -- a simple place with yellow walls, a white ceiling and a bare concrete floor. The sparse furnishings include a portable gas stove with two burners, two laundry lines running diagonally across the room and two plastic bowls where Vida and her daughters wash glasses. The boom box at the entrance, which helps attract customers, was the first present John sent from Europe.
"I missed my father all those years"
They live relatively well. The children go to school and Eva, the eldest, attends college -- all paid for with the money John has been sending home. And Vida does what women do in any crisis region: She controls the crisis by controlling daily life. The Ampan's circumstances are not that uncommon here in Ghana. The husband sets off to reach Europe, and the wife stays at home, where she'll get up every morning at 5:30 to make Coco, Ghanaian porridge, wake the children and send them off to school, open the bar at 8:00 a.m. and close it at 11:00 p.m.
John spends five days with his family. Glenn, his son, is taciturn and constantly walks away. When his father sits downstairs, Glenn finds an excuse to go upstairs, and seems to stay away for as long as he can. He says: "I don't want his money and I don't need his clothes. I missed my father for all those years. "
It doesn't take long for the quarreling starts over who owns the house. "Come to my house tomorrow at one," says John. "Our house," says Eva. "Your house," says John.
Then he looks at his daughter the way fathers look at their daughters, tenderly and proudly. "I used to hold her on my arm for so long. Until she was four years old," he says.
"Six. I was six, Dad, when you went away." "So you were six," he responds. "From then on, other people loved me more," says Eva.
John Ekow Ampan is a cousin of football player Samuel Osei Kuffour, nicknamed Sammy, who played for German football team Bayern München for many years before switching to Rome. John paid his cousin a visit in the spring of 2000, when Bayern München was playing a match in Madrid. He has a photo that shows him posing with German football legend Franz Beckenbauer. In the photo Beckenbauer stares fiercely into the distance.
Opportunities for everyone in Europe
The two cousins' mothers came from Kumasi, a town 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of Accra. There was a man in Kumasi who they called "Hamburger" because he worked in Germany.
"It's so cold in Germany that you don't need a refrigerator. You set your beer on the windowsill when you go to the toilet. When you come back from the toilet it's frozen." These were the kinds of stories Hamburger told. He drove a Mercedes 230 with a horn that sounded like a cow mooing. Hamburger told the villagers that he had started out as a dishwasher and that he was working three jobs now. He also told the villagers that there were opportunities for everyone in Germany. Then he brought the first color TV set to the village and a leather ball for the boys.
Hamburger infected everyone with his stories about Europe. John says that every African village has its own Hamburger, and that these men make a stronger imprint on people's minds than the rumors of inflatable boats sinking in the Mediterranean, tragedies for which there are no images.
John attended elementary school and then learned the trades of carpentry and upholstery. He met Vida in northern Ghana where, at 17, she was helping her mother in the family store, selling paper, sweets and beer. "She was so pretty and funny and nice," he recalls. He asked a friend for advice. The friend spoke with Vida's older sister, who spoke with her mother, and a meeting was arranged to discuss marriage between John and Vida. It wasn't especially romantic, it was very African.
Barely married, Ampan left to find work in Nigeria. In the summer of 1993, when the couple had been together for several years, Vida Ampan received a message from John, who had been doing jobs as a guest worker in Lagos, Nigeria, for the past year and a half. John wrote that he needed to see her -- not at home, but at a location 125 kilometers (78 miles) outside the city.
At 9:00 p.m. on the day of the arranged meeting, John was waiting in his hotel in a town called Sogakope. It was a flat, white building with a terrace and a stairway leading down to the rooms. At about €10 per night, or four for those who knew how to haggle, the rooms were cheap at the Volta View Hotel. Located as it was on the main road, it was noisy here at the Volta View -- flooded by the constant sounds of engines, horns, drums and music that would continue well into the night. John waited, and soon Vida arrived with the baby he hadn't even seen yet -- Alice, age one.
The couple had only one night together, but neither of them slept.
Vida was against the idea. She knew if he went it would be a long time before she saw him again -- and this might even be the last time. He said that they were married, which meant he had to take care of her and the children, something he felt he couldn't do in Africa. "No," she said, that wasn't true. The reason they married was so that they could be together. She wept and she shouted. She knew nothing about Europe, but she did know that she was terrified of what might happen. John remained uncharacteristically tough and resolute. He had $1,000 in debts in Accra, money he said he would never be able to repay. He said he wanted to fight for his family's future, and that there was no future here in Africa.
They lay there together, embracing and talking, and at dawn he left the hotel and, after catching a bus to Lomé in Togo, was soon far away.
Asked today if she understood the odyssey John was about to embark on, Vida answers: "No, not then."
Asked if she can understand 10 years later why he left, Vida doesn't respond.
She plays with her bracelet, and John says: "She's doing well. She's happy." Vida says that the school costs 100,000 Cedi a month for each child, or about €9. The school fees are due every three months, and when parents don't have the money their children are quickly expelled. The €200 John sends home each month are worth about 2.2 million Cedi, enough to meet the family's needs. Vida says: "Families who have no one in Europe don't make it. I understand him today."
Draining the continent
We drive along the coast. We pass the Konkomba market, where they sell fruit and old German clothes that become second-hand, third-hand or even fourth-hand goods here in Africa. We pass the Wind Star Night Club, a shack consisting of a couple of counters and two sofas on the side of the road. "I don't recognize anything," says John. "My home is a foreign place to me." We drive to Cape Coast to visit one of the 37 former slave forts on the Ghana coast.
It's a green and hilly coast. Back in the days of slavery, the British developed a triangle of commerce between Europe, the New World and Africa. They imported rum for the chiefs and glass beads for the people in Africa, and as masters they exported gold and what they believed to be an inferior species from Africa to the New World. The Europeans and North Americans made off with about 29 million Africans, and another 29 million are said to have perished under four centuries of European rule. The Europeans tossed the unwanted into the sea -- the sick, the pregnant, the rape victims, the rebellious ones. Anything they saw as nothing but useless human flesh they tossed overboard into the Atlantic.
The history of slavery is a core element of African history, and it has a lot to do with the history of migration. The continent we see today is one that was robbed in the days when Europe and America were still developing, coming up with inventions and educating themselves. It isn't exactly surprising that Africa is having such a difficult time keeping up in the age of globalization and high technology. After all, it was already torn apart when this age began.
John says that things today are no different from the way they used to be. Europe decides and Africa obeys, Europe takes care of itself but Africa hardly stands a chance. "We have to go to Europe if we want to live," says John. Today, as in the past, it's the young and the strong who leave, forming an exodus that is draining the continent once again.
Ghana, a former British colony, gained its independence in 1957. Its 21.1 million inhabitants speak English, Akan, Ewa or Gã. There is no national healthcare system. Fifteen thousand children died of malaria in 2005. Health insurance is nonexistent and wages are lousy because there are no jobs. Here in Accra and its suburbs, like everywhere in Africa, unemployed young men sit idly in the dust, not knowing what to do with their energy. Teachers earn €200 a month, and the many who stand on the side of the road trying to sell beverages earn €2 a day -- if they're lucky.
And when someone manages to build something -- a small computer business or a telephone shop, for example -- a family member envious of his success will almost invariably find a way to pull the successful one back down to the common denominator of poverty. This has helped fuel a brain drain from the country, as doctors and lawyers, electricians and engineers and those lucky enough to land a spot at a foreign university leave Ghana. Their motives are always based on the same conviction: Life at home is hard, and life abroad will be better.
Glenn Ampan has a football game, and his father, who has never seen his son play, has promised to attend. John doesn't make it, and Glenn's team loses 0:1. "I played badly," he says. John was stuck in a traffic jam.
Vida pulls out her album of family photos, pictures of a younger John, thinner and sporting a moustache, and the obituary of Jacob Ebenezer Ampan, born Dec. 26, 1925. Mr. Ampan, the obituary reads, "offended no one" and "was a true gentleman." Fifteen children mourned the family patriarch when he died in 2002. His mother died in 2004. John wasn't there, but he paid 4,000 for the funeral and to feed the mourning relatives for days.
When we leave Ghana at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning, the children stay at home. Only Vida stands in the parking lot, constantly repeating the same sentence: "Have a safe trip."
John Ampan's African truths:
In our society, you are worthless without a wife and without money. No one listens to you. You simply don't count without a family. But the most shameful thing of all is when someone is unable to take care of his parents.
Stage Two: Benin, 348 kilometers into the journey
It takes hours before John Ampan is able to speak again. As he sits in the back seat, staring out the window, the tears rolling down his face, our vehicle, a Nissan, travels eastward along the coastal roads from Ghana to Lagos.
It was a Ford Caravan back then, when he made the journey the first time, and four men sat on a bench in the back. Each had paid the equivalent of €10. They didn't know the driver, the man who was taking them into a future; nor did they know where that future might be.
When he manages to speak again, John says that little has changed. He feels the same emotions, the same inability to verbalize his feelings, the same physical rigidity he experienced on a morning 14 years ago, when his wife held him and wouldn't let go. In the end, he says, he simply turned around and got into the van. It's easy, he says -- you just go. But what you don't realize is that you are about to become the loneliest of human beings.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
The search for a better life drives hundreds of thousands of people from poor countries to try their fortunes abroad each year. During a trip that lasted seven weeks, SPIEGEL reporter Klaus Brinkbäumer, 39, and photographer Markus Matzel, retraced the odyssey of 46- year- old John Ekow Ampan, a Ghanaian father of three, to Europe. Before he managed to reach Spain and the promised land of the European Union, Ampan experienced numerous setbacks including deportations and arrests on a trip that took four years to complete. Accompanied by SPIEGEL, Ampan made the journey once again -- retracing his route through Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, Morocco and re- visiting all the most important stops on his quest for a better life. Brinkbäumer documented Ampan's epic journey in a new book published in Germany last autumn, titled "The Dream of Life." John stares out at the slums on the border between Togo and Benin, at the billboards that read: "God Loves You."
African border guards have a lot of power, and they routinely abuse it. They symbolize everything that is wrong with the continent. They use arrogant hand gestures to shoo away people as if they were pesky flies. At a typical border crossing -- a rope tied to a post at one end and held in the border guard's hand at the other -- they sit, their legs spread out in front of them, chewing on toothpicks and spitting on the ground.
When an attractive woman comes along, a bucket of water or a bale of cloth balanced on her head, the all-powerful border guards pull the rope taut, forcing the woman to stand there in the midday heat. "Turn around," they say. The woman turns around. "Again." She turns around again. "What do you have under your skirt?" they demand. She lifts her skirt. The powerful stand up, walk away, return with a bag of drinking water, bite off a corner, spit it into the dust, drink and stare at the woman's legs. Then they wave her away, telling her to get out of their sight.
They collect bribes from anyone who looks as though he might have some money. We pay the man standing on the trunk of our car €15, and for another €15 he agrees not to force us to empty our pockets. They want John to pay €30 before they'll even look at his passport. When he refuses, they place the passport on the table and allow the next person to cross the border. After an hour John pays the bribe, the guards wave us through and John tells us about his continent.
John Ampan's African truths:
Corruption will destroy Africa. It would have been possible to fight corruption decades ago, but now it's too late. Everyone takes, everyone pays, every favor costs money. Corruption is part of our culture and our daily life. It eats away at us.
Stage Three: Lagos, Nigeria, 469 kilometers into the journey
It will be dark in 20 minutes, and we have to be in our hotel by then, because this is Lagos. "This is Lagos!" John keeps repeating. What he means is that there are no more rules here, that nothing here is the way it is in other cities.
Lagos is a miserable city, a city of filth and garbage and mud and paths consisting of nothing but a few boards thrown over sewage so you can at least stay halfway dry -- boards they call "major roads" here. Children sit in front of oil drums and play with sticks floating in the muck, as piles of garbage grow in front of huts.
Everyone here has empty eyes. The people are unloved, unneeded, not encouraged and unwanted. In fact, they are completely superfluous. They have no schools, no insurance policies and no books. They have no clean water and the stench they breathe can hardly be called air.
Every license plate reads: "Lagos: Center of Excellence."
Lagos is a city of 15 million and its population is expected to jump to 25 million within the next 15 years. But this city will never point anyone in a better direction again. Its mountains of garbage will never shrink, and its people will never see a better life. It's too late for that.
Everyone here asks about Europe. How do I get there? White man, will you take me with you? Do you want to marry me? Will you take along my sister? My daughter?
Bribes are necessary every step of the way in Lagos. Nigerian police officers are nothing more than highway robbers. After all, outside of collecting money, there is little point to their jobs. There were 17 checkpoints along the 100-kilometer (62-mile) stretch of road from the border to Lagos, and every checkpoint was manned by policemen wielding batons. Two hundred naira here, 1,000 there -- everything here seems to revolve around extracting as much money as possible from anyone who can pay.
What it is, really, is legalized theft. They place tree trunks or planks covered with nails across the road, forcing drivers to stop, and when they want you to pay, you pay. The bribery process here is called, euphemistically, "to settle" -- to solve a problem. The Nigerian police's motto, displayed on every police car, is: "To serve and protect with integrity."
Ultimately ungovernable
Dutch Architect Rem Koolhaas has called Lagos the "paradigm of the postmodern city," and Axel Harneit-Sievers, who heads the local office of the German Heinrich Böll Foundation, says that Lagos is "ultimately ungovernable."
The lack of personal barriers, the all-encompassing sense of being assaulted and the constant aggression, pitting everyone against everyone else -- this is Lagos.
When Ampan, born in 1959, left Ghana for the first time, he was 22 and had only recently married. There was no work in Accra, but it was 1981 and Nigeria was a country where everything seemed possible. New oil money meant new construction everywhere -- houses, office towers, palaces. Ampan stayed in Lagos for five months, where he worked for Osmat Construction, a local company under contract to Strabag, an Austrian construction company. He lived in the Ghanaian ghetto, where wooden huts were built on stilts over puddles and riverbeds, and where he shared a space of about 8 square meters with another man. The men would share the hut according to their shifts, with the man who worked the night shift spending his days in the hut, and vice-versa. Garbage was piled around and below the hut, rats were common, mosquitoes were everywhere and gangs would set fires to the huts of anyone who refused to pay protection money.
"I never had a peaceful night there," says John. He returned to Lagos a second time in 1992, at the beginning of his journey to Europe.
This time he found work at the oil company Mobil. John was a well-spoken man, and he soon became the chauffeur of Mobil's local manager, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He was convinced that he had made it. His job consisted of driving his boss into the city, waiting in the Mercedes and occasionally driving the boss's wife when she went shopping. But one night Tinubu gave a large reception, during which thieves entered his villa. The thieves apparently knew the way and marched directly into the bedroom.
Hard time
Every employee with access to the house was sent to jail.
Lagos's Ikoyi prison is a brown building with black marks on its walls. Wrecked cars stand in front of the building, where women sell moldy white bread and power lines suspended from poles drag in the mud. A Nike poster on a nearby building proclaims: "Don't fail!"
In the prison, 120 men were crowded together in a space measuring about 12 by 8 meters. The toilet was a hole in the floor in the middle of the cell. The 120 men formed gangs. They raped each other. They robbed each other. They listened to the screams of prisoners being tortured. John prayed. They called him "chaplain" because he read the Mass for the others, and at some point a brawny fellow from Benin City took John under his wing. The man's name was Bob Izoua. Life became easier for John. Bob Izoua's family would send minibuses filled with soap, clothing and bread, which Izoua would distribute among his supporters.
John was released after six months. He never saw an attorney, he was never given a court hearing, he was never accused of a crime. It was time to go. He missed his wife, and he hesitated for a moment before choosing the opposite direction -- north.
Endless waiting
Are you going to Niger? Spain? Europe? North, at least to Morocco or Libya? Migrants are shy when it comes to asking questions, shy and quiet because what they're envisioning is a journey into a gray zone. Everyone knows the deal, but everyone also knows it's forbidden. Much depends on how much they're able to pay, and even if they can pay, their ability to continue the journey depends on the capriciousness of police officers, who could just as easily send them back, send them to prison or subject them to beatings. Young couples, families and young men sit by the sides of the major roads or at bus terminals, negotiating and waiting. The daily lives of migrants are made up of successive periods of waiting. They travel light, usually carrying no more than one bag so that they can remain flexible. Of course, they have few possessions because they have already sold as much as possible to raise money for the trip. No one carries books. Those who are fleeing to find a better life aren't people who read.
Most sit motionless under trees, dozing and expending as little energy as possible. Occasionally they wave off a few mosquitoes, and then they become rigid again.
And they wait.
There will be a truck tomorrow, someone says, or definitely the next day. This sort of information is a commodity in the world of migrants. But then the next day dawns and the middleman says: "No, not today, and not tomorrow. The truck will leave at the end of the week, definitely, but unfortunately the prices have changed. We need the extra money for your security." What this means is that policemen have to be bribed, and for the migrants it means renegotiating what has already been negotiated and agreed upon -- and spending a few more days sitting under a tree.
And waiting.
As we leave Lagos, we pass Prayer City. It's an area filled with stadiums and arenas, where hundreds of thousands come on the weekends to beg for God's blessing from preachers like Reinhard Bonnke, a German who claims he can heal diseases like leprosy.
The road takes us north in the direction of Europe. It's a four-lane highway peppered with potholes and interspersed with roadblocks, forcing vehicles to stop again and again.
A policeman knocks on the window. His eyes are bloodshot and he seems unsteady on his feet.
The police officer says: "I love you." We say: "Good afternoon, officer." He asks: "What you got for me." We give him 200 naira. "You can go," he says.
The three phrases -- "I love you," "what you got for me?" and "you can go" represent a typical Nigerian relationship in three sentences.
John Ampan's African truths:
Africans are greedy and excessive. We lack the basic virtues to develop further. "Diligence" and "punctuality" are foreign words in Africa.
John Ekow Ampan's trek from Africa to Europe is a tale of desperation. During his four-year journey from Ghana to Spain, he was deported and imprisoned several times, and yet he remained determined to reach the European Promised Land.
There are journeys that change a traveler, that transform him into a different person. And there are travelers who, by the end of their journey, want nothing so much as for life to return to the way it used to be. But they discover that there is no turning back, that their world has changed irrevocably.
For John Ekow Ampan, Africa was his home throughout his journey. Then he lost his security -- his friends, his customers, his language and his laugh. He wanted to become a European. Today he dresses like a European, works like a European and buys European TVs and washing machines.
"But I'll never be one," he says.
Ampan, 46, wears his hair cropped close to his head and sports the crescent-shaped scar of the Fante tribe on his left cheek, a mark of belonging the Fante slice into their children. Wearing a green T-shirt, grey Levis, a blue cap and headphones, John is returning home with gifts for his children -- they fill many, many plastic bags.
ABOUT THIS SERIES:
People flee from wars and famines, but often it is the search for a better life that drives hundreds of thousands of people from poor countries to set out abroad each year. During a trip that lasted seven weeks, SPIEGEL reporter Klaus Brinkbäumer, 39, and photographer Markus Matzel, retraced the odyssey of 46- year- old John Ekow Ampan, a Ghanian father of three, to Europe. Before he managed to reach Spain, on the promised land, the European continent, Ampan numerous setbacks and even arrests on a trip that took four years to complete. Accompanied by SPIEGEL, Ampan made the journey once again -- retracing his route through Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, Morocco and all the most important stations in his journey. Brinkbäumer documented his journey in a new book published in Germany this autumn, titled "The Dream of Life." Three days ago, John called his wife Vida in Ghana to tell her he was coming home. "No," she said, "don't play games with us, and don't make that kind of promise. I'm not telling the children anything. I don't want them to waste their time hoping for a father who disappeared 14 years ago." For more than a decade now, the African family's connection to their father has a been, at most, a once-weekly phone call lasting perhaps all of one minute, e-mails and the €200 a month he sends from his home in Europe to the Ghanaian capital of Accra each month.
Those 14 years will come to an end on a Monday evening at 6:12 p.m., when John's flight touches down in Accra. Alice, his youngest daughter, has never met her father, never played with him. Letters and phone calls have been their only link. But she knows that the €200 he has been sending, month after month, are the reason she is able to go to school.
John goes to the baggage claim, takes his bag and walks, without smiling, to the exit. A poster proclaims: "Germany 2006, we're on our way" -- a reference to Ghana's national football team, which will be greeted with enthusiasm in Europe.
Europe is decidedly less welcoming to those who are now leaving West Africa. They embark on their journeys filled with a mix of despair and hope, but few ever reach their destination. Most end up in jails or camps, fall ill or die, or fail because they run out of money or are turned in to authorities. Some have almost made it but, after traveling about 5,000 kilometers (3,107 miles) cross-country, their inflatable boats sink during the final, 14-kilometer (9 mile) Mediterranean crossing, and no one ever learns that they made the trip in the first place.
Africa, with its population of 910 million, is home to 14 percent of the world's population. Seventy-one percent of Africans are younger than 25. In sub-Saharan Africa, 45.7 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Of the 38 countries the International Monetary Fund (IMF) classifies as "highly indebted poor countries," 32 are African. For every 1,000 children born in the countries south of the Sahara, 102 die before their first birthdays. The average life expectancy in these countries is 46 years, and the most common cause of death is AIDS. There are 30 million guns in circulation south of the Sahara.
More than 17 million Africans are migrants or refugees.
No one could be better qualified to serve as a guide for anyone hoping to understand this mass migration than John Ampan, who experienced everything there is to experience on his four-year journey. Living in the Spanish region of Andalusia for the last ten years, he now helps those who arrive here from Morocco. He is also willing to retrace his steps and embark on his journey a second time, from Ghana, through the Sahara Desert and to the Mediterranean coast.
He walks to the exit and the doors open to a blast of hot, heavy and humid air from outside. "Finally," says John, quietly.
Station One: The journey begins in Accra, Ghana
They stand facing each other, unable to speak, John on one side of the fence and his wife, Vida, on the other. A matron in a yellow dress, she wears her hair in a bun, a towel stuck to her cleavage to wipe away the sweat -- and she smiles.
Alice, their 14-year-old daughter, is at her side. She wears a short blouse with narrow straps on one side. And she wears headphones, which she doesn't remove.
Glenn is also there to greet his father. The 18-year-old soccer player is nicknamed "Pelé," after Abédi "Pelé" Ayew, a Ghanaian sports legend. Glenn wears knee-length jeans and a T-shirt, smiles guardedly and is silent and unmoving.
And then there is Eva, a 20-year-old college student, her slim body squeezed into tight jeans. She raises her arms as if to stretch her spine, adopting the pose of an adolescent showing her father how beautiful she is.
John approaches his family, opens his mouth as if to speak and then closes it again, and his wife closes her eyes. The two raise their arms to embrace but then drop them to their sides again.
They stand facing one another. Vida and the three adolescents smile shyly, the youngest extends her arm but drops it again, and John pushes his baggage cart and approaches his family. They stand there, silent, as he embraces his wife. They stand there as strangers, the children not recognizing their own father. Who is this man?
"Dad?" Alice asks.
After five awkward minutes, they begin making smalltalk -- chatting about the luggage, who will take which car and where to find the taxis.
The Ampans live in the port city of Tema, 35 kilometers (22 miles) from Accra, in a neighborhood called Community 5. Tema, population 100,000, is a city of crumbling buildings and sandy streets. The family owns a small stone house with a small roadside bar Vida runs in the front -- a simple place with yellow walls, a white ceiling and a bare concrete floor. The sparse furnishings include a portable gas stove with two burners, two laundry lines running diagonally across the room and two plastic bowls where Vida and her daughters wash glasses. The boom box at the entrance, which helps attract customers, was the first present John sent from Europe.
"I missed my father all those years"
They live relatively well. The children go to school and Eva, the eldest, attends college -- all paid for with the money John has been sending home. And Vida does what women do in any crisis region: She controls the crisis by controlling daily life. The Ampan's circumstances are not that uncommon here in Ghana. The husband sets off to reach Europe, and the wife stays at home, where she'll get up every morning at 5:30 to make Coco, Ghanaian porridge, wake the children and send them off to school, open the bar at 8:00 a.m. and close it at 11:00 p.m.
John spends five days with his family. Glenn, his son, is taciturn and constantly walks away. When his father sits downstairs, Glenn finds an excuse to go upstairs, and seems to stay away for as long as he can. He says: "I don't want his money and I don't need his clothes. I missed my father for all those years. "
It doesn't take long for the quarreling starts over who owns the house. "Come to my house tomorrow at one," says John. "Our house," says Eva. "Your house," says John.
Then he looks at his daughter the way fathers look at their daughters, tenderly and proudly. "I used to hold her on my arm for so long. Until she was four years old," he says.
"Six. I was six, Dad, when you went away." "So you were six," he responds. "From then on, other people loved me more," says Eva.
John Ekow Ampan is a cousin of football player Samuel Osei Kuffour, nicknamed Sammy, who played for German football team Bayern München for many years before switching to Rome. John paid his cousin a visit in the spring of 2000, when Bayern München was playing a match in Madrid. He has a photo that shows him posing with German football legend Franz Beckenbauer. In the photo Beckenbauer stares fiercely into the distance.
Opportunities for everyone in Europe
The two cousins' mothers came from Kumasi, a town 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of Accra. There was a man in Kumasi who they called "Hamburger" because he worked in Germany.
"It's so cold in Germany that you don't need a refrigerator. You set your beer on the windowsill when you go to the toilet. When you come back from the toilet it's frozen." These were the kinds of stories Hamburger told. He drove a Mercedes 230 with a horn that sounded like a cow mooing. Hamburger told the villagers that he had started out as a dishwasher and that he was working three jobs now. He also told the villagers that there were opportunities for everyone in Germany. Then he brought the first color TV set to the village and a leather ball for the boys.
Hamburger infected everyone with his stories about Europe. John says that every African village has its own Hamburger, and that these men make a stronger imprint on people's minds than the rumors of inflatable boats sinking in the Mediterranean, tragedies for which there are no images.
John attended elementary school and then learned the trades of carpentry and upholstery. He met Vida in northern Ghana where, at 17, she was helping her mother in the family store, selling paper, sweets and beer. "She was so pretty and funny and nice," he recalls. He asked a friend for advice. The friend spoke with Vida's older sister, who spoke with her mother, and a meeting was arranged to discuss marriage between John and Vida. It wasn't especially romantic, it was very African.
Barely married, Ampan left to find work in Nigeria. In the summer of 1993, when the couple had been together for several years, Vida Ampan received a message from John, who had been doing jobs as a guest worker in Lagos, Nigeria, for the past year and a half. John wrote that he needed to see her -- not at home, but at a location 125 kilometers (78 miles) outside the city.
At 9:00 p.m. on the day of the arranged meeting, John was waiting in his hotel in a town called Sogakope. It was a flat, white building with a terrace and a stairway leading down to the rooms. At about €10 per night, or four for those who knew how to haggle, the rooms were cheap at the Volta View Hotel. Located as it was on the main road, it was noisy here at the Volta View -- flooded by the constant sounds of engines, horns, drums and music that would continue well into the night. John waited, and soon Vida arrived with the baby he hadn't even seen yet -- Alice, age one.
The couple had only one night together, but neither of them slept.
Vida was against the idea. She knew if he went it would be a long time before she saw him again -- and this might even be the last time. He said that they were married, which meant he had to take care of her and the children, something he felt he couldn't do in Africa. "No," she said, that wasn't true. The reason they married was so that they could be together. She wept and she shouted. She knew nothing about Europe, but she did know that she was terrified of what might happen. John remained uncharacteristically tough and resolute. He had $1,000 in debts in Accra, money he said he would never be able to repay. He said he wanted to fight for his family's future, and that there was no future here in Africa.
They lay there together, embracing and talking, and at dawn he left the hotel and, after catching a bus to Lomé in Togo, was soon far away.
Asked today if she understood the odyssey John was about to embark on, Vida answers: "No, not then."
Asked if she can understand 10 years later why he left, Vida doesn't respond.
She plays with her bracelet, and John says: "She's doing well. She's happy." Vida says that the school costs 100,000 Cedi a month for each child, or about €9. The school fees are due every three months, and when parents don't have the money their children are quickly expelled. The €200 John sends home each month are worth about 2.2 million Cedi, enough to meet the family's needs. Vida says: "Families who have no one in Europe don't make it. I understand him today."
Draining the continent
We drive along the coast. We pass the Konkomba market, where they sell fruit and old German clothes that become second-hand, third-hand or even fourth-hand goods here in Africa. We pass the Wind Star Night Club, a shack consisting of a couple of counters and two sofas on the side of the road. "I don't recognize anything," says John. "My home is a foreign place to me." We drive to Cape Coast to visit one of the 37 former slave forts on the Ghana coast.
It's a green and hilly coast. Back in the days of slavery, the British developed a triangle of commerce between Europe, the New World and Africa. They imported rum for the chiefs and glass beads for the people in Africa, and as masters they exported gold and what they believed to be an inferior species from Africa to the New World. The Europeans and North Americans made off with about 29 million Africans, and another 29 million are said to have perished under four centuries of European rule. The Europeans tossed the unwanted into the sea -- the sick, the pregnant, the rape victims, the rebellious ones. Anything they saw as nothing but useless human flesh they tossed overboard into the Atlantic.
The history of slavery is a core element of African history, and it has a lot to do with the history of migration. The continent we see today is one that was robbed in the days when Europe and America were still developing, coming up with inventions and educating themselves. It isn't exactly surprising that Africa is having such a difficult time keeping up in the age of globalization and high technology. After all, it was already torn apart when this age began.
John says that things today are no different from the way they used to be. Europe decides and Africa obeys, Europe takes care of itself but Africa hardly stands a chance. "We have to go to Europe if we want to live," says John. Today, as in the past, it's the young and the strong who leave, forming an exodus that is draining the continent once again.
Ghana, a former British colony, gained its independence in 1957. Its 21.1 million inhabitants speak English, Akan, Ewa or Gã. There is no national healthcare system. Fifteen thousand children died of malaria in 2005. Health insurance is nonexistent and wages are lousy because there are no jobs. Here in Accra and its suburbs, like everywhere in Africa, unemployed young men sit idly in the dust, not knowing what to do with their energy. Teachers earn €200 a month, and the many who stand on the side of the road trying to sell beverages earn €2 a day -- if they're lucky.
And when someone manages to build something -- a small computer business or a telephone shop, for example -- a family member envious of his success will almost invariably find a way to pull the successful one back down to the common denominator of poverty. This has helped fuel a brain drain from the country, as doctors and lawyers, electricians and engineers and those lucky enough to land a spot at a foreign university leave Ghana. Their motives are always based on the same conviction: Life at home is hard, and life abroad will be better.
Glenn Ampan has a football game, and his father, who has never seen his son play, has promised to attend. John doesn't make it, and Glenn's team loses 0:1. "I played badly," he says. John was stuck in a traffic jam.
Vida pulls out her album of family photos, pictures of a younger John, thinner and sporting a moustache, and the obituary of Jacob Ebenezer Ampan, born Dec. 26, 1925. Mr. Ampan, the obituary reads, "offended no one" and "was a true gentleman." Fifteen children mourned the family patriarch when he died in 2002. His mother died in 2004. John wasn't there, but he paid 4,000 for the funeral and to feed the mourning relatives for days.
When we leave Ghana at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning, the children stay at home. Only Vida stands in the parking lot, constantly repeating the same sentence: "Have a safe trip."
John Ampan's African truths:
In our society, you are worthless without a wife and without money. No one listens to you. You simply don't count without a family. But the most shameful thing of all is when someone is unable to take care of his parents.
Stage Two: Benin, 348 kilometers into the journey
It takes hours before John Ampan is able to speak again. As he sits in the back seat, staring out the window, the tears rolling down his face, our vehicle, a Nissan, travels eastward along the coastal roads from Ghana to Lagos.
It was a Ford Caravan back then, when he made the journey the first time, and four men sat on a bench in the back. Each had paid the equivalent of €10. They didn't know the driver, the man who was taking them into a future; nor did they know where that future might be.
When he manages to speak again, John says that little has changed. He feels the same emotions, the same inability to verbalize his feelings, the same physical rigidity he experienced on a morning 14 years ago, when his wife held him and wouldn't let go. In the end, he says, he simply turned around and got into the van. It's easy, he says -- you just go. But what you don't realize is that you are about to become the loneliest of human beings.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
The search for a better life drives hundreds of thousands of people from poor countries to try their fortunes abroad each year. During a trip that lasted seven weeks, SPIEGEL reporter Klaus Brinkbäumer, 39, and photographer Markus Matzel, retraced the odyssey of 46- year- old John Ekow Ampan, a Ghanaian father of three, to Europe. Before he managed to reach Spain and the promised land of the European Union, Ampan experienced numerous setbacks including deportations and arrests on a trip that took four years to complete. Accompanied by SPIEGEL, Ampan made the journey once again -- retracing his route through Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, Morocco and re- visiting all the most important stops on his quest for a better life. Brinkbäumer documented Ampan's epic journey in a new book published in Germany last autumn, titled "The Dream of Life." John stares out at the slums on the border between Togo and Benin, at the billboards that read: "God Loves You."
African border guards have a lot of power, and they routinely abuse it. They symbolize everything that is wrong with the continent. They use arrogant hand gestures to shoo away people as if they were pesky flies. At a typical border crossing -- a rope tied to a post at one end and held in the border guard's hand at the other -- they sit, their legs spread out in front of them, chewing on toothpicks and spitting on the ground.
When an attractive woman comes along, a bucket of water or a bale of cloth balanced on her head, the all-powerful border guards pull the rope taut, forcing the woman to stand there in the midday heat. "Turn around," they say. The woman turns around. "Again." She turns around again. "What do you have under your skirt?" they demand. She lifts her skirt. The powerful stand up, walk away, return with a bag of drinking water, bite off a corner, spit it into the dust, drink and stare at the woman's legs. Then they wave her away, telling her to get out of their sight.
They collect bribes from anyone who looks as though he might have some money. We pay the man standing on the trunk of our car €15, and for another €15 he agrees not to force us to empty our pockets. They want John to pay €30 before they'll even look at his passport. When he refuses, they place the passport on the table and allow the next person to cross the border. After an hour John pays the bribe, the guards wave us through and John tells us about his continent.
John Ampan's African truths:
Corruption will destroy Africa. It would have been possible to fight corruption decades ago, but now it's too late. Everyone takes, everyone pays, every favor costs money. Corruption is part of our culture and our daily life. It eats away at us.
Stage Three: Lagos, Nigeria, 469 kilometers into the journey
It will be dark in 20 minutes, and we have to be in our hotel by then, because this is Lagos. "This is Lagos!" John keeps repeating. What he means is that there are no more rules here, that nothing here is the way it is in other cities.
Lagos is a miserable city, a city of filth and garbage and mud and paths consisting of nothing but a few boards thrown over sewage so you can at least stay halfway dry -- boards they call "major roads" here. Children sit in front of oil drums and play with sticks floating in the muck, as piles of garbage grow in front of huts.
Everyone here has empty eyes. The people are unloved, unneeded, not encouraged and unwanted. In fact, they are completely superfluous. They have no schools, no insurance policies and no books. They have no clean water and the stench they breathe can hardly be called air.
Every license plate reads: "Lagos: Center of Excellence."
Lagos is a city of 15 million and its population is expected to jump to 25 million within the next 15 years. But this city will never point anyone in a better direction again. Its mountains of garbage will never shrink, and its people will never see a better life. It's too late for that.
Everyone here asks about Europe. How do I get there? White man, will you take me with you? Do you want to marry me? Will you take along my sister? My daughter?
Bribes are necessary every step of the way in Lagos. Nigerian police officers are nothing more than highway robbers. After all, outside of collecting money, there is little point to their jobs. There were 17 checkpoints along the 100-kilometer (62-mile) stretch of road from the border to Lagos, and every checkpoint was manned by policemen wielding batons. Two hundred naira here, 1,000 there -- everything here seems to revolve around extracting as much money as possible from anyone who can pay.
What it is, really, is legalized theft. They place tree trunks or planks covered with nails across the road, forcing drivers to stop, and when they want you to pay, you pay. The bribery process here is called, euphemistically, "to settle" -- to solve a problem. The Nigerian police's motto, displayed on every police car, is: "To serve and protect with integrity."
Ultimately ungovernable
Dutch Architect Rem Koolhaas has called Lagos the "paradigm of the postmodern city," and Axel Harneit-Sievers, who heads the local office of the German Heinrich Böll Foundation, says that Lagos is "ultimately ungovernable."
The lack of personal barriers, the all-encompassing sense of being assaulted and the constant aggression, pitting everyone against everyone else -- this is Lagos.
When Ampan, born in 1959, left Ghana for the first time, he was 22 and had only recently married. There was no work in Accra, but it was 1981 and Nigeria was a country where everything seemed possible. New oil money meant new construction everywhere -- houses, office towers, palaces. Ampan stayed in Lagos for five months, where he worked for Osmat Construction, a local company under contract to Strabag, an Austrian construction company. He lived in the Ghanaian ghetto, where wooden huts were built on stilts over puddles and riverbeds, and where he shared a space of about 8 square meters with another man. The men would share the hut according to their shifts, with the man who worked the night shift spending his days in the hut, and vice-versa. Garbage was piled around and below the hut, rats were common, mosquitoes were everywhere and gangs would set fires to the huts of anyone who refused to pay protection money.
"I never had a peaceful night there," says John. He returned to Lagos a second time in 1992, at the beginning of his journey to Europe.
This time he found work at the oil company Mobil. John was a well-spoken man, and he soon became the chauffeur of Mobil's local manager, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He was convinced that he had made it. His job consisted of driving his boss into the city, waiting in the Mercedes and occasionally driving the boss's wife when she went shopping. But one night Tinubu gave a large reception, during which thieves entered his villa. The thieves apparently knew the way and marched directly into the bedroom.
Hard time
Every employee with access to the house was sent to jail.
Lagos's Ikoyi prison is a brown building with black marks on its walls. Wrecked cars stand in front of the building, where women sell moldy white bread and power lines suspended from poles drag in the mud. A Nike poster on a nearby building proclaims: "Don't fail!"
In the prison, 120 men were crowded together in a space measuring about 12 by 8 meters. The toilet was a hole in the floor in the middle of the cell. The 120 men formed gangs. They raped each other. They robbed each other. They listened to the screams of prisoners being tortured. John prayed. They called him "chaplain" because he read the Mass for the others, and at some point a brawny fellow from Benin City took John under his wing. The man's name was Bob Izoua. Life became easier for John. Bob Izoua's family would send minibuses filled with soap, clothing and bread, which Izoua would distribute among his supporters.
John was released after six months. He never saw an attorney, he was never given a court hearing, he was never accused of a crime. It was time to go. He missed his wife, and he hesitated for a moment before choosing the opposite direction -- north.
Endless waiting
Are you going to Niger? Spain? Europe? North, at least to Morocco or Libya? Migrants are shy when it comes to asking questions, shy and quiet because what they're envisioning is a journey into a gray zone. Everyone knows the deal, but everyone also knows it's forbidden. Much depends on how much they're able to pay, and even if they can pay, their ability to continue the journey depends on the capriciousness of police officers, who could just as easily send them back, send them to prison or subject them to beatings. Young couples, families and young men sit by the sides of the major roads or at bus terminals, negotiating and waiting. The daily lives of migrants are made up of successive periods of waiting. They travel light, usually carrying no more than one bag so that they can remain flexible. Of course, they have few possessions because they have already sold as much as possible to raise money for the trip. No one carries books. Those who are fleeing to find a better life aren't people who read.
Most sit motionless under trees, dozing and expending as little energy as possible. Occasionally they wave off a few mosquitoes, and then they become rigid again.
And they wait.
There will be a truck tomorrow, someone says, or definitely the next day. This sort of information is a commodity in the world of migrants. But then the next day dawns and the middleman says: "No, not today, and not tomorrow. The truck will leave at the end of the week, definitely, but unfortunately the prices have changed. We need the extra money for your security." What this means is that policemen have to be bribed, and for the migrants it means renegotiating what has already been negotiated and agreed upon -- and spending a few more days sitting under a tree.
And waiting.
As we leave Lagos, we pass Prayer City. It's an area filled with stadiums and arenas, where hundreds of thousands come on the weekends to beg for God's blessing from preachers like Reinhard Bonnke, a German who claims he can heal diseases like leprosy.
The road takes us north in the direction of Europe. It's a four-lane highway peppered with potholes and interspersed with roadblocks, forcing vehicles to stop again and again.
A policeman knocks on the window. His eyes are bloodshot and he seems unsteady on his feet.
The police officer says: "I love you." We say: "Good afternoon, officer." He asks: "What you got for me." We give him 200 naira. "You can go," he says.
The three phrases -- "I love you," "what you got for me?" and "you can go" represent a typical Nigerian relationship in three sentences.
John Ampan's African truths:
Africans are greedy and excessive. We lack the basic virtues to develop further. "Diligence" and "punctuality" are foreign words in Africa.
Home