Refugee? Economic migrant? Mother Mariam is a bit of both

On Thursday, September 14, Mariam Bamba, a mother from Abidjan, Ivory Coast, makes her way through the crowds outside Lampedusa’s overcrowded shelter with her son Didier, or ‘Didi’. Little Didi, with his red pants, light gray shirt and green bandana, looks like a walking Italian flag. His mother also likes color. Among the thousands of African migrants, mainly young men with short, dark haircuts, her bleached braids stand out.

Mariam attracts even more attention with her fiery character. At the border fence around the reception center she is involved in a heated argument with another migrant. The fact that the man is three heads taller and a lot wider does not bother her. Afterwards she explains why she was so furious. “My son and I haven’t had anything to drink or eat for a day. All these men here are just pushing us aside. The Son of Sauvages! They behave like savages.”

Three months later, on Friday December 15, Mariam Bamba waits outside the post office of the Sicilian rural village of Vizzini, her new home, just over an hour’s drive from Catania. Hidden among the prickly pear-covered hills of the Sicilian interior, Vizzini is certainly picturesque. At the same time, you mainly see strolling pensioners and hardly any young people on the street. Mariam’s hairstyle is now half blond and without braids due to black roots. Her cheeks are fuller. She proudly says that she has gained some weight – a sign of prosperity in Africa.

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The story of Mariam and Didi symbolizes Europe’s seemingly endless struggle with migration. Italy also continued to suffer last year more than 153,000 arrivals by sea leads Europe in terms of migrant arrivals. Radical right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, elected with an anti-migration agenda, barely slowed the influx, despite a controversial agreement with Tunisia. At the last minute, the EU reached an agreement this week on the reform of asylum and migration policy, with the aim of more quickly detecting and deporting migrants without the right to asylum. At the same time, refugees must be distributed more fairly across Europe.

Count to ten

The Ivorian mother does not yet know what this means for Mariam and Didi. She can, however, tell us how things have gone for her and her son since their arrival in Lampedusa on September 12. Five days later they were transferred to a primary care center in Pozzallo, in southern Sicily. Didi turned six there. Later they were transferred to a small shelter for single mothers and their children in Vizzini. “That’s our house!” Didi shouts enthusiastically when he points to the pastel-colored asylum center.

Men are strictly prohibited from visiting the center, and journalists also appear to be highly unwelcome. Mariam hurriedly suggests they talk while walking through the village.

She no longer has to fear male migrants who push her and Didi away when food is distributed in the small reception center. She has a good relationship with the female coordinator, she says, but “the male care workers are bossy and treat me like a child.”

Didi recently started in the first year of the primary school around the corner from the reception center. At four o’clock he storms out of the school, towards his mother and hangs around her legs for a long time, like a chick.

Didier is a mischievous, somewhat introverted child. But he flourishes in the village playground. „Uno, due, tre…” He likes to show how well he can count to ten in Italian. “Shortly after our arrival in Sicily, Didi was admitted to hospital for a week,” says his mother.

The child has drepanocytosis, also called sickle cell disease, a rare genetic disorder that affects red blood cells and can lead to anemia. “Didi often bleeds from his nose at night,” says Mariam. “Every now and then he needs a blood transfusion, something he never got in Tunisia – perhaps because his mother is black African.”

Didier was born in Tunisia, where Mariam lived from 2015 until their crossing to Lampedusa three months ago. Didier’s father is a Cameroonian who met Mariam there, but who disappeared from their lives when Didi was five months old.

“We have always lived in Tunis,” she says softly, “I worked as a cleaner for Tunisian families, ten hours a day, every day except Sunday.” She worked from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon, for 150 euros a month. In the evening she left for her second job as a dishwasher in a restaurant, until midnight. Didi was taken care of by an African woman and that help cost Mariam thirty euros a month.

As a child, both my stepmothers only told me that I was worthless, that my life would make no sense later

When she went to bed exhausted after midnight, dark thoughts came to her mind. “As a child, both my stepmothers only told me that I was worthless, that my life would be worthless later. Maybe they were right, I often thought in Tunisia. And I also thought: why don’t I just kill myself?”

Just as Didi never knew his father, Mariam grew up without a mother. “Mom died when I was a child.” Her father, with whom she was close and whom she lost in August last year, would remarry twice more. Each time with women who regarded Mariam as their rival and who abused her physically and mentally for years. “Dad worked as a gas station attendant. He left at the crack of dawn and didn’t return until I was already asleep. He wasn’t there to protect me.”

With the first wife after her mother’s death, her father had three children, with the second a daughter. The three youngest now rely on Mariam’s financial support for their school supplies and living expenses. “But that’s not possible right now. I’ve only just arrived here and I’m not allowed to work in Italy yet.”

Pleas for money

She stares dejectedly ahead. African migrants in Europe constantly feel the psychological pressure to send money to their family, because, as the cliché goes, whoever entered the EU made it anyway. Despite their very troubled relationship, her second stepmother now also bombards her with pleas for money.

The opportunity to escape at least physically presented itself in 2010, when a bloody political crisis broke out in Ivory Coast. Mariam was eighteen and freedom was calling. The country was turned into deep unrest plunged when, after elections, both President Laurent Gbagbo and opposition leader Alassane Ouattara claimed victory. At least 3,000 Ivorians lost their lives in the power struggle that ensued. Many fled. Mariam saw her chance to get out of the country. “I ended up in a refugee camp in Ghana, which I saw as an opportunity to stand on my own two feet.”

She would stay there for five years. Mariam, a cultural but non-practicing Muslim woman, bumped into Michel, a Christian. Samira was born in 2012, and Nora was born two years later.

When Nora was one year old, in 2015, the UN Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ordered the camp residents to return home voluntarily. Michel traveled back to Ivory Coast with their two daughters, but Mariam did not come with him. “I wanted to travel further, go on an adventure and earn money to send back to my daughters.”

African migrants in Europe always feel pressure to send money to relatives

Things were no longer going well between her and Michel, although returning to Ivory Coast together had never been a serious option. “Our families, especially mine, would never have accepted our free choice of partner, especially since it was a relationship between a Christian and a Muslim woman.”

Mariam ended up in Tunisia. Her search for economic independence resulted in two poorly paid jobs. She had to share the house she stayed in with many other migrants. “We slept in the same room with six women and three children. I never had a moment to myself.”

She does not like to elaborate on the fathers of her children. Only this: “I have not yet met the great love of my life.” She does hint that her relationships up until now have always been part of her search for a more stable and materially more solid existence. For example, she says about Michel, the father of her daughters, that he was also very good to her in Ghana and “helped her move forward.” In Tunisia she had Didi, her third child, and a few months later Mariam was not only a migrant in that North African country, but also a single mother who had to work hard to make ends meet.

It barely worked, but in February the atmosphere in Tunisia completely changed. Instigated by the autocrat Kais Saied, those black migrants accused that they came to ‘replace’ the Tunisian population, incidents of violence against black Africans increased. They were attacked, robbed and threatened. “We were spat at and pelted with stones, including by children and adolescents,” Mariam reflects.

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Mariam gathered her savings and Didi, traveled to the port city of Sfax and boarded a boat. “A wooden boat, with room for ten men, in which thirty-one of us were crammed together. The children cried as the water continued to rise.”

With a distressed Didi on her lap, Mariam started to dump water out of the boat with all her might. For three hours, during the pitch black, cold night. “At Kerkennah [een Tunesische eilandengroep] the Tunisian national guard tracked us down. We were stopped and within five minutes we were all floating around in the cold sea water.”

Didi was wearing a life jacket, but his mother was not. “Dear son, I will protect you, don’t worry,” Mariam cried, just before she felt herself sinking beneath the surface of the water. “I held Didi up with both arms. As far up as I could go.”

The shipwreck claimed the life of one woman, the other migrants were fished out of the water in time by the national guard. “Without help none of us would have survived.”

And plan B? She smiles knowingly. “There isn’t.”

Mariam is eager to start working in Italy, but first she has to go through her asylum procedure. In Vizzini she has one dear friend, a young man from Guinea, who arrived in Italy eight years ago, now speaks fluent Italian and works with migrants as an aid worker. Mariam would also like to have a job like that: “It is my dream to one day – who knows – work for UNHCR and be able to make a difference.”

She regularly video calls her daughters in Ivory Coast, whom she has not seen since 2015. Plan A sounds like this: get a residence permit, because Didi has a disease that can be better treated in Europe, and then also bring daughters Nora and Samira to Italy. “I don’t want them to grow up without a mother and suffer like that.” And plan B? She smiles knowingly. “There isn’t.”

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