Unaccompanied African Youth Migration to Sicily: Reflecting, Becoming, and Integrating through Activist MUSIC

Happy@Cortile — Performance by West African youth migrants, Tunisian percussionist Ramzi Harrabi, and UNC-Chapel Hill musician and anthropologist Alex Polydoroff (that’s me!) on bass.

This series of photographs—both somber and celebratory–tells the story of unaccompanied youth migrants from all over Africa coming of age in Sicily after harrowing cross-continental journeys. These boys, waiting as asylum-seekers in government-funded camps until they turn 18, are self-actualizing as activist musicians, intercultural mediators, and persevering young men.

RefugeeVoice — West African youth migrants perform at Lido Terraza Fanusa, accompanied by renowned Sicilian Jazz musicians Raffaelle Genovese (piano) and Alessandro Faro (drums). The youth performed their original music about the trials and triumphs of their cross-continental migrations at this public concert geared toward intercultural dialogue through music.

In the past three years, more than a half million African migrants have arrived on Italy’s southern shores, prompting intense societal debate on immigration and integration. Unaccompanied minors constitute a growing share of the arriving migrants: in 2016, more than 25,000 youth entered government-funded reception centers–the majority of which are in Sicily–commencing the protracted process obtaining documentation from a backlogged immigration system. Approximately 5,000 of these minors have gone missing from their camps and fallen into clandestine labor operations, migrant smuggling rings, or homelessness. The majority who remain months or years in camps commonly have their allotted government funds clandestinely embezzled by ubiquitous mafia operations. The recent surge of the far-right, xenophobic Northern League—whose stated objective is mass deportation–in 2018 parliamentary elections further exacerbates the enduring uncertainty of unaccompanied youth migrant lives.

Dayna Stephens, renowned saxophonist in New York City, performs a short set of uplifting music at Umberto Primo Youth Migrant Camp (Photo: Alex Polydoroff).

Despite facing structurally induced precarity, many of the young men are crafting fulfilling new lives with the support of committed reception center staff and NGOs, as well as welcoming Sicilians and artists. Camp staff often treat the youth as children of their own. NGOs offer cultural activities, language classes, job opportunities, and legal assistance. Many Sicilians give the youth places at the dinner table, and sometimes a permanent home. Artists engage the youth to tell their complex stories and initiate their cultural integration through a variety of artistic mediums.

MeNTheBoysRoof — The Youth Migrant Band poses for a photo on the roof of Umberto Primo Migrant Camp.

My investment in the lives of unaccompanied youth migrants in Syracuse, Sicily is rooted in empowering them through activist-inspired music-making that enables reflection and expression of past experiences, motivates critical commentaries of their current lived reality, and facilitates intercultural dialogue and cross-cultural understanding with Sicilians. In the current Italian political climate, an act toward dialogue, mutual understanding, and integration is tragically an act of defiance. Unaccompanied youth migrants, Sicilians and I are making politically aware, socially engaged, and uplifting music of diverse genres to foster empathetic awareness of their complex experiences, multicultural inclusivity in the local community, and political resistance against injustice.

Performance at Cortile Minniti — The youth migrants and me perform a concert of our original music–a fusion of hip hop, reggae, West African music, and Jazz–at a local live music venue in the historic center of Syracuse, Sicily.

In my exploration and expression of the stories of unaccompanied youth migrants, I seek to deeply engage the migrants themselves as creative musicians. The youth migrants collaboratively participate in the processes of defining their experiences and generating collective knowledge. Musically, the youth determine lyrical content, instrumentation, and style of groove in order to communicate a particular emotional experience or political message. This artistic process of creative activism aims to promote intercultural dialogue and address sociopolitical issues. Music can be an especially potent tool to advocate for cross-cultural understanding, solidarity, and integration.

Music Session — **Summer Afternoon at Umberto Primo – July 2017. Syracuse, Sicily.**
Unaccompanied youth from The Gambia and Eritrea sing, play percussion, and dance in the courtyard of their camp, a repurposed hospital which houses 40 African minors. Waiting at Umberto Primo until they turn 18, the boys are provided beds, clothing, and two meals a day, and spend their time coexisting with each other in the camp’s common areas.

Ibrahim, The Gambia — **Ibrahim Sanneh – August 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
Ibrahim, a 17-year-old migrant from The Gambia, sings and plays a drum in preparation for a concert the following night at Lido Terraza Fanusa, a nearby beach club.

Abu Bakr, The Gambia — “The journey to Italy was hard. We made it out of Libyan prisons and crossed this big sea. God risked our lives. Now, here in Sicily, with this music, we are free. Music gives us the power to express our experiences and feelings, and we know the people hear us.” -Abu Bakr

Sayou Fati, The Gambia — **Sayou Fatti – July 2017, Mount Etna, Sicily.**
Sayou, an 18-year-old Gambian, listens to music on his phone in the highlands of Mount Etna before performing a concert at an NGO retreat.

Polydoroff-Exhibit-005 — **ThankGod – July 2017, Mount Etna, Sicily.**
ThankGod, a Nigerian migrant, smiles for a portrait before singing his original compositions about his long journey and new life in Italy at an NGO retreat.

Maxwell @ Mount Etna Gig — **Maxwell – July 2017, Mount Etna, Sicily.**
Maxwell, a 17-year-old from Ghana, poses in front of clouds hovering over Mount Etna’s crater. Possessing an affinity for languages, Maxwell translated between curious Sicilians and English-speaking youth migrant musicians at the NGO retreat. “They put hundreds of people in one room in prison in Libya. There was not even enough room for all of us to sit down. We had to take turns laying down to sleep. But it was very uncomfortable. The floors were cement, and we used the same floors for fire to cook our food. I was there for three months.” -Maxwell

Polydoroff-Exhibit-007 — **Austin – June 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
Austin, a 17-year-old Nigerian migrant, strikes a pose on the rooftop terrace of Umberto Primo. The Mediterranean Sea, which he bravely crossed, is in the background. Austin was a passionate dancer at the camp music sessions and concerts.

Alfa, 17, Sierra leone — **Alpha – July 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
Alpha, a 16-year-old from Sierra Leone, spent three years in a Libyan prison camp before his parents could pay the rest of his trip to Italy to smugglers. Commonly accompanying Austin, Alpha preferred to dance—an integral facet of West African musical performance–at rehearsals and concerts. Alpha: “I spent three years in prison in Libya.They beat you there. The Libyans are bad people.”

Bukthar Somalia — **Bukhtar – August 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
Bukhtar, an Arabic-speaking youth migrant from Somalia, watched our jam sessions from a distance, often sending us smiles but recognizing the language barrier.

EritreanBoySoccer — **Aster – August 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
Aster, a 16-year-old from Eritrea, was stalled for three years in a Libyan prison before arriving to Umberto Primo three weeks before this portrait was taken. Speaking only Arabic, Aster could only recount his traumas to the few Arabic-speaking boys from Somalia, Eritrea, and Egypt. Aster spent three years in Libyan prison camp. He arrived to Italy with a wounded leg, and had to walk with a walking stick for his first few weeks.

Polydoroff-Exhibit-011 — **Ibrahim at “Whiteplus Creative Studio” – July 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
Ibrahim poses for a portrait outside of a photography studio in Syracuse. He was denied a modelling job here because the studio director deemed his skin to be too dark, and his blond spot to be aesthetically displeasing.

**Abdoullah on Skateboard – June 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
Abdoullah, a young migrant from the Gambia, was moved from Umberto Primo to an adult camp in Syracuse shortly after this photo was taken on his 18^th birthday. The youth are caught in the flux of waiting for immigration documentation, being moved between camps, and seeking temporary (and often clandestine) work.

Abdoullah, 18 years old, The Gambia. — **Abdoullah Nije at Solarium Nettuno – August 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
Abdoullah Nije, a 20-year-old Gambian who is considered a minor on his immigration documentation, poses at a local beach club where we performed at an open jam session. Well-spoken, personable, and organized, Abdoullah would set up a table to sell migrant-made necklaces and bracelets at our public performances. Abdoullah: “When I saw lights like those ones in the sea when I was trying to leave Libya, I was scared. When we leave in the boats at night, the Libyan police comes looking for us. When we saw those lights, we had to be silent. If the police catches you, they put you back in prison. Then they demand more money. Sometimes they shoot at the boats. They took me back to prison two times. There’s no way to be happy in that life. That’s why I’m happy now.”

PreGigSoccer — **Salieu at Sunset outside Umberto Primo – August 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
Salieu, a 17-year-old Gambian, juggles a soccer ball on the sidelines during a late-evening pickup game outside camp.

Umberto Primo Migrant Camp Scene — **Gambian Boy at Umberto Primo – July 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
A Gambian migrant strolls through the rectangular architecture of Umberto Primo on a hot summer day.

Polydoroff-Exhibit-016 — **Soccer Match from Above – August 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
Youth migrants from Nigeria, Somalia, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Senegal, and the Gambia come together for an evening soccer match outside Umberto Primo.

Polydoroff-Exhibit-017 — **Fares at Freedom Camp – June 2017, Syracuse, Sicily.**
Fares was an interested photographer, and eagerly learned the basics of my camera and editing program. He preferred photos in black and white, exclaiming when he discovered the effect, “così si vede più fico” (it looks coolest like that).

Polydoroff-Exhibit-018 — **Salieu Berry at Freedom Camp – June 2017, Syracuse, Sicily (Photo: Fares Alkahim).**
Fares took this portrait of his Gambian roommate Salieu in the common room of Centro di Accoglienza “Freedom” while he practiced with my camera and I led a music-making session. Freedom Camp is a repurposed office space in the historic center that houses 20 African migrant youth in six bedrooms.

Polydoroff-Exhibit-019 — **Lamin Sings at Lido Terraza Fanusa – August 2017, Fanusa, Sicily (Photo: Fares Alkahim).**
Fares shot this image of Gambian youth migrant musician Lamin during our final concert at Lido Terraza Fanusa, accompanied by renowned Sicilian Jazz musicians Raffaele Genovese and Alessandro Faro. Lamin co-wrote the original tune “In Libya,” which has the repeating refrain lyrics, “Libya, where the black man is suffering, in Libya.” The song addresses anti-black violence, extortion, and physical abuse that occurs in immigrant detention camps in Libya.

Hit@NettunoW-Ramzi — **The Band Performs at Solarium Nettuno – August 2017, Syracuse, Sicily (Photo: Fares Alkahim).**
Fares captured this photo of Abu Bakr, Lamin, ThankGod, and me during a performance at an open jam session in the historic center of Syracuse. In addition to our final concert at Lido Terraza Fanusa, our group performed at various open local jam sessions to foster intercultural dialogue between Sicilians and migrants.

Portrait of a Youth Migrant Musician

Abu Bakr is a 17-year-old boy from The Gambia. It took him six months to make the 5,000-kilometer journey from his home in Banjul to a wooden boat floating across the Mediterranean Sea toward Italy. Like thousands of Gambians before him, Abu left home alone for Tripoli, Libya, the principal point of departure for West Africans fleeing to the European mainland. While searching for passage to Italy upon his arrival in Libya, Abu was captured by corrupt Libyan police officers who imprisoned him in an immigrant detention camp. The police officers—working in conjunction with the boat-operating smugglers—demanded a one-time payment from Abu’s parents over the phone, promising his safe passage to Italy if they paid, and his execution if they failed to. Abu endured four months in Libyan prison before he was released to smugglers, placed on a wooden boat, and pushed out to sea—his fate still utterly uncertain. He spent three nights at sea, crowded amongst 100 other African men, women, and children with severely limited food and water, before the company of migrants was rescued by the Italian Coast Guard and dropped on the shores of Sicily. A week later, Abu Bakr, a hopeful 17-year-old with dreams to reside in Europe, was starting his new life at Umberto Primo Youth Migrant Camp in Syracuse, Sicily.

Abu Bakr was one of my most passionate music students at Umberto Primo. Having endured immense hardships from a young age, Abu bears a deep emotional experience that compels expression through music. Having grown up immersed in West African musical traditions and exposed to global reggae and hip-hop, Abu is an innately musical human being. He understands—like the truly great and wise musicians of the world—the power of music to express lived experiences coupled with their emotional content, and to have those experiences be immediately felt by listeners. We would spend long weekday afternoons in the outdoor common areas of the camp jamming—me on my bass and Abu singing of the struggles and triumphs of his migration. It was primarily during these jam sessions that Abu would freely recount the traumatizing trials of his cross-continental quest. He understood that only through music could he express the deep-seated emotions that characterized his complex experiences.

AbuBakrNettuno — Abu Bakr relaxes after performing at a jam session at “Solarium Nettuno,” a beautiful beach club right on the Mediterranean Sea.

Photographs of Youth Migrant Musicians in Sicily

I lead music classes with unaccompanied youth migrants in two refugee camps in Syracuse, Sicily. In our time together, the migrants and I collaboratively compose music about their cross-continental journeys and new lives in Italy. Following these music-making sessions during which the youth sing, rap, and perform spoken word about their lived experiences in migration, I lead reflective conversations on the experiences and feelings that were shared. After solidifying a body of original music last summer—composed collaboratively by the migrants and me—we played concerts in local venues in Syracuse to facilitate cross-cultural understanding with Sicilians. Next summer, we plan record an album to disseminate the artistic product of our cross-cultural collaboration.

The Band poses with with instruments on the rooftop terrace of Umberto Primo.

Cult.Integ — Migrant boys hang out with locals at our concert in Fanusa, Sicily.

OnTheBusToGig — The boys on the bus to a jam session at “Solarium Nettuno” in the center of Syracuse.

Lamin, a Gambian migrant, poses for a photo atop Mount Etna before playing at a NGO event.

AbuBakrThankGodNettuno — Abu Bakr and ThankGod perform an original rap at Solarium Nettuno.

Before Our Concert on Mount Etna — The boys hang out in preparation for the Mount Etna concert.

BoysW-RamonaNettuno — Gambian boys pose with a local singer, Ramona, at Solarium Nettuno.

Abdullah, an 18-year-old Gambian migrant, poses with my bass at Umberto Primo.

The Band on the Terrace — Abdoullah, Ibrahim, and Sayou–Gambian youth migrants–and I pose for a band photo the night before our final concert.

To The Bus Stop — Gambian and Nigerian youth migrant musicians make their way to the bus to the historic center of Syracuse. They set up fliers for the final concert on the way to “Solarium Nettuno,” the beach club where the jam session took place.

Lamin Spitting — Lamin, a 16-year-old Gambian migrant, sings of his trials in Libya at a concert at “Lido Terraza Fanusa.” Alessandro Faro’s (a composer and musician well known throughout Italy) drumstick appears in the foreground, and Raffaelle Genovese, renowned Italian Jazz pianist, appears in the background.

The Politics Shaping the Experiences of Youth Migrants in Sicily

The Italian government anticipates spending $3 billion on managing immigration in 2017 (Mowat, 2016). With 176,000 asylum seekers living in migrant shelters and a history of legalization programs due to immigration case backlogs, the Italian legal system has been under prolonged pressure to accommodate newly arrived migrants (Mowat, 2016). While an anti-immigrant rhetoric of militarized borders and Eurocentric nationalism has received traction in Italy’s sociopolitical discourse of the past decade, various NGOs, religious organizations, and vast sectors of the Italian citizenry have welcomed African migrants (Merrill, 2011). The precedents of legalization programs and tireless rescue efforts by the Italian Coast Guard, coupled with migrants’ desires for freedom and safety, continue to attract Africans northward (Haas 2011). Unaccompanied African youth, usually males who range in age from 13 to 18 and live in government-funded shelters until adulthood, constitute a growing share of arriving migrants, and find themselves coming of age amidst—and as the subject of—societal debate on African integration.

Camp Architecture Boys — West African youth migrants hang out at Umberto Primo Youth Migrant Camp in Syracuse, Sicily. Umberto Primo used to be the town’s public hospital, and was recently converted into a migrant camp that houses up to 60 youth.

In Syracuse, Sicily, there are approximately 500 unaccompanied youth migrants residing in 33 government-funded camps. The migrant youth—refugees from East Africa and asylum-seekers from sub-Saharan West Africa—inhabit these camps in an enduring state of waiting. They await their immigration documentation from local lawyers, national political decisions affecting asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants, and their eighteenth birthday when they can begin to work and move more freely in local society. Occasionally venturing into the historic center of Syracuse, the kids spend most days in their camps simply hanging out with each other and camp staff, attending language classes, checking their phones and social networks, and watching Italian-language television.

VII: West African Migrants at Italian Class Men from Senegal, Nigeria and The Gambia take an introductory Italian language course at the Confederazione Italiana Sindicati Lavoratori, a non-governmental organization (NGO) and labor union in Syracuse that assists local workers. The bi-weekly Italian language courses are offered by the NGO staff to facilitate migrants’ entrance into the workforce. Men make up the vast majority of the NGO’s students, given their representation in the larger population of migrants arriving from Africa.

The camps the youth inhabit, operated privately by Sicilian businesspeople, are vacant schools, hospitals, and office suites, newly reconfigured with beds to accommodate 15-60 migrants. These businesspeople, whose camp licenses are approved and renewed annually by the Sicilian government, are funded $37.50/day per migrant to rent a space with sufficient beds and furniture, pay themselves and camp employees, and provide three meals a day, toiletries, and clothing to migrants. The more camps are opened, and the more migrants housed within, the greater the profits these businesspeople/camp-owners earn. The European Union and Italian government patronizes Sicilian migrant camps in prodigious sums: Umberto Primo, a youth migrant camp which houses 45 unaccompanied minors in an ex-hospital, receives around $650,000 in funding annually. Umberto Primo is only one among hundreds of migrant camps in Sicily—only one among thousands in Italy. On one hand, this “migrant-industrial complex” revitalizes forgotten Sicilian spaces, provides well-paying jobs to underemployed Sicilian workers, and ensures vast influxes of European capital into Sicily—some of which inevitably takes a dark turn into Mafia-controlled money laundering operations. On the other hand, hundreds of unaccompanied youth are coming to adulthood in Syracuse; hundreds of thousands of migrants are living, working, and waiting in Sicily; and most hope to make the island a sustainable home amidst its worrisome veering toward xenophobic politics.

African Youth Migration to Italy: Precarious Postcolonialism from The Gambia through Libya

Introduction: Tracing Back Youth Migrant’s Paths from Italy to Africa

In the past three years, more than a half million African migrants have arrived on Italy’s southern shores, prompting intense societal debate on immigration and integration. Unaccompanied minors constitute a growing share of the arriving migrants: in 2016, more than 25,000 youth entered government-funded reception centers–the majority of which are in Sicily–commencing the protracted process obtaining documentation from a backlogged immigration system. In Italy, 5,000 of these minors have gone missing from their camps and fallen into clandestine labor operations, migrant smuggling rings, or homelessness. The majority who remain months or years in camps commonly have their allotted government funds embezzled by ubiquitous mafia operations. The recent surge of the far-right, xenophobic Northern League—whose stated objective is mass deportation–in 2018 parliamentary elections further exacerbates the enduring uncertainty of youth migrant lives.

Gambian youth migrants dance and play percussion at their camp in Syracuse, Sicily.

Unaccompanied minors from The Gambia arrived in Italy in significant numbers in recent years. In 2016, 3,257 Gambian youth were registered in the Italian immigration documentation system, the second largest group from any African nation-state (Zandonini 2017). To put this figure in context, 3,040 youth migrants arrived from Nigeria–the third largest group after The Gambia–but Nigeria has a population 190 million compared to The Gambia’s small population of 1.5 million. While both countries have experienced political instability, wealth inequality, and detrimental high-interest IMF loans following the British colonial exit from the region in the 1960’s, Gambian youth are emigrating to Italy at significantly higher rates than youth leaving Nigeria and all other African nations (Kebbeh 2014).

Nigerian and Gambian Migrants on the Terrace of Umberto Primo Camp — These boys, between 16 and 18 years old, endured months in immigrant detention camps in Libya. They refer to these camps as prison.

Sub-Saharan African youth migrants endure multi-faceted precarity in their 5,000-mile journeys across Africa. The European Union has been paying Niger’s army—in weaponry, surveillance technologies, and through funding of detention camps and troops–to shut down the trans-Sahara migration route, making the journey even more treacherous and clandestine (McCormick 2016). Economic privatization and restructuring in Niger (ranked 187/188 on the UN’s Human Development Index) by the IMF has done little to prevent would-be smugglers from entering the clandestine migration business in Niger, the final step for migrants between the sub-Sahara and Libya. Libya is even more dangerous for the youth migrants, who constitute a growing share of the estimated 700,000-1,000,000 migrants stranded in Libya (IOM 2017). The hundreds of millions of dollars from the European Union to curtail migration have resulted in the construction of prison-like detention camps where migrants are extorted, enslaved, beaten, and killed by free-wheeling, well-equipped Libyan militias (Miele 2016). From their homes near Africa’s west coast, through postcolonial Niger and Libya, and across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy, unaccompanied youth from The Gambia endure life-threatening precarity, much of it the direct result of European Union policies rife with coloniality.

III — I shot this image at “Freedom” Camp in Syracuse, a camp for migrants who are under 18 years old and arrive to Italy alone. When these migrants turn 18, they are moved to adult camps, so there is always discernible movement in and out of this camp. The Nigerian migrant in motion turned 18 soon after I took this photo and was moved to an adult migrant camp a few miles away. While “Freedom” Camp is a space that sees continuous movement of African migrant youth, there is also a sense of existential waiting there. Eighteen is the minimum working age in Syracuse, so these youth wait in “Freedom” Camp until they can move, work and feel like they can more fully participate in society.

In this post, I will first address the colonial histories of The Gambia and Libya, attempting to elucidate their conflict-ridden present states through a postcolonial perspective. I will demonstrate how the countries’ respective colonial histories have in part created the precarity experienced by migrants. Next, and principally, I will scrutinize the European Union’s architectural and tactical tools in Libya that are aimed at deterring migrants. I will argue that these tools produce and perpetuate severe human rights abuses and are strategically distanced from European soil in the EU’s callous effort to export migration control.

BusStopHangB4Hit — Youth migrants from the Gambia pose for a photo at a bus stop in Syracuse, Sicily.

Section I: Colonial Histories and Modern Instabilities in The Gambia and Libya

The Gambia: The Gambia became an official British colony in 1813, commencing a 140-year colonial presence in which the British ruled through existing administrative structures (Saho 2012: 8). While The Gambia had been violently coerced into the world market centuries before the British colony through the slave trade—which lasted over three centuries and ended six years prior to colonization—the British initiated architectural, agricultural, and financial projects that had lasting effects (Saho 2012). Colonists shaped the Gambian territory as a single-export economy, in which groundnuts were heavily produced and paid to the British as taxes (Saho 42: 2012). The British constructed their colonial urban center at Bathurst (modern-day Banjul), a strategic port located at the mouth of the River Gambia into the Atlantic Ocean. The colonists constructed government and civic architecture, into which an emerging Gambian elite gained exclusive entrance. This newly constructed architecture facilitated the British process of fabricating a neo-colonial local elite which would act in the political and economic interest of the British–a prevalent imperial technique discussed by Ann Stoler (Stoler 2016: 4) in Imperial Durabilities in Our Times.

Ibrahim, a 17-year-old migrant from the Gambia, had to leave home due to shortages of work opportunities. He hopes to find a sustainable job in Italy when he turns 18.

After The Gambia’s independence in 1963, the internal social divisions and single-export economy left by the British led to a violent coup d’etat in 1981 while then-Gambian president was in London for the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana (Sallah 1990: 633). The rebels defined their intentions as contesting imperialism and neo-colonialism, corruption, economic mismanagement, and unemployment (Sallah 1990). Internal problems worsened as The Gambia could not meet its $280 million dollars of debt to the IMF, nor the annual $15 million of service charges (Sallah 1990: 645). The Gambia was forced into liberalizing its public sector, enforcing a free market, reducing its governmental apparatus and social welfare projects, and increasing agricultural production–all of which exacerbated internal instabilities and inequalities. Subsequent coupsoccurred in 1994, 2006, 2009, and 2016 (Sallah 1990).With high fertility and unemployment rates, a third of the population below the poverty line, out-migration of doctors and nurses, and political instability, The Gambia’s colonial history and coercion into neoliberal globalization are creating a postcolonial present plagued by mass emigration.

Abdullah, an 18-year-old Gambian migrant, poses with my bass at Umberto Primo. He said there was no future for him in the Gambia.

Libya: With the support of the military, the Vatican, and the Bank of Rome, Italy invaded Libya in 1911, commencing a three-decade colonial project that would destabilize and divide a once-unified Libyan territory (Ryan 2012). To streamline their colonial takeover, Italy split Libya into four administrative provinces—regions once at peace with each other but later crippled by separateness. Italy appealed to Libya’s Muslim elites to exert their political control and proffered them ideals of progressive development in the realms of military, agriculture, communications, and oil exports. As colonially appointed leader Idris al-Sanusi’s political influence Libyan interior dwindled, Italian expansionist efforts grew desperately violent; public executions of dissidents or their imprisonment in detention camps became commonplace (Miele 2016). Unable to sustain their repression of the Libyan countryside in World War II, Italy halted its military occupation of Libya in 1941, leaving 110,000 Italian citizens stranded (Ryan 2012). In 1951, the U.N. named Sanusi monarch of the Kingdom of Libya, ensuring political alignment with the West, but deeply dissatisfying a vast sector of Libyan society opposed to neocolonial relations (Fasanotti 2017).

UPWalkB&W — Gambian youth migrants stroll outside their camp in Syracuse, Sicily.

General Muammar al-Gaddafi capitalized on these anti-colonial sentiments held by Libyans and overthrew Sanusi’s monarchy with a military coup d’état in 1969. Pointing to colonial atrocities and unfair petroleum extraction committed by Italians leading up to his leadership, Gaddafi sought to promote his government as pan-Islamist and rooted in the archaic socio-cultural values of the Libyan Sahara (Brambilla 2016). Initially envisioning an isolationist Libya interacting primarily with the Arabic world, Gaddafi began to deal with the EU as its member countries became increasingly desperate for Libyan oil and assistance in curtailing trans-Mediterranean migration to Italy (Brambilla 2016). Gaddafi oversaw the installment of the Greenstream pipeline—an agreement between the National Oil Corporation of Libya and Eni, the Italian oil giant—which carries natural gas 540 kilometers from Mellitah, Libya to Gela, Sicily (Brambilla 2016). Gaddafi also accepted $5 Billion from Italy through the “Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation,” which served as compensation and an official apology for colonial-era abuses, and guaranteed cooperation between the countries in halting the flow of sub-Saharan Africans through Libya to Italy (Brambilla 2016). These migration prevention efforts have become especially complex and violent following Gaddafi’s death in 2011 and Libya’s subsequent falling into a state of anarchical chaos and civil war. Two governments—one backed by the U.N. Security Council and the other by Libyan military elites—preside over the political terrain of Libya. Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj heads the U.N.-branded “Government of National Accord” in Tripoli, which oversees the western region of Libya and shares intimate political ties with the U.S. and its allies (Miele 2016). General Khalifa Haftar oversees the government of the eastern region, which operates a parallel parliament and army. Aided by a postcolonial perspective, this pervasive sense of regional difference–a principal factor shaping Libya’s modern insecurity and lived precarity of migrants within–can be contextualized by colonial-era politics of difference.

Abu Bakr, a 17-year-old Gambian migrant who spent four months in a Libyan prison.

Section II: The Architecture and Tactics of (Gambian) Migrant Deterrence in Libya

European Union policies aimed at migrant deterrence have grown increasingly desperate as 181,000 African migrants crossed the Mediterranean Sea and arrived in Italy in 2016 (Tinti 2017). While the half a million migrants who have arrived in Italy in the past three years are highly visible new residents of Europe, the violent apparatus of migration prevention in Africa–funded by European taxpayers—is ostensibly inconspicuous in Europe. The European Union is strategically neglecting to address the egregious human rights abuses perpetrated in the architecture of migration prevention that the EU itself funds, staffs, and equips. The prison-like detention centers in Libya may be keeping up to one million migrants from attempting to traverse the Mediterranean; as the European Union is advocating for prevention and deterrence of migration, they have elected selective absence of intervention in Libya (IOM 2017). The EU has effectively outsourced the brutality of strict border control to corrupt Libyan militants who answer only to themselves.

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Ethnographic Case Study: Sayou Fatti

Sayou Fatti is a 17-year-old unaccompanied minor from The Gambia. It took him six months to make the 5,000-mile journey from his home in Banjul to Sicily. While roaming the streets after he arrived in Tripoli, Libya from Agadez, Niger, Sayou was captured by Libyan police officers along with four other Gambian youth migrants. Sayou was placed in what he calls “prison,” or an immigrant detention center, and remained there for four months. While this detention camp is likely funded by the European Union and theoretically under its human rights guidelines, Sayou recounts the immense violence running rampant inside these camps. He claims that if a migrant or their family back home do not have money, they will surely die. This is because Libyan guards will either make the migrants themselves pay them the rest of the money they have or call their families and make them pay for their release. Sayou claims to have seen Libyan guards torturing migrants through beatings, electrocutions, and oil burnings for days, months, or years until the migrants or their families have the funds to pay for their release. Migrants commonly die from these kinds of torture.

Sayou estimates that his warehouse-like prison camp housed around 500 migrants, including pregnant women and young children. There would be upwards of 100 people confined to one cement room—a container as Sayou referred to it–without even the space for everyone to lay down at the same time. Sayou says the prison bathrooms were the most disgusting sight and smell of his life. The imprisoned migrants would each receive a piece of bread a day, and sometimes a tomato or a cup of water for dinner. The guards would enslave Sayou and his Gambian friends for long days of work outside their camps on construction sites and the guards would take payouts from contractors for the migrant labor. Sayou claims to be lucky for only having to spend four months in prison, as other migrants spend years in confinement enduring torture, and many die. After his parents wire transferred their life savings and donations from family and friends (likely a total of $5,000-$7,000) to the Libyan militants for Sayou’s release from prison, he was handed off to boat-operating smugglers. The boat operators, who crowd over 100 migrants on faulty boats and send them floating toward Europe, work in clandestine conjunction with Libyan security forces. Sayou was at sea for three days on a heavily overcrowded dinghy with migrant men, women and children before the Italian Coast Guard rescued them and dropped them off in a reception center in Sicily. Sayou is currently living at Umberto Primo Youth Migrant Camp in Syracuse, Sicily and will stay until he turns 18 at which point he may receive immigration documentation or be moved to an adult camp. His fate, however, is still utterly uncertain.

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Gambian youth migrants, who each spent multiple months in Libyan prison, enjoy Italian sandwiches on Mount Etna, Sicily.

The bilateral agreements to halt migration to Europe involve the externalization of European borders to Libya’s northern shores (Palladino 2014). In the past decade, Libya has received $160 million to build and maintain migrant detention camps headed by free-wheeling militias or corrupt police officers, who may loosely identify with the Interior Ministry but ostensibly operate independently (Tinti 2017). These varied security forces receive training, surveillance technology, and military equipment from European Union funds, and go to extreme lengths to capture and detain sub-Saharan Africans on land or at sea (Anderson 2012). These migrants are usually held for ransom—routinely beaten, deprived of food and water, enslaved, or killed—until their loved ones back home pay a “liberation fee” (Anderson 2012). The militias who capture and extort migrants may be completely unaffiliated with any governmental or military body: they simply kidnap migrants, confine them to a cement room with dozens of other migrants, and torture them (often while they call families so they hear the migrants’ suffering) until the migrants’ families pay around $5,000 for their release (Naib 2018). Migrant families commonly drain life savings, reach out to extended family and friends, and work multiple jobs to pay for the life and release of their migrating family member, who could very well end up being recaptured and forced into this same process. The Libyan security forces—rogue or government-sanctioned—that oversee these detention camps reap great profits amidst this chaos: massive payouts from the EU in cash and military technology, substantial wire transfers from migrants’ families across sub-Saharan Africa, and from the sale of migrants’ labor on the open market (Anderson 2012).

Libya Acting III-Alfa — West African youth migrants act out a scene from the Libyan prison camps: forced labor and threats of torture.

Despite their self-declared “humane” approach to managing migration, the European Union is funding the architecture, weaponry, and surveillance technologies that lead to the torture, extortion, and enslavement of migrants in Libya. The process of externalizing European borders to Libya is implemented as a means distanciation of the EU from the border control project. The exportation of border control to Libya is tragically beneficial to the EU: this system functions to covertly curtail inflows of migrants while upholding the moral legitimacy of the EU’s support of refugees and humanitarianism.

Libya Acting V-Amadou — Gambian youth migrants act out a scene from the Libyan prison camps in Syracuse, Sicily.

Eyal Weizman notes that the processes of political distanciation surrounding issues of bordering commonly result in radical increases in violence (Weizman 2007). In the case of the EU and Libya, this distanciation still entails direct involvement by the EU through funding, architectural and tactical planning, and military and surveillance technologies. The EU is not involved, however, in the application of these technologies, and has selected not to intervene in enforcing the technologies’ ethical application. The application of migration deterrence technologies is diffused among such a confounding array of state and non-state actors in Libya–who operate freely of any (inter)national laws—that tracing and addressing instances of violence is tragically unfeasible. In their detention-camp migration deterrence model in Libya, the EU successfully reduces the influx of African migrants, while retaining plausible deniability against the torture and killing of migrants in EU-funded spaces and carried out EU-funded and -equipped Libyan forces (who, it’s worth remembering, reap great profits by extorting the migrants). If politically-right-veering Italy ever resorts to mass deportation, this detention camp architecture and military equipment in Libya can be activated and expanded to receive the hundreds of thousands of migrants being sent home.

Libya Acting I — Alpha (below), a 17-year old migrant from Sierra Leone, spent three years in a Libyan prison camp until his parents could pay his kidnappers’ liberation price. He likely endured beatings acted out here.

Through financial and political coercion to become the southern frontier of Europe and tasked with its migration control, Libya fallen into a state of anarchy where migrants are attacked for profit, and the pure chaos of the situation—and lack of media coverage—obfuscates accountability. Mohammad Beshr, a leading general of Libya’s anti-illegal immigration police, was quoted, “Are they [the European Union] looking for a real solution to this humanitarian crisis? Or do they just want us to be the place where migrants are stopped?” (Tinti 2017). The EU is shortsightedly interested in one thing: to prevent migrants from showing up on Italy’s shores. The EU has so far strategically neglected to address the violence perpetrated—albeit at an untraceable distance–within their self-designed and -maintained migration deterrence system in Libya.

Chilling @ Nettuno — Gambian and Nigerian youth migrants hanging at a jam session in Syracuse, Sicily. They are happy to have escaped Libya and hope to find work and happiness in Europe.

Conclusion: Raising Migrant Voices

In this paper, I have explored the colonial histories of The Gambia and Libya, attempting to contextualize the countries’ current instabilities through postcolonial historicism. I have attempted to expose the tragic succession between violent colonialism, extractive neoliberalism, and disordered migration. In The Gambia, the British colonists harmfully manufactured an elite African class and a single-export economy, both of which precipitated immense wealth inequality, resource shortages, and political instability. Subsequent privatization, debt generation, and political coups in the neoliberal post-colony are provoking the chaotic exodus of Gambian (medical) professionals and economic migrants. In Libya, processes Italian colonialism generated a crippling sense of internal difference and multi-faceted political and economic troubles. The continued funding and equipping of Libyan immigrant detention camps and immigration security personnel—architecture and tactics rife with colonial politics—produces and legitimates the precarity endured by migrants passing through.

Soccer UPo — Youth migrants play soccer outside their camp in Syracuse, Sicily.

The migrants caught amidst these violent phenomena, whose voices are systemically silenced, are tragically the only ones who will speak out against the deplorable conditions of the immigrant detention camps in Libya. The European Union—which effectively controls the outflow of information about its immigration policies–will not collectively bring this issue to light as the violence perpetrated through migration deterrence in Libya conflicts with the EU’s supposed liberal, humanist, universal political values. Similarly, Libya is invested in hiding the information on its horrifying initiatives to curtail migration. Serving as the EU’s southern border brings about favorable political relations and massive payouts from Europe, and smuggling, kidnapping, and extorting migrants is proving immensely profitable for a vast amounts of Libyans.

Lamin Light @ Nettuno — Lamin (right), a 17-year-old migrant from the Gambia, dances to his friends’ music at a jam session on Ortigia Island in Syracuse.

For these reasons it is of the utmost importance to raise the voices of migrants caught amidst these tragic phenomena of detention camps, torture, extortion in Libya. The systems which hold power are actively invested in silencing migrants’ precarious histories–powerful systems which publicize themselves as carrying out humane, objective, and necessary migration control. Only a unification and dissemination of migrant voices can contest these reprehensible circumstances. It is our job as anthropologists, artists, and activists alike to aid migrants in collectivizing and circulating their potent minority histories.

Social, Political, Historical Context of Unaccompanied African Youth Migration to Sicily

African migration to Europe has increased since the late 1980s, and has intensified in the last decade (Haas 2008). More than 680 million Africans, who constitute one-third of the world’s refugees, live under conditions of extreme poverty and insecurity—conditions most commonly alleviated by northward migration. Fleeing as political refugees and refugees of the global economy, more than a half million African migrants have reached Italy’s southern shores in the past three years. However, many do not complete their journeys to Italy: in 2016, more than 5,000 people died on the 300-mile Mediterranean crossing from the northern Libyan coast, and others were stranded in Libya by exploitive smugglers, corrupt police officers, xenophobic citizens, and forced detention in prison-like immigrant camps. Despite the obstacles they face on their cross-continental journeys, a record 180,000 African migrants arrived in Italy in 2016, prompting an intense societal debate on immigration.

Africans from sub-Saharan countries, most notably Nigeria, Senegal, and The Gambia, make up the largest share of migrants arriving to Italy. Due to the sheer distance, widespread political corruption, and extensive financial obligations that lie between migrants departing from the North African coast, sub-Saharan Africans’ journeys northward are commonly fragmented and circular. In the last decade, Libya has emerged as the key point of departure for African migrants making the 300-mile crossing across the Mediterranean to Italy. Around 1.5 million sub-Saharan African migrants live in Libya, where many fall victim to the poor living conditions and abuse within immigrant detention camps, institutionalized racism that pervades the police force and Libyan citizenry, and immigration raids on private residences. Despite political instability in Libya, sub-Saharan migrants continue to form what have come to be transit communities across the northern coast, fueling an exploitive migrant smuggling industry with Italy as the preferred destination.

Upon arrival in Italy, only half of African migrants are granted immigration status, either as refugees or temporary visa holders. A significant portion of the migrants denied immigration status and those whose visas expire remain in Italy as undocumented workers, teaming with Africans who have legal status to provide a flexible, low-wage workforce. Migrants commonly work in informal and underground sectors of the economy, and contribute to the industrial society of the northern Italy and the agricultural society of the south. Despite working for reduced wages in sometimes dangerous conditions, African migrants are a critical part of the Italian economy’s low-wage labor force. In addition to oppressive workplace experiences, African migrants are confronted with issues of racial discrimination due to their undocumented status. Not only are African migrants scapegoated as a major cause of native Italians’ high unemployment rate in Italian political discourse, but they endure significant physical abuse: racially charged homicides and beatings of migrants have been reported to police, and forceful deportations by the Italian carabinieri (military police) are commonplace. Despite Italy’s economic dependence on low-wage migrant labor and historical interconnectedness with Africa, Italian politicians have responded to the migrant crisis with contradictory policies of closed borders, militarized immigration enforcement, forced deportation, funding of detention camps, surveillance technology, and an armed immigration force in Libya. Italy’s free-market approach to economic policy directly contradicts their restrictionist approach to immigration policy.

The Italian government anticipates spending $3 billion on managing immigration in 2017. With 176,000 asylum seekers living in migrant shelters and a history of legalization programs due to immigration case backlogs, the Italian legal system has been under prolonged pressure to accommodate newly arrived migrants. While an anti-immigrant rhetoric of militarized borders and Eurocentric nationalism has received traction in Italy’s sociopolitical discourse of the past decade, various NGOs, religious organizations, and vast sectors of the Italian citizenry have welcomed African migrants. The precedents of legalization programs and tireless rescue efforts by the Italian Coast Guard, coupled with migrants’ desires for freedom and safety, continue to attract Africans northward. Unaccompanied African youth, usually males who range in age from 13 to 18 and live in government-funded shelters until adulthood, constitute a growing share of arriving migrants, and find themselves coming of age amidst—and as the subject of—societal debate on African integration.

A Gambian migrant juggles a soccer ball at Umberto Primo.

An unprecedented number of unaccompanied minors travelled to Italy during the first six months of 2016. According to a UNICEF report. Out of 7,567 minors arriving in Italy, 7,009 of them were unaccompanied. Of these, 3,724 arrived from Egypt, Gambia, Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire.

In Syracuse, Sicily, there are approximately 500 unaccompanied youth migrants residing in 33 government-funded camps. The migrant youth—refugees from East Africa and asylum-seekers from sub-Saharan West Africa—inhabit these camps in an enduring state of waiting. They await their immigration documentation from local lawyers, national political decisions affecting asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants, and their eighteenth birthday when they can begin to work and move more freely in local society. Occasionally venturing into the historic center of Syracuse, the kids spend most days in their camps simply hanging out with each other and camp staff, checking their phones and social networks, and watching Italian-language television.

Gambian boys dance during an afternoon jam session at Umberto Primo.

African Migration to Sicily: Photographs of Youth Migrants in Spaces of Refuge

Images and Text By: Alex Polydoroff

Refugees of the Neoliberal Global Economy, Unaccompanied African Minors Are Leaving for Europe in Search of a Brighter Future.

In 2016, more than one million refugees crossed the Mediterranean from Africa and reached European soil. Of those migrants, approximately 180,000 took the route across the central Mediterranean that connects Tripoli, Libya with southern Italy. Migrants who take this route pay Libyan smugglers for passage on rickety wooden boats hoping to be rescued by the Italian Coast Guard when they reach international waters. While the dramatic rescues and tragic loss of life at sea make for compelling news coverage, the experiences of migrants are largely overlooked as they make their way in a new land amidst an unfamiliar language, culture and societal framework.

Unaccompanied youth migrants constitute a growing share of the 10,000-plus Africans who land on Italy’s southern shores each month. After the 300-mile journey across the Mediterranean, they are placed in government- or church-funded shelters until they turn 18 and are granted—or denied—immigration status. Unaccompanied youth make up around 20 percent of the 176,000 asylum-seekers living in Italian shelters.

This year, the Italian government predicts spending $3 billion on managing these asylum-seekers: providing them with shelter and food, expanding the legal system to hear their cases, rescuing new migrants at sea, and strengthening border security measures. Despite intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric in Italian political discourse, newly arrived African youth migrants continue to find spaces of refuge: from classrooms at NGOs to kitchens in Sicilian homes.

This series of photographs—both bleak and hopeful—sheds light on the lived experiences of unaccompanied African youth finding refuge in Sicily amidst a global migratory crisis. I captured these images during my two-month internship with the Intercultural Studies Center (Director: Ramzi Harrabi, harrabir@gmail.com), a field school in Syracuse, Sicily that provides educational, cultural and social support services to newly arrived migrants.

I: Nigerian Youth Migrants at Camp A group of young migrants from Nigeria spend a weekday in the bedroom of their camp, a six-bedroom apartment that houses 15 unaccompanied West African youth. There are around 20 small-scale youth migrant camps in Syracuse, Sicily which house migrants of similar geographical and linguistic backgrounds. The migrants pictured speak English, and the other rooms in the camp are inhabited by either French- or English-speaking West Africans. Residents of this camp spend the vast majority of their days in the camp surfing the internet and listening to music, or in the common room socializing, playing games, cooking and eating.

II: Umberto Primo Refugee Camp One of the largest adult refugee camps in Syracuse, Umberto Primo houses 60 migrants from diverse cultural backgrounds. Pictured are asylum seekers from Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal and The Gambia. Joshua, the Nigerian youth in the foreground who is at the camp for an acting class, will move into Umberto Primo when he turns 18.

III: Movement at “Freedom” Camp I shot this image at “Freedom” Camp in Syracuse, a camp for migrants who are under 18 years old and arrive to Italy alone. When these migrants turn 18, they are moved to adult camps, so there is always discernible movement in and out of this camp. The Nigerian migrant in motion turned 18 soon after I took this photo and was moved to an adult migrant camp a few miles away. While “Freedom” Camp is a space that sees continuous movement of African migrant youth, there is also a sense of existential waiting there. Eighteen is the minimum working age in Syracuse, so these youth wait in “Freedom” Camp until they can move, work and feel like they can more fully participate in society.

IV: Sicilian Psychiatrist and Gambian Youth Migrants Luigi, an child psychiatrist from Catania, Sicily, visits a youth camp in Syracuse and counsels two Gambian migrants about gaining sustainable employment, immersing themselves into Italian culture and maintaining a positive attitude in their new home.

V: Portrait of a Young Man David was only 17 years old when I shot this photo. He told me Libya was the worst place on Earth, and that Libyan police officers told him, “You will die if you step on that boat.” David lived for nine months in “Freedom” Camp before moving to an adult camp in downtown Syracuse.

VI: Moroccan Boy at Workers’ Rights March Amine, a 17-year-old migrant from Rabat, Morocco, attends a demonstration in Palermo organized by the Sicilian branch of the Italian NGO Confederazione Italiana Sindicati Lavoratori, which advocates for the equitable integration of migrant workers into the Italian workforce. More than 200,000 African migrants participate in the documented Sicilian workforce, and many more work as undocumented laborers.

VII: West African Migrants at Italian Class Men from Senegal, Nigeria and The Gambia take an introductory Italian language course at the Confederazione Italiana Sindicati Lavoratori, a non-governmental organization (NGO) and labor union in Syracuse that assists local workers. The bi-weekly Italian language courses are offered by the NGO staff to facilitate migrants’ entrance into the workforce. Men make up the vast majority of the NGO’s students, given their representation in the larger population of migrants arriving from Africa.

VIII: Portrait of Ramzi in Migrant Boat Tunisian artist, intercultural mediator and leader of the Syracuse Council for Immigrants, Ramzi Harrabi, who is also the director of the Intercultural Studies Center, smiles for a portrait in the hull of a Libyan fishing boat that successfully crossed the Mediterranean with around 50 migrants. Ramzi visits abandoned migrant boats sites like this one in Avola, Sicily to collect possessions that migrants leave behind as they are rescued. He displays the items alongside his own paintings and other migrant artwork for an ongoing art exhibition Uprooted: Raising Migrant Voices, housed in a 14th-century church in the historic center of Syracuse.

IX: Youth Volunteers Three West African boys paint benches on the terrace of the Intercultural Studies Center. At the ISC, these youth migrants take language and classes, participate in field trips and get to know visiting students of the field school.

X: “Freedom” Camp Balcony Two young Nigerian migrants pass the day on the balcony of their room at “Freedom” Camp, in a sense envisioning their futures in their new homeland.