CONAKRY: With a determined look on her weathered face, Safiatou Bah has made up her mind: she will leave her young children behind and migrate to Europe on a new and perilous ocean route from Guinea.
Thousands of young Guineans have attempted to migrate via the Atlantic in recent years, a flow so severe that authorities in the junta-led country have dubbed it a “haemorrhage.”
Lacking both economic opportunity and any hope of change, the migrants are leaving from their own shores after neighboring Senegal and Mauritania and Morocco further north, beefed up controls.
However the longer voyage which begins farther south only increases the number of dangers they will face.
Most west Africans traveling the Atlantic route embark in pirogue canoes toward Spain’s Canary Islands off northwest Africa, the jumping off point for their continued journey to the European continent.
At least eight boats have left Guinea since the spring, each carrying more than a hundred people, according to migration NGOs.
Bah, 33, initially left her village for the capital Conakry where she tried to do NGO work that didn’t pan out. In the end, she started a fruit stand to make money to migrate.
Her husband, whom she was married off to at age 18, is now 75 and can no longer provide for the family.
“I’m the one raising my children alone,” Bah told AFP.
Her decision to leave her three children, age 11 to six months, with her mother is firm: “I’m suffering here. You struggle and there’s no one to support you,” she said.
- New route -
Due to increasingly restrictive visa policies in Europe, migrants say their only option is illegal migration.
The Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras, which monitors migration, confirmed the existence of the new Guinean route to AFP as well as the significant number of people taking it.
Guineans are now the leading African nationality — and the third largest group after Afghans and Ukrainians — to apply for asylum in France, the country’s former colonial ruler.
In 2024 a total of 11,336 asylum applications were made, according to France’s refugee agency OFPRA.
Mamadou Saitiou Barry, managing director of the Directorate General for Guineans Living Abroad, confirmed that “several thousand” Guineans embark on the journey each year.
“We are aware of this, because it is us who lose our sons and these young people,” he said.
Meanwhile Guinea has increased policing measures in an attempt to staunch the outward flow.
Elhadj Mohamed Diallo, director of the Guinean Organization for the Fight Against Irregular Migration (OGLMI), deals with these young people on a daily basis.
“When you tell them that the route is dangerous, most reply: ‘Where we are, we are actually already dead,’” he said, adding that they believe it is better to try.
Even among those with an education, finding a job can be an impossible task.
- Scarring journey -
Abdourahim Diallo, a young father of two, cannot find work and has lost all hope in his country, much like Bah.
AFP met him at a gathering of dozens of young people in Conakry’s Yattaya T6 suburb, in an unelectrified shack being used as a cafe.
“Here we have more than 150 young people and none of them has a job,” Ibrahima Balde, head of a neighborhood young people’s association, told AFP.
Diallo, who said he has “a lot of family who are counting on me,” is preparing to migrate for the fourth time.
His shocking prior attempts, which left him with physical — and no doubt psychological — scars, span 2011 to 2024, leading him through Mali, Algeria and Morocco.
He spent five years surviving in Morocco’s Gourougou forest, which overlooks the Spanish enclave of Melilla.
Thousands of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa seeking to enter the enclave eke out a living in the surrounding woods.
To reach the area and escape authorities, one must jump from a moving train, according to Diallo, who said “some break their feet while others die.”
In December 2011 he injured his head after attempting, along with hundreds of others, to scale the Melilla fence.
Another time he nearly died when his pirogue capsized off Morocco.
Overall, he said, he has lost count of the arrests in Morocco, extortion by various police, and robberies along the way.
Next door to the cafe, 30-year-old Mamadou Yero Diallo is bent under the hood of a car in his garage.
“We manage, we earn a little for food, nothing more,” he said, insisting he too will attempt the Atlantic route later this year.
As for Bah, she became less confident in her upcoming journey when speaking about conversations she has had with those who returned.
“There are so many risks,” she said, adding that she has heard of migrant women being raped.
“But I’m still going,” she said. “I ask God to protect me.”
