The age of 43, Aboubacar Traore is trying once again to kickstart his life after three failed attempts at migration. Poor and adrift, the stonemason and former imam is back in his native Mali — a tale painfully common in a region where dreams of a better life abroad so often turn sour. In his latest migration attempt, Traore had been working in Algeria. But police caught him in a sweep in late 2019 and dumped him on the Niger border. He remained in the capital Niamey for several months before the UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) returned him to Bamako.
The agency placed him in a centre filled with other failed migrants. Most were young men in their early twenties and keen to try their chances again, desperate to escape the clutches of poverty in the Sahel. Traore, too, knew that misery lay in wait for him if he returned home. But, for him, there would be no further attempt at Eldorado. “It’s over,” he told AFP.
Shunned
Traore was born in the village of Kakolo Mountan in southwestern Mali, a relatively peaceful area of the vast country which nonetheless produces many migrants. It was from here that Traore first set off in 1998, for Spain’s enclave of Ceuta — a European foothold on North Africa. But he came home again that year after failing to get across the fence. The village elders requested he become an imam, because he had had a religious education, and to teach in the local Koranic school. But over the years Traore watched his students leave one by one. “The rain doesn’t fall as it used to and the 4G generation doesn’t want to stay and farm,” he says, referring to young people.
Nowadays the economic lifeblood of the village is remittances from abroad. Traore, with no relatives abroad and a family to support, decided to try his luck in Algeria in 2015 — judging himself too old to go to Europe. He returned the same year for reasons that are unclear. His third move, back to Algeria in 2017 where he found steady work, ended with his 2019 arrest in Tamanrasset, a dusty town deep in the Sahara. Traore once again faced returning home empty-handed. “Once you come back, you feel guilty, you’re still the one who used to send the money and who doesn’t send it any more,” says Amadou Coulibaly of the Association of Expelled Malians. “There is talk of voluntary repatriation, but no one wants to go back and then be shunned”.
‘I can’t stay here’
In July, months after his “voluntary” return to Mali, Traore finally headed back to his village from the capital Bamako. He bought some gifts and food in Bamako and boarded a bus to Kakolo Mountan. Wearing a smart short-sleeved shirt, he had shaved his greying beard for the occasion. “Three years isn’t three days,” he said, referring to his time abroad.
After a bumpy 12-hour journey through the brush, Traore reached his village, where he appeared guarded. He spent the night with his family. The next morning, the first stop was to visit the village chief, Site Fofana, who expounded on the value of migration. “We survive thanks to the emigrants — all the buildings were built by them,” the chief said, listing the clinic, the two schools, water tank and well on which the community depends.
Traore listened but said little, before explaining how he was expelled. He knew that he could no longer remain in the village. “They think I came here to become an imam again, but it’s over, I can’t stay here, I’m going to start (a new life) in Bamako,” he said. Traore left the village after a few days, renting a small room in the capital with his wife and son David. When AFP interviewed him again in October, he was downbeat. His search for work as a mason was going badly. Only construction site had called him in, and that was just because a sympathetic friend had pulled some strings. “It’s going to be tough, I don’t know anyone here,” Traore says, before imploring Allah to help him find work. “That’s all I want.”
