Like everything that concerns us, even blessings are made of dust, or rather wind dust. In recent days, in Niamey the capital and its surroundings, they have returned. The wind that brings the desert dust that cools at night and in the early morning. The afternoons are sunny but not excessively because we are in the Harmattan season, an English term adapted from local languages. The wind brings blessings where one least expects them, in the Sahel which is unpredictable by its nature.
Blessed are the children of Makalondi, a town about a hundred kilometers from the capital. The other day they went to school and found the schools closed because they had no teachers. They were threatened with the same fate as one of their colleagues, who was kidnapped and killed by armed men who claimed to know the homes of all the teachers. Yet the military is stationed in this city and finds it difficult at night to ensure protection for the thousands of displaced citizens in the area.
The other blessing happened yesterday, Friday, in the Christian cemetery of the capital, around an iron cross planted in the ground. On the iron tablet welded to the small cross is the name of Godwin Monday, Nigerian. Born on Monday 46 years ago, he returned to the promised land that he sought in Benin, Ethiopia, Kenya, Dubai of the United Arab Emirates and finally the Niger of Niamey where the tumor in his face prevailed with the treatments that he he was following. God would have won.
They are then blessed, clandestinely or better to say ‘illegally’, the migrants who have explored the infinite possibilities of traveling in the Sahel. The military regime in power since the coup d’état last July has decided to repeal the law on migration, made in the image and likeness of the European Union. This law, since 2015, had chosen to ‘criminalize’ those who collaborated in the migratory adventure to better deny migrants’ rights to mobility.
Not rarely does this blessing arrive late. In the central Mediterranean, over 2,800 migrants died at sea in 2023 and in the desert no one was able to go and investigate because everything was militarised, especially the tracks known to the drivers. In the meantime, the Italian republic convenes the African states, assuring them that, inspired by Enrico Mattei, inventor of ENI, the project to outsource the detention and controls of migrants will be on the Italian model of Albania.
The final blessing in the Sahel, however, is of course for the sand. It is the best metaphor and image of the people. She, the sand, is patient, resistant, silent, moans, persists, adapts to the regimes that pass through her and covers everything, in the end, with a blanket that time sediments. As is known, heaven and earth will pass away but she, the sand, will remain as the only witness of the people blessed by the wind of hope.
