by The first French phrases Sara*, a teenager from Nigeria, learned when she arrived in the city of Bouaké were: “So baiser” and “c’est douce”, initiate sexual activity and then fake pleasure during the act.
Her mother’s best friend’s daughter told her she was going to the Ivorian city to sell body lotion. Instead, she was unknowingly sent to a brothel in the city every night by an elderly woman – “madam” – who paid for her travel.
Sara says she is paid between 3,000–5,000 Central African Francs (CFA) – between £3.90 and £6.50 – for each man she sleeps with for a “short time” and 25,000 CFA for an overnight stay. The money is divided three ways between the brewery, Sara and the lady.
Three months after arriving in Bouaké, Sara is still waiting to earn enough to pay off a 2.5m CFA debt to the woman for travel, clothing, sustenance and bribes paid to agents, and return to Nigeria.
“she [the madam] I took my SIM card from Nigeria when I came here, so I couldn’t call my family at home for a month,” says Sara, who now goes by the name Sugar and denied age give her a right.
Trafficking is a major crisis in Nigeria, forcing between 750,000 and 1 million people into begging, prostitution, domestic servitude, armed conflict and labor exploitation.
Some of these are being trafficked out of the country. Sara is one of thousands of female Nigerian sex workers spread across the towns and cities of the Ivory Coast, according to Nigerian officials who spoke to the Guardian.
Agents who traffic mostly girls and women who are taking advantage of Nigeria’s record unemployment and work under the guise of offering better paid work. Ten years ago, the Nigerian naira was three times the value of the CFA; today N1 is equal to 0.38 CFA.
Due to its stable economy and the fact that prostitution is legal, although sex is not sought, the Ivory Coast has become an attractive destination for sex work. Some victims go on to become madams who find other girls, to recover money they have spent and regain their own freedom.
Across Nigeria, recruitment agents go into rural communities or post in jobseeker groups on Facebook, talking vaguely about high-reward strays and sending photos of girls and women they’ve recruited to well-known madams.
They coach recruits to tell immigration officials, who sometimes know what’s going on or don’t care enough to do a proper investigation, that they’re crossing the border to go to the a nearby market in Cotonou, an auxiliary port for Nigeria.
Many agent recruits, known to be relatives, say they don’t accompany them on the trip but pass their numbers on to other agents who guide them across porous borders. With no means of identification, they gain access by paying bribes of 1,000-2,000 CFA, sometimes paid in advance by agents to the driver.
Unlike Sara, most of the sex workers trafficked from Nigeria live deep in the Ivorian jungle, far from the eyes of the law.
In Tengréla, 7km (4.3 miles) from the Malian border, there are several miners’ artisanal camps that men from Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea use to earn money before returning to their countries. Nigerian sex workers between the ages of 14 and 38 also stay here in small settlements of makeshift tents made of black nylon held together with sticks.
At the maquis – as the small farms are called in Francophone Africa – owned by madams in the settlements, the two groups of immigrants fraternize, first publicly and then privately.
“It’s a strange belief in some of the gold mining regions that sex helps you find gold, which in turn [fuels] demand for sex trafficking,” says one former Nigerian official who was previously stationed in the Ivory Coast. “The cocoa [production] Communities also have high sexual demands to keep the men happy.”
The Guardian spoke to at least two dozen girls and women in the forest, some as young as 15. Some said they had been starved for refusing to work or beaten by angry patrons. Many barely speak French and say they don’t know the country well enough to escape.
Nigerian officials who have successfully repatriated girls caught as sex workers say they have seen girls as young as 13 inside.
“Many of the girls we found claim to be over 18 and doing sex work of their own free will, but most of the time from their physical appearance, you know they’re not,” says former Nigerian official. “Tests to determine their age, like scanning a wisdom tooth, cost about 50,000 CFA so you have to talk to them, but if they are persuasive, you let them go back.”
Ivory Coast has a law that criminalizes trafficking, but it is barely enforced, and the country has been criticized by the US state department for its failure to tackle the problem.
Related: A cycle of debt, sex work and cocaine: the women of west Africa caught up in Europe’s drug trail
The escadron, a notorious Ivorian police unit, has burned down some of the settlements where traffickers operate, but new ones are emerging, partly because security personnel entering the jungle allegedly demand weekly bribes of 1,000 -2,000 CFA for each trafficked girl.
Adekoye Vincent, the spokesperson for the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (Naptip) in Nigeria, declined to comment when asked about girls caught as sex workers in Ivory Coast. The Ivorian national police and gendarmerie did not respond to requests for comment.
For Sara, the wait to return home continues. She was in junior secondary school in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, before dropping out to travel to the Ivory Coast. These days she is learning to trade condoms for other items.
“I don’t like the work I’m doing here. I miss my people back home,” she says.
* Names have been changed
