Ciao Ousmane

The Hidden Exploitation of Italy's Migrant Workers

Hsiao-Hung Pai

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781787384699
• eBook ISBN: 9781787386686
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In 2013 Ousmane Diallo, a 26-year-old Senegalese olive harvester, lost his life when a gas canister exploded in a Sicilian field. As an African migrant, he was little mourned. But though they’ve been deliberately forgotten, neither the events of Ousmane’s life nor his tragic death are uncommon. 

Across Italy today, African workers toil in the fields that make it one of Europe’s largest exporters of fruit and vegetables. Having fled home countries devastated by colonialism and global capitalism, those who survive the journey across the Mediterranean arrive on European shores only to find themselves systematically segregated and exploited. They have been subject to anti-migrant policies over decades, from administrations across the political spectrum. Trapped in a chokehold of subhuman living and working conditions, they are the dehumanised Other, invisible by design—the people hidden behind foods and goods branded ‘Made in Italy’.

Ciao Ousmane is the story of this subordinated class. Through the lives and stories of Italy’s migrant workers, Hsiao-Hung Pai exposes the open secret of how state and society create ‘necessary outcasts’. This is a bitter, frank and moving tale of racial capitalism, against which workers constantly find new ways to organise and fight back.

1

OLIVE COUNTRY

By the time of Ousmane’s death, migrant workers had been toiling in the fields of the region for over fifteen years. Whatever their migratory status, they had one common goal: to survive and work to support their families back home.

Local people in Campobello had seen African men and young boys walking around town for a long time, but a conversation with them was rare. Most people preferred to keep their distance from ‘the blacks.’ Those who had any contact with the Africans—in shops when topping up mobile phone credit, or when buying food in a supermarket—would always keep interactions to a minimum. The Africans were kept out of sight in their encampment on the edge of town. In this way, the town had created an enclave for African workers—economically, socially, culturally and emotionally.

What was visible was the power relationship between the town and the ghetto. As Loïc Wacquant would put it:¹ it had always been ‘us’ (the townspeople) setting the rules and making plans for ‘them’ (the ‘foreigners,’ ‘the blacks’). The power relationship meant that the ghetto was distinguished from the town by its desolation, as in Wacquant’s reaction when he first saw the ghettoes of Chicago: ‘I remember thinking: “It’s like Beirut. Or Dresden after the war.”’²

Local residents in Campobello had little knowledge about what went on in the ghetto and what happened to the African workers in the fields. Even the day after Ousmane died, the townsfolk did not know who he was. As it turned out, Ousmane was not quite a clandestine, as he was described. He had received his documents and had been given the disused farmhouse to sleep in by the farmer for whom he was working. Derelict as it was, a bed in that building was a step up from sleeping out in the fields. It was the ‘boss’s house’, as his co-workers called it. Ousmane died on the premises of the farm and was therefore the responsibility of the farmer, the boss.

Even after his death, townsfolk in Campobello did nothing for Ousmane. It was the Senegalese from other parts of Sicily who travelled to Campobello to show solidarity, organising an angry protest against the conditions that had caused his death. Activists from the Palermo Anti-Racist Forum arranged to return Ousmane’s body to his family in Senegal. Other associations and NGOs from across the province of Trapani also came to Campobello and took part in attempts to uncover the circumstances that led to Ousmane’s death.

Among the activists was Alberto Biondo, who had been working for Borderline Sicilia to monitor reception camps in the province over the previous decade. Back then, he had observed that more and more Africans were coming to work on farms and realised that there was a reality outside the reception camps with which Italians were not familiar. They started to see that there were tents and shacks next to the reception camps. He realised there was something else going on. Since Ousmane’s death, Alberto and his colleagues have discovered more about the situation in White Grass. For him, Ousmane’s death was not an accident. He died as a result of political choices. There was a hidden history of blood and violence behind the crops that the country produced and lived on. ‘Sangue nostrum,’ some activists started to call it. Our blood.

What was the world really like at White Grass? What was allowed to happen? The immediate cause of the tragedy was clear to see: the farmers were not abiding by the rules.³ From the day African workers came to work in the Campobello area—and across the entire country—they had never been provided with suitable housing, however temporary. But what made the community and wider society blind to the situation all these years? How did it remain hidden and stay unchallenged for so long?

* * *

Sanji, from Gambia, was one of the longest-serving workers in Campobello. He was among the 700 Africans who were working in the olive fields at the time of Ousmane’s death. Sanji was then twenty-one. He stood out, with a relaxed smile and his short Rasta dreadlocks hanging above his shoulders. His calm demeanour seemed to contrast with the extremely precarious environment in which he found himself. The living space that he shared with fellow African workers was in the open area of White Grass, demarcated by a metal gate, the area surrounded by nothing but piles of waste with no method of disposal. Through the metal gate stood a makeshift camp of more than fifty self-built shacks and tents, each a couple of square metres wide and covered with plastic tarpaulins to fend off the wind and rain. There was no electricity, no water supply, other than a pipe from a nearby farm, and no toilets. People collected wood from the area to set up a fire, allowing them to stay warm and boil water with which they could wash. They also relied on liquid petroleum gas (LPG) canisters for cooking, which weren’t always safe. This self-maintained ghetto sat right next to the derelict farmhouse where Ousmane lived.

A few months before Ousmane’s death, Sanji had come from Basse in Gambia. He would always proudly tell people about his hometown, the easternmost market town on the south bank of the River Gambia. Basse, with a population of around 18,000, was almost the same size as Campobello, and it had a similar kind of simplicity about it. Sanji was called ‘Santiago’ by many close to him, named after a good friend of his father from Mexico, whom his father met during his working years in Spain. His father was a linguist, as Sanji liked to tell people. He had inherited father’s talent, speaking four tribal languages from Gambia as well as Senegalese and Malian languages, alongside English. Sanji talked about his father a lot. Sadly he died when Sanji was seven. Sanji’s uncle married his mother and took over the compound owned by his father, promising to take over the care of Sanji and his siblings. But Sanji was later left to find his own means to pay for school fees.

He worked as an engineer for an electricity company. He only got the job because of his passion for football: he played for the company football team, helping them to win a cup. They rewarded him with a job. If there was anything that he was truly mad about in life, it was football. He had always been a great fan of Manchester United, like many Gambians. However, the electrician’s job did not pay enough. Sanji then tried to make use of his language skills and worked as a guide in Gambia’s tourism industry. The wages were low and he depended on tips from tourists. He met a tourist from Holland who was kind enough to offer to pay for his school fees. But, in the long term, a reasonable and steady income was hard to come by. He was unable to bring in money during the off-peak season. He couldn’t find any other employment that would enable him to support his mother, brother and younger sister. He also had a newborn baby daughter to support, but he couldn’t afford to marry his daughter’s mother, who then married someone else.

Sanji was, however, determined to look after his family. He was close to his mother, who had suffered from poor health for a long time. Apart from taking care of his baby daughter, he also felt the moral duty, as the eldest brother, to look after his sister and provide for her as she was growing up. He always referred to her as ‘my little sister;’ she was then only fourteen years old. When Sanji finally left the country during the rule of dictator Yahya Jammeh, his mother’s health deteriorated and she began to suffer from high blood pressure.

Sanji went on the work-seeking journey that tens of thousands of other Gambians had taken before him. For months, he made money selling pancakes in the streets of Mali, Burkina Faso, and other countries. The earnings he made in each country then went towards paying for the fare to the next country. Eventually, he decided to go to Libya as everyone said there was plenty of work there. When he arrived in Agadez, the largest city in central Niger and the connection point on the way to Libya, his nightmares began. He and fellow travellers were kidnapped and taken to a compound where their documents and belongings were confiscated. They had no idea how it would end. This was the first time on the journey that Sanji actually feared for his life.

The kidnappers told him at gun point to hand over all the cash he had. As he believed that he was about to be shot dead, he simply replied, looking up at the gunman, that ‘I have no money and my family have no money. I’m a poor man. Let me pray and you can shoot me.’ They decided to keep him alive to work. He was then kept in a compound with many others.

One day, during the detainment, a frustrated detainee started talking loudly. On hearing it, a military guard came in, asking, ‘Who’s mouthing off?’ The man pointed to Sanji who stood out with his long dreadlocks. ‘It’s him.’ The guard then took Sanji into a room. To his surprise, the guard didn’t do anything to Sanji but asked him to pretend to be beaten whilst the guard repeatedly hit a piece of wood against the wall. Sanji did what he was told. This had the purpose of intimidating everyone else. A day later, the same guard came in and took Sanji out at gun point. Now everyone thought that this time he was going to be shot. Sanji was confused and terrified and thought that maybe he really would be killed this time. But the guard took him to a building site and got him to work. ‘You look like you’re a good worker,’ the man said. So, Sanji started working there and was fed well for a while. By this point, he had seen that there were no rules in this sadistic anarchy. Whether he died or not was completely in the hands of those who controlled him.

Sanji planned his escape. One night, he attempted to break out with a Malian man he had befriended in the compound. They had to first climb over a fence. The Malian let Sanji climb the fence first, helping him up with his shoulder. When it was the Malian man’s turn and Sanji tried to pull him over, the man was shot dead by a guard right as he got to the top of the fence. Frightened for his life, Sanji ran into the trees and sand dunes, and hid in the dark for several hours. All he could hear was the guard shooting bullets into the desert from a distance and his own heartbeat.

Sanji was one of the lucky few who succeeded in running away. But his kidnappers went looking for him around town, using the picture on his confiscated ID. Sanji cut off his dreadlocks, fearing that they would give him away. But he couldn’t get rid of a small birthmark on his left cheek. The kidnappers found him in the street a day later. They held the ID up next to his face, recognising the birthmark, and said, ‘It is you, isn’t it?’

‘No, no, that’s not me,’ said Sanji, pointing to his birthmark. ‘This is just a tattoo.’ He got away.

Libya was waiting for him, with yet more nightmares. By the time Sanji got there, he had spent around €10,000 transporting himself from Gambia through various other countries. In Libya, he lived in fear, not knowing whether he would survive to see the following day. Someone also robbed him of his gold earring given to him by his mother when he was a child. ‘They’re not real Muslims,’ he summarised Libya to his friends. When he finally escaped and got on a boat to Europe, Sanji was prepared for just as much danger ahead. However, he was now accustomed to the permanent threat to his life and was no longer fearful.

On his boat journey across the Mediterranean, there were many more passengers than the inflatable vessel could take. The plywood floor of the boat soon broke. They were barely afloat, and everyone feared that the worst would come before long, when they saw a boat in the distance. However, they had not been at sea long enough to have travelled far, and some on board didn’t want to signal to the boat fearing they would be returned to Libya. Arguments broke out about what to do. Their boat was about to sink, and something had to be done. Sanji happened to be sitting near the boat’s inflation point and he told everyone that he would let the air out if they refused to signal and be rescued. They decided to signal and, luckily, the boat was heading to Italy. A day later, they all disembarked in Syracuse, the capital of the province of Syracuse in southeastern Sicily. Sanji and some others were sent to an emergency camp, where he stayed for a month.

He thanked God for sending him to Syracuse, which felt like a kind place to him. This 2,700-year-old city impressed and charmed him with its ancient buildings, amphitheatres and relaxed atmosphere. During that month, he took numerous walks around town and tried to talk with anyone he happened to meet. It felt like therapy. It felt like his life was coming back to him. Once, he tried to buy food in a market and didn’t have enough cash. A local woman came up and paid for him. Ten euros. He always remembered that. A stranger who wanted to help him. She treated him with kindness, and they met to talk several times after that. Like many young people in Syracuse, she had worked abroad before. Young Italians would go to London or other western European cities to work and look for better opportunities.

Later, Sanji heard about people being transferred to reception camps for minors. He was worried that he could be mistaken for one, as he had a small frame and looked young. If that happened, he feared he would not be able to work. To avoid being sent to a minors’ shelter, he pretended to be five years older, telling the authorities that he was born in 1990. Soon enough, Sanji was transferred to the province of Trapani on the other side of Sicily to a shelter in a town called Castelvetrano. It seemed a lifeless, dull little place, with nothing much happening except the farming of olives and grapes on the outskirts. Most Africans in the shelter were working in the fields. They told Sanji about a place called Campobello, where there was a lot more work. He realised that they all went to Campobello to work during the olive harvest. He was excited. He joined the others straight away. Thus started his working life in the olive town.

Mohammad, also from Gambia, was an old-timer in Campobello who knew the area and region like the back of his hand. He was thirty-five years old, and only arrived in Italy a few months before Ousmane died. Mohammad stood out for being tall, neat and well-dressed. His hair was shaved, and he often put on a clean, well-ironed white shirt and a pair of casual slacks like a European man going out on a Friday night. He sometimes even wore these clothes to pick olives, his smart dress making him no less productive in his work.

Back in Gambia, Mohammad had an eight-year-old son who was being looked after by his mother and two sisters. He used to run a food store in Brikama Ba, his hometown in central Gambia with a population of around 5,000 people, where he would sell couscous and other dried products. The store hadn’t been doing well enough and he wasn’t able to support his family with his small income. Then a friend of his in Libya told him there was plenty of work to be had in Tripoli and asked Mohammad to join him.

Mohammad had heard about the things that happened to Gambians who worked in Libya, but he stuck to the idea that it was some people’s bad luck that got them into bad situations. He had no idea that the abuses people were reporting back were commonplace rather than the exception. He desperately wanted to improve his lot and do something with his life and, in doing that, make a difference to the lives of his family. However, his wife objected to his plan and threatened divorce. Mohammad was insistent, even at the expense of their marriage. He and his wife broke up before his departure.

Seeing was believing, and it was only when Mohammad spent time in Tripoli himself that he understood the reality in Libya. He counted himself lucky, and happened to find work in a shop for a while. But he never stopped fearing for his safety on a daily basis. Mohammad planned an escape from Libya, but when he got on the boat, he had no idea where he would land. He had never planned to come to Italy. He believed that it was destiny that had brought him here. The sea journey was the only moment in his life that would make his eyes well up to recall. When he was rescued, he was sent to an overcrowded emergency camp in Trapani. He was there for a short while before being transferred to a CAS (Centro di Accoglienza Straordinaria, Extraordinary Reception Centre) in a small town called Castellammare in the same province.

Castellammare had a population of just over 15,000, similar in size to Campobello. It was a quaint little country town that the young had deserted for more opportunities and better prospects in the outside world. On the surface, it seemed like a backwater that was not made for a long stay. But just like the rest of Sicily, things were never quite what they seemed to be. Castellammare was notorious for having been the birthplace of various US mafias. The town was the origin of the Castellamarese War, fought between the Masseria and Maranzano clans in the early 1930s for control of the Italian mafia in New York. As a new arrival, Mohammad had no idea of the extent to which the local mafia still controlled businesses there and across Sicily. All that he cared about was the lack of work in and around the town. Before he had time to plan ahead, the next transfer brought him to another CAS shelter—this time on Via Roma in Campobello, where he was to find plenty of work waiting for him in the surrounding olive fields.

* * *

Campobello, as Sanji arrived, looked as if it had been painted in various shades of yellow earth. There was a dusty feel to it. As he walked through the lanes named ‘Via A,’ ‘Via B’—as if they had run out of street names—he saw numerous houses with courtyards serving as family compounds, some of them converted from old convents. Several tractors drove past. The sunset flooded the town with a golden orange glow.

Sanji had been told that all the African workers were living in a place called White Grass. Instead of returning to his reception camp in Castelvetrano every evening and coming out again in the early morning for the farm work, he needed to sleep over in White Grass. He and two friends shared a wooden shack in the middle of the makeshift encampment. All they had inside were a couple of old mattresses. Outside their shack stood a pile of rubbish and a shopping trolley, which was used as storage space for water containers and cooking utensils.

Sanji’s shack was in the field next to the disused farmhouse where Ousmane was killed. When the news came in the late morning that he had passed away in hospital, it shocked and saddened Sanji. Throughout his journey to Europe via Libya, the deaths of strangers had made him emotional. He knew of Ousmane but, as they didn’t share the same living space, they never exchanged words. He would, however, nod to Ousmane when walking past him in the fields. He could only imagine what it must be like for Ousmane’s family. There was a lot of anxiety among his fellow workers, as they did not know what to expect in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• Foreword
• Omertà
• 1. Olive Country
• 2. Building Babylon
• 3. Fires and a Model Worker
• 4. In and Out of Camps
• 5. Young Labour and ‘Integration’
• 6. Joining the Harvest in Calabria
• 7. Becky and the ‘Integration’ Villages
• 8. ‘If You Can Dream It, You Can Do It’
• 9. Eviction
• 10. Five Star and the Ills of the Town
• 11. Salvini and a Racist Murder
• 12. ‘Tell me, Minister, Would You Yourself Live in a Place Like This?’
• 13. Olive Season Once Again
• 14. Out of Sight, Out of Mind
• 15. Full Moon
• 16. Winter Survival in the Calabrian Tent City
• 17. End of Season
• 18. ‘Integrate’ and Disintegrate
• 19. The Repeated Cycle of Demolish and Re-ghettoise
• 20. ‘How Much Longer Do We Have to Suffer?’
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements