Khady Sabaly, a young Senegalese woman, helps migrants at sea in Morocco when they are in distress
The tension is palpable from screen to screen. Khady Sabaly sits in a windowless, blue-and-white room in Tangier’s medina, not holding her cell phone still. She checks her Whatsapp messages. As soon as Khady put the smartphone down in front of her, she picks it up again, the picture freezes, the connection is bad.
January 16, 3:30 p.m., since midnight, she has been in contact with the passengers of a boat in distress off the coast of Morocco. The 29-year-old works on a voluntary basis for the international organization Alarmphone and accompanies migrants in danger of their lives on the phone. Every day, people from mostly West African countries get on boats to go to Spain. For two years now, the Mediterranean route to Gibraltar has been pretty much closed, so more and more boats are leaving the Atlantic coast to reach the Canary Islands. This route is at least a hundred kilometers long, the sea wild, the current unpredictable. According to figures from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), around 19,000 refugees arrived in the Canary Islands by November last year, almost ten times more than in 2019. The Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras also expects around 2,000 people to have drowned in 2021.
If someone dares to travel towards the Canary Islands, Khady is often the first to hear about it. She comes from Senegal, is well connected in the migrant community in Morocco, has a different name and doesn’t want to be recognizable in a photo. In addition to the Alarmphone cell phone number, she always distributes her own. Before the trip, Khady explains the risks and necessary precautions, “enough water, charged mobile phone, life jacket”. In an emergency, she can fall back on West African French to reassure and retrieve data. She can always be reached on her cell phone.
“Right now 53 people are about to drown,” says Khady. The engine had already failed in the morning and water was now flowing into the rubber dinghy. She’s waiting for a new GPS localization, “we don’t know in which direction she’s drifting”. Locations and other updates are forwarded to the “Permanence”, the European Alarmphone layer, which in turn informs the responsible sea rescue services and calls for rescue. So far, however, neither the Spanish Salvamento Marítimo nor the Moroccan Marine Royale have sent any help. “I have to call the Permanence again,” says Khady. The fate of the fugitives could be their own. Like so many people, Khady left Senegal eight years ago in search of work. She had had to drop out of school to take care of her parents and her son. “But if you don’t have relatives in the authorities, you won’t find a good job.”
So she left for Morocco to continue to Europe from there. She tried the “voyage” six times and failed six times – once because of the Moroccan police, who stopped the travelers on the beach, then again because of the Guardia Civil, who deported her from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta after successfully crossing the border. In Morocco, she makes a living selling Senegalese spices on the streets. And helps other “voyageurs” in their search for hope.
“Khady is just a mega power woman”
“Khady knows how to fight,” says Bousso, who is also from Senegal, also lives in Tangier and has been an Alarmphone activist for almost eight years. “Khady is kind of like my student, very motivated.” He remembers how he initially explained the shifts to her, introduced her to other activists. They were getting more calls than he was now, especially from Laayoun and Tarfaya on the Atlantic coast. “She has local contacts, so her number keeps doing the rounds there.”
Then January 17, 4 p.m. Khady wears the same Alarmphone shirt as the day before, plus a necklace with a small Koran pendant and a purple training jacket. She is curt, “since yesterday I’ve been feeling sick”. News from the wrecked boat? She has: ten survivors, two drowned, the rest of the 53 passengers disappeared. It’s the first time Khady has witnessed a disaster so directly. “It’s really taking me down.” She talks about her nineteen-hour shift: “A woman called me during the night, please help us, we’re in distress,” she called. But all we can do is inform the Navy. We first contacted her at 4 a.m., but she didn’t act until around 5 p.m.
Carla from the German Alarmphone team knows how devastating fainting in a boat accident can be. “We share the sadness and the anger,” she says. An outlet for the pressure are political actions. “And Khady is an extremely political person.” Carla tells how Khady wrote a speech for the last big demonstration on Women’s Day and recently helped organize a memorial event. “Khady is simply a mega-power woman.” The promised woman is angry at Morocco, where people like her have no prospects: “The police are checking you because you’re black. There is no work for you. You will not be saved in distress at sea.” And she is angry at the EU, which is co-financing border protection: “If there were safe routes, the sea would not be a graveyard.”
January 24, 3 p.m. Khady wears a wig over her short hair and sits in a café, the internet is better there. There is good news: Two boats have accompanied you in the past week, both of which have made it to the Canary Islands. You can hear her joy about it.
Read more in the current issue of Friday.