A Landfall in Barbados

The 20ft. launch drifted for a long time.
Aimlessly, yes, but not without a destination, for the pull of those currents was strong.

It started from Praia, Cape Verde, bound for the Canary Islands.
There were about fifty people aboard, mostly from Senegal, Gambia and Guinea Bissau.
They had paid for their passage.
Probably they had been hoping to find work so that they could send money back to those they loved.
For a little while the launch had run under its own power.
For a little while after that, it had been towed by another boat.
But then a decision was evidently reached and it was cut to drift. (Possibly because of a storm? Possibly because the whole thing had just become an inconvenient and costly nuisance? Who knows.) The evidence for that ‘evidently’ is a towing cable cut by a machete.

One can imagine the sound as the launch suddenly loses momentum, hunkers down in the water.
Have you ever been on a boat when the engine cuts out suddenly?
Yes? Then – if you screen the engine thrum from your memory – you know what that part felt like. You need not imagine.
At that time, it is possible that everyone on board was still alive.
One can imagine the sound of realisation.

By the end of January, no-one on board remained alive.
In late April it was sighted by a fishing boat in Barbados.
In late May, it hit the U.K. news.

Many of those who died are still to be identified. One, who left behind a note, was named Diaw Sounkar Diemi. Another, with family in Portugal, was named Bouba Cisse.

These fifty lives are only a small fraction of the thousand or so lives that have been lost so far on this particular clandestine migration route. They are an even smaller fraction – vanishingly small – of the 200 million of us who are first-generation emigrants, who do not live in the nation state where we happened, by random chance, to be born. And in terms of what we might consider the greater diaspora – that loose network of ancestors, descendants, friends, family, and acquaintances? Well that diaspora may even comprise the majority of the world’s population, in which case these fifty lives are a miniscule, insignificant fraction indeed.

But still far too large. Still far too many. Because their lives mattered every bit as much to them and those who knew them, as yours or mine to us and those who know us.

Open the borders.
The world was never meant to be a prison.