I was in Senegal for a few weeks, and was assisted by an able and creative young man. For a while, I wondered why he did not react to my text messages. His French was good. He dressed well, if rather flashily in my Anglophone view. We had a fight when I asked him for receipts and I realised he could not read.
One of the things I was curious about was those people who risk life, lungs and thousands of family dollars to get to Europe. All the news-papers talked about “desperation”. It did not make such easy sense.
You have young Congolese men going to Angola with $5 000 to get on a ship to Brazil —not to find an economic future in one of the fastest growing economies in the world, but to work in Brazil and find their way to France.
In Senegal’s Mbour, a kind of touristy Franco-African village, young men lift weights and run on the beach every day, training to cross the Sahara. They train as if they are planning an international sporting career, with commitment and pain. They talk, and plan and share intelligence. It has become a movement. France is no longer the place to go — it is Italy and Spain. One group says “Barça or die”. They take vows that if they do not get to Barça, they are prepared to die.

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