Surviving the world's most dangerous migration route
After making a Panorama film, "Destination Europe", Paul Kenyon's sense of injustice at the plight of migrants trying to reach Europe fuelled his writing of a book about one man's harrowing story.
I am Justice: A journey out of Africa "carries the agony and hope of Africa in every page" according to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Fergal Keane and here Paul Kenyon tells us why he felt compelled to write the book:
"It sounded Biblical: 27 men shipwrecked in hostile seas, men-eating fish, a tempest, hymns and prayers bellowed to the moon.
I was on the Mediterranean making a Panorama about the most dangerous migration route in the world, and we'd tracked down a group of survivors with an extraordinary story.
I didn't know it then, but it would come to occupy my life for the next two years.
It all began in the summer of 2007, when a picture was flashed around the world of a group of in the middle of the Med. They were fully clothed, some in coats and jeans, others in tracksuits, but there was no clue as to how they'd arrived, or how they could possibly escape.
I took the image to the editor of Panorama, who commissioned a programme straight away.
It turned out the men had set off from Ghana, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, crossing the Sahara desert, and heading northwards to the coast of Libya.
Once there, they'd made contact with a gang of people smugglers who'd packed them into a makeshift boat, and told them Europe was only a matter of hours away. Days later, having run out of food and water, their boat had capsized alongside a fishing net.
One of the men was called Justice Amin.
I interviewed him for the Panorama programme after he was rescued and airlifted to Italy. He was suspicious and guarded, but there was a spark there, a spark of defiance and menace and a fierce untamed intelligence.
Over the months that followed, I kept in touch, and his story gradually began to unfold; the grim and monotonous poverty of his single room shack in Ghana, how he'd been abused by his medicine-man uncle, his capture and torture in a Libyan jail.
On occasions he was in tears down the phone.
The Panorama programme did well, but I couldn't shake off my sense of injustice. Every year thousands attempt the journey from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe. We've grown accustomed to their images, even desensitised; a series of blank faces being led away by Italian police or hauled into lifeboats. I decided to write the book to fill in behind those faces, to give them a history, a family, ambition and purpose. I hope we can see a little of ourselves in there. But beneath it all is a grim undertow, the one I've felt ever since meeting Justice Amin two years ago, and it comes in the form of a question: if I was faced with such grinding poverty, would I have the courage to do the same?"
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