Part 4: How a Nigerian teen trafficked through Libya became a celebrity barber in Europe

Part 3 recap: Jimmy’s journey took him from the edges of Niger into the unforgiving heart of the Sahara. He endured weeks without water, watched people die in the desert, and worked like a slave under the brutal sun for nothing but scraps of bread. By the time hope flickered again, he was stranded, starving, and praying for a miracle.

Catch up here: Part 3: How a Nigerian teen trafficked through Libya became a celebrity barber in Europe

Part 4: Getting Trafficked

Cars showed up out of nowhere. Big, dusty ones. Dozens of them. Out stepped Arabs, armed and cold-eyed, along with a few Nigerians and Ghanaians who spoke the local dialects. The men barked orders, tearing down the makeshift tents where Jimmy and the others had been living for weeks in the desert.

"Stand in a straight line," they shouted.

The Nigerians among them translated what sounded like good news: "They're here to pick you up. These are the people you've been waiting for. It's time to go."

And just like that, people started crying. Smiling. Hugging each other. Their prayers had been answered. Or so they thought.

No one asked questions. No one hesitated. After weeks of heat, hunger, death, and waiting, this felt like deliverance. So they climbed into the cars, blindly, willingly, obediently.

But it was a lie.

These weren't smugglers taking them to Europe. They were traffickers. And by the time Jimmy and his group arrived in Tripoli, the real Tripoli, the capital of Libya, it was too late.

They were driven into what the locals called the ghetto. A kind of hidden underworld. It was an abandoned, crumbling section of the city where screams echoed through hollow buildings and windows had no glass. That's where the mask came off.

The Nigerian man they'd been told would help them cross the sea was nowhere in sight. No safehouse. No plan. What greeted them instead was a nightmare. Black men slumped on the ground, hands chained, faces hollowed by starvation and despair.

That was when Jimmy knew they had been sold.

And this wasn't the end of the journey; it was the beginning of a new kind of hell.

They were stripped of identity, separated, beaten, and imprisoned. The tortures were both psychological and physical. Jimmy was chained hand and foot, then hung from the ceiling. His body bent backwards, his spine arched unnaturally, his face pointed toward his own feet tied above his head.

"They beat us while we were hanging," he would later say. "They used thick metal pipes. Then they'd bring a gas cylinder, attach a nozzle, light it, and burn our backs while we were still up there."

You couldn't move. You couldn't scream loud enough. The smell of your burning skin lingered in the air, thick and permanent.

After they were done, they'd drop you to the floor like meat in a market. Leave you to cry. Then do it all over again the next day.

There was no recovery. No healing. No escape. What they wanted was money.

They made the migrants call their mothers, fathers, siblings, anyone who could be extorted. If you didn't get through, you were beaten again. If the person you called couldn't help, you were locked in dark rooms for days. No light. No food. No water. Just waiting.

Jimmy called his mother.

He cried. Screamed. Begged. Told her they would kill him if she didn't send something, anything. But there was nothing to send.

She had no idea he had even left the country. She was shocked, heartbroken, and helpless. Still, she tried. She walked into banks, begged for loans, explained her son's life was on the line. But she had no collateral, so she was repeatedly turned down.

Jimmy's voice was cracking on the phone, blood in his mouth, fresh burns on his back.

"My mom was crying too," he recalled. "She said, 'I've tried everything. There's nowhere left to go.'"

And so the torture continued.

The food they were given was barely food at all. A single bowl of watery pasta soup was dropped into a room of over 2,000 people. Everyone rushed it like animals. Some clawed at the bowl. Some shoved fingers in. Most got nothing.

A handful of soggy noodles. A taste of warm water. That was it. Many starved. People died from hunger, exhaustion, and hopelessness.

Jimmy turned seventeen in that hell. It was the worst birthday of his life.

And still, the beatings came. Morning and night. Before food. After food. Sometimes both. You could be beaten so badly, you'd be unable to eat when the food came. That didn't matter. You still got beaten the next day.

His family stopped picking up the phone. Not because they didn't care, but because they couldn't take it anymore. They couldn't stand hearing him scream. Couldn't bear his sobs. His father had nothing. His siblings had nothing. And his mother, already battling heart problems, had been admitted to the hospital.

At some point, even the traffickers gave up. No one was answering; no money was coming. So they made a decision. They sold him.

Again.

Don’t miss Part 5 of Jimmy’s story next Friday, only on Pulse.ng.

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