CONAKRY: With a determined look on her weathered face, Safiatou Bah has made up her mind: she will leave her young children behind and migrate to Europe on a new and perilous ocean route from Guinea.
Thousands of young Guineans have attempted to migrate via the Atlantic in recent years, a flow so severe that authorities in the junta-led country have dubbed it a “haemorrhage.”
Lacking both economic opportunity and any hope of change, the migrants are leaving from their own shores after neighboring Senegal and Mauritania and Morocco further north, beefed up controls.
However the longer voyage which begins farther south only increases the number of dangers they will face.
Most west Africans traveling the Atlantic route embark in pirogue canoes toward Spain’s Canary Islands off northwest Africa, the jumping off point for their continued journey to the European continent.
