Aug 21, 2022
The story of Ebrima Conneh: “Man should never give up”
I met Ebrima Conneh in the summer of 2011 in a city park in the Italian port city of Bari. It was a hot July. He was living with a group of compatriots in the streets of the old Mediterranean port. Hungry, sick, like living skeletons, they wandered around the city. Unwanted. The police chased them, the locals shook them off. At that time, civil war was raging in Libya. They did not flee, but were pushed into the European Union by the Gaddafi regime. No one listened to them. They were accommodated in a nearby refugee accommodation centre, where they had been brought from the island of Lampedusa.
Orphaned at the age of eight, surviving the Liberian and Libyan civil wars, growing up in the poverty of the Gambian Serekunda, crossing the dangerous Sahara, kidnapped twice and escaped twice, embroiled for several years in the brutal Libyan and Italian criminal underworld, exposed to racial prejudices in the Arab and European world, Ebrima Conneh is today sending aid to the Gambia.
His life is written like a suspenseful book, where Ebrima admits throughout the tragic events of his life, when fate could have turned very differently: “I was also lucky.”
Years ago, he was adopted as a grown man by a German couple and today he works for a large construction company. He has proved to himself and to the world that the limitations of prejudices can be overcome if we are able to see more, but Ebrima keeps his head clear:
“You have to stay wise and humble. You must never flaunt the success when it happens to you.”
This is not another refugee story, because Ebrima Conneh is not a refugee but a fighter, a “one-man soldier in the jungle”, as he addresses himself.
An extraordinary man in not so extraordinary times.
From a story:
“In Serekunda, there were two taxis driving the city, one green and one yellow. You had to pay more for the green one, but you were safe in it. The yellow one was cheaper, but you risked being robbed and you couldn’t complain afterwards. They would say to you: ‘Why did you get in the yellow taxi?’” says Ebrima.
He admits that he always took the yellow taxi. “You have to take risks in life so that you can always be prepared for anything,” he explains.
Two years of life in Libya were also marked by the brutal racism of Arabs towards black Africans.
“They called us ‘dog’ in Arabic. Children threw stones at us until our heads started bleeding. The adults didn’t stop them. We Africans never went to hospital because the Arabs would have killed us. I did not trust them. I heard they sell organs and get rid of the bodies,” he explains.
Ebrima dressed like a footballer as he walked the streets of Rome. He carried a ball and football boots to fool the police with his image.
“As a black man, I was always stopped by the police. That’s why I wore the jersey of the Roman football club Lazio. I was often treated differently and avoided being searched. The police liked to debate football,” he laughs. He points out that the years he spent in the Libyan and Italian underworlds saved his head: he learned to be cautious, to face an aggressive world and to develop the ability to assess people accurately.
The story on Ebrima Conneh was originally published in Slovenian language 20th of August, 2022: Zgodba o Ebrimu Connehu: “Človek ne sme nikoli obupati” (vecer.com)
