I was a girl sold for the price of a used motorcycle at 17

I was 17 when I learned that a person could be traded for the price of a used motorcycle.

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a village when the rains fail and the yams come up stunted and grey.

It is not the silence of peace, but of a holding breath. You see it in the way the men lean against the mud walls and the way the mothers look at their daughters, not with pride, but with a growing, desperate calculation. In the geography of poverty, a girl is often seen as a door that might lead elsewhere.

I am speaking now because the girl I was deserves more than a three-paragraph mention in the metro section of a newspaper. In the news, we are “rescued victims.” In reality, we are ghosts who were forced to walk back into our own bodies.

The memory that stays, more than the dusty roads of Burkina Faso or the humid heat of the transit houses, is the smell of my mother’s kitchen the night before I left. She was frying plantains. The oil was popping, a rhythmic, domestic sound that should have meant safety.

“Mr. Ojo says the garment factory in Ouagadougou has beds with white sheets,” she said, her back to me. She didn’t look up from the pan. “You will send money for your brother’s school fees. It is a sacrifice for the blood.”

“I don’t want to go, Mummy,” I said. The words were small, like pebbles dropped into a deep well.

“We are hungry,” she replied. She didn’t use an elaborate statement; she didn’t shout. She just stated a fact that she expected to outweigh my fear. At that moment, I hated her more for her pragmatism than for her betrayal. I realised then that she wasn’t a villain, just a woman who had run out of choices and decided that mine was the only currency left to spend.

Man of shiny shoes

Mr. Ojo was a man of shiny shoes and soft hands. He spoke of “opportunities” and “humanitarian pathways.” We crossed the border at night. There were three of us girls; Joy, who was barely 15, and Blessing, who cried until her eyes were puffed shut. We were told to stay quiet, to be “good daughters of Nigeria.”

The transition from a girl with a future to a commodity happens slowly, then all at once. In the house in Burkina Faso, the white sheets my mother promised were actually thin mats on a concrete floor. The “garment factory” was a room with a locked door and a succession of men who smelled of stale beer and exhaust fumes.

I remember trying to tell a woman at a local market, a lady who sold bright oranges and looked like my aunt. I leaned in while Mr. Ojo’s associate was distracted. “Please,” I whispered in broken French and Pidgin, “I am not supposed to be here.”

She looked at my gold-flecked headwrap, then at the man watching us. She didn’t call the police. She just handed me an orange and turned to the next customer. “Everyone is where they are supposed to be,” she muttered. That was the moment the world felt truly vast and indifferent. I wasn’t a person; I was a logistical error she didn’t want to correct.

The rescue, when it came years later, wasn’t a cinematic explosion. It was the Task Force on Human Trafficking and the police, a blur of uniforms and paperwork. They told us we were “safe” now. But safety is a relative term when you have lost the ability to trust the ground beneath your feet.

Last month, I saw my mother for the first time since my return to Benin. We sat in that same kitchen. The smell of frying oil made my stomach turn. She looked older, her skin like crumpled parchment.

“I thought you would have a better life,” she said, her voice cracking.

“You knew,” I said. I wanted her to deny it, to lie to me so I could have something to push against.

“I hoped,” she corrected. It was the most devastating thing she could have said.

I do not hate her, not entirely. Hate requires an energy I no longer possess. But I cannot forgive her either. We live in a strange, polite suspended animation. I help her with the chores, and she avoids looking at the scars on my wrists or the way I jump when the door slams. We are bound by the shared knowledge of what was sold and what can never be bought back.

Small shop

I am working now in a small shop, saving money not for my brother, but for a room of my own. I still wake up at 4am, my heart hammering against my ribs, expecting the sound of a key turning in a heavy lock. The news reports say we are “reintegrated.” I suppose that is true in a physical sense. I walk the streets, I eat, I breathe. But I am always listening for the sound of the rain, wondering if the next harvest will be enough to keep the doors closed.

I am not a survivor in the way the posters suggest. I am simply a woman who survived, which is a much quieter, much heavier thing to be.

•Series, first published in thisislagos.ngr, was written and edited by Peju Akande and based on true stories

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