Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, and the administrative, communications, cultural and economic centre of the nation, is a beautiful city full of motorcycles. Virtually everyone in Ouaga, as the capital is also known, owns a motorcycle, from the shoemaker to the bank manager. Ouagadougou’s primary industries are food processing and textiles. It is host to an international airport and has rail links to Abidjan in Ivory Coast, and a paved highway to Niamey in Niger Republic. In all, the landlocked nation shares borders with six West African countries ( Benin, Ghana, Niger, Ivory Coast, Mali and Togo).

It is those borders that have attracted human traffickers for decades, especially because from Mali, traffickers can proceed to the Sahara desert and Algeria, Morocco and then Spain or Italy by land and water. It is also those borders that give strength to lies told by Nigerian human traffickers who lure victims by promising them paradise in Europe via Burkina Faso. Human trafficking is a serious problem in Burkina Faso and the number of girls trafficked in the landlocked country is very alarming, said Ochuko Patrick Otoba, my Nigerian guide, who had told me about the phenomenon while in Lagos with two victims he had rescued from Burkina Faso and was returning them to Nigeria.

As the President and Founder of the National Association for the Fight Against Trafficking of Young People in Burkina Faso, known in French as Association Nationale de Lute Contre le Traffic des Jeunes ( LUTRA-JEUNE), Otoba has fought a long, lonely battle to draw attention to the human trafficking crisis. “More than 12 teenage girls are trafficked from Nigeria alone to Burkina Faso on a weekly basis and are forced against their volition to engage in compulsory selling of their bodies to pay the trafficker huge sums of money as ransom for their liberty,” said Otoba, who has been fighting human trafficking in Burkina Faso for seven years without much support or acknowledgment. He spent some months in detention, he told me, for trying to rescue some Nigerian sex slaves and drawing the anger of the Nigerian community in Burkina Faso. “They told me a Nigerian cannot arrest a Nigerian trafficker in Burkina Faso. One day, after rescuing some victims and taking them to Nigeria, I returned to Burkina Faso and I was arrested and accused of being a trafficker myself,” he said.

•Ouedraogo in front of his house in Somgande

The human trafficking network in West Africa uses Burkina Faso as a route to other West African countries such as Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, and upward to North Africa and Europe by road and sea. Burkina Faso subscribes to the definition of trafficking in the U.N. Trafficking Protocol but trafficking of young girls in the country is both internal and external. “In Burkina Faso, the government, with the support of its partners, is engaged in the long-term objective of eradicating child trafficking,” Otoba said.

For Nigerian girls, it is a long journey. Girls are often lured from states like Edo, Delta and Cross River and taken to Lagos, then Saki in Oyo State, before proceeding to Kenu or Chikanda or any other porous exit point in Kwara State. From there, they are moved to Benin Republic and then to Burkina Faso with the help of traffickers and immigration officials only interested in money. From the moment they leave Lagos, they spend about three days on the road. The story is the same virtually everywhere in West Africa. The victims are promised jobs and better lives in Europe with a brief stop in Burkina Faso. But once in Ouagadougou, instead of proceeding to Mali and the Sahara desert to get to Spain or Italy, most girls are spread to the 45 provinces in Burkina Faso and used as sex slaves.

Many girls end up in places like Bale, Banwa, Kossi, Mouhoun or Nayala. Others are moved to Sourou, Comoe, Leraba and Kadiogo while many end up sleeping with men in Boulgou, Koupelogo, Kouritenga or Bam. Many Nigerian girls are also found in Namentenga, Boulkiemde, Sanguine, Sissili and Ziro. Otoba put the number of Nigerian girls being held captive in Burkina Faso and working as sex slaves to at least 6,000. He said every province has between five and twelve local government areas known as communes, and in each of the councils, there is a minimum of twelve Nigerian girls working as sex slaves in the 45 provinces. But I wanted to see things for myself and not just listen to activists.

On the cold night of 11 January, the same day I arrived, I visited Pharmacie de gare and Ali Baba in Sankariare area and came across many girls who spoke English. It was an incredible scene of a very large crowd of revellers with girls in mini skirts, tight trousers or vests standing on one side and many young men staring from the other side. They were so close to one another that it appeared as though a fight was about to break out. It all looked like a market location where selling and buying took place.

“You can all hear them speak pidgin English. They are all Nigerian girls,” said Sawadogo Abdoulaye, a Burkinabe activist and Head of Cordination Nord-Sud, a human rights organisation that fights against human trafficking, especially trafficking of under-aged girls. We approached three girls. Two of them claimed to be from Edo and Delta States in Nigeria, while the other girl refused to disclose where she came from. She spoke little French with an English accent and said phrases like “Cheri coco tu veux?” (Sweetheart, do you want?”, showing her backside.

Ouedraogo bike

“You can see they are all very small girls. And for some of them, the breasts have not fully developed,” Sawadogo said in French. “And they are virtually all from Nigeria, very very small girls,” he lamented. We moved behind the streets to see where actual sex took place and saw girls with braided hair, black eyeliner, garish red lipstick and mini skirts, surrounded by tall guys who acted as body guards. We asked how much it cost for a sex romp. A girl who had just finished having sex with a patron and was rushing out to get another customer replied that it was a thousand franc cfa, about N350 or $2 for a quick session.

“Twenty minutes,” she said, referring to the session duration.

Sawadogo took us to other streets full of girls, many of them speaking broken French with some pidgin English. We went around town and ended up in a club with mirrors on the walls and different lights all over the room. One girl approached us, greeted us in French but with an English accent and left. Sawadogo called another girl. “Nigeria?” he asked, pronouncing Nigeria in French. The girl replied in the affirmative. He took us inside rooms at the back of the club where sex takes place every day and we entered very small and filthy rooms with little foams on the floor.

“Can you see where they have sex,” he asked. “And there are many places like this one full of Nigerian girls. They seem to come in every week”. Otoba, my Nigerian guide and President of Lutra-Jeune, joined us with one other guy. We began discussing over drinks. “This is a poorer country,” I said, “why are Nigerian girls coming here when they can do this at home?”. Sawadogo had a ready answer for me: “Many parents do not know where Burkina Faso is. When some of them are told by the traffickers that they are taking their girls to Burkina Faso, they think they are taking them to Europe. “Others are told that they are taking them to Europe and would be given new passports in Burkina Faso.”