Of Mukhalas and Magafe: Somali Migrants Navigating the Dangers of Ransom Smuggling in Northern Africa

• Published date: 01 September 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00027162241246664
• Author: Tabea Scharrer
• Date: 01 September 2023

86 ANNALS, AAPSS, 709, September 2023

DOI: 10.1177/00027162241246664

Of Mukhalas

and Magafe:

Somali

Migrants

Navigating the

Dangers of

Ransom

Smuggling in

Northern Africa

By

TABEA SCHARRER

1246664ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYOF MUKHALAS AND MAGAFE

research-article2024

In the late 2000s, after the implementation of European

policies to prevent and criminalize irregular migration,

a new form of human smuggling—ransom smuggling—

appeared in North Africa. This article is an analysis of

ransom smuggling of Somali migrants, based on anthro-

pological fieldwork in Germany and Kenya. Ransom

smuggling is dangerous and complex, involving both

human smugglers and hostage takers, but I argue that

Somali migrants—especially younger ones—make use

of this form of smuggling despite its risks because it is

cheaper and easier to organize than other options. I

describe the major elements of Somali ransom smug-

gling, which involves transit through the Sahara and

Libya. I focus on the various actors involved, and the

responsibilities and burdens that accrue to the migrants

who transit a system that accounts for their lives as

commodities for trade.

Keywords: Somalia; Libya; human smuggling; ransom

smuggling; kidnapping; tahriib; irregular

migration

It’s sort of an agency. They would kidnap you and

call your parents. And your parents would either

pay money for your life or they won’t. It depends

on if you are important for them.

—Khadija, a Somali migrant1

This article analyzes a relatively new form of

human smuggling that developed in Northern

Africa at the end of the 2000s, following the

Correspondence: scharrer@eth.mpg.de

Tabea Scharrer is a social anthropologist working on

(forced) migration, inequality, and religion, with a

regional focus on Kenya. In addition to journal articles,

she has published books on Islamic missionary move-

ments in Kenya and Tanzania (2013), African middle

classes (2018), Somali urban presence in East Africa

(2019), and a handbook on forced migration research

(2023). She is on the editorial board of Comparative

Migration Studies.

NOTE: I would like to acknowledge the work carried

out by Samia Aden, Inga Albrecht, Malika Autorkhanova,

Vittoria Fiore, Monika König, Julia Kühl, Najah Abdalla

Osman, and Stephan Steuer, on whose fieldwork the

empirical part of this article largely draws.

OF MUKHALAS AND MAGAFE 87

implementation of European policies to prevent and criminalize irregular migra-

tion. In this form of human smuggling, hostage taking and extortion play a critical

role. While some authors refer to this form of kidnapping as trafficking for ran-

som, I propose the term “ransom smuggling” to make the combination of the two

elements, smuggling and holding for ransom, explicit. Both smugglers and hos-

tage takers—actors of mobility and actors of immobility, respectively—are part of

the system.

Ransom smuggling in the context of Somali2 migration via North Africa means

that migrants are first smuggled from the Horn of Africa or Kenya along clandes-

tine routes by locally embedded actors and then taken hostage by local kidnap-

pers in the Sahara and/or Libya. By threatening to kill the migrants and using

psychological and physical violence, including torture and rape, the kidnappers

extort money from their captives’ relatives. Only after ransom is paid are migrants

released and able to continue their journey, again with the help of smugglers who

are often, but not always, different from those involved in the kidnapping. In

contrast to other forms of smuggling, the “service” on the ransom-smuggling

route is not, or not fully, paid upfront but collected later, in most cases through

kidnapping.

In this article, I argue that, despite the risks involved, Somali migrants make

use of this form of smuggling because it is cheaper and easier to organize than

other options. The routes along which this form of smuggling is prevalent are

used especially by young people who often leave without the knowledge of their

parents on travel-first-pay-later schemes (Ali 2016) but also by others with fewer

resources. Choosing these route enables them to be mobile, in both a spatial and

a social sense. Somali migrants refer to migrating by ransom smuggling as tahriib

(which means smuggling in general, but in the Somali case refers mostly to dan-

gerous irregular migration journeys), a term implying the dangers of the route as

well as its criminalization.

Kuschminder and Triandafyllidou (2020) argue that this form of smuggling

poses a conceptual challenge, as it blurs the distinction between smuggling of

migrants and human trafficking (for a similar legal argument, see Goor 2018).

While smuggling is based on a mutual agreement on price and service and hence

presupposes “a legality of an agreed contract” (Kuschminder and Triandafyllidou

2020, 208), ransom smuggling does not entail such an agreement. Due to this

blurred distinction, Somali migrants often found it difficult to differentiate

between the various actors they encountered. Against this background, this arti-

cle explores the distinction Somali migrants made between mukhalas and magafe

as two discrete smuggler figures.3 Whereas the term mukhalas (from Arabic,

“trustworthy, sincere”) refers to brokers in general who can facilitate migration

by organizing legal documents, transport, or food (but also organize, for instance,

property deals), the term magafe (literally, “the one who does not miss”) emerged

specifically in relation to hostage-taking actors in the Sahara Desert and further

north in Libya. I argue that this distinction helps migrants to make sense of

ambiguous and risky situations and to navigate the dangers of irregular

migration.