The young Cameroonian Augustin Prince (Pouma, 2000) had not even considered emigrating when he found himself crossing the border of Nigeria with the cries of his mother still echoing in his head: "Run away!"
At 16 years old, he crossed four countries, lost friends in the desert, miraculously survived dying in the Strait and only felt safe when he set foot in Tarifa.
"I was just looking for a safe place. I couldn't find peace in Nigeria. Nor in Niger or Algeria. In Morocco, the same. I decided to stay in Spain when the Police stopped us upon arriving in Tarifa. At that moment I began to feel safe," he says. "That moment" was October 28, 2017, the day Maritime Rescue rescued him.
With record numbers on the Canary Route, where almost 47,000 people survived last year, one in five migrants who irregularly crossed the EU borders in 2024, this young Cameroonian has moved to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to present at Casa África Prince's Journey, the book where he tells his story, published by CEAR and Libros de las Malas Compañías.
In an interview with Efe, Prince makes it clear that he did not choose to emigrate. "Many people think that we all go out in search of a better life and it is not always like that. In my case it wasn't," he explains.
He had no destination in mind when he left Cameroon, nor was he moved by the hope of opening a future in Europe that pushes thousands of young Africans to the canoe or the boat every year. He did not emigrate, he fled.
And he did so after a terrible experience, witnessing four men raping his mother in the midst of the clashes between French-speaking and English-speaking communities that broke out in Cameroon in 2016, a war that caused half a million displaced people.
"Four men entered our house and raped my mother. I tried to save her, but one of them cut me with a bottle of glass in my hand. Here I have the scars. I only remember my mother telling me: Get out of here, get out of here!" he recalls. That same night, he joined a group of people who were walking towards the border of Nigeria fleeing the violence that took over Cameroon.
Prince wandered aimlessly for almost a year. He endured a few weeks in Nigeria waiting to be able to speak with Rosine, his mother, but he had no news from her. He crossed to Niger, then to Algeria and then to Morocco, always hoping to find a safe place.
"We survived sleeping on the street, asking for money and stealing. I'm not proud, but that's how it was," he confesses. And along the way, he fell into the hands of human traffickers, who took everything from him. His worst experience was crossing the Sahara, where the United Nations estimates that at least 6,578 migrants have died since 2014.
In his book, Prince argues that people tend to focus on the drama of shipwrecks at sea, but that the desert is worse.
"On the boat they can save you. Red Cross, for example. In the desert no one is going to save you. And many people die, many. I lost companions who went to bed with me at night and the next day they were no longer alive," he explains.
"The car that picked us up in Niger left us in the middle of the desert. We don't know where they went, but luckily they came back. There are cars that don't return. And if they don't come back, what do you do? There is no food, there is no water, there is nothing... and the cold in the desert at dawn is unbearable. Many people die," he emphasizes.
The opportunity to take a boat to Europe presented itself in Morocco shortly after crossing from Algeria. He replaced a companion who could not pay the price of the smugglers and ended up crammed with seven other men in a small inflatable boat of just three meters.
Salvamento recorded a video when rescuing them in the Strait of Gibraltar that speaks for itself: the boat filled with water with each wave, its occupants had one leg outside because they did not fit and everyone tried to row, since the engine had broken down.
At that time, Augustin had already come to the conclusion that rather than risking his life, he had "paid for death".
Why did he embark in such conditions? "Everything happens at night," he answers, "if it had been in the morning, I wouldn't get on that boat, but at night I didn't know anything, you couldn't see. I realized it at dawn. At 8:00 in the morning of that day I asked myself many questions about why I had risked my life so much, why I was there. It was horrible. I saw myself dead. I was sure I was going to die."
Although since he set foot on land he already felt "at peace", things did not go well for him immediately: he was in a detention center for foreigners, suffered recurrent nightmares that made him talk in his sleep and had to struggle to prove that he was 17 years old, because the authorities did not recognize him as a minor. When he achieved it, the joy lasted little: when he turned 18, again sleeping on the street.
The Raíces Foundation and the CEAR helped him to channel his life, train as a cook and regularize his situation through the arraigo route, since they denied him asylum. Today he has a job and has even been able to afford to return to Cameroon to see his family.
Now, Prince tries to give back what he has received by explaining to young people from Cameroon the risks of emigrating irregularly to Europe and offering them a job alternative in their country. For this he has created his own foundation. It's called Rosine, like his mother.
