This is the very personal story of Ibrahima Balde, a migrant to Europe from Africa, told by Ibrahima himself when befriended by Basque poet Amets Arzallus Antia who wrote it down. Their book Miñan was translated from the Basque by Timberlake Wertenbaker, who made this stage adaptation.
Ibrahima did not set out to be a migrant. He left home to seek out and bring back his younger brother who had run way from school and was last heard of in a refugee camp in Libya.
Ibrahima begins his story when he was stlll a schoolboy living with his shoemaker father in Konakry, the capital of Guinea in West Africa, where he helped run their market stall, while his brother lived with their mother in her home village where she kept a dozen cows and a few goats. It proceeds through 35 short scenes (plus a Prologue and Epilogue from Amets) that see him travelling endless kilometres, trudging across desert, north to Libya, then Algeria and Morocco until boarding an inflatable boat to cross the sea.
The power of the play lies in its very simplicity: short scenes and stark facts. Slave-like exploitation or kind encounters are presented as instant realities without explanation just as Ibrahima met them.
Blair Gyabaah plays Ibrahima with Youness Bouzinab, Whitney Kehinde, Ivan Oyik and Mo Sesay playing all the other roles: family, gun-toting brigands and border guards, fellow refugees. Sesay, for instance, ranges from Ibrahima’s father to the lorry driver who takes him on as apprentice or an ogre-like poultry famer, Bouzinab from Antia, to the biker who gives him a lift and his water bottle, Kehinde as his mother and all other women, including one abandoned in the desert as Ibrahima struggles on, Oyik as little brother Alhassane or the young lad who gives him a restorative massage.
Some are not much more than animated illustrations to the ongoing story but, whether creating the bustle of the market place or enacting the torchlight boarding of an inflatable, this is a cast that gives them all real life and is able to blend naturalism with Lati Saka’s stylised movement.
Natalie Johnson’s pink-washed setting gives an African vibe and provides multiple surfaces, while Jahmiko Marshall’s lighting and Max Pappenheim’s sound—and especially Falle Nioke’s score with what sound like indigenous instruments—add drama.
This is a picture of one person’s experience, but it can stand for many thousands, caught in situations they never planned for, trapped by the way the world is. It speaks for all of them and, when presented so simply and sincerely, it really strikes home—and it is not all about cruelties and endurance; human generosity sometimes shines through.
There is a final twist. As reported by the media a week ago, Ibrahima was to come to London to see this presentation of his own life—but the Home Office refused to give him a visa.