‘Almost impossible to think about’: the Seoul crowd disaster one year on
No bomb went off. No bullets were fired. No building fell down, no car veered out of control and no plane fell out of the sky. Yet still 159 mostly young people perished that night, crushed to death by nothing more than their own volume and a banal failure of planning.
“This wasn’t a concert or mosh pit or soccer game where barriers are erected for a day and maybe they’re in the wrong position,” explains Stu Schreiberg, executive producer of Crush, a two-part documentary about a deadly crowd disaster in Seoul, South Korea, last year. “This is a public street with lots of history of traffic patterns and where the choke points are and so it is almost impossible to think about how 159 died.”
More than 100,000 revellers were packed into the narrow bar-lined alleyways of Seoul’s trendy Itaewon neighbourhood for the first full Halloween celebration since coronavirus pandemic restrictions had been lifted. They became trapped in mass panic. Witnesses described people – many in Halloween costumes – falling on one another like dominoes, suffering severe breathing difficulties and falling unconscious. Most of the dead were in their 20s and 30s, and about two-thirds were women.
It was South Korea’s worst disaster since a 2014 ferry sinking that killed 304 people and exposed lax safety rules and regulatory failures. Yet such is the fast metabolism of the media that the Halloween horror did not linger in global headlines for long. The producers of Crush hope that, by giving viewers the vicarious experience of what happened, the events of that night will be remembered so that lessons can be learned from them.
Dispensing with a narrator, the tragedy is replayed in intimate, immersive and harrowing detail, drawing on 1,500 hours of archival footage from 280 sources, including body-camera video, surveillance video, survivors’ mobile phones, inquiry hearings and press conferences. Like the last calls of airline passengers on 11 September 2001, there are poignant words from people calling emergency services voiced by actors.
Speaking via video call from Los Angeles, Schreiberg adds: “The thing that was shocking to me when we first started looking at the footage coming in was the visual juxtaposition where you have people in obvious distress and then only a few feet away people are taking selfies, not aware.
“It’s almost like split attentions and that’s part of all the sensory input that’s coming into Itaewon. You’ve got music blaring, you’ve got crowds moving in lots of directions. What’s amazing about the footage is how people reacted so differently depending on where they were.”
He adds: “There is the whole notion of relatability. We’ve all been in Times Square. We’ve all walked at 30 Rock at Christmas time. We’ve all been in crowded elevators and so there’s something that is very universal about what actually could happen here.”
The film-makers also shot 22 interviews with people caught inside the tragedy as well as government, medical and other first responders. Among them is an American student who convinced her roommate to go out to a bar for the first time with fatal consequences; a fashion executive who describes his desperate search for his best friend; a Korean illustrator who was buried under dozens of bodies and must now come to terms with being partially paralysed; and two off-duty US soldiers who describe how they pulled unconscious people from the crowd.
Jeff Zimbalist, another executive producer of the film, says from Los Angeles: “Even though these are incredibly tragic incidents and there is no way to see them through a positive lens, there are moments of generosity, heroism where the human spirit comes through and making the stories a little more palatable by including some of these instances was important to us.
“We were ultimately inspired by some of those anecdotes that we were able to find and include where
American soldiers helped save probably dozens of lives, where a German expat helped to unite some of the other characters in our American pod. So trying to make sure that we’re not just painting the bleak picture.”
Known for a expat-friendly, cosmopolitan atmosphere, Itaewon was the country’s hottest spot for Halloween events and parties, with young South Koreans taking part in costume competitions at bars, clubs and restaurants.
Josh Gaynor, who co-executive-produced, says from Bologna, Italy: “It’s not just a cool part of town; it’s not just a place where young people go; it represents diversity, it represents freedom, it represents a place where people can go and be themselves, whoever that may be, and interact with people that perhaps they don’t always interact with.”
Zimbalist adds: “It celebrates career paths that aren’t traditionally celebrated in South Korea, like the arts.”
Indeed, the tragedy and subsequent investigation exposed a generation gap in the country. The second episode explores claims that police had failed to act on a report that gave plenty of warning about what tragedies could happen, including specific scenarios that came to pass, but were less responsive to the information than they should have been.
Zimbalist continues: “The explanations that we got and that were offered in the series had a lot to do with the politics of using tax money to allocate big amounts of resources and authorities to do crowd control in a district of the city that is generally rather stigmatised as a place of fun and revelry for the youth.”
He adds: “In a culture that values work above play and in an older generation that was a part of the economic boom since the Korean war in 1953, there is an expectation that the younger generation will follow suit.
“The younger generation generally feels that, as hard as they’re being asked to work, they’re still facing unemployment, often poverty and unrealistic expectations of how they can live and survive and be psychologically healthy. It’s a country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world.”
Initial reports on the incident pointed to negligence and lack of preparedness and painted a picture of a government and system of authority incapable of handling a crowd on such a scale.
But Zimbalist notes: “What we found, and what many of both the subjects we interviewed and a lot of the survivors who are still seeking justice would point out, is that this is a culture, a society, a government that is extremely well equipped and experienced at handling large crowds and has a culture of frequent protests – weekly protests in some instances. There are numerous examples where crowds of vast size are well handled.
“Then if you look at the exceptions, the Sewol ferry disaster of 2014 and this instance on 29 October last year in Itaewon, you have to ask, why not now? Why were these systems put into place successfully in other instances but not in these two? The obvious consistent factor between these two mass tragedies is that the majority of the attendees and the victims were of a younger generation.”
The film shows how the grief of the first days after the disaster turned to anger, especially with the release of the transcripts of 11 emergency calls raising the alarm. Police have admitted that the officers who received the calls failed to handle them effectively.
Gaynor comments: “What stuck out to to me and to us is there was no ambiguity when you read the transcripts of those calls. It wasn’t, ‘somewhere in the city something big is happening’. The word ‘crushed’ was used in that very first call at 6.34pm and it continued from then in a very specific part – just a couple of streets – in a very crowded part of town and it continued. When that came out, public sentiment started to change and to ask questions and have anger: why did this happen and that perhaps there was something more to it.”
An official investigation blamed police and other government agencies for failing to take precautionary measures and for inadequate and inept rescue operations. Two mid-level officials killed themselves but the president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, and his cabinet ministers appear to be weathering the storm.
Victims’ families set up their own organisation and operated and guarded a memorial 24 hours a day in front of city hall while demanding answers. Zimbalist says: “It’s very moving to see these family members there in front of photos of the deceased at all hours of the day holding vigil. The families do not feel as if enough has been done and they believe a more comprehensive investigation needs to happen.
“There is an ongoing investigation with the prosecutor’s office but they believe more needs to be done because they don’t believe that they have, in many cases, basic answers as to: When did my child die? Where did my loved one die? Was it there on the street, was it in a hospital somewhere, was it in an ambulance? They feel they deserve – and anybody would agree – to at least have some answers.”
Gaynor adds: “As I think back to the time we spent in Korea, a word that kept coming up as we spoke to people both on camera and off camera, is trauma. Whether it was people who were there that night or citizens in Seoul or first responders or politicians or reporters, we heard how traumatic covering this story was, how traumatic being there was, how traumatic this was because of just how senseless it seems.
“We use that word a lot, of course, but this was not a terror attack, this was not a shooter – this was young people out for a good time and not doing anything wrong when the absolute unthinkable happened.”
Crush is out now on Paramount+
to poorer countries without effective waste management – and reveal how overproduction has rendered piles of Tshirts, dresses and jeans worthless to charities and resellers.
But the 60,000 tonnes of textile waste Renewcell will be able to process by next year is a drop in the ocean. The EU and Switzerland generated 7m tonnes of garment waste in 2020. By 2030, this figure is expected to be more than 8.5m tonnes. About 70% of this gets thrown out with ordinary household waste and goes directly to landfill or incinerators, according to themanagement consultancy McKinsey. About 30% is collected via donation bins, take-back schemes and charities. The better-quality garments are taken and resold by vintage or charity stores within Europe; the leftovers are exported to Africa and Asia to be sold in their secondhand markets.
But a report published in February by the sustainable fashion foundation Changing Markets suggested that as much as half of the castoffs sent to the global south are of such poor quality that they end up being dumped in rivers or sold to be burned for (very toxic) fuel. The amount turned back into new clothing is estimated to be between 0.1% and 1%.
Companies other than Renewcell have chemical recycling technology, which creates virgin-quality fibres that can in theory be recycled on a loop, but progress towards achieving commercial scale has been slow. The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel
(HKRITA), for instance, opened a plant in Indonesia in 2021, but it recycles fewer than 1,000 tonnes annually. “Without getting [more] recycling systems operating at significantly higher scale, we will not be able to catch up with the industrial and postconsumer waste being generated,” says its CEO, Edwin Keh. Mechanical recycling of textiles has existed for years, but it accounts for a tiny percentage of the fibre market and produces materials that have to be blended with virgin fibres to be useable as clothing.
The problems that vex textile recyclers tend to be the same: a need for single materials that is complicated by blended fibres(which make up most of our clothes); a lack of infrastructure for collecting and sorting textile waste; and a difficulty procuring sufficiently large orders to justify the investment to build big enough factories.
Renewcell had some advantages when it came to industrialising. It took over an old paper mill that was already using 100% renewable energy and had some of the required infrastructure. A partnership with the H&M group and the not-for-profit Canopy led to orders from fashion brands including Levi’s, Ganni and Filippa K. Even so, it has reported weaker-than-expected sales; on 16 October, it announced that Lundström would be departing as CEO, with the company reportedly hoping that new leadership will spark an uptick in orders.
The process at Renewcell can handle cotton textiles that contain up to 5% synthetic materials, but Lundström says it is working to expand this. In Renewcell’s labs, Circulose can be recycled up to seven times. The hope is to increase capacity at the Sundsvall plant to 120,000 tonnes in 2024; they are exploring opening locations in the US, Asia and Africa. “There are no excuses any more,” says Lundström. “Our promise is to process 100% of textile waste. We are creating that circularity.”
The textile waste crisis is starting to catch the attention of legislators. Soon, extended producer responsibility schemes will make brands accountable for the end-of-life phase of their products. In the EU, the destruction of unsold goods will be banned from 2024 and, by 2025, textiles will be collected in a separate waste stream, similar to paper and glass. The UK is yet to legislate on the matter, but, in July, the environment minister Rebecca Pow launched a programme that includes proposals to stimulate circularity and create a textile recycling industry.
These moves represent a significant shift in awareness of how rapidly the garment industry has collapsed into one of take-make-waste. But the everincreasing speed of production and the rise of ultra-fast fashion brands such as Shein and Boohoo mean the gap between the volume of waste created and the capacity of textile recyclers will continue to widen.
In some respects, fast-fashion players are working to find solutions. H&M has an 10.37% stake in Renewcell and is already selling clothes made from Circulose. Since 2013, it has run a take-back programme through collection bins in its stores. Its ambition, according to Cecilia Brännsten, the head of resource use and circular impact at H&M Group, is to use “textile waste from production to build the raw material that we use for our garments”. But the lack of recycling infrastructure and capacity makes this ambition hard to reconcile with a business model built on mass production.
Plus, H&M’s take-back scheme has long been plagued with questions about its efficacy. In the 10 years it has been operating, the programme has collected 155,000 tonnes of textiles for resale and recycling, but some sources suggest their production volumes are as high as 3bn garments annually. In its report, Changing Markets reported finding garments from fast-fashion brands, including H&M, in landfills, or burned in Kenya. This is “a symptom of a very linear industry where the pieces of the puzzle do not fit yet”, says Brännsten.
The truth is that the fashion industry produces too many clothes. In the years it will take textile recyclers to build industrial-scale factories, hundreds of billions more garments will be made – and discarded. “Recycling is perhaps the last resort to address waste,” says Keh. “It is much better not to create waste, or [to waste less in the first place.”
means being “papped” outside the flat the couple live in when they’re in London. “I’ve lost my anonymity,” he says mournfully, “and I’ve realised that that was what was important to me. I haven’t ever experienced anything like this. I mean, you ask for success in your work, and you get it, and then you have to deal with the consequences. I’ve always valued my privacy, but that’s gone. I’ve been very lucky that I’ve had it for so long. You know, I’ve been doing this for over 60 years. And finally it’s over.”
In his memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, published two years ago, Cox describes Ansari-Cox as his soulmate. They met in Hamburg in 1990 when he was playing King Lear. She was so smitten, she saw it eight times. They got together properly eight years later and had two sons, but as a German Iranian in the wake of 9/11, she could only join him in the US on a tourist visa. It wasn’t until she landed a cameo in the western TV series Deadwood – in which Cox had a regular role as theatre impresario Jack Langrishe – that she managed to get a green card. They didn’t coincide on set there either, although his memoir states: “It was a very happy show. I was looking forward to coming back in season four … but then things fell apart, some kind of pissing contest, which meant the fourth series never happened.” He was approached to be in the film tie-in, but by then was committed to Succession.
As with so many actors, there is a whole phantom life in his list of near misses. “I’m often asked,” his memoir revealed, “if I was offered a role in Game of Thrones – reason being that every other bugger was – and the answer is, yes, I was supposed to be a king called Robert Baratheon.” He turned it down because the money wasn’t great and the character got killed off early. “There’s always been a tendency of American productions to treat British actors differently from American actors,” he grumbled. “In other words, to get them cheap.”
But it’s not just about money. He also rejected the part of the governor in Pirates of the Caribbean, a lucrative role that eventually went to Jonathan Pryce. Why? “It would have been a moneyspinner but, of all the parts in the film, it was the most thankless.” Also, he continues, it was very much the Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow show. “And Depp, personable though I’m sure he is, is so overblown – I mean Edward Scissorhands! Let’s face it, if you come on with hands like that and pale, scarred-face makeup, you don’t have to do anything. And he didn’t.”
None of these near misses, however, is quite as significant as the one he had in October 1965, as a 19-year-old actor in Scotland desperate to prove his chops on the London stage. He had been summoned for a meeting with Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre, and had booked a night flight for after his evening show at the Edinburgh Lyceum. But when he arrived earlier that day at the Lyceum with his overnight bag, the stage doorman handed him a note cancelling the meeting because Olivier was indisposed. Cox awoke the next morning to learn that the plane had crashed at Heathrow, killing everyone on board.
“Well then,” said Olivier, his hero, when they finally met in London. “What the fuck are you doing here? Because I can tell you now that you’ll only understudy here.” Cox took himself off to Birmingham Rep, where he had been offered a string of roles, including the villain Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. His stint there established him as a versatile character actor, while also introducing him to Michael Gambon – who, as Othello, was continually trying to get him to corpse.
Starting with a demolition of Steven Seagal, with whom he worked on the 1996 film The Glimmer Man, Cox’s memoir is so fabulously outspoken that I wonder if he actually wrote or even read the book. Perhaps he simply nodded it through like so many celebrity autobiographers do? No, he says, it’s all his words, dictated for a ghostwriter who merely helped to organise them.
But if he is rude about others, he is also unstinting about himself, berating himself as an absent father and – until Nicole – an unfaithful husband. Just about the only flaw he doesn’t confess to is excessive drinking, to which many of his peers succumbed. He took his craft too seriously. He is also careful not to punch down, backtracking a couple of times during our interview over indiscretions about past productions, usually involving one of his pet hates: directors. Apparently Nicole is always telling him to be less outspoken. “I sometimes sound off a bit too much,” he says, somewhat needlessly.
On politics, however, the 77-yearold has no such qualms. Among the subjects he has recently “sounded off” about is the shrinking number of opportunities for working-class kids like him, who were once able to get grants to go to drama school. “But,” he says, “you’ve got to be balanced about it, you know. I’m very happy to be outspoken on politics because I think this country is in such a mess. It’s horrible that we have had these successive Tory governments based on selfishness and not community.”
He recently made a pair of documentaries for Channel 5 called How the Other Half Live. “Because I was playing Logan,” he says, “I decided I wanted to look into the nature of the wealth gap and see how things were going back in my home town.” He pauses and digresses: “But did I know Logan had a Dundonian background? No!” At first, Cox had been told Roy was American through and through, or at least north American: during the birthday party in the very first episode, we find out the tycoon was born in Quebec.
“So I’m doing my best mid-Atlantic American,” Cox recalls – and then came the ninth episode, when the clan assemble at a castle for Shiv and Tom’s wedding. “Peter Friedman, who plays Frank, who I constantly fire and rehire, said, ‘They’ve changed your birthplace.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, they’ve changed my birthplace?’ He said, ‘Well, you’re no longer born in Quebec.’ I said, ‘So where am I born?’ He said, ‘I can’t remember. Let me check. Oh, yeah. It’s somewhere called Dundee.’”
And so art imitated life. The Channel 5 documentaries took him back to the Dundee tenement where he had lived as a child with his parents and his four older siblings. Until his dad died, when he was eight, it was great – but then his mother went to pieces. “I remember him doing fireworks on top of the old air raid shelter among all these pristine lawns. And you know, there was no more difficult time than in the 50s, when people were back from the war and trying to readjust.”
How did it all look when he returned? “I just couldn’t believe the state of the place. And I saw one thing that I thought was quite revealing. Back then we were all tenants, but we all had our names on the door. It was the Brodys, the Coxes, the Patersons. Now you go and there’s no name. It’s just 1, 2, 3. People have become numbers. The depersonalisation is a way of controlling them – and they don’t even realise. I think that’s at the root of what we are now struggling with. Dundee has a huge heroin problem, of course, but it’s also to do with poverty. It’s to do with people not being taken care of. I think that’s where we’re very guilty.”
Next year, Cox will return to Scotland to direct his first feature film, Glenrothan, set in a whisky distillery. He will also play one of the leads. “I was supposed to do it this year, he says. “But it just became overwhelmingly difficult because I was exhausted.” Although he doubts he will ever live in Scotland again, he insists he “certainly will be buried there. That much I know.”
His main home is in New York but he keeps a foothold in London, because it’s where his son and daughter from his previous marriage live. “And,” he adds, “because London represents freedom to me. When I came to London as a student in the 1960s, it was that period of incredible social mobility. And everybody who was alive at the time knows how phenomenal that was.”
He doesn’t consider himself to be British, “because the United Kingdom doesn’t make any sense. It’s not a United Kingdom and never was a United Kingdom.” It should be remodelled, he believes, as a United Federation: “A group of countries in the EU that come together to do things on behalf of one another. That’s a different system. And it’s a system we really need to look at. It’s the way we will progress – by giving each country its autonomy.”
Given the strength of his opinions, has he ever considered going into politics? “I doubt if I’d ever stand for office because I will always be the dissenter. My thing is to ask the questions. I don’t want to be trying to deliver horrible answers. And anyway, I don’t think of myself as a political animal. I just think in terms of fairness, of justice.”
This thought brings him back to the importance of community, his love of film and theatre – and the music of Bach, which he has realised, through the communal activity of rehearsal, he does like after all. “There’s absolutely nothing more joyous than sharing,” he says. “I just think we’ve undervalued that so much.”
And with that he’s off to prise the latest version of the script off Cotton and Nunn, muttering dark oaths about having to spend the weekend learning his lines all over again.
• The Score is at the Theatre Royal Bath until 28 October
Did I know Logan Roy had a Dundonian background? No! I thought he was born in Quebec
ficer tells him the group is travelling to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to take up jobs as domestic workers.
The activist is perturbed. Many reports say that this domestic worker route often ends up with young women trapped in modern slavery conditions, where they suffer long working hours, beatings, rape and even murder. How have these Ugandans missed the numerous radio and news reports?
But Emmanuel Mutaizbwa, a ZAM reporter and friend of the activist, tells him he has come across many Ugandans who have heard the stories, but still go. Such as Joyce Kyambadde, 27, who says she was abused, beaten and raped, but nevertheless recently returned to the Gulf for a second domestic job. “You keep thinking that this time you’ll get a salary. There is barely any hope here [in Uganda],” she says.
According to the Ugandan Bureau of Statistics, at least 41% of 18 to 30year-olds – more than 9 million young people – are not engaged in any productive activity. Of those who are, a large proportion do not earn enough to pay even a modest rent. This stands in stark contrast to the children of the country’s extremely wealthy governing elite.
***
In neighbouring Kenya, the story is similar. Patricia Wanja Kimani, who experienced months of abuse as a domestic worker in the Gulf, says: “It’s like telling a child not to put its hand in the fire; it will still put a hand in the fire.” Kimani has written a book about her experiences and now works for an NGO that aims to warn Kenyan women off leaving. Her colleague Faith Murunga, who works at an NGO with a similar mission, says that Kenya’s young people, 67% of whom are unemployed, have few alternatives.
As in Uganda, a wealthy elite does little to tangibly improve the lot of the majority. “We try to engage with the government. We do what we can,” says Murunga.
According to Kenyan government statistics, the bodies of 89 Kenyans were transported back from the Gulf between 2019 and 2021, with their employers reporting that they had died from cardiac arrest, suicide or had “died in their sleep”.
Awareness campaigns by NGOs seem to have limited effect. Ngina Kirori, an investigative reporter at ZAM, recently approached 10 women and men at random on the streets of the capital, Nairobi, and asked if they were considering going to the Gulf, despite the horror stories. Four people said they would still go because “there is no hope here”; two hesitated, saying they were scared, but still considering it; only four were sufficiently deterred to say they wouldn’t go.
Kimani has little faith that the government will address the situation. “Honestly, some government officials and civil servants are enablers. I was once threatened for going public about the abuse I suffered, and the person in question told me that a certain government official was on their side. Other women have also told me that they were given ‘orders from above’ to drop charges whenever they spoke out.”
Kimani has now left Kenya to look for a future elsewhere.
***
In Nigeria, ZAM reporter Theophilus Abbah stops and questions builders, plumbers and doctors in the capital, Abuja. Nine out of 10 say they want to “japa”, the Nigerian term for exiting the country at the “slightest opportunity”. They cite poor governance, the dismal state of health, education and other public services, a massive wealth gap, corruption and the oppression of media and civil society organisations.
“The suffering is unbearable,” says one building contractor. A plumber says he just feels sad: “I would love to stay in Nigeria, if the country worked.”
Most Nigerians try to leave with visas, but many also japa illegally, trekking north through the Sahel, hoping to reach the Mediterranean. According to NGOs who work with Nigerian migrants, the overwhelming majority never make it to the sea, getting stuck in the Sahel, ending up in exploitative labour projects, trafficking or other criminal rings, begging syndicates, brothels or even detention.
The risks are well-known in Nigeria, just as the dangers of the Gulf are known in Kenya and Uganda, and Cameroonians know they can perish in the desert, sea or jungle. But people continue to leave nevertheless, says Grace Osakue, co-founder of Girls’ Power Initiative, which aims to create small business futures for former and would-be migrants in Nigeria.
Osakue tells Abbah that her work is challenging, as “even many of those who already experienced the hardship, go again”. A 2021 report commissioned by the EU, found as many as half of Nigerians who returned were likely to try leaving again.
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In Zimbabwe, 95% of teachers would emigrate given the opportunity, according to a 2022 survey. The reason, says Obert Masaraure, president of the Amalgamated Rural Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe, which conducted the survey, is that teachers earn too little to take care of their families “even without food or school fees”.
Speaking to ZAM reporter Brezh Malaba, Masaraure says he regards a colleague who made it to Saudi as “so lucky”.
Zimbabwe boasts some of the world’s richest gold and diamond reserves, as well as lithium and other minerals. But the proceeds don’t reach state coffers; many reports have exposed how income is appropriated by individuals in the ruling Zanu-PF party.
“The ruling elites are stripping the nation of all the wealth,” Masaraure says. “They even facilitate the looting of our natural resources by foreign multinational companies. We as teachers and other professionals are taxed heavily, but ministers get salary packages of around $500,000. We fund their private jets and luxuries.”
When Zanu-PF won the election in August, which was widely criticised as fraudulent, Zimbabwe social media was full of messages addressing its neighbour South Africa after the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, congratulated Emerson Mnangagwa on his presidential win. One read: “I congratulate you too; on the number of Zimbabweans coming illegally into your country soon.”
Of the 3 to 5 million Zimbabweans who have left their country, as many as 2 million are estimated to have gone to South Africa. Their presence has been the target of political scapegoating by South African populist politicians, who have orchestrated hate campaigns, accusing Zimbabweans of criminality. Xenophobia has escalated into violent attacks, which Zimbabweans are well aware of, referring to it in online messages. “But we are still coming,” they say.
In none of the five countries did the reporting team find people who thought that migration could be stopped. Cameroonian opposition activist Kah Walla says: “No one leaves their home if it is comfortable. If I believe for my survival I need to leave my country, I will use every means to do that.”
BanyiTabi was urged by a man sitting next to her on a plane from Cameroon to Amsterdam “not to come back”.
Most people felt sadness about the state of the countries of their birth, feeling powerless to change anything, or “build up their own country”, the mantra of many of those in the west who oppose migration.
“Yes, our country must develop, it needs excellence,” says Dr Ejike Oji, a health sector expert in Nigeria. “So it is sad when our best minds are leaving. But [in the Nigerian system] you will be overlooked, even if you are the most excellent. Excellence is not rewarded here.”
There is no hope in Cameroon. I felt like a dead man and therefore I was no longer afraid of death
Njoya