In the early evening of November 11, after four days at sea, the passengers of two boats carrying 75 Somali migrants spotted distant lights and a hill. They could hear the muezzin calling for the Maghreb, Muslim evening prayers. Their destination, Mayotte, a French island in the Indian Ocean, was finally in sight.
The lead skipper confirmed what they saw and heard — they were close to shore. However, he expressed a concern. He said he feared that gangsters on the beach might attack them. He decided to stop the boats and informed the passengers they would spend the night at sea and go ashore in the morning, according to a Swahili-speaking migrant who served as the interpreter.
Little did the migrants know their journey, so close to a successful ending, was about to descend into unspeakable horror.
The skippers, who were also human traffickers, had been with the passengers since November 7, when they set off in the two boats from a mothership anchored off Kenya’s southern coast, near Mombasa.
The skippers’ role was to take Somalis on the final leg of their journey to Mayotte, the French island off the northwest coast of Madagascar that has recently become a magnet for asylum seekers hoping to reach Europe.
Map of Madagascar and the French island of Mayotte
However, the skippers were not happy with their compensation. The smuggler told the interpreter that he had been contracted to transport 40 people, but now there were 75. “The money I was given is not enough,” he complained, according to boat passenger Luul Osman Mohamed, who overheard the conversation. The smuggler wanted the passengers to hand over more.
Soon after, the smuggler briefly turned the boat’s engine on, revved it in the water, and then shut it off again, perhaps as a tease or a warning to the passengers. The other boat did the same.
“Sometimes they moved farther out to sea, and other times they came closer to shore,” Luul told VOA’s Horn of Africa Service. But after two rounds of this, she said, “the engine on the other second boat broke down. Then, our engine failed too.”
That night, the migrants and the two smugglers spent the night adrift on the two boats, just off the coast.
One boat carried 37 people, mostly women and two children — a 2-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl — while the second boat carried 38 passengers.
November 12
Early the next morning, two men rendezvoused with the ships in a boat, seemingly responding to phone calls made by the smugglers. The first smuggler announced that he would leave with the men to repair his boat's engine. He never returned.
The passengers and the second smuggler remained stranded. The two boats drifted aimlessly in the open sea under the scorching sun, with no shelter to protect them. Desperate to cool off, the passengers resorted to splashing seawater on themselves.
November 13
The waves rocked the boats back and forth, but the passengers managed to sleep peacefully. One challenge, however, was that they couldn’t communicate with the second smuggler, as he spoke a language they didn’t understand. This became a minor issue compared to what lay ahead.
The next morning, fishermen arrived and communicated with the second smuggler. Together, they managed to repair the engine on the second boat.
They agreed the boat with the working engine would tow the other one, and it seemed to work at first. As the engine roared to life, they began moving — only in the wrong direction, further out to sea. For some reason, the skipper steered toward Comoros instead of Mayotte.
They continued for three to five hours, Luul recalls, until the only working engine failed once again.
“After taking us deep into the sea, he took the navigation system with him and left on the fishing boat,” Luul said. The second skipper disappeared and never returned.
“When the smugglers were with us, we felt calm. They were with us, and whatever happened to them, we knew would happen to us,” said Anas Ibrahim Abdi, 21. Now, with both smugglers gone, the migrants were at the mercy of the sea and the elements.
November 14
The 75 migrants drifted in the ocean. They had run out of the dates, fried chicken and bread they had received from the mothership a week earlier. The boats and the migrants were stranded in no-man’s sea, not knowing where to go — or how.
Passengers tied the two boats together, to stay connected, says Luul. But when strong waves battered the vessels, they untied the ropes, fearing that if one boat were to sink, the other would go down, too.
About six men who knew how to swim came over to the women’s boat, just in case there was an accident.
Anas, who was in the first boat, moved the other way. “My energy was low, I was sick. Because lots of people come on board, it was not balanced, so I moved to the other boat,” he says.
For three days, the passengers tried to make the boats move, without success. During these days the first death occurred — a young man who was a diabetic.
“We read Fatiha for him. He died in an evening,” Anas said.
Bodies of migrants who died in a boat tragedy are seen on the shore of the Madagascar coast in the Indian Ocean on Nov. 23, 2024.
Sometimes, the waves would bring the passengers close to land, only to drag them back to sea. After 10 days adrift, another passenger, a woman named Fatima, passed away.
“It was hot, she was hungry. She was sitting at the front. Her brother was with her. She was shocked for about two days before she died,” Luul said.
The following day, another passenger died — the 2-year-old boy.
“We had milk for him. When we mix milk with sea water he refuses. When he sucks milk from his mother she faints, she finds it hard to breathe because she has not eaten. Later we started to mix milk with her urine... That kept him alive for two days,” says Luul.
Days later the boy’s mother died, too.
As one passenger after another died from hunger and thirst, others suffered hallucinations. Luul says her friend Fathi was one of them. “She was saying this is Lido beach, let us get off the boat, let us take Bajaj [rickshaw],” she says. “She was ripping off her clothes.”
At times, a swarm of fish hit the boats. Inventive passengers used their sarongs to catch a few, giving them some welcome nutrition.
“We were also eating green grass, salty, that was brought by the waves from the beach,” Luul said.
The only other protein came from a bird that came hovering over a body on the boat. It was caught and eaten too.
November 23
On the first boat, 17 people died, 14 of them women. Ten others died on the second boat. One boy, realizing the boat was going nowhere, jumped into the water, confident in his ability to swim. He was seen swimming away, but moments later, the waves carried him in the opposite direction. He was never seen again.
The last three days, as everyone lost energy, the boats moved swiftly, carried by strong winds. Rain gave the drifting migrants some desperately needed water, but most were losing hope of survival.
Then, after a dark night with no moon, Anas recalls, “At dawn, there was light, we saw the mountain and then a coastline.”
Madagascar. After 16 days at sea, the migrants had finally reached land. The migrants were able to guide the boats close to shore and staggered onto the beach.
Nearby fisherman shied away at first, Anas said. Then they saw the bodies in the boats.
“They were moved. They gave us water, rice and fruits,” Luul said.
The fishermen made a phone call. Another boat came. They tied their boat to the migrants’ and pulled them onto the beach.
“They were good people, they helped us, they changed our clothes, they gave us warm water to get our energy,” Luul said.
The migrants were transferred to authorities in Madagascar.
Survivors of a boat tragedy that killed 28 Somali migrants off the coast of Madagascar arrive at Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Dec. 7, 2024.
Luul, the 31-year-old mother of five, was the only person from her family on the boat. She says she survived because “everyone has their time to die” — and this wasn’t hers, although she felt it was close.
“I was thirsty, I was hungry; my voice has changed, the last day my throat was not opening, it was swollen. I had lots of spots, and from sitting on the boat. I was weak,” she said.
Out of the 75 passengers, 47 survived the grim journey. The Somali Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on the social media platform X that it chartered a plane for the survivors, including Luul and Anas, and brought them back to Mogadishu on Saturday.
This story originated in VOA’s Horn of Africa Service.