WSF: Nigerian, Senegalese participants mourn missing, dead family members

At the World Social Forum, conversations about migration took on a deeply personal dimension as participants from Nigeria and Senegal shared stories of family members who disappeared or died while attempting to migrate.

For them, migration is not simply a question of borders, policies or statistics. It is also about the families left behind—families forced to live with grief, uncertainty and unanswered questions.

For Nigerian participant Purity, speaking about migration meant revisiting the painful story of her brother Nicholas, who left Nigeria in 2012 and has not questions that have remained with the family been heard from for more than 13 years.

Nicholas left behind a young family and two children. His first child was only three years old, while his second was six months old.

He hoped to travel through Libya and eventually reach Europe in search of better opportunities and a future for himself and his family.

But after he left Nigeria, communication stopped.

There was no phone call. No message. No explanation of what happened to him.

For more than a decade, his family has been left with questions that have no answers.

“Is he alive? Where is he? What happened to him? Does he remember us?” Purity said, describing the questions that have remained with the family throughout the years.

The pain of not knowing

For families of missing migrants, grief does not always come with certainty.

When a loved one dies, families may eventually have the opportunity to mourn, hold a funeral and begin the difficult process of accepting the loss. But when someone disappears, there is no such closure.

Purity said Nicholas’s children have grown up without their father. The child who was three when he left is now an adult, while the child who was onlymemoration, she concluded, must also become an opportunity to question the policies and systems that continue to put migrants’ia Dieye of Senegal, the pain of migration became personal when her younger brother, Mbaye, died while attempting to reach the sometimes appears in her dreams, giving her brief moments in which it feels as though he is still alive before families, the issue is therefore bigger than individual decisions to migrate. They want governments and institutions to examine the conditions that make dangerous journeys appear to young people as their only route towards six months old has grown up without the chance to know their father as they should have.

More than 13 years later, his absence continues to shape the family.

“Sometimes people may think that after 13 years a family should have moved on,” Purity said. “But time does not automatically remove uncertainty.”

She said Nicholas’s story has changed the way she understands migration.

“Behind every missing migrant is a family,” she said. “Behind every migration journey is a human being with people who love them and people who are waiting for them.”

That understanding, she said, is why families of missing migrants must be included in conversations about migration.

They need systems that can help them search for missing relatives, access information and receive emotional and psychosocial support while they live with uncertainty.

Speaking about Nicholas remains painful, but Purity said she continues to tell his story because she does not want him to be forgotten.

“Nicholas is not just a missing migrant,” she said. “He is a brother, a father, a son and a member of our family.”

For 13 years, the family has waited.

For 13 years, they have wondered.

And for 13 years, Nicholas has remained in their hearts.

From remembrance to accountability

For Rita, another Nigerian participant, the Forum provided a different but equally important lesson: remembering migrants who died or disappeared should also involve demanding answers.

Through her work with FREMNET, Rita has participated in activities remembering migrants who left home and never returned.

Families and advocates have held candlelight events and prayers for those who died along migration routes and those whose whereabouts remain unknown.

But at the World Social Forum, Rita encountered people organising specifically around missing migrants, and she said their approach changed her understanding of commemoration.

“What really touched me was that their work is not only about remembering these people,” she said.

“They are also asking questions and demanding justice.”

The discussions pushed her to look beyond remembrance and ask why migrants are forced to take dangerous journeys in the first place.

Why do people have to risk their lives at sea or crossing deserts?

What policies and systems make migration more dangerous?

And what can be changed so that other families do not experience the same pain?

For Rita, that was one of the most important lessons from the Forum.

“Remembering those we lost is important, but we cannot stop there,” she said.

Commemoration, she concluded, must also become an opportunity to question the policies and systems that continue to put migrants’ lives at risk.

A Senegalese family’s journey from hope to grief

For Alia Dieye of Senegal, the pain of migration became personal when her younger brother, Mbaye, died while attempting to reach the Canary Islands.

Mbaye, she recalled, was not simply a young man taking a reckless gamble. He was pursuing what he believed was a chance at a better life.

Football was his passion. He dreamed of opportunities beyond the poverty and economic uncertainty around him.

“He was not leaving on a whim,” Dieye said. “For him, football was everything. He wanted a bigger field, a better future and a way out of poverty.”

But the journey ended in tragedy.

The family spent more than a week desperately waiting for news after the boat carrying Mbaye encountered disaster near the Canary Islands.

Eventually, what reached them was an image of a capsized pirogue.

“All we received as an answer was the chilling image of a pirogue capsizing,” Dieye said, recalling the anxiety and unanswered questions that followed.

Grief without an expiration date

More than two years after Mbaye’s death, Dieye said the loss continues to affect her everyday life.

At times, she instinctively reaches for her phone, imagining she might call her brother. A notification or a memory can briefly revive the impossible hope that he might still be alive.

“The memories remain intact in our minds,” she said. “People ask us to forget, but that is impossible.”

Mbaye was not only her brother, she said.

“Mbaye was my little brother, my confidant, my other half.”

She said he sometimes appears in her dreams, giving her brief moments in which it feels as though he is still alive before she wakes to the reality of his absence.

Rather than carry the grief alone, Dieye found strength among other families who had experienced similar losses.

Through networks including the Collective of Victims of Migration in Senegal (COVES) and the CommémorAction movement, she met mothers, fathers, sisters and other relatives mourning loved ones lost along migration routes.

Those gatherings created spaces where families could talk about their experiences, remember their relatives and challenge the tendency to reduce migrant deaths to numbers.

“Being able to talk about my brother and his passion for football with other mothers and sisters who share the same pain helps us transform our enormous grief into collective strength,” she said.

In Senegal, families have organised commemorations, including candlelight gatherings in Dakar, to ensure that those who died or disappeared are remembered by name and story.

‘Every missing person has a family’

The issue was also discussed during a commemoration panel at the World Social Forum focused on missing family members.

Participants spoke about the trauma of families searching for loved ones who disappeared during migration and called for truth, accountability and justice.

“Every missing person has a family, a story and a voice that must not be forgotten,” participants said.

They remembered missing migrants, stood with their families and demanded truth, justice and accountability.

The gathering then observed a minute of silence for missing migrants.

For families like Purity’s and Dieye’s, such moments of remembrance are significant because they affirm that their loved ones have not been forgotten.

But the participants also want commemoration to lead to action.

A crisis that crosses borders

Dieye’s advocacy eventually took her beyond Senegal to Cameroon, where she met families who had experienced similar losses.

The encounters helped her understand that her family’s tragedy was part of a much wider crisis affecting communities across Africa.

Families spoke about poverty, isolation, broken family structures and the pressures that push young people towards dangerous migration routes.

Some parents blamed themselves for being unable to provide better opportunities for their children.

But Dieye and other activists challenged that sense of guilt.

“The parents are not responsible,” she said. “The real problems are closed borders, inequality and the lack of prospects for our young people.”

For the families, the issue is therefore bigger than individual decisions to migrate. They want governments and institutions to examine the conditions that make dangerous journeys appear to young people as their only route towards a dignified future.

‘The ocean must not have the last word’

At the heart of the campaign is a demand that the dead and missing be remembered as people—not statistics.

Dieye argues that poverty, inequality, social pressure and restrictive migration policies have combined to create circumstances in which young Africans are willing to risk their lives on dangerous land and sea routes.

For her, remembering the dead must therefore go hand in hand with confronting the conditions that contributed to their deaths.

At a final commemoration involving families from different countries, national borders appeared to fade as participants united around a shared experience of loss.

Today, Dieye said, her brother’s memory has become part of a broader struggle for justice.

“My brother no longer lives only in our regrets,” she said. “He continues to live through our struggles.”

Alongside families who have lost sons, daughters, brothers and other loved ones, she says she will continue to march, speak and commemorate.

“We will continue to walk, gather and remember,” she said, “so that their memories can light our path and so that the ocean will never have the last word.”