Nigerian women, Agentic lives I
The triumph of Iziegbe Ogbeide
I first came across Nigerian content creator Iziegbe Ogbeide on TikTok through what I now know to be her third video out of over thirty videos detailing her gruesome experience and eventual escape from sex trafficking in Italy.
In the video, “Izzy” (as she is fondly called), rejected any sympathy from her viewers for her experience and charged them to focus on young girls currently being trafficked all over the world, citing a recent example of someone trafficking young girls to Kuwait. She mentioned her healing journey and instead directed her audience to help young girls around them, chastising the Nigerian community for a culture of bullying young girls and even stigmatising them after sexual assault. In a predictable fashion, her comment section was divided: some praising her for her bravery, others chastising her for not having any privacy and accusing her of “enjoying” her trafficking experience. But as I would come to learn about Izzy, she is truly a courageous woman who has not allowed her life to be defined by others and instead has shown up for herself with authenticity, love and sometimes, a bit of dark humour. While I have experienced the immigrant life in Europe, my story differs from Izzy’s in many aspects. I do however strongly identify with her perspective and experience on inter-gender relationships within the European diaspora, the cyclic nature of workplace abuse abroad, and the complicity of immigration policies in making Black immigrants susceptible to exploitation within their communities.
I hope that by shining a light on Izzy’s story through this essay, you the reader, are able to find courage to push past difficult circumstances, to seek justice, and to find your voice unapologetically.
“They Like to Carry Children”: How It Happened
Izzy was seventeen years old and had barely travelled outside her home state when someone she trusted gave her a set of instructions and a ticket. She was a teenager from Benin City, and like many girls recruited into trafficking networks through Nigeria’s south-south corridor, she was young enough to seem manageable and old enough to be moved across borders without arousing immediate suspicion. She flew from Nigeria to France, where a connection was waiting, and was then rerouted on a second ticket to Italy. The instructions were simple: walk straight off the plane and wait to hear your name. Follow whoever calls it. She did exactly that.
What happened next would consume seven years of her life.
This is not an unusual story; and that is precisely what makes it so devastating. Izzy has noted, matter-of-factly, that sex traffickers prefer young girls. Some of the girls she knew in Italy had their ages falsified to make them easier to move. The entire operation ran on logistics and compliance strictly mapping out flights, connections, handlers, instructions delivered in stern, threatening voices to children who had no framework for understanding what they had been delivered into. The violence was not always spectacular. Sometimes it was the slow grind of having no choice: being told to block your period and go to work regardless of the pain, having a “madam’s relative” stationed at your workplace to monitor and report back everything you did, seeking help from Nigerian men and being told that the only alternative to sex work was drug trafficking - a path that if caught by the authorities would mean prison. Taking a ritualistic “blood oath” back home and being threatened with harm to yourself and your loved ones back home. The trap was total.
Her words about the physical reality of that period are some of the most arresting in the entire series. She describes various forms of reproductive abuse including having to stuff cotton balls into her uterus to block her menstrual flow and being forced to drink dangerous substances including copious amounts of alcohol to abort pregnancies. With no duty of care and a constant looming threat of physical and/or sexual assault, the girls were disposable to these traffickers.
The Men Who Watched and Said Nothing
One of the things Izzy returns to repeatedly, and with a specific, focused anger, is the role of Nigerian and African men as bystanders who profited from proximity to the women they claimed to love or desire, while offering nothing in return. She is not speaking broadly or theoretically. She is speaking from a very particular experience of what community looked like to a young Nigerian woman navigating sex work in Italy.
There were the men who stayed home with the babies while their partners went out to work, then spent the money and supplemented it with contempt, simultaneously holding religious standards over their women. They shamed these women as sex workers while using their financial resources to take care of their families back home. There were the men who travelled across Europe and built businesses, bought land, funded various construction projects back in Benin - all of it, she says bluntly, built on “ashawo money”. The wealth was laundered through respectability but in the eyes of the community led by these men, the women who generated it were not. Anecdotally, she recalls being stranded at an airport, trying to exchange pounds, and it was two Senegalese men who helped her. Not a single Nigerian man.
In contrast (not in a subservient or glorifying way), she makes an important distinction about white male clients here. Within the transactional world she was forced to inhabit, Izzy recalled that the men who treated her and women like her with the most basic human decency were often not from her community. The men from her community knew exactly what she was doing, sometimes created the conditions that kept her doing it, and still felt entitled to judge her for it. This, she says, is what she means when she calls them “disgusting”. The hypocrisy is not incidental, it is structural. It is what it looks like when patriarchy extracts labour from women while denying them the dignity of naming that labour honestly.
She is also careful to extend this critique to the broader social ecosystem around trafficking. The women who recruit and manage other women (the “madams”) are not exempt. Izzy describes knowing a woman who had been in Kuwait for barely a year before she began trafficking girls from her home state. The pipeline does not only run through men. It runs through anyone with proximity to power and a willingness to use other people’s vulnerability as a resource.
The Body After: Trauma, Healing, and Relearning Pleasure
Izzy arrived in the United Kingdom at twenty-three, having spent seven years in Italy. She claimed and was successful granted asylum. Recalling her asylum interview, she insists that she did not cry, making this choice deliberately as she did not want the people who had trafficked her to win. She wanted it on the record in her own voice, not filtered through the conventions of victimhood. She has since said that she was never in any doubt about how her application and testimony would be received, because according to her, “You don’t have to have a good memory when you’re telling the truth”.
But this was the start of a completely different challenge for Izzy..........
(PT. 2 of this two part essay will be published soon)
Update (PT. 2):
