He advised parents to inquire very well when someone promises to give a better life to their daughter in another country. “They should look at the map and see where they are taking their children. Anyway, they are not going to Europe. This is where they end up. They end up as sex workers who must pay their traffickers before they are set free,” he said. It had been a long day travelling and I was beginning to feel sleepy. I went back to my hotel room to prepare for the next day.

In the afternoon of 12 January, Sawadogo, Otoba, their friend and I travelled to the outskirts of town where many Nigerian girls work as sex slaves. We arrived at a brothel called ‘Bar Dancing Petit Ouaga’ in Toudoubweogo village. The brothel is also known as Petit Ouaga (Little Ouaga). Virtually all the girls at Petit Ouaga spoke pidgin English. “All of them are from your country,” Sawadogo told me, referring to Nigeria. We called a very young girl to join us. Her name was Gift, she said, and she’s from Edo State in Nigeria and had travelled with someone for three days to get to Burkina Faso in April 2014. But, instead of coming straight to Ouagadougou, she travelled first to Dori where gold is being mined manually. Dori is about 271 kilometres from Ouagadougou. I asked her how old she was. She said she’s 18. But she looked far younger than that. Most girls who are trafficked are taught to say they are 18 years and above.

She left for some minutes and Sawagodo explained that many young girls are being taken to Dori because there is a belief there that when you sleep with a virgin or a very young girl, you discover more gold.

•Gift: One of the victims

Gift returned some minutes later and I asked her how much it will cost me for a sex romp. She said a thousand franc cfa, about N350 or $2. I followed her to a room. It was another filthy room divided into two with a piece of clothe. It was divided that way because two girls could have sex at the same time with two men. Before I could sit on the small mattress, she handed a condom over to me and was already pulling off her clothes. She said I should hurry but I told her to wait a bit.

“I will give you more money but I just want us to talk and be friends,” I said. “I want to be able to come here to take you out and away from this place,” I added. She told me she worked for someone and was yet to pay all her money to be set free and could not go out of the brothel. A cab brought her and other girls to the brothel every afternoon and came back to take them home at about midnight or one o’clock the following day. It was a routine she was now used to since she arrived Ouagadougou from Dori. I asked her if she did not want to come back to Nigeria, if she was happy with what she was doing. She said she was not happy and added that once she finishes paying, she would become independent and would make her own money. She refused to disclose how much she had been asked to pay, but Sawadogo said, they pay about 1.5 million franc cfa, about N500,000 or $2800.

I spent some minutes with her in the room talking, asking her questions about the trafficker, but she would not say much. I paid her, collected her phone number and left. I joined the other guys who were having some drinks and eating some meat at a small bar in the brothel. By then, other Nigerian girls had joined them, most of them very young girls of about 16 years old. We were joined by “the middle man” for the girls, a very vibrant guy called Ouédraogo. He spoke freely about his business.

He explained how human trafficking works. The girls are brought in by some people from Nigeria and handed over to a lady he called the main trafficker in Ouagadougou, a former prostitute who was trafficked to Burkina Faso from Nigeria many years ago, and is now helping traffick other girls while she remains a high class prostitute. The lady, whom I will later meet, then hands the girls over to middle men like Ouédraogo who find brothels for them for a percentage of the money they make by having sex with men. At the brothels, the girls are handed over to managers who ensure patrons pay and the girls are safe.

Ouedraogo and the trafficker

Last December, Ouédraogo was handed over six girls of between 14 and 16 years old by the Nigerian trafficker. “Just in December, she gave me six girls. Very young girls. She always gives me young girls because she knows she can trust me,” he said over drinks. I told him about Gift, the girl from Edo State. He said there were even younger ones. “There are even younger ones, when you sleep with them, it is very tight and they cry. I like it when they cry. I like it when it is very very tight, and most men like it like that. I can supply you with very young girls,” he said in French. He said he did not have the name of the trafficker but had her phone number and knew where she lived and could take me there.

•Another victim at Petit Ouaga

He gave examples of very young girls who were brought into Burkina Faso as virgins and had to sleep with them first before passing them to the manager at Petit Ouaga brothel. I asked him if he knew the manager of the brothel and where he hailed from. “I don’t know his name but he is from Burkina Faso. You don’t need to know people’s names here. It’s a network. Just do your job, get paid and you are good. You don’t need to ask many questions, otherwise they will begin to suspect you,” he said. He said in four months he had handed over ten girls to Petit Ouaga alone, including the six girls he brought there in December. He used to deal with another brothel, he said, but the manager was not honest, so he left him four months ago.

In four months, he said, he had bought a brand new motorcycle.

“I bought the bike for 472,000 franc cfa (about N160,000),” he said. “That’s a lot of money,” I countered. “Can you make such an amount in four months?” He replied in the affirmative. It was getting late. I took my leave and scheduled an appointment with him the next day, 13 January. That day, on his motorcycle, I crisscrossed Ouagadougou with Ouédraogo. The Nigerian trafficker, he said, lived at Ouaga 2000, an upscale neighbourhood for wealthy people, including expatriates and tourists.