Bold woman’s tale of life as sex slave overseas

Lucy Kabanya, 39, was in high spirits at the Moi International Airport in Mombasa on July 8, last year.

And she had every reason to be, for she had just boarded a Condor Airline plane on her way to Germany, courtesy of her German “boyfriend”.

Various thoughts flashed through her mind as the plane cut through the clouds on its way to Frankfurt, where she was to spend a three-month holiday.

But all hopes of an exciting and wonderful stay in a foreign land were shattered on arrival in Germany, when her host confiscated her travel documents and denied her food for several days before informing her that she would work as a sex slave.

“I didn’t know I was a victim of human trafficking until I arrived in Germany. Before I left Kenya, my host had treated me so well; he had lavished me with gifts of all kinds, sent me money whenever I requested for cash. He promised me a life I had never seen before. On that, he was right.

Beyond words

“At first I didn’t believe him when he said that I was going to be a prostitute because he had brought me to Germany as his girlfriend. But I realised he meant business when he bundled me into a vehicle and took me to a bar to start my vocation. I was stunned beyond words,” she said.

Lucy says this was the moment her most harrowing, humiliating, degrading and inhuman experience started. She said her host, who has since been charged in a German court, worked in cahoots with some Turks to torment her. 

“For nearly three weeks before I escaped, I went through hell on earth. Apart from being raped, I was viciously beaten and threatened with death by my host,” she added. “Some of the things I experienced I’m unable to express in words because they were beyond human imagination, and you can only wish they were scenes in a horror movie,” she said.

Lucy, who made her startling, shocking and emotional revelations during a workshop on combating human trafficking at the Coast, organised by Solidarity with Women in Distress (Solwodi), said she was forced to change tack in order to escape.

“I was forced to convince my host that contrary to our earlier disagreements, I was now enjoying myself and there was no need of suspicion among us,” she told Nation in an interview.

Denied telephone

Lucy, who had been kept incommunicado and denied a telephone and refused permission to talk to strangers, gathered the courage and asked for a mobile phone. She said she needed to call her friends and relatives, since they were expecting to hear from her ever since she left home. The request was granted.

“I saw a ray of hope in my escape plan. Immediately he left the house for work, I called a friend in Finland and told her I was in trouble,” she said. 

Lucy said her friend gave her a German police hotline, which she called and the police responded.

“The police arrived immediately and rescued me, arrested my host and one of his collaborators, and took me to hospital before taking me to a safe house. Finally I was taken to Solwodi-Germany,” she said. 

Lucy, who returned to Kenya recently and is undergoing counselling and rehabilitation through the support of Solwodi, is set to return to Germany to testify against her tormentors who have since been charged with sexual assault.

She said she had since found out that the man who lured her to Germany — an employee of a local authority there — had trafficked five other girls to Germany, but they had endured their suffering quietly.

Lucy says she met the man who invited her to Germany through a friend, and they started communicating through e-mail early in 2005 before he came to Kenya last year to meet her. 

“When he came to Kenya, we stayed together in a hotel for a month before he went back to Germany and told me that he was going to send me an air ticket to go there on holiday,” she said.

Before she travelled to Germany, her ‘boyfriend’ used to send her gifts and money for upkeep. 

Many Kenyans have gone through similar experiences at the hands of international traffickers, but are suffering in silence for fear of being ridiculed.

But Lucy said she opted to go public because she wanted to save other Kenyans who expected a blissful life abroad. “What I went through were humiliating, degrading and inhuman experiences. A right-thinking person should not gloss over them because of fear of being laughed at or ridiculed,” she said.

“I would be doing a lot of disservice to many young men and women who have the perception that they can get rich by having foreign girlfriends or boyfriends. They should know that some of these people are beasts who have no respect for Africans,” she added. 

International crooks

Ms Elizabeth Akinyi, the manager of the Kenya branch of German-based Solwodi, said: “We have received more than 25 women who have been returned to Kenya from Europe after falling prey to international crooks who took them there as their boyfriends before they turned them into sex slaves.” 

A trafficking in persons interim report released by the US Department of State on January 19, says Kenya is among the countries affected by human trafficking. The report says the Government has made some progress in combating trafficking in persons since release of last year’s report that indicated Kenya was a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for forced labour and sexual exploitation.

The interim report says more needs to be done, as lack of awareness of human trafficking among law enforcement officials undermines the ability of police to identify and track cases. The report says Kenya Police was unable to report any concrete action its human trafficking unit had taken in the past year. 

NGOs presented a draft Anti-Trafficking Bill to the Attorney-General in May 2006. The bill should be tabled in Parliament during the session that starts next month.