1 - Migration, Sexual Exploitation, and the Form of the Afterlife of Slavery: Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street and Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail

Summary

People knew the risks and people took them. Because the destination was worth it.

—Chika Unigwe, On Black Sisters Street

The 2019 Netflix drama Joy tells the story of Joy and Precious, two African women from Nigeria who live in Austria working as street prostitutes. The title character, Joy, is a seasoned sex worker who is close to paying off her sixty-thousand-euro debt to Madam, herself a former prostitute, who helped Joy and Precious settle in Austria.1 Precious has only recently arrived and is just beginning sex work. The film opens with an unidentified young woman in the house of a juju practitioner in Nigeria. The woman wants to go to Europe, and the juju practitioner is performing what viewers learn is a common ritual for women who are being funneled into the sex trade industry. The ritual is said to protect them on their journey to Spain, Germany, or whatever country they are traveling to. Viewers soon learn that it is a ritual designed to ensure the obedience of young women who wish to go to Europe and work in the sex trade out of economic desperation. During the ritual a shrine is constructed, and the women are told that if they fail to deliver money as instructed, then the powerful shrine will be used to inflict harm on them from afar. Throughout the ritual the unidentified young lady is forced to repeat “If I call the police on my master, this shrine shall kill me.” The film subsequently shifts to the title of the film, then to the streets of Austria where viewers are introduced to both Joy and Precious (1:08–6:09).

The rest of the film delivers a profound insight into the lives of African women in the diaspora who find themselves caught up in the sex trade. The movie ends with Joy paying off her debt to Madam, only to be arrested by immigration—presumably based on a tip from Madam—and sent back to Nigeria where we see Joy plotting to return to Europe. What the film dramatizes is ripped straight from reality. According to Princess Inyang Okokan, a former victim of sex trafficking in Turin and other places in Italy who now helps African women leave the sex trade, the rituals are often done by practitioners of juju who prey on young, impoverished, rural women seeking a better life abroad (“Sex Trafficking”).