The weight of the waves: A brother’s final journey
BY HAKEEM TOURAY
The air on December 4, 2020, carried that familiar Gambian stillness, the kind that makes the night feel like it’s holding its breath. I was returning from Kampeh, one of those late-night gatherings where laughter stretches time, when I saw my brother, Buba, standing outside our gate like a lone sentry. It was nearly 2am.
As I approached, the silence between us thickened. Then, with a calmness that felt unnatural, he delivered the sentence every family in our region dreads: “I want to take the back-way journey to Europe.” My tongue froze. I knew too well the predatory nature of that path, the desert that devours the unprepared, the sea that swallows the hopeful. I pleaded. I reasoned. I warned. But in our culture, respect is a river that flows downward. When an elder brother declares his destiny, a younger one can only splash against the current.
That night, something shifted. I became less a brother and more a reluctant strategist. We mapped out a journey stitched with hope yet soaked in danger. By sunrise, he was in Banjul, asking about the desert buses to Mali. By Allah’s will, or perhaps a cruel twist of fate, there was one seat left on a Friday departure. He didn’t come home to say goodbye. Maybe he feared our mother’s face would unravel his resolve. He asked me to bring his belongings instead.
After Jumu’ah, I drove toward the coast with Sheikh Hatab Hydara, a friend who long ago became family. We met Buba at the station. I handed him his bags, the weight of his new life compressed into canvas and zippers. He left that Friday without a final word to our mother, without teasing little Joko, without a last laugh with Degen or Gibril, without a hug for Kombeh. Only Hatab and I stood on the asphalt, watching him disappear into the machinery of migration.
His passage through Libya was unnervingly swift. In under three weeks, he reached the Mediterranean. But the sea is a moody gatekeeper. His first attempt failed; the money evaporated into the pockets of ghosts. We tried again. That second attempt would become our undoing.
On February 3, 2021, just after Maghrib, my phone lit up. A voice note from Buba. He said they would launch into the blue later that night. That voice note became the last time I heard my brother alive. I spent the night in a feverish half-sleep, sending message after message, waiting for the double-blue ticks that never arrived. I prayed. I bargained. I waited for dawn. Shortly after Fajr, a Libyan number called. The voice was not Buba’s. It carried only a jagged truth: the Mediterranean had claimed him.
I sought our Imam, may Allah grant him Jannah, to help shoulder the impossible task of breaking the news. He looked at me, eyes heavy, and said, “Walahi, this is beyond me. I cannot tell your family that Buba is gone.” He summoned three elders. I refused to walk with them. I could not bear to witness the moment my mother’s world shattered. I stood by the gate, a ghost in my own home, listening to the screams of my sister Kombeh and the rising wails of neighbors.
When I finally entered, the scene was a portrait of grief carved in dust. My mother lay on the ground, earth clinging to her clothes. When she saw me, she lunged, gripping my shirt with a strength born from pure, unfiltered agony. “Where is my son?” she cried. And in that moment, the weight of the sea settled into my own chest. Walahi, no heart is built to carry such a load. Today marks five years since he left us. Buba didn’t leave because he was restless. He left because he was selfless. He chased a horizon he believed would bring us dignity, ease, and opportunity, gifts he never lived to enjoy. He remains a son of The Gambia, a brother of the soil, and now, a memory carried by the tide.
Rest in peace and dignity, Buba. Until we meet again in Jannah, In shaa Allah.
Ends