Lives: The Ferryman Who Refused to Call It a Border

Salim Boakye, who died this month at eighty-one, would not accept the word "migrant" for the people he ferried. For nineteen years he ran flat-bottomed boats across a widening estuary on the Gulf of Guinea, moving families inland ahead of tides that the Oceanic & Atmospheric Assembly now logs as routine and that he simply watched climb his own dock, plank by plank. By the reckoning of the trust that later formalised his route, he carried some twenty thousand people — a rounding error against a global count approaching 116 million, and the whole world to each of them. He kept no register of nations, only of names and the number in each family. "A border is a thing governments draw," he told an interviewer in his seventies. "I only ever saw a river, and people who needed to be on the other side of it." He asked, at the last, to be carried across his own estuary one final time. He was.