“We see potential spies and enemies everywhere,” says David. “It can be at border control or it can be in a cafe. The other day, a guy was looking at me strangely, so I left without finishing my breakfast, and jumped in a taxi — asking the driver to take me to the wrong address.”
David is an Eritrean footballer, a refugee who thinks government agents are still watching him even though he fled the country a long time ago and is now thousands of miles away.
Though he has claimed asylum abroad, his fears mean that he often sleeps with a chair pressed against the door of his bedroom. Sometimes he will have nightmares about a group of men armed with weapons bursting in and taking him away.
He lives with the memory of 18 months of training at the Sawa military camp in Eritrea, where, from the age of 15, he was awoken each morning before sunrise and beaten if he did not carry out the orders of his superiors to their liking. There were day-long hikes without food or water and he saw unspeakable violence to women and girls, some of it sexual.
He felt like his future was being stolen from him yet insists he was one of the lucky ones.
While military service can be an unending indenture of slavery in Eritrea, he was released, he believes, because he had already started to prove…
