Staying human at the Scalabrini Centre: the testimony of Bintou Diop
By Bintou Diop
At the age of twenty-six, after many travel experiences in different European countries in the area of migration, I felt the need to understand the South African migration context arise in me.
Today I work in the legal department of the Scalabrini Centre in Cape Town, one of South Africa’s three capital cities.
Cape Town is a city suspended at the far edge of the African continent, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Indian Ocean. Out of this meeting comes a singular beauty: unique mountains, landscapes that surprise the eye, a summer climate ideal for experiencing beaches, and a wind so impetuous that trees struggle to stay upright.
Behind its spectacular landscapes, however, lies a reality of deep inequalities, structural violence and extreme vulnerabilities. It is one of the most dangerous cities in the world, not by accident, but as a consequence of broken histories and systems that leave the most fragile behind.
It is this vulnerability that I encounter every day at the Scalabrini Centre, through the asylum seekers we accompany. Men and women forced to leave their lands, pushed away by armed conflict, political instability, natural disasters or resource scarcity – when the only option left is to flee.
Women and men who arrived from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Zimbabwe-each with a unique story, but bound by the need to survive. We accompany them daily on a journey that has something deeply human, almost therapeutic about it: listening, support, guidance and presence, within the complex and bumpy labyrinth of the asylum procedure in South Africa. It is not just administrative or legal work.
Title renewal, personal history, empowerment, appeals, advocacy, strategy meetings: words that punctuate our days with a constant, sometimes heavy, but necessary rhythm.
I could not recount my experience in Cape Town without evoking the many questions and personal learnings that resulted. Being a volunteer at the Scalabrini Centre has been a path to understanding this space, fragile and powerful at the same time. It has been confronting my own limitations, questioning my certainties, learning to work in a complex, multicultural and deeply human context.
Living a year in South Africa, immersing oneself in its various languages, contradictions and still-living history, is not just a professional experience. It is a journey of transformation. For me, geographic distance became a form of clarity. As if moving away allowed me to get closer to what really matters.
