IN BARCELONA – Lamine Sarr used to sell fake Barcelona football shirts on the streets in a practise known as “top manta” after the plastic sheets which migrants use to show off fake wares.
Today, his world has come full circle. Now he helps run a fashion label known as Top Manta, which is designed to provide work for the migrants to Spain and get them off the streets.
The association, which is run by former manteros as they are known in Spanish, produces regular collections of new lines much like brands including Zara or Mango. But the difference is Top Manta also hopes to educate the public about the world from which many of these migrants have come.
Instead of shiny high street shops, Top Manta operates out of a small store in a side street in Barcelona’s tough Raval district. This is home to migrants from Africa and many parts of Asia. Halal butchers stand side by side with the best Indian restaurants in the city.
Inside Top Manta, the shelves are full of brightly coloured designs with slogans like, “Legal Clothing”, “Illegal People”, or “Fake System, True Clothes” and “Salon de Coiffure Top Manta Cutting Prejudices Since 2015”.
One top resembles the blue and purple of an FC Barcelona shirt but instead of the local football team, it reads: “Top Manta”.
For Mr Sarr, 41, and many others, it has been a long road to get to this stage.
In 2006, he left his native Senegal and spent seven tense days in kayak with 98 other people crossing the Atlantic before finally arriving in Tenerife. No one died during the journey but many often do.
“It was an adventure like any other migrant who arrives here, with the exception of [footballers] like Leo Messi who arrive here without any problems,” Mr Sarr remembers.
“It was a difficult and dangerous journey. To travel in a kayak across the seas is almost impossible. There are kayaks which carry more people than the one I was in.”
Once he arrived, he was held by police then transferred to a migrant holding centre before being let out while he claimed asylum. He was not officially allowed to work so had to make his own way, doing whatever job he could find.
Mr Sarr moved to Barcelona where he worked on farms or as a mantero. Finally, he was granted a work permit in 2019 and could go home to see his family for the first time.
Under Spanish law, a migrant from most African states must live in the country for at least three years before they can start to apply for permission to work legally. While they wait for the chance to work legally, they must scratch out a living on the streets.
The presence of the top manta sellers on the streets has prompted controversy in Spain, with some conservative politicians claiming they are a menace that encourage organised crime.
Mr Sarr says Top Manta, which makes a small profit, is more than a money-making fashion label.
“Top Manta is a fashion label, but it is different to all the others. It has a real story behind it,” he says.
“Our designs mix cultural influences. It is an ethical brand and tries to give the clothes an African touch and mix that with an influence from Barcelona. We also try to touch of the issue of neocolonialism and the reality which many migrants face every day, like the bureaucracy.”
The nationalities of Top Manta workers are as varied as the bright colours on some of their designs. The designers come from Gambia, Senegal, Venezuela and Bolivia.
Top Manta started in 2017 but it was hard to find the material to make the clothes and a workshop.
At first, the designers had to sew them in the shop in Barcelona. Now the sewing machines are in a different workshop in a separate part of the city.
Even now running the business is precarious. When i interviewed Mr Sarr, he suddenly dashed out of the shop to catch a would-be bicycle thief. Living in Raval has its hazards.
Top Manta employs designers based in Madrid and Zaragoza in eastern Spain, but the clothes are sold in the Barcelona shop and online.
Looking back at the years when he sold fake shirts in the street, Mr Sarr says the Spanish law forces migrants to work illegally in this way for years.
“It is sad that people have to sell things in the street when in their own countries they were not doing anything like that,” he says.
Before embarking on his search for a new life, Mr Sarr worked in a food shop in Senegal. He does not have a family in Spain.
So what future is there for the designers of Top Manta?
“So far none of our designers have gone on to work for Inditex or Mango but who knows?” Mr Sarr smiles.
In 2019, a group of 20 leading Spanish graphic artists who were more used to selling their work to major fashion brands or seeing it appear in the pages of New Yorker magazine offered their art to help in a one-off lottery for Top Manta.
Twenty limited-edition denim jackets were used as the prize to help Top Manta.
Among the designs, one jacket showed a black panther along with the slogan “Top Manters” – a play on words linked to the famous black power organisation.
Another jacket showed migrants emerging from the sea. To some it might seem nothing more than a colourful design, but for many street sellers, it is a very real reminder of how they made it to Europe in the first place.
