I’ve heard of stowaway stories before, and I’ve even heard of people crawling into the undercarriages of aircraft leaving Africa and then being crushed to death, but this story is bizarre and completely in a class of its own.

This will show you the truly desperate measures used by blacks to get off this post-colonial hellhole of Africa.

Three blacks guys, at least one of whom is a Nigerian stowed away on board a Japanese car-carrying ship in the Ivory Coast. But they did not stow away inside the ship… they climbed on to its RUDDER!!

And there they stayed, unseen… for the next 8 days without food and without water. The ship sailed all the way to South Africa, 6,000 Km away. The crew of a tug boat spotted these guys on the rudder.

The one had already died, and the other two were in extremely bad shape. The following photos are from an eTV news item. The whole story sounds almost unbelievable. The two who are still alive and in hospital have asked if they could remain in S.Africa.

Here they are loading the corpse of the one stowaway in a van to be taken to the mortuary.

The others were being taken care of by the paramedics.

This is one of the stowaways who survived.

This is the Japanese ship now in berthed in one of our harbours.

Gavin Riddle of the National Sea Rescue Institute tells the amazing story.

This is the hospital where they are being cared for.