"Iye Omoge" is in Edo, the most common language spoken by Nigerian sex workers on the streets of Italy. The person who told me this story explained that the expression can be translated either as "an older woman who behaves like a young girl", or "the mother of Omoge", that is, "the mother of a girl who likes looking good and dressing well".
"Iye Omoge" was the African name for the third class section of an avenue in Turin. There worked women in their thirties, who had left their children in Africa. It was a way of making fun of the older women, used by the teenagers and girls in their twenties who stood at the beginning of the avenue, in the first and second class sections. It was the women working there who decided the partition in "classes".
The avenue in question is Corso Regina Margherita, and there used to be hundreds of African women lining the stretch of road which runs alongside the Pellerina Park, offering sex in the surrounding area, in cars or out in the open.
The first Nigerian women arrived in Corso Regina in the autumn of 1987. In the space of a few years there were so many of them that the area began to be called by journalists as "little Africa", "the Nigeria of Turin", or "love street".
When that part of the street was closed off to traffic at night, the Pellerina went back to being an ordinary city park.
