There aren't many fresh-faced journalism students who already have a book to their name, but then Abel Ugba is no ordinary student. Today, Ugba is a post-graduate at Dublin City University, preparing for his final exams in a few months' time. But for most of this decade, since he fled his native Nigeria, he has lived as an asylum-seeker, shuttling around Europe, weaving and ducking before faceless and incompetent bureaucracies, enduring the dog's abuse that is the lot of the black man in these parts.

Now married to a German/Irish woman, who is expecting their first child this month, Ugba should feel safe, knowing for once he can no longer be deported. However, Ireland has proved anything but welcoming.

"I've had to endure more abuse in Dublin in a year than I suffered in six years in Germany. But the worst thing is the institutional racism, like being unable to get a work permit for a job in McDonald's, even though my wife has an Irish passport."

Appalled at the plight of African asylum-seekers in Europe, Ugba decided to write a book that would alert the world to the "colossal waste of manpower and materials" which Germany's asylum programme has become - and which Ireland's might also become, he now believes.

The result is Dear Mama . . . An African Refugee Writes Home, a warts-and-all account of Europe as seen by the new underclass of drifting black immigrants. The book bluntly confronts the preconceptions of both liberals and hardliners, challenging liberal views of refugees as much as anti-immigration opinion.

Ugba does not hesitate to criticise his fellow west Africans, and even paints an unflattering picture of the Jehovah's Witnesses, though he himself has converted to this faith. There are enough tales of subterfuge, drug-dealing, false marriages and counterfeiting here to make the hair stand up on the back of Department of Justice official.

The book, written as an open letter to an African mother the narrator Kwame cannot return to, is described as "a fictional work based on true life experiences". Having fled religious persecution in his homeland, Kwame is thrown into the twilight world of the African asylum-seeker in Europe. He quickly learns the rules of the asylum game, which could be summarised as: say nothing, but if you do talk, lie.

Though he has a genuine reason for fleeing, Kwame is met by a wall of official disbelief. He capitulates to the arguments of others: "I invented fictitious facts on nearly everything - nationality, name, age, background and the circumstances which prompted my departure. I even changed the story of how I arrived here . . . One lie necessitated others . . . The basic task was to establish a believable story from a welter of fictitious facts."

False papers provided by a trafficker get him to Paris, where he is strip-searched in the airport and thrown in a cell with another African, a heroin addict and dealer. From then on, the book is a tour of the desperate fringes of the new Europe, a landscape peopled with pimps and prostitutes, rackrent landlords and forgers, drug couriers and mules, welfare scammers and bigamists. He describes the German government's response to the influx of refugees in the early 1990s. The tactic was to "discomfort and discourage" immigrants without openly rejecting them and thereby provoking an international outcry. Make them wait. Pack them in like sardines. Paperwork. Sound familiar?

The government professes to care for its immigrants, but puts "their entire life on hold". It offers food and shelter but withholds freedom. "The state is overly concerned with their present not their future, and with their stomach but not their brains. To me, this is the equivalent of a farmer who feeds and nourishes his cow today, then slaughters it tomorrow."

With nothing to do all day, and little prospect of getting asylum, many African men come to see their salvation in marriage to a German woman. The stories in the book outline the many dimensions of these unequal relationships: men who marry older German women yet have a wife back home in Africa; women with short-lived sexual desires for black flesh; arranged marriages for money to addicts.

"The trick is to tell the truth when you have led the woman very far, too far for her to turn back," writes Kwame. "Some of us select our targets very well. Usually, we go for the fairly elderly, people above marriageable age, or the fat, really overweight women. In fact we go for the dregs of society, people that are out of the mainstream of things, those we know are not `hot cakes' anymore."

Offensive though this passage is, Ugba says it represents the reality. "The worst thing I could do would be to say these things are not true, and to sweep them under the carpet."

Now 35, Ugba has paid £6,000 in fees to attend university here, and he has never received social welfare. His wife, Silke, is German and her mother lives in Rathmines. Yet he says most people see all blacks as asylum-seekers, and many believe asylum-seekers are spongers. So in many ways, he is still a refugee.

For all their ingenuity and camaraderie, most Africans' experience of Europe ends in defeat. "No matter how long we manage to remain afloat, we nearly always end up sinking." One way or another, Kwame says, Germany ends up destroying the personality and identity of Africans who run to it for refuge.

Only time will tell whether Ugba will share the same fate in Ireland.

Dear Mama . . . An African Refugee Writes Home by Abel Ugba is published by Minerva Press, £7.99 in UK