A recent news story reminded me of the heart-wrenching stories of the past few years about the treacherous journeys by Africans braving the dangers of the Sahara desert, the risks of falling into slavery and sexual bondage, heading to North African countries of Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, and hoping to cross the Mediterranean sea to Spain, France, Italy or Greece.
Surviving the North Africa, they got crowded into dangerously wobbly fishermen’s boats, sometimes dying at sea when some of these boats capsize. Desperate to escape poverty, desperation for jobs and/or violence in Nigeria, Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Chad and some coming all the way even from Ethiopia and Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. They moved from country to country across the Sahara in desperate attempts to find asylum in Europe.
And when they flee their countries, an Eritrean, an Ethiopian, a Senegalese, a Gambian, a Nigerian or a Nigerien must travel through four or five countries within Africa before he or she arrives at the North African country chosen by the traffickers as the point at which to cross into Europe. Sometimes, that North African country becomes the final destination for some, either because they get killed when the deal goes bad, get sold as slaves or spend years in detention camps. In these places, gory stories of beheadings of some of them by affiliates of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Libya.
These journeys used to be front-page news all across Europe, mainly because of the spectacular and deadly accidents of boats capsizing and the daring rescue missions that followed. Once rescued, these migrants attempting to enter Europe illegally often end up in detention centers for years where they await decisions on their fate. There are many of these camps in Spain, Italy and France. The new headline story this week that has brought back those shocking images was about Covid-19 in some of these detention camps, the focus of which was Lampedusa Island off the southern coast of Cecily. At the height of the pandemic, and despite the evidence that the infection rates were much lower among these detained migrants, Covid-19 provided a perfect pretext for right-wing political figures to advance a long-standing anti-migrant agenda, almost sealing the fate of some of these desperate youngsters to either years in the camps or deportation back to their countries.
Anti-immigrants policy politically paid off
For Italy, the former interior minister Matteo Salvini was one prominent political figure looking for fodder to feed anti-black fervor, which he found in stories about the risks that African migrants in the camps pose to Italy. In the Netherlands, the Dutch anti-immigrant politician, Geert Wilders, asked a crowd of supporters in The Hague in 2014 whether they wanted “more or fewer Moroccans in this city and in the Netherlands,” they replied “fewer, fewer.” “I will take care of that,” he promised. Wilders’ party, the Party for Freedom, lead the polls in 2016; anti-immigrants policy politically paid off. In Britain, fear of perceived immigrant invasion was one of the strong reasons for Brexit, as people like Nigel Farage blamed everything wrong in their country on immigrants.
No African should forget that the anti-African attitude that is increasingly rampant in Europe, carries through from the slave trade and colonialism. Anti-African feelings have been sharpened from time to time since 2003, as prominent political leaders express it as a way to galvanize political bases. Whether they genuinely believe African immigrants are a real threat to host communities in Europe or they simply pick what they believe is on the minds of would-be political supporters, the fact is that it is relatively easy to rally quite a lot of white people on both sides of the Atlantic against Africans. This is perhaps with the exception of a couple of countries in Europe.
What is often so dishearteningly absent from these stories is any reactions from African countries of origin. This made me think of why Africans must continue to risk their lives to travel to Europe and whether the time has really not come for Africans to act collectively on these humiliating and dangerous journeys by young Africans.
Lest African governments and people forget, the history and the sentiments that drive police brutality and racial injustice against Black people in the US can neither be separated from a general disdain for Africa by white supremacists and by many White elites holding public office, nor from the history of the exploitative US-Africa relations, whether that exploitation relates to the cold-war era when Africa was the battle ground for US wars against the boogeyman called socialism or the continuous extraction of Africa’s minerals by unscrupulous Western corporations that trampled human life in order to access these resources. These things add up to create a mindset that dehumanises the African person in the minds of many Whites and creating the impression that Africans are not worthy of respect. It has been building up for over 400 years.
Juxtapose this history with the current plight of the African person since the end of colonialism and you hardly see any signs of a continent run by its own people. The situation is made desperate by the failure of public policy in their countries, by autocratic regimes like Eritrea, South Sudan, Sudan and Cameroon and by the corrupt system in Nigeria that denies the citizens of the world’s sixth-largest oil producer the proceeds of their God-given resource. These Africans can only hope that Europeans will take them in on humanitarian grounds. But what many Europeans see are invaders, people who will take their jobs, deplete their welfare system and burden their countries, including through perceived crime. If the people of Niger and Mali cannot enjoy the dignity of living in one’s own country because radical Islamic ideology that has made people run in different directions, the Europeans will see in the migrants nothing but a manifestation of the failure of the African state to grant them a dignified life.
Why is it important for Africans to carefully watch these dynamics in the West? Because the factors that push young Africans to leave their home countries and head into harm’s way should be addressed by African governments, which they can only do if they are pressured by the public. How otherwise can Africans expect to be treated nicely in America and Europe when they do not experience that treatment within their countries? Also, even if African governments and communities appeared incapable of caring for their people, the main reason for the failure to provide welfare is not lack of resouces but lack of solidarity across national borders within Africa.
My outrage emanates from Africa’s disregard for opportunities offered by Pan Africanism, the idea that Africans, despite their differences of culture, language and pride in their different nations, can still achieve a continental plan to deal with these collective challenges. Without this inter-Africa solidarity, it would be hard to expect Europeans and Americans to accord Africans the respect they deserve if Africans are not doing this for each other.
Like many Africans who are outside the often fenced-in corridors of power and wealth and who often shout from outside the fence to point out the many public policy issues that go wry, I am convinced that a Pan African approach to such things that affect Africans on a daily basis should press these issues upon public officials who otherwise seem unmoved by these events!
Despite the constraints born of the vestiges of colonialism, where there is a will to utilise the existing strong currents of shared experiences, Africans can still do things together. This requires open communication and planning that pools both material and human resources together, create platforms for Africans to understand each other beyond negative stereotypes, create common marketplaces for ideas and enable skilled labour to move within the regions.
