Article One
Dear reader,
I. INTRODUCTION
I will be writing a few articles on the question of MIGRATION because I feel the need to contribute to challenging and fighting back the disinformation and the negativity associated with the current migration discourse. Whatever is said and done is a sandstorm thrown into our eyes, because migration is inherent in the human nature. This shall be the foundational philosophy for an orderly, negotiated or not, migration movement.
I will be writing a series of reviews on migration because we in Africa are being fed a narrative that is neither ours nor in our interest. More recently, migration has been poisoned by the history of relations between peoples which starts with colonial expansions, in most cases associated to slave trade. Today’s ideology of migration is inhuman and unilaterally self-serving. It has been turned into a weapon (weaponized, they say) and into a tool of relations between countries, and more than between countries, between Continents. It has been racialized.
I am positing that the African Continental leadership reject such narrative. To do so, let me get to the beginning.
If you practice any religion, the first migration is supposed to have been of Adam and Eve who were told to collect their few clothes and vacate Eden into the wild, because of some shady apple smuggling business proposed by the wife. The more historical representation of forced migration was the flight of the child Jesus with his parents into Egypt, where they sat their time away until Herodes died in Jerusalem. The bible and the Al Qur’an are replete with stories of migration. If you limit yourself to the scientific theory, migration is the essence of mankind, a complex web of movements necessitated by the search for less harsh environments, food, need for commercial exchanges and the natural progression of demography and space.
It is said that human ancestors appeared between five and seven million years ago, when some creatures in Africa began to walk on two legs. They evolved first through hunting and produced crude stone tools around some 2.5 million years ago. Then some of them spread from Africa into Asia and Europe two million years ago[1] The theory continues[2] that modern human (the Homo erectus) also originated in Africa 200,000 years ago. Current archaeological evidence supports the migration out of Africa theory.
According to this theory therefore, casting migration in a negative light and using it in the restrictive management of relations between states is unnatural and a denial of history itself, a denial of nature. Is my argument valid? I would not advance it if I thought I had any doubt. I will come to that, but perhaps a bit of personal context to this article (I hope to make more articles on this complex topic that cannot be exhausted in one article, at the risk of being indigestibly long).
II. PERSONALIZING THE ARGUMENT
To develop my thesis, let me start this long essay on migration with me. I am sure that my history is very much a “mutatis mutandis” proposition for most readers. In fact, it alarms me that all proponents of the current racist exclusionary migration policies would not be where they are to-day (location, power) were it not for the migration of their ancestors.
Migration affects me in three ways:
First, because I am a product of it, a great-grandson of Ngoni migrating northwards from South Africa, led by a General who rebelled against Skaka Zulu by the name of Zwangendaba, who decided to migrate North with his soldiers and people, into Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania. As they crossed the Zambezi, they fought battles with local chiefs, settled for a short while and when they continued North, some remained. My grandpa Kanyandula, whom I had the opportunity to meet only once, told me in that one meeting, among other things I still remember, that his father had been given one of four women he captured in the local war on crossing the Zambezi River, and the other three, he left with his military chief to deliver and become slaves in the King’s kraal (court, a word they brought from South Africa).
So, I am both a descendant of an immigrant and a descendant of a slavewoman. Migration therefore affects my state of being.
Secondly, in my public service, migration profoundly affected me, my work and my future. I specialized in the management of forced migration as an International Civil Servant dealing with the problem of refugees and war-displaced persons inside their own countries, in the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. For thirty-two years, I worked with other colleagues and organizations, first to bring relief to fleeing populations, and then trying to solve their situation, primarily through a programme of voluntary return to countries of origin: Mozambican, Liberian, Ivorian, Sierra Leonean, Somali, Sudanese, Nigerian, Congolese, Burundian, Rwandan, etc. It is with UNHCR that I came to appreciate the catastrophic side of forced migration. I will come back to refugees and forcefully-displaced populations from the angle of migration. Both to find commonalities and fundamental differences.
My third reason: Migration affects me because not only did I work the best part of my life outside my country, but also because I married in Tanzania. So, while refraining from passing judgment values on the politics of that country, I remain intellectually engaged and critical of things good and bad about Tanzania. Consequently, my feeling of belonging is seriously dented by the direction of the public vitriolic political debates about citizenship that have been taking place in that country. I do not feel so sure. I have an alternative by birthright, my country of origin. But one of my sons has opted for the Tanzanian citizenship, by maternal right. So, his birthright does not have the same strength as mine, over time. If we should build policies based on the prevailing discourse, the man will be in danger of exclusion if he tries to exercise any political and economic right. At that time I may not be alive to witness. That is the real state of affairs!
III. DISCUSSION
Having established my standing on the migration ideology and debate, let me in this first article review the historical perspective. Other perspectives in the articles that will follow.
People migrate because they are people. So, in order to construct a healthy narrative about migration, we need to start way back. My tribespeople migration occurred in the 1800s. So, it is recent. Earlier, Europeans migrated South and West in an expansive imperial way. Meanwhile, one cannot manage migration as if it were only a South-North movement. It has been a North-South violent project, expropriatory in character. And migration has always also been a South-South interaction.
Very early on, migration was enmeshed with industrial progress and commerce through territorial conquest, occupation and establishment of colonies. Ancient colonialism was practiced around 200 BC and more recently in medieval times by Phoenicians, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs[3]. The Silk Road[4], the Spice routes[5] etc are all phenomena that led also to migration and sometimes colonial occupation.
More modern colonialism[6] that entrenched the negativity and racism of migration started with the infamous "Age of Discoveries", led by the Portuguese and the Spanish who expanded domination of territories from Ceuta in 1415, expressly and with the support of the Popes in Rome, to spread Christianity, but more importantly to plunder and accumulate wealth further South. And in the process, this violent migration introduced an African slave trade as a colonial necessity. By 1450, facilitated by new technologies of sea navigation, and the Ottoman Empire having closed trade routes with Asia, European exploration turned to Africa and South America, with the French joining the Spanish colonization of South America and the Caribbean in 1490s (Haiti) all pursuing economics of plantations, especially sugar for Europe.
The Portuguese and Spanish Empires were the first to establish overseas empires (read colonies) across different continents, followed by England, France, and the Dutch Republic in the 16th and subsequent centuries. And more recently in the 19th century, the Germans also established colonies in Africa, which were mostly lost after the second World War. In summary, all colonial occupations were characterized by the purposeful, government-financed migration of colonizers into the colonized territories.
North America suffered also its own violent colonial migration from Europe, as did other areas of the globe. So colonialism is associated with violence, and migration is being irretrievably brought in as a part of the violence package. History is replete with such narratives.
While European settler colonialism in Africa was characterized by exploitative migration, the Jews in Europe were being exiled[7] at the height of the Spanish Inquisition in the 1490s[8]; demonstrating the other negative facet of migration: expulsions.
The end of 19th century was the first era of decolonization, strongly influenced still by the paramentres of the Berlin colonization Conference. The decolonization of Africa retained a system that would have been quite difficult to manage if modified: the colonial notion of geographical boundaries, a notion devoid of any social, cultural or anthropological considerations. Somewhere in a Berlin table[9], some bizarre lines were drawn, including funny straight lines, which up to to-day define the way in which we conduct business with our neighbours, how we see and protect ourselves. In summary, how we also define migration. Blatantly turning our brother across the border into a perfect stranger, the “other”, a whisker away from becoming the “enemy”. Niger was made to combat African migration to Europe in its territory[10], Chad[11] is being reinforced with European troops to combat the migration of Africans into Europe. Would any European country be made to host South African troops to prevent the migration of Europeans into Cape Town?
It was in that spirit that Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal were just recently quite ready to bid for France and wage war on Niger. They were only dissuaded by footdragging on the ground, field leaders and chiefs who understand that a war on the neighbour would be a war between two sides of the same people, even ethnically. Colonial boundary, colonial servitude mentality, colonial interest.
IV. CONCLUSION
Deep down, the West is afraid of the demographic tsunami that Africa will represent in another 50 years. One more reason for Africa to be strategic and show leadership on how it manages the youth, a demographic group that in Mozambique alone represents already more than 53% of the population (>15<40). And how it appropriates and defines migration for its own current and future interests.
It has always been far from my mind to associate all movements with wars, disasters and the like. There are movements that are not forced, at least not in that way. I migrated to study, I migrated to work, I migrated to marry. My home is no longer just my country. Home is where I feel fine, my family feels protected, welcomed and treated humanely. At home in Mozambique for obvious reasons. At home in Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania, where I have relatives. I would feel just at home in any country, as long as I am treated without discrimination and with the dignity due to a human being, including the dignity of opportunities.
The way migration is managed on our behalf in Africa only demonstrates the institutional inferiority and subordination of Africa to foreign interests. Pushing a bit further the argument of the persistent and servile mentality that appreciates colonialism, one has only to look for example at the way an African lawyer in court puts a white wig and displays a polished perfect English or Portugues or French. So polished in fact that he does not realize that what comes from his mouth is an attempt to imitate the European the best way he can. Like he cannot speak in Yoruba, in Zezuru, in Swahili or Nyanja, or Shangaan or Fulfulde in court! By the way, let us bring our languages to the courts and make them accessible to our peoples. But I digress!
Migrated minds, rejected immigrant bodies in Libya, Tunisia and floating in the Mediterranean Sea, exported raw minerals, rush for African gas: That is the state of affairs of Africa today.
Colonialism, defined as “the control and subjugation by one power over a foreign territory and its people, with the objective of exploiting it and of forcing its own language and cultural values upon the dominated people”, has characterized modern ways of managing migration. Western colonialism[12], has mutated into neocolonialism to continue exploitation of the natural resources, the same system but now exercised through a national compradore bourgeoisie that continues to be identified from outside in, and fostered on us “democratically through regular elections”. Domination without governing, without being too visible. Forcing their policies and practices of migration control in our airports, our land border posts, our migration offices, our transit routes, international institutions, all means they can get hold of and pay for.
Independence movements pushed for decolonization and gained momentum after World War II, particularly in Africa during the 1950s and ’60s. However, the colonial project is still alive and well. The history of violence, exploitation and control is now exercised through the cooptation of a foreign philosophy on migration fostered on us today.
Jose
Tete, February 2024
[1] https://www.yourgenome.org/theme/evolution-of-modern-humans/#:~:text=Modern%20humans%20originated%20in%20Africa,out%20of%20Africa'%20migration%20theory.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/26/science/when-humans-became-human.html#:~:text=The%20first%20human%20ancestors%20appeared,after%20two%20million%20years%20ago.
[10] https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20231204-niger-s-repeal-of-migrant-smuggling-law-sets-back-eu-efforts-to-curb-immigration-flows
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