Weekend Reading
There is a concerted effort, financing, summits and programmes destined to get us all adopt a discourse that casts migration as a problem that needs to be suppressed. Is it really? And why is it unidirectional?
I wish to elaborate my points around an article published in 2022, an analysis by Kalundi Serumaga, where the author discusses migration with which I fully concur. Given its importance to my own analysis, let me start with a full transcription. For that reason, this my article will be quite long.
Article begins
ANALYSIS: Moving or Changing? Reframing the Migration Debate[1]
The purpose of the mass and civilizational migrations of Western Europe was the same as now: not simply to move from one point to another, but also from one type of social status to another, to change one’s social standing in relation to the country of origin.
Kalundi Serumaga, June 24, 2022
Do we move to change, or do we move to stay the same? That seems to depend on who we were, to begin with. In most cases, it seems we move in an attempt to become even more of whatever we think we are. A good Kenyan friend of mine once (deliberately) caused great offense in a Nairobi nightspot encounter with a group of Ugandans he came across seated at a table. There were six or seven of them, all clearly not just from the same country, but from the same part of the country. “It always amazes me,” he said looking over their Western Uganda features, “how people will travel separately for thousands of miles only to meet up so as to recreate their villages. He moved along quickly.
“Most African Migration Remains Intraregional” is a headline on the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies website: Most African migration remains on the continent, continuing a long-established pattern. Around 21 million documented Africans live in another African country, a figure that is likely an undercount given that many African countries do not track migration. Urban areas in Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt are the main destinations for this inter-African migration, reflecting the relative economic dynamism of these locales.
Among African migrants who have moved off the continent, some 11 million live in Europe, almost 5 million in the Middle East, and more than 3 million in America. More Africans may be on the move now than at any time since the end of enslavement, or perhaps the two large European wars. Even within the African continent itself. They navigate hostilities in the cause of movement—war, poverty and environmental collapse. The last 500 years have seen the greatest expression of the idea of migration for the purpose of staying the same (or shall we say, becoming even more of what one is). The world has been transformed by the movement of European peoples, who have left a very visible cultural-linguistic stamp on virtually all corners of the earth. It is rarely properly understood as a form of migration.
It took place in three forms. The first was a search for riches by late feudal Western European states, in a bid to solve their huge public debts, and also enrich the nobility. This was the era of state-sponsored piracy and wars of aggression for plunder against indigenous peoples. The second form was the migration of indentured Europeans to newly conquered colonial spaces. The third was the arrival of refugees fleeing persecution borne of feudal and industrial poverty, which often took religious overtones.
Certainly, new spaces often create new opportunities, but only if the migrants concerned are allowed to explore the fullness of their humanity and creativity. The historical record shows that some humans have done this at the expense of other humans. A key story of the world today seems to be the story of how those that gained from the mass and civilizational migrations of Western Europe outwards remain determined to keep the world organised in a way that enables them to hold on to those gains at the expense of the places to which they have migrated.
We can understand the invention and development of the modern passport—or at least its modern application—as an earlier expression of that. Originally, passports were akin to visas, issued by authorities at a traveler’s intended destination as permission to move through the territory. However, as described by Giulia Pines in National Geographic, established in 1920 by the League of Nations, “a Western-centric organization trying to get a handle on a post-war world”, the current passport regime “was almost destined to be an object of freedom for the advantaged, and a burden for others”. Today the dominant immigration models (certainly from Europe) seem based around the idea of a fortress designed to keep people out, while allowing those keeping the people out to go into other places at will, and with privilege, to take out what they want.
Certainly, new spaces often create new opportunities, but only if the migrants concerned are allowed to explore the fullness of their humanity and creativity.
For me, the greatest contemporary expression of “migration as continuity” has to be the Five Eyes partnership. This was an information-sharing project based on a series of satellites owned by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Its original name was “Echelon”, and it has grown to function as a space-based listening system, spying on telecommunications on a global scale – basically, space-based phone tapping. All the countries concerned are the direct products of the global migration and settlement of specifically ethnic English Europeans throughout the so-called New World, plus their country of origin. The method of their settlement are now well known: genocide and all that this implies. The Five Eyes project represents their banding together to protect the gains of their global ethnic settlement project.
In the United States, many families that have become prominent in public life have a history rooted, at least in part, in the stories of immigrants. The Kennedys, who produced first an Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and then through his sons and grandsons, a president, an attorney general, and a few senators, made their fortune as part of a gang of Irish immigrants to America involved in the smuggling of illicit alcohol in the period when the alcohol trade was illegal in the United States.
Recent United States president Donald Trump is descended from a German grandfather who, having arrived in 1880s America as a teenage barber, went on to make money as a land forger, casino operator and brothel keeper. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States was the paternal grandson of a trader named Warren, a descendant of Dutch settlers who made his fortune smuggling opium into China in the 1890s.
While it is true that the entire story of how Europeans came to be settled in all the Americas is technically a story of criminality, whether referred to as such or not, the essential point here is that many of the ancestors of these now prominent Americans would not have passed the very same visa application requirements that they impose on present-day applicants. The purpose of migrations then was the same as it is now: not simply to move from one point to another, but also from one type of social status to another. It was about finding wealth, and through that, buying a respectability that had not been accessible in the country of origin. So, the point of migration was in a sense, not to migrate, but to change one’s social standing.
And once that new situation has been established, then all that is left is to build a defensive ring around that new status. So, previously criminal American families use the proceeds of their crime to build large mansions, and fill the rooms with antiques and heirlooms, and seek the respectability (not to mention business opportunities) of public office. Many of the ancestors of these now prominent Americans would not have passed the very same visa application requirements that they put to present-day applicants.
European countries that became rich through the plunder of what they now call the “developing world”, built immigration measures designed to keep brown people out while allowing the money keep coming in. They built large cities, monuments and museums, and also rewrote their histories just as the formerly criminal families have done. Thus the powers that created a world built on migration cannot be taken seriously when they complain about present-day migration.
Migration is as much about the “here” you started from, as it about the “there” you are headed to. It is not about assimilating difference; it is about trying to keep the “here” unchanged, and then to re-allocate ourselves a new place in that old sameness. This is why we go “there”.
This may explain the “old-new” names so common to the mass European migration experience. They carry the names of their origins, and impose them on the new places. Sometimes, they add the word “New” before the old name, and use migrant-settler phrases like “the old country”, “back east”. They then seek to choose a new place to occupy in the old world they seek to recreate, that they could not occupy in the old world itself. But as long as the native still exists, then the settler remains a migrant. And the settler state remains a migrant project.
To recreate the old world, while creating a new place for themselves in it, such migrants also strive to make the spaces adapt to this new understanding of their presence that they now seek to make real.
I once witness a most ridiculous fight between three Ugandan immigrants in the UK. It took place on the landing of the social housing apartment of two of them, man and wife, against the third, until that moment, their intended house guest. As his contribution to their household, the guest had offered to bring a small refrigerator he owned. However, when the two men went to collect the fridge in a small hired van, the driver explained that traffic laws did not permit both to ride up front with him – one would have to ride in the back with the fridge. The fridge owner, knowing the route better, was nominated to sit up front, to which his friend took great and immediate exception; he certainly had not migrated to London to be consigned to the back of a van like a piece of cargo. After making his way home via public means, and discussing his humiliation with his good wife, the arrangement was called off – occasioning a bitter confrontation with the bewildered would-be guest.
There must have been so many understandings of the meaning of their migration to Britain, but like the Europeans of the New World, the Ugandans had settled on replicating the worst of what they were running from in an attempt to become what they were never going to be allowed to be back home.
A good case in point is the ethnic Irish communities in Boston and New York, whose new-found whiteness—having escaped desperate poverty, oppression and famine under British colonial rule on what were often referred to as “coffin ships” —saw them create some of the most racist and brutal police forces on the East Coast. They did not just migrate physically; they did so socially and economically as well. It starts even with naming. The word “migrant” seems to belong more to certain races than to others, although that also changes. When non-white, normally poor people are on the move, they can get labeled all sorts of things: refugees, economic migrants, immigrants, illegals, encroachments, wetbacks and the like.
With white-skinned people, the language was often different. Top of the linguistic league is the word “expatriate”, to refer to any number of European-origin people moving to, or through, or settling in, especially Africa. According to news reports, some seven million Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion were absorbed by their neighboring European countries, most of which are members of the European Union. Another 8 million remain displaced within the war-torn country.
This is an outcome of which the Europeans are proud. They have even emphasized how the racial and cultural similarities between themselves and the Ukrainian refugees have made the process easier, if not a little obligatory. This sparked off a storm of commentary in which comparisons were made with the troubles earlier sets of refugees (especially from the Middle East and Afghanistan) faced as the fled their own wars and tried to enter Western Europe. And the greatest irony is that the worst treatment they received en-route was often in the countries of Eastern Europe.
Many European media houses were most explicit in expressing their shock that a war was taking place in Europe (they thought they were now beyond such things), and in supporting the position that the “white Christian” refugees from Ukraine should be welcomed with open arms, unlike the Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians before them. Human migration was not always like this.
Pythagoras (570-495 BC), the scholar from Ancient Greece, is far less well remembered as a migrant and yet his development as a thinker is attributable to the 22 or so years he spent as a student and researcher in Ancient Egypt. The same applies to Plato, who spent 13 years in Egypt. There is not that much evidence to suggest that Pythagoras failed to explain where he got all his learning from. If anything, he seems to have been quite open in his own writing about his experiences, first as an apprentice and later a fellow scholar in the Egyptian knowledge systems. The racial make-up of Ancient Egypt, and its implications, was far from becoming the political battleground it is today.
Classic migration was about fitting in. Colonial migration demands that the new space adapt to accommodate the migrant. The idea of migrants and modern migration needs to be looked at again from its proper wider 500-year perspective. People of European descent, with their record of having scattered and forcibly imposed themselves all over the world, should be the last people to express anxieties about immigrants and migration.
With climate change, pandemic cycles, and the economic collapse of the west in full swing, we should also focus on the future of migration. As was with the case for Europeans some two to three hundred years ago, life in Europe is becoming rapidly unlivable for the ordinary European. The combination of the health crisis, the energy crisis, the overall financial crisis and now a stubborn war, suggests that we may be on the threshold of a new wave of migration of poor Europeans, as they seek cheaper places to live.
The advantages to them are many. Large areas of the south of the planet are dominated physically, financially and culturally, by some level of Western values, certainly at a structural level. Just think how many countries in the world use the Greco-Latin origin word “police” to describe law enforcement. These southern spaces have already been sufficiently Westernized to enable a Westerner to live in them without too much of a cultural adjustment on their part. The Westerners are coming back.
End of article
My main statement is that the Western management model of migration breeds violence. Starting with the colonial occupation and the promotion of European colonies in the colonized territories, passing through the forceful removal of Africans to other Continents as slave labour, to the rejection of Africans in Europe or America, it is all violent human migration. Deaths in the Mediterranean Sea represent violence against humankind, and Europe has no moral issues in equipping countries in the Maghreb to exercise that violence on its behalf. More violence is coming. But that would put my conclusion at the beginning of this my argument.
Migration management today is characterized by a naked effort: keep the so-called South away from the so-called Northern borders. This is a continuation of a colonial project of one-way migration supported by repression, designed to suppress migration in the other direction. As stated above, the slave trade, and the encouragement of colonists to settle in occupied territories was, and still is migration[2]. Israel is a full story of migration[3]. Most of the establishment that controls America today is a product of various waves of migration that today have practically eliminated the native Americans. All these examples should confirm to our leaders here South that the migration management of today is by nature violent against the people of the South. It is based on a query and a self-serving answer:
The query: “What do we do in order to keep Africans away, while maintaining our privileged cheap access to the resources they are sitting on in their territories?”
Practical response on which a whole system is designed, reinforced by a media that amplifies the discourse: “Convince them first that they are overpopulated, and they need population control programmes”.
This policy approach overlooks the fact that Africa is 30.37 million Km2, and is larger than China, India, Japan, the US and Western Europe combined. With a population of 1.22 billion, Africa is much less populated than the US, China, India, Japan, Western and Central Europe combined and with an aggregate population of 3.5 billion. Who is gaslighting whom?
For the benefit of our leaders in the “global South”: migration management is all about control and reserve, and that control is multi-dimensional, including through other means we shall not elaborate here, but will mention only vaccine incidents and the forceful promotion of LGBTQI and other strange behaviours.
Migration for sure creates social tensions always. It is these tensions that we are called to manage while acknowledging the inevitability of the phenomenon. Migration within Africa has shown such tensions as well, mostly managed one way or the other, with the prominent exception of South Africa, where in several occasions migrant fellow Africans have been gruesomely murdered with the indifference, if not quiet “let them do it” of their government.
Migration Northwards? Free Money
Migrants may move for a host of natural genuine reasons that are systematically ignored and suppressed. The stringent visa restrictions to Europe and North America today is a construct that not only tightly restricts entry, and has also been conceived to transfer wealth from poor countries to richer ones. Consider applications for student visas to two countries alone: Canada[4] and UK[5]: Of 161,300 student visa applicants to Canada in 2023, some 69,400 have not been approved. Considering that universally the application fee is non-reimbursable, at an average of just $400 dollars the visa processing cost, we are looking at $27.7 million subsidy going northwards for naught. Taking the same number for the UK, with a lower rejection rate (27%, according to a parliamentary study), we would still be talking of an annual and growing income of $13 million for failed visa applications.
Another study (why Europe is rejecting African visa applications)[6], indicates that in 2022, of 621,134 applications from seven African countries, 278,324 (44.8%) were rejected. At 90 Euro per application (to be effective this year), that represents a transfer of 25 million Euro of free money from Africa to Europe. These growing visa fees are essentially another type of fence/wall, and the deliberate rejection rate is devised to enrich the rich at the expense of the poor. While exercising the perpetual racialized discrimination, through those migration discretionary powers, whitewashed by the multitude of paper proofs demanded.
Subverting the Refugee Convention to reinforce negative migration
Unfortunately the refugee protection regime is also part of this distortion of migration. The international refugee regime has saved lives and allowed countries to rebuild from the ashes of devastating wars, such as in Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia and other parts of Africa with successful repatriation operations. Nonetheless, the perception of the principle of first country of asylum and its inflexible interpretation by governments, not only does it allow their institutions to turn a blind eye to objective reasons why a refugee would cross various countries and settle far away (security, proximity to family ties long established elsewhere, etc), but also gives them a sense of dispensation from providing humanitarian assistance.
The literal interpretation of the concept of first country of asylum becomes thus gradually weaponized in order to exclude, and is turned into a lazy, convenient ploy to avoid analyzing complex human relations and behaviours that determine forced movement of persons.
Migration management today is neocolonialism 101. So bad that even UN-associated organizations are being drafted into implementing technical solutions that advance policies criminalizing movement of people across borders: “guilty of crossing the border, until you can prove your good intentions (of not staying), your return ticket, your passport, and your money”.
As you migrate from the Horn of Africa into South Africa, the controls do not start just at the border, but are dispersed along the roads in Kenya, in Tanzania, in Malawi, in Mozambique and all countries of transit. If you reach South Africa nonetheless, you are of the few that paid heavy money to be hidden in a stinking fuel tanker, or survived travel in a hot container[7].
And of course you will find Operation Dudula waiting for you. Dudula, officially, aims at addressing crime, lack of jobs and poor health services for the nationals, caused by an influx of illegal immigrants. The hostility towards movement of people outside the control of states is a colonial legacy and ignores the profound roots of the dependency of the South African economy on foreign labour, in particular from Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi. Apartheid South Africa instituted a system of importing manpower, keeping it permanently precarious and controlled, so that when no longer useful, the depreciated manpower (such as the sickly from mine conditions) could be shipped back. All the while, keeping new stronger manpower coming in[8].
The underlying philosophy of Dudula is an apartheid legacy mentality: that South Africans are above all other Africans, because they have (inherited) an efficient (?) state machinery. in fact, if they could, they would shed the curse of being called African. Someone is feeding this narrative and has a long-term objective, for which the Africans in South Africa are only instruments[9]. State capture in ESCOM,, PRASA, South African Airways and other key state pillars, if remembered, could sober the South African mind.
Under the guise of Conservation
Negative migration management is also forced on us inside our own countries, through the forceful displacement of populations under the pretext of conservation. National populations have always lived together with animals and have known how to conserve nature, how to eat minimal quantities of meat and coexist with nature in a balanced manner. Until some nature conservation missionaries came along with plenty of money, with the colonial discourse of overpopulation threatening the animals! They proceed to corridors of power and with sweet PPPs signed, convince our leaders to use force to displace their own populations. The official discourse all of a sudden is that national populations are a threat to conservation and to the environment. Citizens have been and continue to be chased away from their lands in East Africa, to promote white tourism and game hunting. Rich people from other Continents come to develop hotels and hunting resorts, in fact destroying the environment many times more than the nationals, creating exclusive, expensive enclaves where foreigners roam around with 5,000 Shilling hunting licenses[10]. And how are the citizens treated? Read here.
The legal(ized) violence of the state is turned against its own people in order to facilitate capitalist exploitation. It creates at the same time two negative migration movements: populations forced out of their land, and the settlement of colonies inside independent territories. The state becomes therefore the enabler of a neocolonial (long-term) project.
This prevailing complex relationship forces our leaders to accept a migration discourse that facilitates the entry of Europeans into our small gardens of Eden that our national parks are, while making those same gardens inaccessible to the people who for centuries have lived there, and for which they expected that independence would bring better outcomes.
CONCLUSION
We are all (im)migrants and how we treat other migrants today, is the same way our children will be treated by others when the tables turn. And they will turn, only that we won’t be there.
Clearly Europe is alarmed and it reacts with the same colonial attitude: Africans should stay where they are. In exchange, we will bring them some diversion called aid through USAID, Agence Francaise de Development, GIZ, NPA, CARE and other aid programmes. Keep them permanently weak enough to allow their resources to be exploited and exported raw, prevent the development of local manufacture. Keep them as defenseless unregulated markets for our second-hand products: clothes, cars, computers, etc[11]. And punish them if they do not accept to keep their markets open[12].
It is an international financial, diplomatic, military and information system construct that wants to protect the benefits of Europe in Africa, with the help of international capital institutions such as the Bretton Woods banks, which they control. It was for instance the IMF that destroyed MABOR, the tyre industry, the cashew processing and wagon manufacture in Maputo, the textile industries in Maputo and Manica (Texlom, Textafrica, Texmoque, Soveste, etc). The list in Mozambique alone is long and can be replicated everywhere in Africa.
Let me venture to say that we have in Africa many cultural, spiritual, religious and social beliefs, practices and philosophies that every one else outside the Continent cannot comprehend, the same way as we do not comprehend many features of non-African cultures.
One of our rural beliefs and practices is that the umbilical cord of a child should be buried. It links the child to the land of her/his ancestors. It grounds our being to the land. Our buried ancestors are part of our family, especially referenced during ceremonies, which makes our behaviours complex. In some cultures, the dead are buried in the family banana plantation. In fact some of our houses become unmarketable because the tombs of our relatives can be in the homestead/compound.
A propos de quoi?
We believe that all of this explains the mystic relationship between African migrants to Europe and the resources that Europe looted over centuries and continues to steal from Africa. And how these resources, part of our land, attracts our blood. Africans will continue to move to where their resources are being exported by a neocolonial system. What do you expect of a Senegal without industry, dependent on products from France? Did Senegalese not die for France?
So, the solution is not to raise borders even higher. That is like a hammer roaming around looking for a nail to hit. We will still go there, until Africa is free from European exploitation, and freed to build their economies, based on their resources. Resources which for now are part of the European warehouse inventory.
We are managing legacy borders with a European handbook. Colonial boundaries ring-fenced communities and separated nations and nationalities that in the past were quite fluid.
While regional organizations such as ECOWAS, SADC, EAC have endorsed the principle of freedom of movement of people and goods, and lately even at the Continental level, the ACFTA has been adopted, national governments remain very ambivalent in relation to movement of people and goods as the basis for real regional prosperity.
Are there alternatives?
We need courageous, visionary leaders that can innovate. Meanwhile, and until then, we can enhance the protection of people in movement and encourage a more positive outlook on migration: the importance and potential of expanding the role and existence of consulates between countries.
After the 2006 Europe Valetta[13]global approach, migration has been portrayed in largely negative terms and identified as one of the problems that development aims to address in Afrtica. Current migration theories have blinded us to the objective drivers and direction of migration. Consequently, we fail to plan for the future, as we are busy managing European fears.
On the contrary, we should not shy away from the fact that migration has always been a strategy for life improvement by individuals globally.
After all, most important is migration across borders in the African context: Most migration in Africa happens across long, isolated and uncontrolled borders between neighbouring countries with very little formalities and for people whose traditional chief may very well be in the neighbouring country, and at the feet of whom the real taxes are deposited and paid. Malawi/Mozambique/Zimbabwe/Zambia/Tanzania etc. Smooth small cross-border trade is beneficial to all and should be nurtured. After all, we marry in a community, not in a country. Do we realize that my Ngoni community starts in South Africa, crosses Gaza (Mozambique), Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tete (Mozambique), Malawi and ends in Southern Tanzania? So, to me as part of that community, what does migration mean?
Assuming that international migration is a bad thing and that people should prefer to stay at home is a European idiosyncratic execution of a self-serving border wall on us Africa. No wonder they are extremely angry for having lost their bases in the Sahel, which they slowly and surreptitiously had been building and considering as their Southern displaced border.
People want to move but given the obstacles, for many the only alternative has become clandestine movement. In the process, they fall of course into exploitative crime rings, themselves fertilized by the policies of Europe that profess to combat a monster their money ends up creating. Classic dog biting its own tail!
We should see mobility as necessary to affect change for the better in any society, rather than as an exceptional problem for Africa. That will help us avoid the trap of thinking that mobility is normal for the wealthy (into Cape town), the self-centred self-entitled international elite, but that a shorter travel from Zimbabwe Beitbridge to Messina on the contrary is a symptom of personal and government failure by a Zimbabwean pregnant woman that can only reach Messina for medical treatment.
Jose,
Tete, June 2024
[1] https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2022/06/24/moving-or-changing-reframing-the-migration-debate
[2] https://www.9news.com.au/world/french-authorities-regain-full-control-of-new-caledonias-capital-after-days-of-deadly-unrest/3adeea61-2b69-4376-93bc-6abc91d496c9
[3] In this context, stating “violent migration” is a tautology.
[4] https://www.applyboard.com/applyinsights-article/canada-countries-with-high-study-permit-approval-rates-2023#:~:text=The%20Canadian%20student%20visa%20approval,during%20the%20temporary%20application%20cap
[7]https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/3/25/more-than-60-people-found-dead-in-cargo-container-in-mozambique
[10] https://www.thecitizen.co.tz/tanzania/news/national/american-couple-claim-of-world-record-crocodile-kill-in-tanzania-sparks-outrage-4475498
[11] https://www.fashionrevolution.org/where-does-clothing-end-up-modern-colonialism-disguised-as-donation/
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