Under a post yesterday, I got this question from a reader. I thought I’d attempt a reply.
Q: I understand you lived in Africa for a while, perhaps you could shed light upon this recent surge north?
A: That’s like asking someone who has eaten carbonara a few times how to breed pigs for the best salted cheek. I have indeed lived for some time in Africa. For substantial stretches I lived in Harare and in Lagos. And I have had shorter stints in Sierra Leone, Mozambique, and South Africa. None of that makes me an Africologist. I don’t think I’m better qualified than anyone with an opinion.
If you’re looking for expertise perhaps you should ask an expert. All I am armed with is empathy and a basic understanding of world history.
On the scale of human experience, the phrase “recent surge north” is meaningless. All of humanity descends from multiple waves of people who marched out of Africa. People have moved in waves of migration for ever, from well before the recording of history. We know of recent migrations from records, of older migrations from legends, and of older migrations yet from the archaeological and genetic mapping of the story of our kind.
Maltese people of a certain age grew on English or Anglo-centric history. Island histories testify to layers of migrations, Britons on Celts, Saxons on Britons, Norse and Normans on Saxons, and so on.
Later generations grew up on Maltese history too often burdened with the misguided and misleading notion that there is an undiluted genetic line connecting the temple builders with Dom Mintoff while “foreigners” passed by keeping to themselves, waiting their turn to be kicked out by the heroic purebred locals. We are, of course, no better or worse than the genetic product of generations of people who moved here from east and south of us, and sometimes from north and west.
Even Nazis romanticised migration, fancying themselves cousins of imaginary Vikings who ruled India. Their purity was an opaque soup of vague contradictions and the sort of anti-historicity that ‘justifies’ racists to this day.
The fact is people move because of a combination of push and pull factors that have barely changed over the few hundred thousand years we’ve been here.
Drought should be obvious. The current extent of climate change may kill off nonagenarians who can’t afford air-conditioning in Europe. In Africa swathes of land have been desertified.
War should be obvious. People run away from conflicts if they can.
Economic hardship and a lack of prospects. Corruption. Violence and lawlessness.
Living in some cities in Africa, none of which in conditions of war or drought, and afflicted by corruption and economic hardship not entirely alien to other places as well, perhaps opened my eyes to other factors that should have been obvious to me but had not been.
A “surge north” is what we think is happening. But it isn’t really. Most Africans migrate within Africa, because they hope the rest of Africa is more familiar, less hostile, and the risk of dying on the way is relatively lower. Of the approximately 25 million people who migrate from somewhere in Africa every year, 19 million go to a destination within Africa. Consider Lagos, where I stayed for some time. The population is now around 16 million, 4% more than it had been just last year. They are coming there from all over Africa.
Consider Zimbabwe, another place I stayed in. Zimbabwe has a total population of around 16 million people. Since 2000 it is estimated that around 5 million Zimbabweans migrated to South Africa (a country with a population of 61 million).
Compare that now with migration from all the African continent towards Europe. During the last five years around 400,000 Africans migrated to Europe every year. Europe (excluding Russia) has a population of nearly 600 million.
I think therefore we have a serious problem of siege mentality colouring our perceptions. We perceive a crowded boat with a few hundred Africans as a form of invasion, somehow a part of the movement of people as Africa is emptied and an entire continent’s population piles up on rafts. The reality is the poor souls that make land amount to no more than a very unrepresentative drop in the ocean, to misapply the metaphor.
Consider also that the pull factors to Europe are not simply relative prosperity or opportunities for career progression. I doubt migrants are unaware of the risks of travelling to Europe the way they do and of the welcome they can expect when they get here.
A major pull factor may be the fact that at destination there may be relatives, even if distant, who can help them make a start in this hostile, alien country. Relatives may be close – brothers, uncles who have made the journey before them – or distant, sharing loose ancestries like villages and wider communities.
Even in historical terms “recent surge” is a misnomer. Africans have migrated to Europe for hundreds of years, not always voluntarily, while Europeans have migrated out of their continent of origin in far vaster numbers.
I’ve lived nearly all my life in Malta, and I have been aware of migration out of it well before I gave any thought to migration towards it. My mother’s brother left for Australia when he was 18 years old. He never saw his mother alive again. I wondered as a child why he would do that. There was no famine nor war in Malta. Why did he leave his mother for good, a notion I could not fathom when I first tried to imagine it still in my mother’s arms?
After an article I wrote on Sunday some commenters sat me down to distinguish legal migration equipped with proper paperwork from illegal migration of Africans to Europe. I think sometimes we think law itself creates things. We think that permitting migration makes it happen, while forbidding it prevents it. Law is but an attempt to regulate and manage phenomena that exist in and of themselves.
The Slavs didn’t apply for passports before they moved to the doors of the Roman Empire. The Israelites from Egypt didn’t fill out forms before thundering down the walls of Jericho.
We forget of course that Europeans migrated to Africa for centuries as well without any legal basis or documents letting them through. Unlike Africans coming to Europe in this “recent surge”, Europeans went to Africa armed, they committed genocide, caused environmental catastrophes, exploited, enslaved, and transported oceans of people, seized assets as if they were theirs by right and extracted resources without profit to the native heirs of the land they stole. That migration may, perhaps, be better suited for the description of an ‘invasion’.
People migrate without documents because the need to move is greater than the administrative obstacles placed in their way. Movement is freedom and people will move towards greener pastures whichever way they can. When you already live in the green pastures you may perceive migration in your direction as an unwanted intrusion. When you’re standing on scorched earth you perceive your survival as your right.
I’ll go back to the commenter’s question then. Asking ‘why’ Africans come to Europe may be an attempt to determine causes like one looks for a leak in the plumbing to restore water pressure to a house. The idea would be to repair the leak and Africans would stay put.
The poverty of that thinking comes from the failure to appreciate the scale of the movement both in terms of volumes but also in terms of how humanity functions now, just as much as ten or a hundred thousand years ago.
We’re not dealing with people escaping a particular conflict that would go back home if it was resolved. We’re not seeing people who give up on a halting economy but would go back if the government changed.
We think that way because we all like to limit our understanding to problems we think we can solve.
We deny people passports and visas, we deny them access to planes and boats and trains to travel decently and humanly, and when they risk the desert and the sea to get here anyway, we even deny them rescue at life’s end. We’re amazed that none of that is enough to stop them trying to get here. We think they’re mad or criminal or suicidal to do so.
Our amazement at the stubborn determination of the liminal souls on those unworthy rafts attempting to cross into Europe by boat is the result of a simple ignorance, a gap in our collective logic, if you will. We fail to see what should be obvious. That in their place we would wish to have the courage and the strength to do the same.
People everywhere have the same aspiration, to live a better life, to have a future in which children might grow. You don’t need to spend time in Africa to share that aspiration because you will recognise it in the memory of your youth. You will even recognise it in the slave traders and the miners and the colonisers and the farmers who moved from Europe to carve Africa as if it was their own.
The incredible thing to me is not that Africans try to get to Europe. The incredible thing is that Europeans don’t seem to understand why.