Reports about African migrants dying to breathe free have become normalized. They hardly register in public consciousness, let alone prick our collective conscience.
At least 65 migrants have died after their boat capsized in the Mediterranean off the coast of Tunisia. … The incident is thought to be one of the deadliest shipwrecks involving migrants since the start of the year. …
The passengers are understood to have been from sub-Saharan Africa.
(BBC, May 10, 2019)
Did you know about this latest tragedy? Even if you did, chances are you’d probably stay inured and carry on. But that’s because such tragedies have become normalized.
According to a UN report, an average of six migrants died every day in 2018 trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Except that I’ve been lamenting these serial tragedies for years, including how African migrants turning Mediterranean into cemetery has become normalized.
Arguably, this normalization betrays the utter futility of my commentaries. And I readily concede that a few of my despairing titles read like alarms nobody heard:
- “Europeans Erecting Fences to Maintain Good Relations with African Neighbors” (October 8, 2005)
- “Lampedusa Tragedy Highlights Europe’s ‘Haitian’ Problem” (October 7, 2013)
- “African Migrants (Still) Turning Mediterranean Sea into a Vast Cemetery” (June 1, 2016)
- “World Refugee Day” (June 20, 2017)
- “Africans Selling Africans as Slaves … Again” (December 18, 2017)
- “Colonial Ties Have Europe in Knots Over African Migration” (July 9, 2018)
Nonetheless, my conscience remains sensitized. In fact, I feel a little of our shared humanity dying every time I read about migrants dying for the freedoms we take for granted.
Like as the waves make towards the sandy shore,
So too will Africans take to the sea;
All changing place with those who went before,
In droves these poor souls continue to flee.
History (and God, ultimately) will judge African and European leaders harshly for dealing with this migration crisis so inhumanely. But I have already rendered judgment, damning them jointly and severally in many commentaries.
The failure of leadership
Europeans ascribe no blame for these tragedies to the African governments that have failed their people so abysmally. But their failure is the only reason so many Africans, utterly bereft of hope at home, are fleeing to Europe in desperate pursuit of peace, prosperity, and happiness.
This dynamic illustrates the difficulty Europeans face in severing their umbilical cord of colonial obligation. Now their colonial ties have Europe in knots over African migration.
But the damning irony should not be lost on any proud African: 50 years after decolonization, hundreds of Africans risk their lives practically every day to subjugate themselves to the paternal mercies of their former colonial masters in Europe.
You’d be hard-pressed to find any African leader who has done more to redress this crisis than German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Even her record is not without blemish, as I’ve documented regarding Merkel betraying migration policy that won her ‘Person of the Year’.
You’d also be hard-pressed to find any African aid worker who has called out fellow Africans the way Jan Egeland, Secretary General, Norwegian Refugee Council, has called out fellow Europeans:
I remember when European leaders, organisations and columnists in 1989 expressed their collective outrage about those who had died fleeing across the crumbling Berlin Wall. …
Around 250 died trying to escape across the Berlin Wall during the three decades from 1961 to 1989; ten times as many, 2000—3000 [African] men, women and children, now die every single year in their attempt to escape their hopelessness and reach protection and a better life in Europe. The silence surrounding these mass drownings is unacceptable and hypocritical.
(Thomson Reuters Foundation, January 23, 2019)
Colonial chickens coming home to roost
Granted, these African migrants might just be European chickens from colonial days coming home to roost. And it might be collective guilt more than shared humanity that is motivating Europeans like Merkel and Egeland.
But only man’s inhumanity to man explains generations of African leaders
- showing so little concern about the fate of African migrants;
- holding European leaders responsible for their own failures;
- alienating African political refugees even more than European leaders alienate African economic migrants;
- making it impossible for young and educated Africans to find gainful employment at home; and
- extending inter-generational malaise by ignoring the root causes of African migration.
Regrettably, these leaders seem incapable of feeling any shame. Because only a modicum of it would prevent any African leader from ever setting foot in Europe until Africans implemented African solutions to solve this (African) migration crisis.
And, apropos of damning silence, don’t get me started on American leaders, especially black ones. Because, as far as they’re concerned, these African tragedies might as well be playing out on Mars.
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