So much for Ubuntu: A devastating week for Africans on the move

For all our talk of ubuntu and pan-Africanism, this is a continent that really knows how to mistreat its people – especially its most vulnerable.

Let’s start at the very bottom, in South Africa, the economic and political powerhouse that prides itself on its commitment to human rights and international law. A Zulu king, railing against his own irrelevance, wrote himself into the mainstream once again by taking verbal aim at those easiest of targets, “the foreigners”, whoever they may be.

Turns out he had more power than anyone thought: his words turned into actions, and sure enough, foreigners – Africans only, mind you – were chased from their homes; hounded out of their businesses, their goods looted; and beaten for the mortal sin of being from somewhere else. So far, six have been killed, and with every death the myth of South African exceptionalism cracks a little more.

Now let’s move towards the middle of this vast continent of ours, and a little east, to the world’s largest refugee camp which, incidentally, doubles as Kenya’s third largest city by population. This is Dadaab, a safer haven for hundreds of thousands of Somalis fleeing war and persecution, although life here isn’t easy either – food is scarce, jobs are scarcer, and the Kenyan state does everything it can to discourage real integration, leaving refugees in a kind of social limbo, stuck in a purgatory far from home and told they can’t make a new home either.

Then the war in Somalia – the same one from which Dadaab’s residents fled, and in which Kenyan troops are deeply embroiled – reared up yet again and lashed out at Kenya proper. 148 university students were slaughtered in cold blood in Garissa. Al Shabaab claimed responsibility, but somehow it is Dadaab that is being punished. Kenya is demanding that the camp is closed down within three months, and that its refugees return to Somalia. The subtext is clear: that refugees only remain in Kenya because they want to, as if they are tourists on the world’s worst package holiday whose visas have expired. Because who wouldn’t trade their homes, businesses, friends, families, land, furniture, property and history for a dusty tent in a hot, barren strip of no-man’s land in a country that doesn’t want them?

Finally, let’s move up, all the way to those lush white beaches on the continent’s northern coastline, where every week hundreds of nervous passengers gather up their courage and put their lives at the mercy of some rickety ship and its unscrupulous crew that has promised, for a sizeable fee, to take them to the promised land across the waters – to Europe, where, if they are lucky, they will work harder than anyone else as street sweepers and toilet cleaners and still incur the wrath of over-fed locals who are too selfish to understand that a few foreigners taking a few menial jobs is a small price to pay for their own extraordinary wealth and prosperity, built as it was almost entirely on the systematic rape and pillage of foreign lands.

If these would-be migrants are unlucky, the unscrupulous crew will abandon ship somewhere in the Mediterranean, the ship will get swallowed by the waves and they will drown within sight of the Promised Land, as more than 400 did this week.

What links Durban, Dadaab and the North African migration route is that these are all Africans on the move. Africans in search of a life free from war and conflict, from persecution and discrimination; a life that can guarantee for themselves and their families a basic standard of living, security and respect. There are still too many African countries that cannot offer this. And those that can are reluctant to extend these privileges.

This is a mistake. Not just on a moral level, or a human rights level, although the arguments for both are obvious and inarguable. But even on a practical, selfish level: Those Africans that make it out of extreme poverty, that escape from war, they are survivors. They are entrepreneurs. They are the hardest workers and the biggest risk-takers, the people who have been forged in the fire and can make it anywhere. They are the very best of us, and if they happen to end up within our borders we should be doing everything to keep them here, instead of chasing them away to other lands which they will inevitably improve and enrich.

And history is on their side. Humanity is not and has never been static; as a species, part of our success has been a relentless search for greener pastures and new frontiers. No matter how hard we try, we will never be able to stop the movement of people across lands and borders. It’s a habit ingrained in our DNA. The sooner we all accept this, and start taking advantage of this, the better. Ultimately it will be those who fight hardest against this movement, against human nature itself, who will lose out. DM

Photo: A foreign national signs in with immigration officials at a makeshift camp set up after recent xenophobia attacks by South African's on foreigners living in the port town that left scores dead, in Durban, South Africa, 15 April 2015. Attacks on foreign African nationals ended with running battles in downtown Durban. EPA/STR

Read more:

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  Xenophobia and bloodshed in His Majesty’s kingdom on Daily Maverick

  
  


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  Analysis: Kenya's Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, isn’t going anywhere yet on Daily Maverick

  
  


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  Lampedusa tragedy: We were all African refugees once on Daily Maverick