Prevent Youth from Sacrificing Themselves to the Seas

It's no secret that high unemployment in many African countries has been a major factor in the massive migration of young people to Europe and the United States. Youth seek big jobs in big cities and many of those opportunities aren't available in their home countries. Unfortunately, this mass exodus has often resulted in very dangerous and often fatal trips through treacherous conditions in order to be smuggled across borders. In the last twenty years, more than 80,000 people have died trying to enter Europe by sea. Many migrants are lucky if they survive the journey and arrive at their destination, but there are still many who arrive only to face even harsher living conditions than they escaped in their home country, and still perish in vain.


In an attempt to curb the number of young Africans risking their lives to migrate abroad, the European Union has created an immigration center in Bamako, Mali. Its intention is not to be a recruitment center for Africans seeking employment, but rather a supportive and information center that will encourage migrants to move to Europe legally and educate them of the different types of vocational training that would be most useful in gaining them employment once they are able to migrate.

The establishment of the European immigration center is not the first effort to dissuade people from illegal and dangerous migration abroad. A Senegalese woman whose own son died while traveling by boat to the Canary Islands launched her own grassroots campaign a few years ago to educate those in her community about the dangers of small boat travel. She has seen her small fishing community transformed into a departure point for young West Africans traveling to Europe in small fishing boats.

The map below diagrams the path that travelers take throughout the various hubs and transfer points to make it to the northern and western shores of Africa and eventually Europe- usually by way of Spain or Italy.

One Spanish couple who was traumatized by the site of 37 dead Africans, killed by drowning while attempting to travel to Spain, decided to invest in Hansala, Morocco- the community that many of the dead migrants they found came from. They founded an NGO called Solidaridad Directa, that works to enable its citizens to build the capacity of Hansala and encouraged them to continue to develop their community rather than embarking on the often fatal migration to Spain.

Though the EU has sought an institutionalized solution to remedy this issue and many are launching grassroots campaigns to stop Africans from traversing the dangerous journey, it is impossible to ignore the disparities in this situation. Europe and Africa hold strong colonial ties that are still evident in European countries' (especially France) intervention during times political and economic strife on the continent. Europeans easily travel throughout Africa and often obtain their visas when they are entering the country. However, Africans are continually denied visas to Europe and thus their need to smuggle across borders in order to gain entry. Africans do not take boats because they are unable to pay airfare, many times these treacherous boat rides cost more than $1,000. They choose this method because that is their only hope of gaining entry into the country.

For centuries African nations have been exploited by Europe and continue to be. I believe that Africans need to set the same stipulations on entrance to their countries as Europe (and the US) has put on entering theirs. We can not continue to support such a lopsided relationship. We sadly even close our borders to our fellow Africans, but are quick to open them to foreign Europeans and Americans!

We need to work harder to create economic and social conditions within our countries that will dissuade young people from longing to fulfill their dreams abroad. Zebra Jobs, which I wrote about a few moths ago has launched their virtual job fair and I am impressed. It is now up to us to encourage our young people within the country and those that have migrated to to work in Africa and work towards building it rather than sacrificing their human potential to the seas.

US Halts Family Reunification of Refugees

The US State Department has halted the family reunification of African refugees due to their belief that the participants were creating fraud. The article by BBC did not say what prompted it, but DNA tests were issued on samples of applicants and showed that only about 20% had blood relation. The State Department and Homeland security thus deemed this a fraud and have halted the program.
It is clear that the implementors of this investigation are ignorant of African kinship networks. Family is regarded as anyone who comes from the same village, compound, or community as you and is very rarely genetically defined. Also, as the African diaspora expands, Africans define family even more loosely. I, myself, who was not brought up in Cameroon refer to my family members as fellow Cameroonians that I've known since childhood, those who come from the same village as my parents, and even those who share the same dialect as my parents. I often and easily refer to someone that I may have met that same day as my cousin, aunt, or uncle.
Likewise, I come from a very large family and have more cousins than I can count. My mother being the most successful of the family has financially supported almost all of my cousins. For this reason many of them view her as their mother and if they were to immigrate to the US, she would call them her daughter or son.
Ultimately, I understand why an African refugee would refer to an extended relative or someone that is not a blood relative as their child or daughter. There is a good chance that they raised them! Especially in communities ravaged by warfare, such as the ones tested, where a child may have been orphaned. But I think that the US should rethink its labeling of this frequency of occurrences as a fraud and instead realize that if the pattern was found in so many countries (Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Ghana, Guinea, Gambia and Ivory Coast), perhaps there's a gap in intercultural communication. And more importantly, if the resources and opportunities already exist for these people to be resettled and removed from potentially violent situations- why prevent it on such an arbitrary basis?

Reflections on African Brain Gain Movement

While doing some reading about the Brain Drain, I came across a scholars perception of the African Brain Gain. There is nothing especially enlightening about the scholar's position, but he describes his perception of this phenomenon so precisely, that I had to share it.

Reflections on African Brain Gain Movement
By Ebere Onwudiwe*

Brain drain implies the situation whereby some of the best and the brightest among citizens of Africa are leaving the continent for greener pastures in developed countries. Brain gain is said to occur when these “talented 10th” return to their home countries in Africa with their skills and talents.

I do not think that this conception of brain gain is correct. When a scientist, a doctor,a history professor leaves Africa, brain is drained, but when he returns, brain is not gained. It is replaced. When you replace what you lost, you have not gained. I believe that brain gain only occurs when you attract additional skills from other countries not when you replace skilled manpower that left to other countries.1 To gain is to advance, to add value, not to return to status quo ante. Yet, the conditions which are necessary for attracting skilled labor from other countries are necessarily the same conditions that are needed for a successful repatriation of skilled people lost to other countries, professions and sectors. I am sure that many people here are aware of these enabling conditions: paying salaries and working conditions commensurate with level of expertise including relocation expenses and laboratories; fostering a stable condition of peace and stability at home; ensuring a policy of meritocracy rather than nepotism under which people without skills are given jobs due to those that have them; investing in stable infrastructure including communications, electricity, roads, etc. There so many of these.

I believe that if Africa creates the right conditions, it can attract skilled people from other countries including its skilled children who left, and grand children born in other continents. That would constitute real brain gain.

Onwudiwe goes on to compare the plight of highly skilled and educated African immigrants to that of highly skilled and education African-Americans using W.E. DuBois' theory of the "Double Conscious".

But there is another tension which is not captured in the argument between African leaders and African intellectuals who emigrated. This second tension is the one happening in the heads of each of us Africans who are economic refugees in the United States. Many feel that they should be home rather than here. This fact is a living burden with which many African emigrants are dealing with at the personal level everyday.
Some say that this is a type of identity crises, the type of “double consciousness” that W.E. Du Bois made famous with respect to the African-American educated minority that he called the “talented tenth.” It is said that the inner torture of these African American intellectuals was the realization that their qualifications meant very little in a racist society. For the African emigrants to the United States, it is that their qualifications meant very little to their home countries. Both groups of intellectuals suffer an attendant sense of alienation and guilt.
The African knows that his expertise is more needed in his home country than in his
adopted country, but for some very personal reasons of personal survival and extended
family he knows that he is better-off staying here rather than returning home. This duality of loyalty for country and for family is the source of inner tension in the souls of all African intellectuals and professionals who live in this and other countries.

I see this internal struggling present throughout the lives of my family members who migrated over 20 years ago and have yet to return, some are even yet to visit. I think that the saddest part about of this is that this elite, highly educated and skilled class, is relegated to menial positions in Western society and that is where I see the "Double Consciousness" most strongly apparent. Many do not realize that their Blackness will become an impediment abroad and their differences are not valued or understood. Unfortunately, the menial living that they receive abroad is still more than the unemployment they face in their home countries even with advanced degrees and training.
This is where I face my moral dilemma. I am thrilled at the chance to be able to work in Africa and make a descent living, but it is not so much because of the schooling I've received, but where I've received it and my American citizenship. During my travels, I have met professionals who are more experienced and educated than I, but will never receive the same opportunities because of their nationality. It kills me to know that I can easily live and flourish in a land that is not my own and its own inhabitants struggle to live the same way as I on their own land and will never live as easily on my land as I do theirs.