A couple days ago I posted a link to a trailer for a new independent film by Idrissa Guiro, Barcelona ou la Mort (Barcelona or Death, http://docbarcelone.canalblog.com). It’s in French, but I think worth watching because the images alone are visually arresting (for me, their beauty comes from their realism - that’s so Senegal!) Although if you’ve ever been to Gorée Island, the last image hits you like a slow-motion punch to the stomach. It’s like peering out of the “door of no return” at the Maison d’Esclavage, and seeing the tides washing over the glossy black rocks below your feet. (Always a bleak reminder that few things survive the ocean the way rocks do). The trailer starts with a man recounting this visit to a jardin d’enfants, a preschool, in Senegal where he asks the kids, “Who among you wants to go to Europe?” The kids look at each other quizzically. Rephrasing the question, “Who wants to go to Spain,” all hands shoot in the air. “Why?” He asks the gathered 2 and 3 year olds before him. Finally a little one says, “pour manger.” (To eat.)
Pirogues are the long heavy boats that have made possible the livelihood of Senegalese fishermen for centuries. They are carved out of the wood of the colossal fromager trees, and they have colorful images painted on their sides, sometimes words like Baraka, Serign Touba, and Alxamduilay, which aren’t really so much magical lingo on their own so much as plain old vernacular blessings. These are the boats that fathers, sons, cousins - a handful, maybe 10 - push out on the waters in the morning and steer back into port at night, hopefully heaped with the daily catch.
On October 16, about 130 men from Senegal, Mali, Guinea-Bissau, and Gambia piled into a pirogue and quietly sped away from Ziguinchor, the sunny fishing village that took a swing at being a city and landed a little left of field, that I temporarily call home. Their destination was the Spanish Canary Islands (and ultimately, I believe Spain). First they had to reach international waters, 220 km off-coast, where travelers are immune to the menacing threat of helicopters and coastal patrols (Senegal and Morocco partner with Frontex, the border security branch of the EU). Somewhere outside of Mauritania their engine broke, and after a week of drifting, the surviving 90 or so were pulled from the sea and hospitalized in Morocco. 42 bodies are missing. To give you a sense of the numbers, since January of 2006, roughly 25,000 Africans have made similar journeys, and 3,000 have died (according to one estimate). No small number have college and post-collegiate degrees.
Immigrants from Senegal send home $630 million every year, which is 6.85 % of the GDP. And though it's a little off track, I think it's worth considering the family structure, or the idea of the family, as it exists in Africa. Families are loosely but extensively conjoined, and when these young men get in a pirouge, it’s got little to do with job satisfaction, wanderlust, or the lure of the West. It’s not their own future they’re ready to die for, but ultimately, their family’s.
How much do Americans know about the problem of clandestine immigration? My sense is that many Americans have an awareness that this goes on, shelved someplace neatly in the back of waking thought. The truth is, as I see it, it doesn’t touch us immediately enough to spark any sort of inquietude beyond a passing sympathy. In our defense, it’s not exactly all over the American news; in fact judging by the NYTimes archives, the subject barely makes it out of editorials. I think in not so many words, we tell ourselves, “that’s Europe’s problem.” How much truth is there to that idea? Many young Senegalese, particularly in the cities, say they’d rather drown en route to Europe than spend their lives looking for jobs that don’t exist. Worse yet, this is one of those things you hear so many times, it’s lost impact. How much is this America’s problem too?
This article could go in a dozen different directions. I could start highlighting the blame on the US, for its hand in keeping these economies at such a low-achieving level. I could talk about globalization and the exchange of culture (or the importation of western culture, but not entirely) that occurs as markets open across the globe, specifically in developing countries. That gives birth to a consumer culture, which ordinarily drives a work force. But then there’s massive unemployment. And then on the bigger level there’s substantial trade barriers against African goods. Outside of Senegal, Africans migrate for different reasons, persecution and war. I could talk about America’s responsibility in regards to those conflicts. But I’m neither an economist nor a historian - maybe an art historian - so I’m going to stay out of those murky waters! Obviously the answer is, a lot.
But instead of plunging into answers, I’m going to go ahead and take the other route, that is to say, put a few more of my own questions out there.
Starting with a less-than-rhetorical question: What is this notion of borders today - borders between people - at a time when they’re falling down everywhere? Economically speaking, culturally, speaking. Diplomatically, too, in some ways. While in theory, non-interventionist ideas sound nice, (America’s meddled in one too many cookie jars for its own good and everyone else's). That being said, there is no such thing as as political isolationism anymore, at least not in the way just about every American president before Wilson espoused. So where do you draw this line, between non-intervention and isolation? Where do you draw the line between economic and political intervention? (Quickest way to a government’s heart is through its pocketbook). Where should we intervene? Given that interventions are unfortunately just non-altruistic.
Ok, so, we’ve got these borders evaporating into thin air, at the same time as country borders are being reinforced and “controlled.” What’s our aversion to immigrants, us, a country founded by them? I think part of it has to do with the fear of a growing permanent underclass (We've watched France struggle with the repercussions of this). But if we’re not going to open our borders, then we could in the very least provide economic incentives for would-be immigrants to stay home. In the very most, we could pull their countries out of impoverishment.
I’m going to finish with a quote from Bono’s Foreword to Jeffrey Sach’s The End of Poverty (I know, I know, it seems almost unfairly easy, adding a little extra gravitas, a little ummph, to your speech by adding 9/11, we learned that from Rudy Guiliani. Nonetheless, point taken):
The destinies of the "haves" are intrinsically linked to the fates of the "have-nothing-at-alls." If we didn’t know this already, it became too clear on September 11, 2001. The perpetrators of 9/11 might have been wealthy Saudis, but it was in the collapsed, poverty-stricken state of Afghanistan that they found succor and sanctuary. Africa is not the front line in the war against terror, but it soon could be.
"The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty." Who said that? Not me. Not some beatnik peace group. Secretary of State Colin Powell. And when a military man starts talking like that perhaps we should listen. In tense, nervous times isn’t it cheaper - and smarter - to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them?
