Scrap the borders that divide Africans
The continent was a place where people could always move freely, and this is what we must strive for, writes
The government of human mobility might well be the most important problem to confront the world during the first half of the 21st century. Worldwide, the combination of fast capitalism and the saturation of the everyday by digital and computational technologies have led to the acceleration of speed and the intensification of connections. Ours is, in this regard, an era of planetary entanglement. Yet, wherever we look, the drive is decisively towards enclosure.
If this trend persists, tomorrow’s world will increasingly be a gated world, with myriad enclaves, culs-desac and shifting, mobile and diffuse borders.
The capacity to decide who can move and who can settle, where and under what conditions, will be at the core of the political struggles over sovereignty.
The right of non-citizens to cross national borders and enter a host country may not have been formally abolished yet. But, as shown by countless ongoing incidents, it is becoming increasingly procedural and can be suspended or revoked at any time and under any pretext.
That things are fast reaching this point is because a new global security regime is in the making.
It is characterised by the externalisation, militarisation and miniaturisation of borders, an endless segmentation and contraction of rights and an extension of tracking and surveillance as the privileged mode of mitigating risks. Its key function is to enhance mobility for some while impeding it or denying it to others.
It is paving the way for unprecedented forms of racial violence, most of which target minorities, the disenfranchised and already vulnerable people. This violence is abetted by new logics of containment and incarceration, expulsion and deportation.
Furthermore, mobility is increasingly defined in geopolitical, military and security terms. In theory, those who present the lowest risk profile can move. In practice, the calculation of risk mostly serves to justify unequal and discriminatory treatment along the colour line.
As the trend in favor of balkanisation and enclosure intensifies, the unequal redistribution of the capacities to negotiate borders on a global scale becomes a key feature of our times. Indeed, in the North, anti-immigrant racism is on the rise. Those deemed “non-European” or “non-white” are subjected to overt and not-so-overt forms of violence and discrimination. Racism itself has been discursively retooled. Difference and foreignness are now overtly construed either as cultural or as religious.
Globally, the trend is to withdraw the right to move from as many people as possible, or to subject such a right to draconian conditions which, objectively, make mobility impossible.
In instances where the right to move has been granted, similar efforts are deployed in order to make as uncertain and precarious as possible the right to stay. In this apartheid-like regime of global movement, Africa is doubly penalised, from the outside and from the inside.
Today, there is hardly any country in the world that does not consider migrants from Africa undesirable.
At the same time, saddled with hundreds of internal borders that make the costs of mobility highly prohibitive, Africa is trapped in the slow lane and increasingly resembles a massive open air prison.
In its attempt to contain the migratory flows from sub-Saharan Africa, Europe for instance is funding countries of origin and transit so that people seeking to move either do not leave in the first place, or are in no position to ever cross the Mediterranean. In this regard, the ultimate goal of the recently established EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa is to cut off any credible legal route for African migrations to Europe.
In exchange for money, brutal and corrupt African regimes are entrusted with the task of locking up potential African migrants and warehousing asylum seekers. Many have been drafted as key cogs in the system of deportation and forced returns that has become a hallmark of European anti-African migration policy.
As a matter of fact, no travelling person with an African passport — or person of African descent — is today free from unreasonable search and seizure. Very few are immune to time-consuming and invasive identity verifications at airports, on trains and highways or at roadblocks. Very few enjoy the right to a hearing prior to confinement at the site of inspection or prior to deportation.
At borders and other checkpoints, they are almost automatically among those subjected to scrutiny or closely and thoroughly inspected. Permanently under the gaze of racial profiling, they are almost always among those who bear a prohibited or penalised status.
Within the continent itself, postcolonial African states have failed to articulate a common legislative framework and policy initiatives in
The moment has come for African states to develop a genuine common mobility policy