TODAY is Africa day and I wish to share a very painful story with you. One has heard or read many horror stories about detentions, forceful removals, and deportation of Africans accused of being ‘illegal immigrants’ or failed asylum-seekers, almost always from one European country or another.
Most people are not likely to encounter this directly. In February, I came face to face with the inhuman way it is done. I was travelling to Nigeria with a former radical lecturer, mentor to several generations of Nigerian students and intellectuals, Dr Patrick Wilmot.
In 1988 he was kidnapped by the Securitate officials of Ibrahim Babangida regime and forcibly removed from Nigeria, a country he had lived in for almost two decades and despite the fact that he was and still is married to a Nigerian. Wilmot’s crime was allegedly, ‘teaching what he was not paid to teach’!
Wilmot is of Jamaican origin but has lived longer in Nigeria than in Jamaica and is better known to Nigerians and considered ‘one of us’ by many. Yet in one night the military government had yanked him away from his family and academic community and landed him in the United Kingdom, a country he had not lived in before and had nothing but a painful historical link of slavery and colonialism. Britain finally gave him legal residence and later citizenship and London has remained his home since 1988.
In spite of fears and anxiety by friends and colleagues unsure about the selective efficiency of the African state when it comes to real and imagined ‘enemies’ Wilmot was happy to be returning to a country from which he was deported. I was never officially deported from Nigeria but have become an expert at being ‘prevented to leave or enter the country’ throughout the military regime and even under the current ‘democratic’ order.
My travelling with Wilmot was both a personal and political assurance that we could face any trouble together and toughen it together. From checking in, boarding and by the time you got on board you know you are Nigeria-bound and in many ways feel like you are already in the country.
As loud as Nigerians are infamous for on boarding there was an unusual noise from the back of the plane, distinct from the racket of voices around. The voice grew more disquieting as we sat so I went to check in the next cabin.
At the very last seat in this jumbo plane was a young Nigerian man, definitely not
more than 25 years old sandwiched between two ‘bulls’ of White British Police/immigration officers and handcuffed to both of them.
I made enquiries from the air hostesses since my initial attempt to talk to the boy’s captives was rebuffed. The British Airways hostess casually informed me that it was nothing unusual, that these things happen fairly regularly, that the man was being ‘removed’ and assured me that his noise would reduce as soon as the flight settled in the air!
Meanwhile, the ‘Removal Police’ was trying its best to calm down the howling young man as they would ‘calm’ an aggressive dog or cat. On his part he was just crying, howling, swearing and whining like a trapped animal. It was so dehumanising and made me so sad.
Even sadder still was the general indifference of most of the other largely Nigerian passengers. Many of them have become inured to this kind of routine humiliation of fellow citizens.
One even advised the young man to ‘shut up and try again after when you get home’! Here was Dr. Wilmot, happy to return to a country from which he was unceremoniously thrown out on the same flight with a young man being unceremoniously returned home and he was definitely unhappy about it.
One got the impression that if he was left unshackled he could attempt jumping out of the plane. He wanted to be
anywhere but home.
How bad can it be that a young man who should have his whole life ahead of him should be so frightened of going back home? What kind of society have we created where our young people see no hope in remaining in Africa and would do anything to leave it?
These kinds of stories are repeated everyday across Africa and Europe. Some of our own governments, despite being responsible for the economic and political conditions that are making many Africans leave home, even connive in the routine humiliation in their forcible return from different countries in Europe. Some of them are willing to accept payments from European countries in exchange for taking fellow Africans (not necessarily their citizens) that are deported from Europe.
Who says slavery is dead? This is official people-trafficking by any other name and is done with impunity by countries who have signed all kinds of international conventions allegedly protecting human rights. The same countries that are forcing us to globalise, open up our economies and markets but are unwilling to open up their markets for our goods and our labour.
In spite of the humiliations many more people from across this continent will do anything to get a visa to go to the West and if that fails, anywhere else but Africa.
Many years ago I wrote about this phenomenon suggesting that were a slave ship, properly labelled to appear in any port city in Africa, people wouldl rush into it proclaiming that they were fit to be slaves! It is worse today; we are in many ways financing our way into slavery, both at home and globally.
Today being Africa day, we need to ask ourselves: if Romans were not there who would have built Rome?
