I was 24 when I fled Rwanda for the UK in 2007. I was a successful political reporter and had just been appointed editor of the leading removable investigative magazine. The vision, whose work was gaining admiration from many within Rwanda. I also ran a weekly column, The City Watchman, writing about current social issues, and was presenting for Reuters, Al Jazeera, Xhinua, as well as the Associated Press. This was my life, and I loved every part of it.
Meanwhile, some 4,000 miles away in the UK, and in my case in Glasgow, a city that had now become my home, a dangerous and sustained campaign against people like me was taking shape. Britain was in the tenth year of a Labor government, and while the party had transformed the country’s economic fortunes, a particular kind of malaise was beginning to set in. Desperate for power, politicians from the opposition parties (mainly Conservatives and UKIP) as well as sections of the media were beginning to arouse public anger on two issues: immigration and welfare. Debates around immigration were getting nastier, often with racist overtones. BBC broadcast the poles are cominga 50-minute television documentary and part of the White Season Series in which filmmaker Timothy Samuels set out to interrogate the growing anti-immigration narrative.
“You don’t have to go far these days to find a little piece of Poland or Eastern Europe in your city,” he says, before adding, “but for some in Peterborough it’s too much.” The film cuts to a crowded doctor’s office and school before a visibly furious middle-aged British man replies that Peterborough is “utterly and utterly overwhelmed”. Seconds later, a councilor intervenes to say that the country is fed up with immigration.
I remember watching the documentary in my one-bedroom apartment in Glasgow and feeling scared. There is a tendency to think that asylum ends the day you are resettled. While this is somewhat accurate, it is far from the truth. The loneliness, the concern for all that is left behind, family and friends, keeps one wondering. nothing is ever certain. It also depends on the specific threat of each. I know of people, myself included, who continue to look over their shoulders years after we were granted protection, because the truth is, you can never be sure. The question that came to my mind was, if this is how Eastern Europeans, most of them white with blue eyes and so able to blend in, are treated, what chance is there for us Africans?
After all, I already lived in a high-rise, with all kinds of neighbors, some of them active drug addicts or recovering addicts. But life goes on, and indeed she did. Despite the occasional noise, I got along well with my addicted neighbors and they never insulted me or bothered me in any way during the six months I lived in the flat.
A common misconception about those of us who seek refuge is the almost universal condemnation of why we do not seek protection in the first safe country we enter. “France is a perfectly peaceful country, they could have stayed there”, I have heard people say about those who cross the Channel in boats. Of course, there are a myriad of reasons why people may not apply for protection in certain countries despite going through them. People want to settle in countries where they have a local connection: friends, relatives, or because they speak the language.
I went through Uganda, Kenya and the Netherlands before landing at Heathrow. At my asylum interview, I was asked why I did not seek protection in Uganda or Kenya. My answer was always the same: Rwanda continues to have very good relations with its neighbors, and in the case of Uganda, they share a border. The chance of harm increases the closer you are to the country you fled from and the better your relationship with the host country. Furthermore, there is no legal obligation for refugees to seek asylum in the safe countries through which they pass. Refusing to do so does not disqualify them from refugee status.
People want to settle in countries where they have a local connection: friends, relatives, or because they speak the language.
Most of these assumptions are based on a lack of understanding of the diversity of African migration. Anyone who follows the debates on migration from Africa to the Global North might think that the burden is too much. But as studies have shown, this is not true. What Elephant As previously reported, most African migration remains on the continent. Around 21 million documented Africans live in another African country, with countries like Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt being some of the top destinations. Anti-immigration policies directed against Africans, implemented in part through strict visa policies and a general climate of persecution against foreigners in Europe and North America, have sent would-be African migrants to new and more destinations. receptive countries, such as China, Turkey, the Middle East and, in some cases, South America.
From my own experience as a former asylum seeker, I know that migrants are not necessarily fleeing war or poverty. Those who saw me land at Heathrow on the morning of July 22, 2007 might have thought I was another African immigrant escaping poverty and disease. But the truth is, like most people leaving Africa for Europe and the Americas, he wasn’t. If anything, I was part of the African elite who are able to overcome strict visa requirements, can afford pocket-busting airfare, and are able to take risks to come to countries where, whether they seek asylum or not , they are not exactly sure of the final outcome of their case. For suffering Africans, this is often an excessive outlay, especially when the country next door or the country of some northern or southern countries can welcome you and provide shelter for less than the cost of a UK visa. When it comes to migration to the Global North, Africans will only migrate if they have the ambitions and resources to make it happen.
Around 21 million documented Africans live in another African country, with countries like Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt being some of the top destinations.
In the run-up to the Brexit vote, which was heavily influenced by what campaigners to leave the EU referred to as uncontrolled immigration, there were more Eastern Europeans in the UK than immigrants from Africa or Asia combined. However, the entire campaign was dominated by discussions of illegal immigration, deliberately painting the picture that the country was being inundated with foreigners, many of whom were already subject to some of the most stringent visa requirements. Even Nigel Farage’s infamous Breaking Point poster, which was correctly reported to police as inciting racial hatred, was deliberately punctuated with brown faces as if to emphasize the point that white migration is okay, non-white migration is not so good.
I was having a discussion with one of my neighbors a few weeks ago, a son of Irish people who immigrated to Birmingham, England, in the 1950s. He has only been to Ireland twice in his life, and although he considers himself Irish, he doesn’t believe to be considered Irish. He speaks with a Birmingham accent and has lived in the South East of England for over 30 years. I don’t think he’s racist, but some of his views could very easily be construed as racist towards “these foreigners who can’t stop complaining”.
“Why only young people cross the Channel?” she asked. “If the situation in their countries is so dire that they have to flee, why are they leaving their family behind? Would you let your wife and children be killed or even raped? I would not do it. When I asked him what he would do if the only money he had left after selling most of his possessions was enough to transport one person in a family of four, he replied, “I don’t know, but I’d have to think of something.” I bothered him to tell me what that something was, he replied: “I don’t know.”
And herein lies the madness of the dangerous immigration rhetoric that has been carefully promoted by right-wing politicians with the help of increasingly agenda-driven media. The son of an Irish couple, who left Ireland in search of a better life in Birmingham, and were likely discriminated against as IRA sympathizers during the riots, he has grown up to become others doing exactly the same thing his parents did long ago. so many years. “We can’t let everyone in,” he says. Except we’re not.
–
This article is part of a series on migration and displacement in and from Africa, co-produced by Elephant and the Heinrich Boll Foundation’s Center for African Migration, which is based in its new Horn of Africa Office in Nairobi.
