Ties between Europe and Africa have never been rosy. A relationship based on predatory conquest and the exploitation of resources (slave flesh, minerals, and such assortments) is only ever going to lend itself to farce and display rather than sincerity. The late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, whose death must be placed squarely at the feet of the Franco-Anglo-American intervention in the Libyan conflict of 2011, typified the cruelly distorted relationship, a man who morphed from erratic, third way statesman of revolution to terrorist inspired “Mad Dog”; then to a modern, if cartoonish figure capable of rehabilitating a state from pariah to flattered guest.
A neat expression of Euro-African ties was captured in the 2007 Dakar address by then French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Like the current French President Emmanuel Macron, Sarkozy wanted to make an impression on those in what had been formerly characterised as the Dark Continent. The leaders of the Maghreb and West Africa had been led to believe that promise was wafting in the air, that France would have a grand update on its relationship with former colonies on the continent. The system of Francafrique, larded with neo-colonial connotation, would be scrapped. Sweet sensible equality would come to be.
An impression he did make, albeit in spectacularly negative, sizzling fashion. “The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history… They have never really launched themselves into the future.”
Sarkozy’s speech seemed a cribbed version of texts produced at a time when European officials were falling over each in other in acquiring and renting portions of the continent. But in 2007, a French leader could still be found speculating about the limited world view of African agrarianism, its peasantry cocooned from enlightenment. “The African peasant only knew the eternal renewal of time, marked by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words.” This, for the French President, was a “realm of fancy – there is neither room for human endeavour nor the idea of progress.”
The impact of the speech was such as to prompt Senegal’s foremost scribe Boubacar Boris Diop to suggest a cognitive confusion of some scale. “Maybe he does not realise to what extent we felt insulted.” Defences were offered in France, one coming from Jean-Marie Bockel. The speech, he concluded, had one thread through it: “the future of Africa belongs firstly to the Africans.”
And so now, in 2018, where history has again become an issue, throwing up its human cargo of suffering from conflict, poverty and strong shades of neo-colonialism, France, fashioned as a European leader, again finds itself considering how to respond to relations with the southern continent.
For various African states, the signs are not good. Historical condescension and the sneer seemingly persists. Macron, in an effort to steady the refugee control effort in the European Union, has gone into full school teacher mode. The EU, he has iterated, cannot take decisions on behalf of African states, though he does suggest that, “Helping Africa to succeed is good for Europe and France.”
African states also suffered from a distinct problem of fecundity: unplanned population growth threatened further northward migration. Immigrant processing centres in North Africa designed to halt the flow into Europe’s south, he suggests, “can fly, just if some African governments decide to organise it”.
This is something Macron has been onto for a time, and it replicates a broader formula adopted by wealthier states to more impoverished ones. No doubt eyeing such ghoulish experiments as Australia’s Pacific Solution, which shifts the burden of processing and assessing refugee claims to small, low-income Nauru and unstable Papua New Guinea, Macron suggested in 2017 that states such as Libya carry the can, a suggestion as absurd as it is venal.
In August that year, he ventured, with agreement from German, Spanish and Italian counterparts, to focus on the setting up of migrant processing centres in Libya, Chad and Niger. These would involve European resources to help create and sustain them. The gaping flaw of this suggestion, one carried over into the EU negotiations last week, ignores the shattered status of Libya, a state in all but name.
Such plans, in the assessment of Left MEP Malin Björk, were “tainted by structural racism towards the African population”. In the opinion of the Swedish MEP, “Europe has not right to criminalise mobility of movement especially not in third countries.” Such views are coming across as marginally quaint in the hard nosed and distinctly inhumane line of EU politics.
The value of Macron’s schooling is also compounded by manifold problems on what Europe actually intends to do. The EU-Turkey Joint Action Plan that came into force on March 20, 2016 was meant to be a holy of holies, stemming the flow of refugees into frontline Greece. It came with the natural consequence of shifting the routes of movement towards the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean. Like aqueous matter, human flows will find a way.
Macron is only speaking for Europe in one respect: regaining control of borders and putting the refugee genie as far as possible back into the bottle. Disagreement reigns over the method. During negotiations in Brussels, EU leaders agreed, for instance, that “regional embarkation platforms” established outside the zone would be implemented to target the people-smuggling process. In principle, it was also agreed that there would be secure migrant processing centres set up in EU countries.
On this point, member states remain deafeningly silent, though Macron has insisted on the traditional formula that states who first receive the migrants should have those centres. The current Italian government hardly sees the point of why; other EU states are more than fit to also conduct such processes.
As such squabbling to the richer North takes place, the impecunious South will simply continue to be a massive conduit of dangerous, often deadly travel. This, along with Francafrique notions and various lacings of European suspicion towards African states, will continue with headstrong stubbornness.