Litnet

“In the eyes of the Other, we become aware of our own visible existence.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre

“To live without roots takes a stout heart.”
– Erich Maria Remarque

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

Is President Putin of Russia waging a deliberate campaign to try to bring famine to Africa?

The answer is almost certainly yes, according to at least one newspaper in the UK, well connected to government intelligence sources: “We must assume this is (his) primary aim, in stopping the grain shipments from Ukraine.”¹ If so, it would add another straw to the camel’s back of the intensifying crisis in the EU caused by almost unstoppable numbers of people making their way from the “global south” to the West in search of a better life.

More than 50 million people across Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and South Sudan are currently in need of food aid due to successive years of failed rains. The most desperate are completely dependent on food provided by Ukraine’s biggest purchaser of grain, the World Food Programme (WFP). Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, could now die of starvation if the WFP cannot source grain.

The timing of the Moscow blockade is also pretty obvious: this week (24 July), the second Africa-Russia summit is taking place in St Petersburg. The last summit in 2019 attracted 43 African countries, but fewer attended this time round. 

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Cynics will deduce that Putin wants to lay the blame for the grain shortages on Western sanctions. African audience most affected by the shortages – ergo, if the grain is to be forthcoming again, then Africa must appeal to the West to lift sanctions against Russia.

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Cynics will deduce that Putin wants to lay the blame for the grain shortages on Western sanctions. He’ll be doing so in front of an African audience most affected by the shortages – ergo, if the grain is to be forthcoming again, then Africa must appeal to the West to lift sanctions against Russia.

The summit is, therefore, designed to show that Russia is not a pariah and enjoys the implicit endorsement of its violations of international law by African heads of state. All eyes will be on who attends, but few will resist the invitation, lest they incur Moscow’s displeasure and even become a future target of the Wagner mercenaries, who are being redeployed to various African trouble spots following their stint in Ukraine. We have all seen that even Pretoria is afraid of a war with Russia, a possibility had they dared arrest Putin on a possible Brics visit to Durban. Wagner is reportedly operating in four African conflict zones at present, and maybe more.

Real-life chess

Apart from getting sanctions lifted – and the calculation is that the effect of the latest grain shipping blockade embargo will trigger another massive migration crisis in Europe – Putin must also be hoping that the political impact in the EU will speed up calls for an end to the war in Ukraine via a negotiated settlement. No one can deny that migration is a real hot potato for the EU. It’s a problem that has been brewing for decades. The original migrant “wake-up call” for Europe may, in fact, have occurred one morning in 1972, suggested the New York Times recently, when the respected French travel author, Jean Raspail, was at his home on the Mediterranean coast and had a “vision” of a million refugees clamouring to enter Europe. They were part of a vanguard from the global south that had embarked on cargo ships, a vast flotilla of which was headed for Europe.

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Apart from getting sanctions lifted – and the calculation is that the effect of the latest grain shipping blockade embargo will trigger another massive migration crisis in Europe – Putin must also be hoping that the political impact in the EU will speed up calls for an end to the war in Ukraine via a negotiated settlement.

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“Armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil. To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them,” he wrote, as desperate, clamouring faces crowded the window of his cottage, looking in at this lone European ensconced with food and drink in front of a warm fire.

His vision resulted in The camp of the saints, which would become his most controversial work. Although Raspail was generally thought to be a moderate politically, his book is today up there with Ayn Rand’s Atlas shrugged in reading lists of the right, where Raspail is hailed as a prophet who correctly forecast the dramatic surge of migrants into the EU.

The dystopian novel details how political elites fail to respond to the influx, and the continent is overrun. For nearly half a century, says the New York Times, the book has stoked fears of immigration that have, to its supporters, seemed increasingly prescient, as growing numbers of refugees and asylum seekers have arrived in Europe in recent years.

“Raspail can boast himself (sic) about being a prophet,” says Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs. “People now buy The camp of the saints because they want to read the book written by the writer who saw what would happen before everybody else.”

“The power of the book comes from the very vivid images of near destruction of the white race, and the absence of resistance from the government,” adds Cécile Alduy, a professor of French studies at Stanford University who has studied the discourse of the French far right.

Has compassion fatigue set in?

Today, we are confronted with the extraordinary and completely unexpected spectre of post-Brexit Britain turning to the left politically, while the rest of Europe is heading right. Brexit has paradoxically removed the reason for existence of pro-Brexit conservative campaigners like Nigel Farage, and the UK has been able to sidestep the anti-immigrant surge across the channel. The driver behind this shift to the right in Europe is, quite simply, the tens of thousands of hungry migrants from the global east and south who, just like in the storyline of The camp of the saints, are willing to risk their lives in boats to get to the promised land of western Europe.

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The driver behind this shift to the right in Europe is, quite simply, the tens of thousands of hungry migrants from the global east and south who, just like in the storyline of The camp of the saints, are willing to risk their lives in boats to get to the promised land of western Europe.

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In France, all the polls show the right forging ahead. The country has been bedevilled by ongoing violence, laid at the feet of migrants from North Africa, which the authorities seem unable to stop. Seven years ago, a 31-year-old man drove a 19-tonne lorry down Nice’s celebrated Promenade des Anglais while crowds were celebrating Bastille Day. Eighty-six people were killed.

The previous year, 130 people had been murdered across Paris in a series of attacks. This followed earlier atrocities at the Charlie Hebdo magazine office and a Jewish supermarket in the French capital. In all cases, the attackers were of North African origin. French newspapers began to write about a so-called “intifada” – a holy war – against France.

Part of the problem seems to lie in the fact that integrating migrants into French society is difficult, owing to the fact that France refuses to recognise immigrants as anything but French – an approach which has led to a widespread sense of alienation on the part of migrants; it only takes a single incident to set off street violence in the cities, frequently involving a set-to between police and migrant suburbs. The difficulties inherent in accepting migrants was dramatised two months ago, when France simply turned away a large boat full of migrants which had been diverted to Marseilles by Italy – which has itself already taken in hundreds of thousands of migrants and feels that Paris needs to step up to the plate and accept its fair share as well. As a result, diplomatic relations between France and Meloni’s Italy were severely strained for a while.

Meanwhile, in Germany, according to Rainer Zitelmann, writing in The Article^3,  the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) is currently the second strongest political force in Germany, after the Christian Democrats (CDU), at around 19-20%. Since the 2021 federal elections, when the AfD scored 10,3%, the party has doubled its support in polls. The AfD is particularly strong in eastern Germany (the former GDR).

There are many reasons for the AfD’s success, says Zitelmann. “(But) it is clear the AfD is primarily profiting from dissatisfaction with immigration – Angela Merkel’s immigration policies, which opened the country’s borders to millions of migrants (many of them with economic motives), have long been a reason for the rise of the AfD.”

In France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Finland and elsewhere in the EU, voters are demanding a battening down of the hatches against migrants; and those policymakers who still occupy the centre of political gravity, like Macron of France and Scholz of Germany, are not oblivious to the risk of their own positions if they lose control of the migration narrative. In Belgium, this narrative is at risk of being lost altogether, with anti-migrant sentiment in the Flemish part of Belgium driving a Flemish independence movement threatening the very future of Belgium as a united country with the French-speaking part.

Fortress Europe

What we can see at present, therefore, is a kind of “fortress Europe” in the making, revolving around three main pillars: border control, cooperation with origin and transit countries, and integration policies. The policy is defined by a selective emphasis on who can come in and who cannot. At the moment, Ukrainians, perhaps two million, have been welcomed in the EU because of the war, but for all other nationalities the fence has become higher.

The EU has invested heavily in reinforcing its external borders. This involves increasing the presence of border patrols, surveillance technologies and intelligence sharing to detect and deter illegal crossings. The establishment of joint European border agencies, such as Frontex, has further enhanced coordination and resource allocation.

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The policy is defined by a selective emphasis on who can come in and who cannot. At the moment, Ukrainians, perhaps two million, have been welcomed in the EU because of the war, but for all other nationalities the fence has become higher.

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Meanwhile, diplomatic efforts are underway to promote economic development, stability and opportunities in the regions from which the migrants hail. The idea is to encourage them to stay in their homelands, and all kinds of ambitious aid packages are on offer to support capacity building in areas like security, education and healthcare.

Will it work? Who knows, but basically it often comes down to EU countries “bribing” North African and near-East regions with massive amounts of money – billions of euros – to patrol the coasts and prevent the boats from setting off. The money, in some cases, is simply used to prop up faltering governments. And, if these countries of migrant origin are further deprived of grain to feed their populations, the EU’s capacity building efforts will run into the sand.

In the EU itself, integration policies have also been devised to accommodate legal migrants while ensuring a smooth assimilation process. By providing language training, job opportunities and access to social services, European countries hope to facilitate the integration of migrants into their societies, reducing the likelihood of marginalisation and enhancing mutual benefits.

That’s the official line, anyway, but the process is extremely fraught, and, as we see in France, assimilation is proving very difficult, with rising crime levels in countries like Sweden attributed to new migrants from the troubled Middle East and North Africa.

Outside the EU

Outside the EU, the British parliament has also, just this week, passed a controversial law making it easier for any UK government in future to deport illegal migrants, as opposed to those arriving with permits issued by British embassies abroad. The intention is that illegal arrivals will now be sent almost immediately by plane to Rwanda, which has agreed to act as a safe “holding centre”, where asylum and entry applications can be processed outside Britain by British officials. The idea behind this strategy, modelled on the original Australian system, is to break the “business model” of traffickers, who charge migrants thousands of euros for a seat on lethally dangerous small boats; the plan is to send a clear signal to both traffickers and migrants alike that their efforts will avail them little.

Human rights challenges in the courts have thus far frustrated the Rwanda option, but Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is determined to push ahead with the scheme in order to prevent unnecessary deaths at sea. Meanwhile, thousands of migrants are being housed in hotels all over the UK, costing millions every day at the tax payer’s expense, and community tempers are rising – there have been muted demonstrations by residents in a few areas against housing new arrivals. Hundreds of migrants are still arriving by small craft from France every week, despite sophisticated efforts by French police to prevent them from using French beaches to launch the boats. At the same time, France is making it difficult for the UK to return the refugees to Calais, once they arrive at Dover.

Integration is the key.

Migrants can be a very positive force in Europe and elsewhere, if successfully integrated. Falling birth rates and older populations mean there is an enormous skills shortage, and young migrants can provide a real boost to regional economies. European governments know this, but are having great trouble getting the message across to voters.

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Integration is the key and is proving difficult. The UK is arguably the most successful of all the European nations in achieving a balance between newcomers and locals. Possibly this is because the UK differentiates between communities – each with its own special language – and cultures, while elsewhere in Europe the insistence is to oblige newcomers to “become” Swedish, or French or Spanish, by complete absorption into the adopted countries’ languages and mores.

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Integration is the key and is proving difficult. The UK is arguably the most successful of all the European nations in achieving a balance between newcomers and locals. Possibly this is because the UK differentiates between communities – each with its own special language – and cultures, while elsewhere in Europe the insistence is to oblige newcomers to “become” Swedish, or French or Spanish, by complete absorption into the adopted countries’ languages and mores. Newcomers are not encouraged to live in “communities” of their own culture. Newly arrived South Africans in the UK, on the other hand, are often taken aback by local council questionnaires which ask for their ethnic and racial identity, which shows a concern by these councils for community identity and where to allocate spending priorities.

Refugees in literature

Most people know of Erich Maria Remarque’s All quiet on the western front, filmed in various versions, the most recent of which was widely applauded. But, having been a refugee himself, stripped by the Nazis of his German citizenship, Remarque was also well placed to produce two subsequent novels, possibly even more moving, describing the refugee plight. Flotsam (Hutchinson, 1959) describes with extraordinary poignancy the life and tragedy of the dispossessed refugee – the men and women who, hunted from frontier to frontier, deprived of hope, have neither home nor country. His characters flit from hiding place to hiding place, and, rereading Flotsam recently, I realised that their desperation could be replicated a thousand times over in the personal tales of the current wave of refugees in Europe.

Picture of book cover: provided by David Willers

In both Flotsam and The night in Lisbon (Hutchinson, 1964), Remarque searingly challenges the contemporary conscience of Second World War Europe and the inhumanity of the bureaucratic system in general. Seventy-odd years later, refugees are still prisoners of bureaucracy, even as the Europeans demonstrate that things have moved on, on the conscience front. The plight of refugees is recognised, at least on a somewhat elevated moral level, and everyone feels sorry for them. But the discussion now is literally about how many refugee migrants Europe can afford to host, before their health and housing systems become overloaded. “The inn is full” is the basic conundrum facing EU governments – and it is polarising political opinion, as already mentioned. If the refugees are rejected, they need to return to their homelands, where they will starve; and the only way they will not, is if the Ukrainian grain taps are opened by lifting sanctions against Russia.

The entire canon of European – indeed, world – literature is, in many ways, the story of refugees from war, famine and pestilence through the ages and the struggle to be accepted in new communities. Countless films, memoirs, novels and books trace what is, in effect, a never-ending road trip of humanity. Pick a country, any country, and it will have its own story of refugees.

South Africa, too, has probably absorbed as many migrants from African countries to the north as Europe has, over the past 15 years or so. Despite the odd xenophobic flare-up and push-back by locals, they seem to be assimilating very well, forming distinct communities. You never read about the problems of integration they may be having in the European press, and the assumption must be that for whatever reason they are increasingly accepted by South African society.

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Many distinct migrations of the past are long forgotten. But some have attracted the attention of scholars, and there has been a lot of writing on the subject. For example, the history of the Afrikaans-speaking prisoners of war settled by the British in Argentina is a fascinating chapter of the Second Boer War (1899–1902), when thousands of Boers were sent into exile by the British, and a significant number of them found themselves resettled in Argentina, a distant land that held the promise of a fresh start.

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Many distinct migrations of the past are long forgotten. But some have attracted the attention of scholars, and there has been a lot of writing on the subject. For example, the history of the Afrikaans-speaking prisoners of war settled by the British in Argentina is a fascinating chapter of the Second Boer War (1899–1902), when thousands of Boers were sent into exile by the British, and a significant number of them found themselves resettled in Argentina, a distant land that held the promise of a fresh start.

In 1903, negotiations between the British and Argentine governments culminated in an agreement to resettle approximately 800 Boer families (about 4 000 individuals) in Argentina. The Boers saw this as an opportunity to escape British rule, while Argentina viewed it as a way to encourage agricultural development. Upon their arrival in Argentina, the Boer settlers were provided with land, tools and resources to establish their farms. The settlers faced numerous difficulties in adapting to their new environment. They had to cope with a different climate, learn to cultivate unfamiliar crops, and grapple with a language barrier. Nevertheless, their resilience and determination helped them gradually establish thriving farming communities. Over time, the Boer settlers integrated into Argentine society while still preserving their cultural identity. They maintained the Afrikaans language, traditions and culinary practices, which enriched the cultural tapestry of Argentina. They exemplified how a group of people, uprooted from their homeland due to war, could manage to find new opportunities and contribute to the development of a foreign land.

South America also became a magnet for other groups of migrants, who flourished, such as the Welsh settlers, who established a Welsh colony in the heart of Patagonia, Argentina. There are several books available on the subject of the Welsh and German settlements in particular.

The idea of creating a Welsh settlement in a distant land took root in the aftermath of the industrial revolution, which brought economic hardship and cultural assimilation to Wales. The influential figure behind this ambitious project was Michael D Jones, a Welsh minister, who envisioned a utopian community that would maintain the Welsh identity while cultivating new opportunities abroad.

The Welsh settlers worked tirelessly to turn the barren land into productive farmland, employing their agricultural expertise to grow crops and raise livestock. The construction of irrigation systems, houses, schools and churches soon followed, creating the foundations of a vibrant community.

Maintaining their native Welsh language and cultural practices was of utmost importance to the settlers. Welsh-language schools were established to ensure the education of their children in their mother tongue, and cultural events, choirs and eisteddfods (traditional Welsh festivals) became regular fixtures in their lives.

Over the years, the Welsh settlers succeeded in not only surviving, but thriving, in Argentina. Their resilience and resourcefulness garnered admiration from the local indigenous communities, as they found ways to coexist and share their knowledge of agriculture and land management. This mutual respect and understanding contributed to the unique cultural melting pot that is Patagonia today.

The history of German settlers in Brazil is likewise a fascinating tale of adventure, struggle and cultural assimilation. Their arrival and subsequent contributions left an indelible mark on the nation’s development, shaping Brazil’s diverse landscape and rich heritage.

The first German immigrants arrived in Brazil during the early 19th century. In 1824, the Brazilian government initiated a programme to attract European settlers to the country, offering them land and support to establish colonies. The immigrants were essentially refugees, seeking better economic opportunities and an escape from political and social unrest in their homeland.

Initially, language barriers and cultural differences made integration difficult. Despite these obstacles, their resilience and determination led to the establishment of several successful settlements.

The German immigrants also played a vital role in transforming Brazil’s agricultural landscape. They introduced new farming techniques and advanced irrigation methods, and cultivated crops like grapes, hops and tobacco, contributing to the country’s growing economy. Moreover, they brought with them their expertise in brewing and established Brazil’s first beer breweries, further diversifying the nation’s culture.

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Today, the EU is at a turning point. Much as it may wish to, it cannot afford to turn inwards.

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Today, the EU is at a turning point. Much as it may wish to, it cannot afford to turn inwards. A new Monroe Doctrine is not possible. The only way the refugee dilemma can be resolved is if Africa and the near East are assisted to develop their economies and eventually achieve some kind of parity with the Europeans. The challenge of climate change will have to be addressed at the same time, since desertification is also a driver for refugees.

Cited articles:

¹Telegraph newspaper. 21 July 2023.
²The Conversation. 21 July 2023.
³The Article. 18 July 2023.

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