So Europe has a
refugee crisis. Ag shame.
In Africa we always have one. But we don’t cry, we just deal
with it. Live with it; assimilate and absorb it. And get on with it. Sometimes
our xenophobic side gets the better of us, but then we settle things down
again, punish the culprits and try to make our guests feel comfortable again .
With few small exceptions, we don’t kick out the refugees or
put them in barbed-wire camps, unless they so desire. They continue living
among us, become a part of us. We are good hosts to those less fortunate than
us. That’s what Ubuntu is all about, a word they won’t understand in Europe,
let alone be able to spell or pronounce.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),
Sub-Saharan Africa hosts more than 26% of the world’s refugee population. Yes,
Europe does provide a little assistance, but only so they can stay in Africa
and not, heaven forbid, try to come to Europe. Kenya hosts the world’s largest
refugee camp filled with displaced Somalis; it also has one of the largest
total refugee populations in the world. Most are housed in two large refugee
camps close to the border, simply because Kenya has no other living facilities
to offer them in the border region. But these are by no means Gulags or
Gestapo-run prison camps that treat their residents like vermin.
Take my country, South Africa: we have between 2 and
3-million Zimbabwean refugees. We also have more than 32,000 documented (legal)
Somalis, and many thousands of Nigerians, Cameroonians, Mozambicans and others.
And quite a large number of tax refugees from Europe to boot. That adds up to
about 3 to 4-million (conservative estimate) foreign refugees in a country of
52-million people and per capita GDP of US$6,617.91. This is just one small
country in Africa.
Compare that to Europe’s 28 countries with a combined
population of 742-million and a combined average per capita GDP of around
US$30,000…and only 1 to 2-million Syrian and North African refugees, housed
mostly in prison-like camps or special projects (is that the modern name for
“ghetto”, I wonder). The European “crisis” is a 0.27% one; the South African
“experience” adds up to just under 8%. Crisis in Europe? Forgive me if I don’t
see one.
Generally by far the majority of South Africa’s refugees are
decent, honest, industrious and law-abiding people earning their living by
their own means, effort and resources. A minority of them are drug dealers,
bank robbers, thieves and rapists, as you would find in any community on the
planet. Our criminal justice system – which admittedly has quite a few weak
kinks in it - deals with them like it would with any of our criminal citizens.
In Europe, when a few suspected Arab chauvinist gropers
misguidedly decide to have some “fun” on New Year’s Eve, there is a
continent-wide outcry to “send them all back” and shut down the borders,
followed by a right-wing backlash with all the undertones suggesting Hitler is
alive and well and living among them. You’d swear that civilised, advanced and
sophisticated Europe – an entitlement we are constantly being reminded of - has
no criminal justice system that could deal with this handful of misfits and
their archaic criminal nonsense.
And the Europeans are vociferously supported by their
American cousins shouting out from behind their band leader, a man with an
orange peel for a hairstyle, an IQ of about 10 and the unfortunate name of
Donald, as in Donald Duck. Replace the last D with an F and you know what we’re
talking about. Strange, coming from a man whose country was built by European
refugees after they wiped out the original inhabitants.
Which brings to mind the old saying that “Africa is no place
for sissies”, with the word used here in a purely non-sexist context before my
feminist sisters lash me. Europe on the other hand is a continent flooded by
sissies and a handful of refugees putting the fear of Hannibal in them. Now
that seems more like a crisis to me.
One wonders what would be the lesson in all of this? Perhaps
just that the old European attitudes and notions of borders, exclusivity and
hostility towards foreigners no longer have any place in the modern global
village the world has become. Just like the ancient political and economic
systems the world inherited from Europe are no longer able to satisfy the needs
of today’s world. Think 1%. There are backlashes and protests against these
failing European-created systems, their banks and their governments,
everywhere.
It’s time to think outside the box, or perhaps more
appropriately, outside Europe. And it’s time that Europe came to the party.
Perhaps it can learn something from Africa. Yes, I am proud to be African,
despite what a few racist spoilers like Julius Malema or Dan Roodt might think
of this one.
