The African Record

Africans abroad should share blame for migrant deaths

OVER the weekend, six African migrants attempting to cross illegally to Israel are said to have been killed by their smugglers and Egyptian forces. What’s even more unfortunate is that these deaths are not the first ones. According to JTA, a Jewish news service, 24 Africans have been killed this year while trying to enter Israel.

Israel isn’t the country of choice for Africans trying to migrate illegally to wealthy nations. In 2006, Spainish immigration authorities reported that as many as 6,000 may have died while trying to sail to the Canary Islands, one of the leading European points of entry for Africans.

When migrants die, human rights advocates often blame African governments for failing to invest in their citizens, forcing them to take suicidal journeys abroad. While it is true that corruption and poor governance do contribute to poverty, we Africans living in the wealthy nations should share the blame.

A San Francisco homeless man sleeps on the sidewalk. Photo: Paula Craig/Flickr

Africans in the continent continue to take risks to reach the West because we in the Diaspora continue to perpetuate the false notion of the West as the Promised Land. That’s how Kenyans who had made it to the United States before me described America. Every American, they said, was wealthy, leaving plenty of menial jobs for immigrants.

My time to come to America came in 1995. My uncle picked me up from San Francisco International Airport in a burgundy Toyota 4Runner that was less than five years old. The vehicle had a heater and a cassette player, and made very little noise as he drove south in the thick winter rain on Highway 101 to Santa Clara.

As the music of Congolese musician Aurlus Mabele — my high school favorite — filled the cabin, I tried hard to contain the joy and excitement threatening to burst my veins. I had finally made it to America. Very soon I’d be able to drive myself — preferably a BMW like the ones I had seen in the Netherlands two years earlier, on my failed attempt to come to America.

But the signs of wealth I saw as we rode down the highway vanished only a few hours after I got to my uncle’s residence. I was disappointed to find out that he lived in a two-bedroom apartment, not in a mansion like I had seen on the few occasions I had watched television in Nairobi. To add to my distress, I learned that I was not going to have my own bedroom. The seven people I thought had gathered to welcome me live there.

My uncle lived in the larger bedroom alone, my cousin Phillip shared the smaller bedroom with another relative, while the rest of us slept in the living room on sofas and on the floor.

Oh, how horrible that living room was.  The gases from farts, exhausts of people sleeping with their mouths agape, and the body odors of those of us who hadn’t discovered deodorant fumigated the room like invisible fog, trapped by the windows tightly shut to keep the winter cold out.

There was always a shoe to trip on, and the lines to the one bathroom all of us shared were long. That was not the America I had signed up for. Unable to explain why my relatives and their friends — some of whom had been in the United States for decades — chose to live such a life in America, I concluded that something was wrong with them.

I learned very quickly that — contrary to what my kinfolk had told me — America was not a country where you’d wash cars for a week and make enough money to take the next week off.

I did eventually find a job at a fast food restaurant, making  about $700 a month, which was equivalent to what my father made in a year as an untrained schoolteacher in Kenya. I sent money home to announce that I had finally arrived in the Garden of Eden.

That was of course before the expiration of a six-month, expense-free grace period my uncle had given me. Soon, I was paying rent, telephone and energy bills, food and personal effects, expenses I never had to worry about when I lived with my parents and relatives in Kenya. One of the funniest moments in my early life in America was protesting (at my father’s urging) my uncle’s decision to charge me — his blood brother’s son — pay rent.

My uncle held his ground. I began to pay rent, but only sporadically. In 1998, my uncle asked me to move out of his house. Painful as that was, it’s a moment I cherish to this day, for it introduced me to the real America. I rented a room in an house, living with an American family. It didn’t take long for me to see how stupid I had been. Why was I so willing to pay strangers $300 a month to live in confined space under strict rules (Rule #1. No overnight visitors.) when I could have paid my uncle the same and live in absolute freedom?

It was too late to move back to my uncle’s, so I left the American family home after a few months to rent my own apartment for $750 a month. To make the rent and other expenses, I worked multiple jobs. Over the years I guarded buildings, washed dishes, scrubbed toilets, stocked shelves, developed film, and packed boxes. Still, I didn’t make enough money.There were some nights I went to bed sobbing, wondering if I coming to America had been a right decision.

My story is not unique. I know dozens of friends and relatives who have been through worse. I have also heard similar stories from other Africans. Regardless of the financial difficulties we encounter, we continue to send money home, creating a false sense of life in Paradise. We never tell our families and friends that life abroad is hard.

When I returned home in 2006 after 12 years in America, my relatives were disappointed that I couldn’t afford to rent a car and drive them around like those who had returned before me. Two years earlier one of my relatives had come home, rented a car and showered his family and friends with money and booze. “And he has only been in America for four years,” a cousin said, in an apparent attempt to humiliate me.

I laughed.

I laughed because I knew how much my relative made in his night job stocking shelves. Those he had entertained confirmed my guess that our kinsman had used credit cards to pay for his splendid return. “At the bar he used to throw credit cards on the table and tell us how much money he had in each,” one man told me.

There are many more who travel to Africa pretending to have gone from rags to riches. They lodge and dine with Africa’s movers and shakers — something that would have been unimaginable before they went to America. Three years ago in Atlanta, Dr. Bitange Ndemo, a Permanent Secretary in Kenya’s Ministry of Information, talked about an increasing number of mansions that were being built in rural areas and left vacant. A friend of mine, a professor at a Kenyan university, told me in his rural birthplace it is a competition, and that even he had fallen for the trap and built an expensive home he only went to for a few days every year.

Of course there are many Africans who have done well abroad and can afford to spend lavishly. But there are many who are pretending to have escaped poverty, and by doing so, they are contributing to the misinformation that makes poor Africans willing to risk their lives.

We know, for example, that there are millions of American citizens who are hungry and homeless. We know that economies in countries that were once wealthy are on the decline, and citizens are increasingly becoming resentful of immigrants. Let’s pass that information to our people so they can stop risking their lives.

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