Abstract
Contemporary discourses on migration from West Africa to Europe tend to frame migrants as victims of syndicated trafficking cartels that truck in human desperation. As part of this narrative, migrants are increasingly portrayed as ‘modern-day slaves’ in need of humanitarian protection. In both media and policy circles, African migrants are commonly referred to as desperate travellers who fall prey to exploitative ‘slave traders’ on their clandestine journeys to Europe. And yet, such framings do not adequately account for the ways in which migration from West Africa to Europe has a long and profound history, and thus does not sufficiently correspond to histories of enslavement. Nor do such framings appreciate how contemporary movements within and outside West Africa are informed by interrelated political genealogies that tie Europe to Africa in mutually dialectic ways. Focusing on the case of Senegal, this article aims to disrupt the ‘migrant as slave’ narrative by looking back at the histories of regional and international mobility that continue to shape population movements out of Senegal today.
Highlights
In recent years, migration from Africa to Europe has gained widespread global attention
In both media and policy circles, African migrants are commonly referred to as desperate travellers who fall prey to exploitative ‘slave traders’ on their clandestine journeys to Europe. Such framings do not adequately account for the ways in which migration from West Africa to Europe has a long and profound history, and does not sufficiently correspond to histories of enslavement. Nor do such framings appreciate how contemporary movements within and outside West Africa are informed by interrelated political genealogies that tie Europe to Africa in mutually dialectic ways
Senegalese people have been migrating for centuries, but for them, the condition of ‘irregularity’ is a very recent political construction.[49]
Summary
Migration from Africa to Europe has gained widespread global attention. Back in Senegal, as economic times grew more constricted, people responded quickly to such open, if ambivalent, immigration policies in southern Europe Many of those migrants framed their mobility through the lens of the teachings of the politically influential Sufi Murid brotherhood,[34] and stories of its founding saint who resisted and evaded colonial control. As one repatriated boat migrant in Senegal put it to me, ‘With Frontex, migration just moves elsewhere.’[46] From the moment that Frontex implemented Operation Hera in 2005, migratory routes began shifting overland to journeys across the Sahara to North Africa where, it was rumoured, one could buy passage across the Mediterranean from departure points in Libya In this way, border controls can create what Martin Lemberg-Pedersen calls ‘border-induced displacement’.47. Border securitisation, not presumed ‘slave traders’, forces prospective Senegalese and other West African migrants to take more circuitous and more dangerous routes
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