The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

The courage of the helpless Africans

2022-12-16T11:12:18.403Z


The 21st century is going to be even more full of stories in which the West will have to respond to those who arrive on its shores fleeing pain, war or poverty.


In the early hours of November 28, an oil tanker from Lagos, Nigeria arrived in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

In the stern, at the helm of the ship, three stowaways had traveled hidden.

In the tiny space between the hull and the blade, not even two square meters, they spent 11 days, enduring it all day and night, undaunted.

The photograph that shows them, their heads down, surely already aware that they had been discovered, is a monument to courage, bravery, determination, and strength.

And to that strange dignity that they have no choice but to cling to when they know that their journey may have been for nothing.

They endured the cold, the darkness, the onslaught of the waves, the hunger, the noise, and surely also the fear.

Soon they had to face other obstacles,

less harsh but with lightning efficiency: procedures, international laws.

This time they had the necessary support, they were not returned ex officio to the place where they came from;

They remain in Spain while their asylum request is being resolved.

These three boys came to Europe by choice.

Who knows what they were running from, what they were leaving behind, all they wanted was to have a better life.

The story (so in the abstract) is already known.

Little is known about the details, sometimes some can tell what pushed them to try their luck in opulent Western societies.

Hundreds of thousands come, and the world on this side is mostly concerned with putting up barriers, putting up barbed wire, digging ditches, hitting, throwing rubber bullets and tear gas, whatever it takes to keep them out.

And that mess, that deaf battle, is going to be the music (rather, the noise) in the background of this 21st century.

It has already been seen this year on the border between Nador and Melilla.

Some of these boys' ancestors (and hundreds of thousands of them too) came to the West instead by force.

The historian Anthony Pagden, in his book

Peoples and Empires,

it even gives the specific date on which modern slavery began.

“It originated on the morning of August 8, 1444, when the first cargo of 235 Africans captured in what is now Senegal was landed in the Portuguese port of Lagos,” he writes.

“A crude slave market was improvised on the docks, and the Africans, confused and cowed, reeling after weeks confined to the insane holds of the little boats in which they had been brought, were herded into groups by age, sex, and state of mind. Health".

And sold.

Over there was Prince Henry the Navigator.

He had sponsored the operation, arrived to take his fifth of those new arrivals, a total of 46, and rode leisurely away.

Those slaves left Lagos in the fifteenth century on their way to Europe, in Lagos in 2022 three young men hid at the helm of an oil tanker to leave for a better life.

It is inevitable to pull a thread between one episode and another, they still have some connection.

They are, of course, different situations, but something unites them.

The terrible suffering of all those Africans, that helplessness in which they continue to live and that produces vertigo (and shame).

Pagden says at the end of his book that we need "some common code that is capable of uniting us all", those here with those there.

It's true, but so far that code is not working well.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-12-16

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-20T18:41:59.398Z

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-27T16:45:54.081Z
News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.