Let’s cut to the chase – no matter how painful it may be for many ears to hear that Africans are enslaving other Africans in the 21st century, the fact of the matter is that the French President is technically correct in his observation. To bring the reader up to speed in case they’re not already aware, Macron was speaking to students in the Burkinabe capital of Ouagadougou earlier this week when he lost his cool during an interactive session and suddenly blurted out the following:
“Who are the traffickers? Ask yourselves – being the African youth – that question. You are unbelievable. Who are the traffickers? They are Africans, my friends. They are Africans. Ask yourselves the question. It’s not the French who are the traffickers, it’s the Africans. So everyone should understand the responsibility, and we’ve started to do that, to dismantle them. But stop the argument saying, ‘It’s someone else.’ Show me a French, Belgian, German person, who carried out trafficking between Nigeria and Libya. This person doesn’t exist. So, these days in Africa, there are Africans who make other Africans slaves, this is the reality. And there are Europeans who benefit from this misery in Europe, it’s unacceptable. In both cases, these are crimes. We are fighting both cases.”
This Trump-inspired declaration was the epitome of “political incorrectness,” made even all the more pronounced by the world’s expectation that the French leader would always conduct himself in a more “diplomatic” manner. Once the shock of what Macron said wears off, however, it’s difficult to argue against anything that he said. It’s indeed true that Africans are trafficking, and even enslaving, other Africans, and that there are also Europeans in Europe who benefit from this atrocious violation of human rights. And, as Macron said, both of these are unacceptable crimes.
What he didn’t mention is just as important, though, and it is that the EU’s soft power has served as an irresistible “pull” factor for many of these migrants and, in the worst cases, future slaves. Africans are leaving Africa because many of them actually believe that the EU is an earthly paradise, not just in comparison to their own countries but in general, and that all of their problems will be solved the moment that they leave the “black continent” and set foot on the “white” one.
Brussels is to blame for this to a very large extent because of the bloc’s “EuroLiberal” policy of blindly accepting and generously providing for any and all civilizationally dissimilar migrants regardless of their desire to assimilate and integrate into their host societies. Sweden is the manifestation of this ideology taken to its ultimate extreme, though “The Frau’s” Germany and Hollande-Macron’s France give the Scandinavian country a run for its money in this ignoble regard.
But that’s not all, since there are some serious “push” factors that make European destinations much more attractive than most of these migrants’ current homes, and it’s at this point where Paris needs to accept partial culpability for Francophone Africa’s atrocious domestic conditions. The neo-imperial policy of “Françafrique” has seen the cultivation of national elites who owe their fealty to France, and when these figures fail to do what’s expected of them in guaranteeing their overlord’s reliable access to markets, resources, and labor, then they’re swiftly deposed of by rival French-backed elites (coup) or direct French military intervention.
It might be surprising for some folks to find out, but France still de-facto controls the monetary, and therefore economic, policies of 14 “formerly” colonized countries in Africa through the West African and Central African Francs, which thus provide Paris with enormous influence over a broad swath of the continent’s territory and therefore makes it an African power. On top of that, France has always retained a network of bases scattered throughout its post-imperial lands, with its military footprint increasing over the past few years as Operation Serval in Mali transformed via mission creep into Operation Barkhane across the Sahel region’s “G5” countries of Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad.
Tracing back the origin of the “G5” and other Western & Central African countries’ emigration crisis, there likely wouldn’t have even been a terrorist takeover in northeastern Mali by Ansar Dine or in northeastern Nigeria by Boko Haram had the 2011 NATO war on Libya never happened. It was this event more so than anything else mentioned thus far that contributed to the collapse of the “old” post-Cold War geopolitical order in Africa and the emergence of the new chaotic one in which regional crises driven by non-state actors are the norm in some of these fast-growing (Niger) and even already overpopulated states (Nigeria).
It’s little wonder then that so many Africans are willing to undertake the dangerous cross-Saharan and –Mediterranean voyages north in search of their desperately hoped-for “EuroLiberal Utopia”, putting their fates in the hands of fellow African traffickers who they’ve likely never met before and who could probably care less about anything other than the amount of money that their clients are willing to pay up for the journey.
Like Macron pointed out, it’s not Europeans trafficking and enslaving Africans in Africa, but Africans themselves perpetrating such crimes on one another, but by leaving out the crucial “pull” and “push” contexts of the EU’s “too effective” soft power, the perennial regional mismanagement deliberately exacerbated by “Françafrique”, and the NATO war on Libya, he’s not telling the full story.
Having said that, and while accepting that the average person is incapable of policing their political class, let alone the globalist ones half a hemisphere away and on a whole civilizationally dissimilar continent, there are still some kernels of wisdom to be gained from Macron’s “politically incorrect” statement, namely its implied suggestion that concerned citizens should try to take ownership of their communities by combating crime within them. This advice isn’t just relevant to Africans, but is a universal responsibility of all people regardless of where they’re from, even if this probably wasn’t what Macron originally had in mind.
Just as Africans should confront human traffickers operating in their communities, so too should Europeans do the same to the people around them who are benefiting from this misery, just like Americans ought to be more proactive in combating drug-dealing in their neighborhoods.
Even though all three of these social scourges of human trafficking, illegal migration, and drug use are strongly driven by the external factors of “Françafrique”, the NATO war on Libya, the prevailing ideology of “EuroLiberalism” in Brussels, and the CIA’s Machiavellian hegemonic games in Afghanistan and Latin America are mostly beyond their control. When people absolve themselves of any pretense of even passive responsibility for the local effects of these calamities and apathetically accept them as a fait accompli, they’re doing a major disservice to themselves and their countrymen.
It sounds unrealistic to expect regular people to confront these daunting challenges when a host of foreign governments are against them, but their communities are the one thing that they’re capable of taking ownership of if they try hard enough, and while the root causes of these international problems might never be solved, the best that one can hope for is the peace of mind that they did everything in their personal power to make sure that their family, friends, and neighborhood are as safe from these scourges as possible.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
